A property-disposal record locates the apparatus built to test the 1996 rotating-superconductor claim: a 300-millimetre disc, a cryostat, two lock-in amplifiers. It cost $607,000, returned a null in 2002, and has been available to borrow ever since.
Eleven patents from that lot were flagged for technical review. This one was not. No employee of the buyer appears ever to have read it. It has been free for anybody to build since 2017. We had one built.
A laser tracker measured every inner face in the Saqqara galleries. The precision claim survives. The lids do not: their undersides wander fifteen times further, and each error map is the mirror of its own box rim.
The walking works; this desk accepts it. But only two of the twenty-one trials ran on Rapa Nui, none on an original road surface, and one stopped when the hau hau rope parted.
We surveyed the sandbar with a total station, borrowed the camera, had its lens measured on a bench, and gave the lot to three photogrammetrists working blind. All three returned a height that depends on a setting nobody wrote down.
The cedar came back with a radiocarbon date three to five centuries older than the pyramid it was taken from. It is the date of a tree, and the tree was old when somebody cut it down.
Ninety minutes on a wildfire-mapping aircraft, $6,800, and a mid-wave infrared turret. Beyond thirty kilometres every aircraft we filmed rendered as a featureless lozenge with the same aspect ratio, 2.7 to 1, whatever it actually was.
Twenty-seven astronomical targets, back-calculated for 200 BCE to 650 CE, tested against azimuths from a drone survey. The tolerance and the correction were published first. Nothing survives. Slope at the origin predicts bearing better than any star.
Seventy-eight prize essays, read end to end for the first time. Sixty-one are ordinary general relativity, nine are unreadable, four are by physicists who later took Nobel prizes, and not one of them describes a device.
Two laboratories that had never corresponded ran forty cells for ninety days under a protocol published in advance. Thirty-nine sat inside calorimetric error. The fortieth did not, until the teardown. Cost to this newspaper: $71,000.
Three appeals and a tribunal established that the one-inch reels existed, went to a regional records office in 1991, and were degaussed in 1993 under a media-reuse schedule. What survives is a fourth-generation VHS, re-recorded twice.
Four quantities a manned underground facility cannot suppress: air, spoil, power and effluent. Each is metered by somebody with no reason to keep a secret. Here is the whole method, with the four ways it fails.
Three families lent us four fragments said to have come off the ranch. Two laboratories, told nothing about their provenance, identified all four. One is nitinol, which does remember its shape, and which nobody could have made until 1959.
A gear metrologist who inspects industrial gearboxes and had never heard of the mechanism measured every surviving tooth on the Saros wheel. Forty-seven sit outside tolerance. The errors are not random; they cluster where a hand stopped.
On 9 December 2009 a blue beam and an enormous grey spiral stood over northern Norway. A submarine had fired a missile whose third stage failed. The spiral was sunlight on leaking fuel, spinning.
Nine people died on a slope too shallow to avalanche. Two engineers modelled it with animation code from a Disney film and injury thresholds from cadavers crash-tested in the seventies. They say plausible. The headlines said solved.
In May we printed that the cumulative study needed doing, cost more than we had, and would be run on the campaigners' terms if it ever happened. It is happening. Here is the protocol, a year before the result.
Observatories excite a layer of sodium 90 kilometres up to create an artificial star for their optics. It is real, it is nightly, and we went and watched. Getting from one dot to a picture is where the arithmetic stops being encouraging.
Nobody had scored the old projections, so three researchers did. Average skill 72 per cent, the best of them 99, and 0.20 °C per decade. The data and the code are in a public repository.
A physics teacher measured the video frame by frame and told a federal agency its draft was wrong. The agency checked, agreed, and rewrote the report. Then it explained why that changes nothing.
The money was for a telegraph tower to beat Marconi. Tesla built something else and did not say so. Morgan's letters complain about a business, not about free electricity — and the scheme could not have worked anyway.
Four firms signed an agreement in 1924 capping lamp life at 1,000 hours, then fined each other for making bulbs that lasted. A federal court agreed in 1949. It is the best-documented conspiracy on this beat and nobody writes to us.
Kicked regolith leaves the boot in a clean parabola and lands. It cannot billow, because there is no air to billow in. We hired an effects supervisor to reproduce ninety seconds of it with 1969 tools. Her costing has one line.
Fifty-odd countries seed clouds and the physics is not in dispute. The arithmetic is: you cannot measure the rain that would have fallen anyway. Seventy-five years on, nobody has solved that, and the honest operators say so.
Bob Lazar named element 115 in 1989, fourteen years before anyone made one — and that is the only part of his account that came true. Moscovium decays in ninety milliseconds. We split the rest into six claims and tested each.
Malanga, Biondi and Mei reported shafts and spiral stairs beneath the pyramid and were told satellite radar cannot see that deep. This newspaper paid for a borehole and lowered a camera. The stairs are cut, and they turn.
Application 4,112,889 described a device its author said produced thrust without reaction mass. The third action invited withdrawal. He withdrew, never refiled, and burned his notebooks in 1991. Nothing in the file says the device worked.
Four computations of the same orbit disagree by 214 years. We asked all four to publish their inputs. The two that did both reproduced on our correspondent's own machine. The other two are not wrong. They are worse than wrong.
Forty-one sites, all chosen by the campaigners. Two calibrated meters, two engineers who could not see each other's readings. The highest reading anywhere was 0.4 per cent of the public exposure limit.
