Okay, the title of this topic reminded me of an article I read in a recent New Scientist about technology that is currently being developed that would allow for cars to take in water, break it into hydrogen and oxygen by reacting it with boron o get boron oxide. The boron oxide byproduct could be dumped periodically at a sort of filling station where it could be carted off to be purified at factories run entirely on solar energy (the reaction required requires little energy apparently) The hydrogen in the car could then be used like any other hydrogen car, except that the water byproduct could be pumped back into the initial stages of the process, thus creating a zero-emissions car.
Snazzy. Granted the article mentioned that it would get only slightly better mileage than today's cars on a reasonable amount of boron before it had to be switched out, nothing like the outrageous claims being made in the article chrono threw up there.
Even a superconductor provides some amount of resistance.
There is nothing in the known universe that has a negative resistance... Well, except for drunk blonde girls, but that's a different matter!
Um, no. A superconductor has exactly zero resistance - in theory and as far as can be done by experiment. You can set up a current in a superconducting wire and come back a week later and it will still be there with absolutely no change.
Also, for a long time liquid nitrogen wasn't cold enough for superconduction, but in the last couple of decades several High Temperature Superconductors discovered, where high temperature in this context means "above the boiling point of nitrogen (77 K)".
EDIT: Perhaps you meant that they don't have zero impedance?
Oh, and when I first saw the thread I parsed the title as meaning drive on water, which is of course possible if you're going fast enough.
EDIT: Even if liquid nitrogen isn't cold enough, liquid helium isn't all that expensive. Of course, the Helium-3 is horrendously expensive but you only need that to get down to 100 mK, normal helium will see you to 4 K just fine and even older superconductors work at up to 20 K.
Comments
Snazzy. Granted the article mentioned that it would get only slightly better mileage than today's cars on a reasonable amount of boron before it had to be switched out, nothing like the outrageous claims being made in the article chrono threw up there.
Also, for a long time liquid nitrogen wasn't cold enough for superconduction, but in the last couple of decades several High Temperature Superconductors discovered, where high temperature in this context means "above the boiling point of nitrogen (77 K)".
EDIT: Perhaps you meant that they don't have zero impedance?
Oh, and when I first saw the thread I parsed the title as meaning drive on water, which is of course possible if you're going fast enough.
EDIT: Even if liquid nitrogen isn't cold enough, liquid helium isn't all that expensive. Of course, the Helium-3 is horrendously expensive but you only need that to get down to 100 mK, normal helium will see you to 4 K just fine and even older superconductors work at up to 20 K.