Remember that zany Irish company Steorn, who claimed to have built a working perpetual motion machine that could produce clean, free energy out of a few magnets and some plastic discs? Well, they're ...

Perpetual motion machines. A century and more ago, they were a hot ticket. Ebenezer Punderson Avery, a Connecticut man who lived in Great Barrington in the 1780s before relocating to New York, ...

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back and forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the ...

Special to The New York Times. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print ...

Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, hasn't had the best of weeks. His perpetual motion machine mysteriously failed at a recent unveiling, and a tsunami of international ridicule washed over him and his ...

The IVO quantum inertia drive is in orbit now and will be turned on within one to ten weeks and then operated for many weeks or months. The IVO quantum inertia drive is very controversial because it ...

Inventors have long tried to cheat the laws of physics. From quirky toys to impossible contraptions, these are the strangest ...

Perpetual motion devices are either a gag, a scam, or as in the case of this particular toy that [Big Clive] bought on AliExpress, a rather fascinating demonstration of a contact-free inductive sensor ...