Florida Man Gets Year in Jail For Running over Baby Ducks with a Lawn Mower
By Lydia Price | 07/27/2015 AT 02:00 PM EDT

Do not hire this man to mow your lawn.

John Scott Falbo II, 24, who used to work for a landscaping company, intentionally ran over nine ducklings on May 2 in Wellington, Florida.

On Thursday, Falbo was sentenced to a year in Palm Beach County Jail and three years probation for both the duck massacre and separate charges of domestic battery. Falbo was ordered to complete 10 hours of community service every month after he is released from jail and receives a mental health evaluation. Falbo will also be prohibited from owning any animals.

"They were in my path so I just kept mowing," Falbo said, according to the police report.

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http://www.people.com/article/man-kills-ducklings-lawnmower

Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum
David A. Brady, Harold G. White, Paul March, James T. Lawrence, and Frank J. Davies
NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 77058

This paper describes the eight-day August 2013 test campaign designed to investigate and demonstrate viability of using classical magnetoplasmadynamics to obtain a propulsive momentum transfer via the quantum vacuum virtual plasma. This paper will not address the physics of the quantum vacuum plasma thruster, but instead will describe the test integration, test operations, and the results obtained from the test campaign.

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Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the “null” test article).

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http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140006052.pdf

NASA confirms that the ‘impossible’ EmDrive thruster really works, after new tests
By Rick Stella — November 3, 2015

Engineer Roger Shawyer’s controversial EmDrive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech.

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http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/researchers-conduct-successful-new-tests-of-emdrive/#ixzz3qYZoCwPd

NASA confirms ‘impossible’ thruster actually works, could revolutionize space travel
By Drew Prindle — August 1, 2014

When Roger Shawyer first unveiled his EmDrive thruster back around 2003, the scientific community laughed at him. They said it was impossible, that it was based on a flawed concept, and couldn’t work because it goes against the laws of conservation of momentum. But somehow, despite all of the reasons it shouldn’t work, it does.

Scientists at NASA just confirmed it.

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http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nasa-confirms-impossible-space-drive-actually-works-revolutionize-space-travel/#ixzz3qYauUeve

Warp Drives and Scientific Reasoning
Posted on May 26, 2015 by Sean Carroll

A bit ago, the news streams were once again abuzz with claims that NASA was investigating amazing space drives that violate the laws of physics. And it’s true! If we grant that “NASA” includes “any person employed by NASA,” and “investigating” is defined as “wasting time and money thinking about.”

I say “again” because it was only a few years ago that news spread about a NASA effort aimed at a warp drive, a way to truly break the speed-of-light limit. Of course there are no realistic scenarios along those lines, so the investigators didn’t have any tangible results to present. Instead, they did the next best thing, releasing an artist’s conception of what a space ship powered by their (wholly imaginary) warp drive would look like. (What remains unclear is how the warpiness of the drive affected the design of their fantasy vessel.)

The more recent “news” is not actually about warp drive at all. It’s about propellantless space drives — which are, if anything, even less believable than the warp drives. (There is a whole zoo of nomenclature devoted to categorizing all of the non-existent technologies of this general ilk, which I won’t bother to keep straight.) Warp drives at least inspired by some respectable science — Miguel Alcubierre’s energy-condition-violating spacetime. The “propellantless” stuff, on the other hand, just says “Laws of physics? Screw em.”

You may have heard of a little thing called Newton’s Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you want to go forward, you have to push on something or propel something backwards. The plucky NASA engineers in question aren’t hampered by such musty old ideas. As others have pointed out, what they’re proposing is very much like saying that you can sit in your car and start it moving by pushing on the steering wheel.

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http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/05/26/warp-drives-and-scientific-reasoning/