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Unlimited energy from a simple unit? Yes, latest work suggests that cold fusion is not so dead and cold! Jayalakshmi K shares the details. As the world grapples with the energy crisis, a group of maverick scientists working on the fringes of accepted science has yet again come up with tantalising results. Last month in Japan, Yoshiaki Arata, a highly respected physicist in Japan and recipient of Japan's highest award, the Emperor's Prize, demonstrated the production of continuous excess heat from a simple experiment. This low-energy nuclear reaction experiment was one more in the sporadic efforts to prove 'cold fusion',...

 This is a follow-up to exciting cold fusion demonstration of last month.  PHOTOS-A public demo open to the media and skeptic by professor Arata of Japan   Yoshiaki Arata receiving Preparata Award in 2007Photo: S.B. KrivitBy Jon CartwrightSeveral of you have asked when I'm going to give you an update on Yoshiaki Arata's cold-fusion demonstration that took place at Osaka University, Japan, three weeks ago. I have not yet come across any other first-hand accounts, and the videos, which I believe were taken by people at the university, have still not surfaced.However, you may have noticed that Jed Rothwell of...

Cold Fusion, the act of producing a nuclear reaction at room temperature, has long been relegated to science fiction after researchers were unable to recreate the experiment that first "discovered" the phenomenon. But a Japanese scientist was supposedly able to start a cold fusion reaction earlier this week, which—if the results are real—could revolutionize the way we gather energy. Yoshiaki Arata, a highly respected physicist in Japan, demonstrated a low-energy nuclear reaction at Osaka University on Thursday. In front of a live audience, including reporters from six major newspapers and two TV studios, Arata and a co-professor Yue-Chang Zhang, produced...

On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton, UK, and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, US, announced that they had observed controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature, and — for around a month — the world was under the impression that the world's energy woes had been remedied. But, even as other groups claimed to repeat the pair's results, sceptical reports began trickle in. An editorial in Nature predicted cold fusion to be unfounded. And a US Department of Energy report judged that the experiments did "not provide convincing evidence that...