I just saw the tail end of clip on the Discovery Channel on anti gravity lifters. The show referenced a website (americanantigravity.com) that has video and pictures of these lifters. I know nothing about this kind of thing, but it looks like these tin foil things actually levitate off the ground and defy gravity. Is this for real? How exactly do they work?

They're ion wind thrusters. Air gets ionized at the top, then attracted to the oppositely-charged lower plate. On the way down it bumps into more air, generating more downforce as it does. It's just a electrically powered reaction engine with no moving parts and a really poor thrust-to-weight ratio.

This technology has been around for decades. It's no big deal, except lately some of the woowoo crowd have decided they actually work by some magical antigravity force instead. But they still don't work in a vacume.

http://www.blazelabs.com/l-vacuum.asp

Or with much load. Ever notice that they're all powered by HUGE voltages (we're talking 50KV here) and are made out of balsa wood? Yup, this is definitely safe tech here.

This thread hyar has bunches of info about thrusters, both woo-wo and straight.

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
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This is called the biefeld-brown effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biefeld-Brown_effect

As it happens, I am also related to Dr Paul Biefeld (my wifes great grandfather) and I am in possesion of a number of letters between Einsten and Biefeld about this effect with commentary of Mr Brown (woo woo does not go far enough). Lemme know if these letters are of historical significance to anyone, to me all they represent is a sort of ultimate Sci-fi paraphenila.

I do know much of Dr Biefelds work in this area remains classified, although most of Mr Browns work is seminal for ufologists...

Where's my hovercar?

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- Learn a lot teaching others.

Due to budget constraints all we can afford to give you right now is a baloon, a round piece of cardboard with a hole in the middle to stick the end throught, and a lego man to stick on top.

A Lego man? I'll take it!

Well that's pretty cool too.

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I had some fun with these ‘lifters’ a couple of years ago, party trick stuff mostly. But I haven’t seen much work done on maximizing the thrust/power ratio using new materials and geometries—such as concentric triangles, or fine tungsten filaments rather than steel. I’d like to see how high the ratio could go.

I tried one interesting variation though—I took an airfoil silhoutte and rotated it through 360 degrees, to create a ufo-shaped disc out of light eps foam. Then I put the wire in the center of the disc, and the foil around the edge. And it produced a slight thrust that I attributed to a slight pressure differential on the airflow side. It looked really cool too—a ufo-shaped disc covered in a violet ionic haze ;)