One interesting snippet that emerged from the "Podesta emails" on Wikileaks was this weird email from one time Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in which he mentions aliens "helping us" bring "zero point energy" to earth.

While it's entirely possibly he could just be a nut spamming someone of political influence it does make you wonder...

Remember, our nonviolent ETI from the contiguous universe are helping us bring zero point energy to Earth.

While I'm a big fan of both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, I think that leaks of information are (unfortunately) going to become increasingly politicised in future, with the validity of the information coming into question.

Bruce Schneier recently had a post on "Organizational Doxing and Disinformation" he he talked about the problem of the leaker (or supplier of information to the leaker) throwing in a few choice items that aren't real.

Forging thousands -- or more -- documents is difficult to pull off, but slipping a single forgery in an actual cache is much easier. The attack could be something subtle. Maybe a country that anonymously publishes another country's diplomatic cables wants to influence yet a third country, so adds some particularly egregious conversations about that third country. Or the next hacker who steals and publishes email from climate change researchers invents a bunch of over-the-top messages to make his political point even stronger. Or it could be personal: someone dumping email from thousands of users making changes in those by a friend, relative, or lover.

Imagine trying to explain to the press, eager to publish the worst of the details in the documents, that everything is accurate except this particular email. Or that particular memo. That the salary document is correct except that one entry. Or that the secret customer list posted up on WikiLeaks is correct except that there's one inaccurate addition. It would be impossible. Who would believe you? No one. And you couldn't prove it.

It has been a few years since I last paid any attention to the ECat /LENR cold fusion saga, however Tom Whipple's latest column (The Peak Oil Crisis: A Bizarre Twist) caught my eye this week.

Apparently Andrea Rossi found an American company called Industrial Heat willing to pay him if the technology could be successfully tested over a 350 day period.

The company ended up deciding the test was a success (though there seemed to be some problems with too much energy along the way) and made the initial payments, however there is now a dispute over whether or not the remaining licence payments need to be made, with Whipple speculating this is because Rossi is now claiming he has an even better version of the technology under development.

A cynic might think all this light and noise is being generated to draw investors into the process like moths to a flame, however I guess we can all hold our breaths and wait for another decade or two to see if this really is a viable means of generating power.

I don't usually expect to see "free energy" style stories on Inhabitat but I guess they make for good clickbait - this one is on a very hot looking car that can supposedly travel 370 miles on a tank of saltwater - This Blazing Fast Electric Car is Powered by Saltwater.

Nanoflowcell has developed the world’s first saltwater-powered electric car – the Quant e-Sportlimousine – it just received approval for testing in Europe! The futuristic gull-winged vehicle runs on a special type of gasoline that is made from salt water, and it’s now street-legal on public roads in Germany. According to Nanoflowcell, the Quant e-Sportlimousine can accelerate from 0-62 mph in a blazing 2.8 seconds and it has a driving range of up to 373 miles.

Tom Whipple at the FCNP has an article on the cold fusion / free energy world, displaying rather less skepticism than I feel comfortable with (but I guess it's a change from the intense doomerism he traditionally emanated back in the heyday of peak oil) - The Peak Oil Crisis: Hydrinos In Your Future?.

One of the companies mentioned, Blacklight Power, has received a reasonable amount of press lately - see these links for some examples - Impact Lab: Hydrino Theory validated by Harvard tests, EarthTechling: HYDRINOS A PIE IN THE SKY CLEAN ENERGY? and Next Big Future: Move over Rossi. Blacklight Power is claiming megawatts from their super-controversial hydrino process and devices.

In recent months I have written about the progress being made in “cold fusion” which is short hand for a third way to extract energy from the forces binding atoms together. Some who are familiar with the details of what has been going on appreciate that we are nearly over denying that cold fusion is real as at least three companies have mastered the technology at lab bench level and are working on commercial-scale hydrogen powered devices that hopefully will one day replace fossil fuels as a source of energy for heat, electricity, and transportation.

The Italian developer Rossi seems to have linked up with a North Carolina company that not only is supplying the cash he needs to develop a marketable product, but apparently has made contacts to develop the technology in China.

The California company Brillouin was recently the subject of a series of videos detailing the current state of development of the prototype commercial boiler it is developing along with SRI to replace fossil fuels as the source of heat in electric power stations. Moreover Brillouin has recently licensed its technology to a Korean manufacturer who hopes to have a prototype in operation before the end of the year. The major take home from the videos, however, is that scaling up cold fusion from lab bench to commercial boiler size will involve some difficult engineering.

The third major contender in the race for cold fusion, Defkalion Green Technologies, announced last week that they are making good progress and hope to “commercialize’ their technology by the third quarter of this year. All three of these companies say they have had their technology verified by outside scientists, but have no intention of releasing their proprietary techniques as to how they make cold fusion work at this time.

Last week another contender in the race to replace fossil fuels resurfaced with the announcement by a New Jersey company, BlackLight Power, that it has applied for a patent and will be demonstrating its technology to selected observers on February 28th. BlackLight Power and its technology has been around for over 20 years; has raised and spent circa $80 million developing their technology; and have released a mountain of reports, data and even books describing how their technology works. Every few years they have announced that they were close to a commercial product that could produce heat, but somehow they always slipped back into the R&D mode and were largely forgotten even by close observers of the field and certainly not remembered by the mainstream media.

The biggest problem with gaining acceptance for the technology that BlackLight Power claims to have invented that it is so revolutionary that, should it pan out, the world and much science will never be the same. The simple version of BlackLight’s technology is easy to understand. By taking hydrogen atoms (protons with an electron orbiting around the nucleus), all one has to do is give the atoms a good zap of electricity in the presence of the right catalyst and the electrons drop down into orbits closer to the nuclei – releasing very large amounts of energy in the process.

After the hydrogen atoms’ electrons falls into a lower orbit, the resulting now-shrunken atom was called a “hydrino” by its discoverer, Randell Mills. The main problem with this idea is that our current chemistry says there are no stable states of hydrogen below what is known as the base state. Therefore most scientists say Mill’s hydrino thesis must be wrong. For 20 years, Mills has had to contend with an endless string of naysayers, including some very well-known scientists many of which called him a charlatan for raising and spending some $80 million dollars in search of something which cannot possibly be true – or so they contend.

Cryptogon has a link to a Brazilian free energy generation device. I've got no idea if it works (though I always enjoy the universal popularity of perpetual motion machines) but I guess if it doesn't it could always serve as a piece of industrial art - The RAR Energia Gravity Motor.

When one follows “free energy” inventors, a lot of times, the path leads to madness.

The machines in question (that don’t work, by the way) are usually very small—table top scale—bicycle tires and JB Weld sorts of things.

Knowing all of this, I nearly fell out of my chair when I looked at what RAR Energia has built in Brazil. That thing is about two stories tall, and must have cost a minimum of hundreds of thousands of dollars to build.

Free Energy News has a report on Irish free energy company Steorn, who, undeterred by their abject failure a few years ago when trying to demonstrate their technology, are planning another demonstration of their technology this year - Steorn plans Orbo free energy demo in 2009.

The Irish company, Steorn, is gearing up for another public demonstration attempt of their revolutionary Orbo "free energy" technology -- by the end of 2009.

This past Tuesday, FreeEnergyTimes conducted an email interview with Steorn CEO, Sean McCarthy, providing an update to their progress and intentions. McCarthy said "The demonstration will involve a public display of various Orbo systems, there will be a live video-stream from the location that people can watch via our website." The primary purpose of the demonstrations will be to attract the interest of individuals and companies who want to develop Orbo-powered products.

Free Energy News reports that "After nearly three years of review, the jury selected by Steorn to validate their claim to a free energy device has issued a verdict: Steorn's process does not produce energy" (though the company remains convinced it will have a owrking product later this year) - Steorn Jury issues verdict: no excess energy.

After nearly three years of review, the jury selected by Steorn to validate their claim to a free energy device has issued a verdict: Steorn's process does not produce energy.

Despite the negative results of this jury, Steorn continues to allege that they will have such a product available to go into production by the end of this year. Members of the private forum who have been given information about some of the key ingredients seems optimistic as well.

When I interviewed Steorn CEO, Sean McCarthy just after they first made their announcement in 2006, he revealed to me that the free energy device was an all-magnet motor. ...

The negative ruling has not deterred McCarthy. In a response on their website, he pointed out that the Jury process had actually commenced at the end of 2008, and new developments through the beginning of 2009 have "resolved the key technical problems related to the implementation of Orbo." He said the company "is now focused on commercial launch towards the end of this year, at which time academic and engineering validation [will] be released concurrent with public demonstrations".

There has always a strong thread of conspiracy theory woven through the "Free Energy" world - fed by a steady flow of strange deaths amongst free energy proponents. One recent (unsolved) case involved Eugene Mallove of the New Energy Foundation - Mallove slaying: ‘Unanswered questions’ set suspects free.

More than three years after their arrests, a Superior Court judge Thursday dismissed charges against the two suspects in a 2004 Norwich slaying, leaving Norwich police with a four-year-old unsolved murder. ...

Joseph Reilly, 42, and Gary McAvoy, 46, had been charged with murder in 2005 by Norwich police in the brutal May 14, 2004, beating death of Eugene Mallove, 56, a scientist and writer from New Hampshire. Mallove was found outside his childhood home at 119 Salem Turnpike. His clothing was bloodied and disheveled, indicating a violent struggle. ...

Eugene Mallove was a Norwich Free Academy graduate who became the chief science writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He later dedicated much of his work to cold fusion and promoted experimentation in the field of alternative energy sources.

He founded the nonprofit New Energy Foundation in New Hampshire and published the magazine Infinite Energy, publicizing the work of others seeking alternative energy sources. He was cleaning out his rental property at the time of his death.

Members of the New Energy Foundation were astonished by the developments in the case, general manager Christy L. Frazier said Thursday. “Those who loved Gene Mallove will continue to hope that the individual(s) responsible for his death are brought to justice,” Frazier said.