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20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success
New Scientist is reporting that twenty years to the day since the initial announcement of a cold fusion discovery another Utah-based team is trying again. This announcement is being taken a little more seriously than the original, although some might say it is just more available wishful thinking. "Some researchers in the cold fusion field agree. 'In my view [it's] a cold fusion effect,' says Peter Hagelstein, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others, though, are not convinced. Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, has been following the cold fusion debate for many years and also spoke at the ACS conference. 'Their hypothesis as to a fusion mechanism I think is on thin ice ... you get into physics fantasies rather quickly and this is an unfortunate distraction from their excellent empirical work,' he told New Scientist. Krivit thinks cold fusion remains science fiction. Like many in the field, he prefers to categorize the work as evidence of 'low-energy nuclear reactions,' and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion."
There, fixed that for ya.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
CR-39 is a very common detection method. It is by no means unusual. The article does make it seem that way, but that is not the case. It is just a passive detector and is fairly cheap. The plastic is typically etched after exposure and analysis is usually automated with some software that "reads" the tracks.
According to the journal article:
Advantages of CR-39 for ICF experiments include its insensitivity to electromagnetic noise; its resistance to mechanical damage; and its relative insensitivity to electrons, X-rays, and gamma-rays.
So they chose it because it would give more reliable data, less prone to interference.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
While I see and appreciate your sarcasm in regards to "Darksuckers", you are actually *absolutely correct* that AC units are "Heatsuckers". "Cold" is not something you can manipulate... the kinetic energy of particles that we call "Heat" is what is trasferred by air conditioners.
It may have been science fiction to the general public (which includes all non physicists), but it did in fact have a sound theoretical basis. (Unlike cold fusion.) It didn't take a war to make them work, it took a war to spur their engineering development. They would have worked regardless.
You weren't inspecting any such things because they never existed. Nor can there be such a thing as an atomic rifle grenade - as the minimum mass for a practical fission explosion far exceeds what a rifle can project.
Not as far as you fantasize they were 45 years ago. (You don't seem to have kept up with the field, at lot has been declassified since 1963.) I invite you to check out Carey Sublette's excellent Nuclear Weapons FAQ and then join us on the Usenet group alt.war.nuclear for further discussion.
I can envision plaid polka dotted elephants - but their only basis in fact is the consumption of psychoactive chemicals.
Yeah, when all else fails - invoke a conspiracy theory. It relieves you of dealing with the really hard questions... Like the lack of a theoretical basis for cold fusion. Like the fact that despite twenty years of trying, the experiments cannot be replicated on a reliable basis. It's all Big Oil and their evil minions.