First, a little recap: In 2006, a little-known IT company announced that it had, in effect, circumvented the law of conservation of energy with its "Orb" generator, which produces "Clean, Free and Constant" power. To mitigate the inevitable response from rational people horrible skeptics, they issued a challenge to the world's scientists in The Economist, claiming they would assemble a qualified, unbiased jury to evaluate their technology. And so they did.

The next—and many assumed, final—chapter of the Steorn saga was a botched demonstration in 2007. Steorn blamed heat from the camera lights for the failure, but by then, people weren't really listening.

Today, we get this terse announcement from the jury, who has been silently plugging away all the while:

Twenty-two independent scientists and engineers were selected by Steorn to form this jury. It has for the past two years examined evidence presented by the company. The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.

But guess what! They didn't see the new stuff, apparently. Cue Steorn's (familiar) response:

[D]uring 2009 the company had resolved the key technical problems related to the implementation of Orbo and is now focused on commercial launch towards the end of this year, at which time academic and engineering validation would be released concurrent with public demonstrations

In other words, Steorn has discovered an unlimited source of energy, and they're using it to power their PR department, forever. [Steorn Jury via Ben Goldacre's Twitter]

No, Steorn did not create a wormhole to another part of the universe. There was no white hot spinny thing raging out of control, though there were problems with spinny things, and they did involve excessive heat. The "technical difficulties" message appeared thusly:

We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today. As a consequence, Kinetica will not be open to the public today (5th July). We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience.

The question now is: Will it ever happen? We're not so sure, although much of the world has already pounded the gavel and headed off to chambers. Stay tuned to the camera link and find out. In the meantime, I leave you more technically minded readers with Steorn's own description of the Orbo technology (which it is very happy to license or have you invest in). Is it snakeoil? Or does it have real bite? You be the judge:

Orbo is based upon the principle of time variant magneto-mechanical interactions. The core output from our Orbo technology is mechanical. This mechanical energy can be converted into electrical energy using standard generator technology either by integrating such technology directly with Orbo or by connecting the mechanical output from Orbo to the generation technology. The efficiency of such mechanical/electrical conversions is highly dependent on the components used and is also a function of size.