http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7315
Sure, it is not good enough for power generation, but non the less it is cold fusion on a desktop. Very cool indeed.
New Scientist seems to be down just now. Here’s an IHT story.
Awesome! I hate being caught short of neutrons.
“Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need.” -Morpheus
THEY’RE COMING! THEY’RE COMING FOR US! THE END IS NIGH!
I keed, I keed.
Anyway, this is really cool. I had no idea that materials like this lithium tantalate even existed. Ten degrees C - most of us would find that almost chilly. I wonder what you could get out of it at 80 or 90 degrees C. Maybe that would be enough for energy-generating fusion? Surely they would have tried that though.
Muon-Catalyzed Fusion also takes place at room temperature. It isn’t workable as an energy source either, but the process is pretty neat, I thought.
So fusion at room temperature which produces less energy than it consumes dates back to the 1950’s.
Cool article though. Every new way we figure out to do this is one step closer to discovering how to harvest energy through fusion.
Very cool.
…and you just know that they are going to eventually create a new type of crystal using a doubled crystal structure that will be tremendously-more efficient, and will yield a net power output in an easily-tractable form…
This will, of course, be the famous ‘dilithium tantalate’ crystals. 