Cold fusion is back (again)
The old scientific wives' tale that is cold fusion is back in the news.
Cold fusion is the Holy Grail of renewable energy - a way of coaxing nuclear reactions at room temperature. Clean, unlimited energy for all.
Sounds too good to be true? It is, or so we thought.
There was a lot of hullabaloo 20 years ago when scientists at the University of Utah said they had nailed down cold fusion in an experiment.
After a big fanfare the rest of the scientific community crushed the hopes pretty quiickly and the whole episode was something of a fiasco.
But you can't keep a good/wishful idea down and chemists at the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center say they've proved that the experiment was right after all.
There's still plenty of skepticism, as you would expect, but the hope is one day we might replicate the powerful energy generation that occurs in stars such as our sun, but to do so at a much cooler temperature.
If successful, it could provide a nearly infinite supply of clean energy here on Earth. Which would be very nice.
Weird Science Factoid: 55 per cent of people yawn within five minutes of seeing someone else yawn. Reading about yawning makes most people yawn. Is is true or is it my ramblings that's sending you to sleep?
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
This is quite interesting. How wonderful isn't it to live in a world with unlimited supply of energy, free and clean energy, no carbon emissions, hardly any waste at all, and little radioactive waste. It would be fantastic. And I hope I live long enough to see this happen. Tire Works