Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Dept. of Energy Takes A New Look At Cold Fusion
lhouk281 writes "Technology Review is reporting that the U.S. Department of Energy has decided that recent results justify a fresh look at cold fusion. According to Peter Hagelstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, experiments performed under properly controlled conditions reliably produce more heat than standard theory predicts, and nuclear products show up in about the right amounts to account for this excess heat. Maybe we'll get those atomic-powered automobiles after all ..."
the same crackpots who brought you an Earth that orbits the Sun, an Earth that isn't flat, blackholes, gravity waves, etc turns out to be right about "cold" fusion - say it ain't so...
Surely Heat might be more useful :-)
Get the EULA T-shirt
I want an atomic powered FLYING car. Until they get those babies off the ground I'm not interested.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
But since it relies on dihydrogen monoxide, it'll never make it through congress
Haven't most people switched to PHP or ASP now?
Does this mean we have to give Ponz and Fleishman their dignity back?
You can't really criticize the government too much for doing this. We'll certainly have cold fusion before the Bush administration finds any WMDs.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
That extra heat is coming from an exogenous source: the bowl of the researcher's crack pipe.
An atomic reaction small enough to be contained within a laptop, providing months of continual power. Really gives "BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH" a whole new meaning...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
I thought Flash 8 was supposed to have Cold Fusion built in...
I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
But consider yourself replied to now.
"Over the past 15 years, enthusiasts have generated some 3,000 manuscripts on cold fusion, but very few were ever published in scientific journals.
Really?
I can't think why
Get the EULA T-shirt
1. A naive female scientist who writes her formula on post-it notes
2. A Russian scientist who is forced to decipher the formula on said post-it notes
3. An international spy that uses names of saints as a disguise
Don't believe me? Here's proof!
i'm either too geeky or not geeky enough...but it took me 4 times reading the article to figure out they were not talking about Cold Fusion development tools... /smack!
/shrug
I kept trying to figure out what the dept of energy wanted with Cold Fusion Tools...
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
...and nuclear products show up in about the right amounts
;-)
About? About?
Is that the kind of "precise" measurement that will lead to three eyed fish and babys with 12 toes in twenty years?
Man, I would give a volkswagon worth of dollars to have a more precise way of measuring nuclear by-products!
You mean we've been making fun of cold fusion for nothing all these years? What'll we make fun of now?
I think instead of Cold Fusion they should consider using Perl, PHP or J2EE. Why US governement still insists on using those proprietary formats?
----
>> SELECT SIG FROM USER WHERE ID='15607317'
NO ROWS RETURNED
the Fusion cools you.
Omg, i can't believe I just did that...
Yeah, it's a shame we ever allowed the oil companies to develop nuclear weapons. They've kept the American auto industry away from building cheap fusion-powered flying cars, ever since they nuked Honda & Toyota back to the Stone Age. And what can we do, except stay away from Canada (those Canucks with their straw-to-ethanol enzymes; you know they're getting blasted into atoms any day now! What were they thinking?!)
Damn oil-company overlords... I'll never welcome them! Never!
Got to go - I hear the medication cart coming down the hall.
I'll believe it when my Mr. Fusion(TM) is using beer cans and banana peels to power the Flux Capacitor(TM) on my DeLorean(TM).
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
We did not invade Iraq for the oil, we invaded Iraq because Sadam was about to release his own cold-fusion technology to the wide world, and we had to stop that at all costs.
What do you think all that talk of "nuclear weapons" was about? Bombs? nah! cold fusion!!
Is that the kind of "precise" measurement that will lead to ... babies with 12 toes in twenty years?
Think of the great tap dancers we'll get to see!
A handful of failed attempts to replicate the results are discouraging, yes, but the potential benefits should've justified a bit more tinkering back when it was announced.
I'd like to announce that I've produced a fusion reaction in my sock drawer. I await further funding. Surely the potential benefits justify a bit more tinkering?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
One day I was going to south to visit my gal.
But I had to stay and keep watch over the equipment.
My Sal she is a spunky gal,
But I was on polywater duty all day.
Now I just hope I can cool my beer in my engine. Every evening after my commute I would let out a cry "Thank god for cold fusion", and crack a nice cold one.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
We had these flying machines called Zeplins. They were big, full of hydrogen, and generally were most spiffy except once and a while they blew up.
Back in 1996 I took a Small Business Economics course (cash cow definitions and all that) and the lecturer explained the story behind cold fusion.
Two scientists (physicists I believe) had apparently found Cold Fusion.
Of course, shortly after their claims were made public, one disappeared, the other owns a small island, and 1/3 of their research was missing. With the missing 1/3 many scientists attempted to reconstruct the experiments and concluded that it was not possible and cold fusion did not exist.
But does it not seem coincidental that one of the two suddenly owns an island and the other vanished?
Society changes slowly. A discovery like that, back then when the automobile industry was struggling and slowly recovering, would crumble such a vast infrastructure. Think about it; a new fuel! Would that not put thousands if not tens of thousands out of work? Yes, all those gas stations, oil refineries, mines (for fossil fuels), etc..., all no longer needed. It would be an economical disaster.
Now that it is well known the environment has taken a lot of abuse from fossil fuel usage the possibility of cold fusion reappears. Of course, after all the investment into Hydrogen power and Fuel Cells, we won't see Cold Fusion for a long while.
Just my suspicious/consipiracy theory $0.02 worth!
so why not approach things with a neutral opinion until proven one way or the other? ...
If you want to critique this guy, then go show me how smart you are and pick apart his experiments or apparatus, or maybe propose a theory that could explain the results another way - and devise an experiment to test that theory.
You're new around here, aren't you?
Alchemists accidentally stumbled into modern chemistry.
-B