Dagmar wrote:

The problem there is that most major scientific breakthroughs also seem too good to be true (harnessing lightning, breaking the sound barrier, penicillin, escaping Earth's gravitational well, etc), because they figured out something that we were all wrong about before. I definitely want to see this looked into, because if what was said by the two gentlemen interviewed wasn't a barrel of lies, then they've got something seriously world-changing.

...which means assassins from General Motors, Shell Oil, and British Petroleum should be descending on them any minute now, not to mention the army of lawyers from companies who think they're entitled to sue for a piece of the patent money.

I couldn't watch the CNN vid, but had one from YouTube a couple days back. I'm still skeptical, but one hopes it's not completely bullshit.

This is likely just Browns gas, which my interweb research indicates is nice except for the fact that it tends to become unstable and blow up. So that sucks. I imagine his equipment is creating it in small volumes, on the fly, to get around the danger of storing the unstable stuff.

As for the water powered car, it's been a rumor for nigh on 40 years if my memory serves, but lets assume the video of this dude's Water/Gasoline hybrid is legitimate. The main problem is that unless he has found the magic catalyst which breaks down H2O, he's probably using electrolysis, which is, as we all know, inefficient. In the absense of a catalyst, there's no way he's getting more energy out of the water than he's putting into the electolyzer. So, either it's all crap (possible), or he's conducting an experiment in converting energy from one form to another while losing some to inefficiency at every stage (probable), or he's found a catalyst that tips the scales (doubtful).

More info here : http://www.atsnn.com/article/158213
here : http://hytechapps.com/technology/electrolyzer.htm
here : http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2004/08/brownkleinhho.html
and a lot of comments on this digg thread : http://digg.com/technology/Water_Fuel_-_HHO_Gas

Incidentally, I'm not saying any of this is a bad thing. If we can get electricity in a cheap and clean way, and then use it to break up water, and burn the results back into water, then that's a lot better than gasoline and all the envrionmental and geopolitical repercussions attached to using it. The problem with my statement above is the "get electricity in a cheap and clean way" part. Batteries are heavy and toxic and even assuming you can store useful volumes of the post-electrolysis gas safely (questionable), we get electricity from a lot of coal, oil, LNG, etc. If we can start getting most of our electricity from clean sources, then powering our cars with it (either directly or indirectly) becomes a lot more useful an idea. We *may* be reaching a point where using coal sourced electricity for our cars *is* better than the growing dangers of the petrowar, but I don't know that. It's such a complex issue. Anyway, this whole water fuel deal seems like a lot of sensation over not a fundamentally new concept.

RE: New water-fuel technology appears to be viable...