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The 2011 Cold Fusion/Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions Colloquium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Part 2 (Report prepared by staff of JET Energy, Inc.) INFINITE ENERGY • ISSUE 99 • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 The 2011 Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions/Cold Fusion Colloquium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts) was held on Saturday, June 11 and Sunday, June 12, 2011. The meeting focused on the science and technology of cold fusion (CF) and lattice-assisted nuclear reactions (LANR). In 1989, the initial failures of cold fusion resulted from bad experiments, bad paradigm, materials issues, poor loadings and a poor appreciation of the...

MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report Compiled and written by Eugene F. Mallove, Sc.D. MIT Class of 1969, S.B. Aero/Astro Eng., 1970 S.M. Aero/Astro Eng. Editor-in-Chief, Infinite Energy Magazine President, New Energy Foundation, Inc. Introduction When on March 23, 1989 Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had measured nuclear-scale excess energy from a palladium-heavy water electrochemical cell, and that they had also detected some preliminary evidence of nuclear signatures from their exotic energy-producing reactions, the world was in awe. Their famous afternoon press conference at the University of Utah, coming less than twelve hours before the...

The surprising discovery of "square ice" which forms at room temperature was made by an international team of researchers last week. The study was published in Nature by a team of scientists from UK and Germany led by Andre Geim of University of Manchester and G. Algara-Siller of University of Ulm. The accompanying review article was done by Alan Soper of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK. "We didn't expect to find square ice ... We found there is something strange in terms of water going through [nanochannels]. It's going too fast. And you can't explain that by just imagining a...

The atom-thick sheet of carbon, graphene already has a number of amazing properties to it, including strength and electrical conductivity. As impressive its conductivity is though, superconductivity is still greater and has been observed with graphene, but not explained. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have now found how graphene and calcium become a superconductor.Called calcium intercalated graphite, or CaC6 is produced by interweaving calcium and graphite, which is a means of isolating sheets of graphene. About ten years ago it was discovered that this material could become superconducting, but neither the exact means nor...

High-temperature superconductors exhibit a frustratingly varied catalog of odd behavior, such as electrons that arrange themselves into stripes or refuse to arrange themselves symmetrically around atoms. Now two physicists propose that such behaviors – and superconductivity itself – can all be traced to a single starting point, and they explain why there are so many variations. This theory might be a step toward new, higher-temperature superconductors that would revolutionize electrical engineering with more efficient motors and generators and lossless power transmission. -snip- Most subatomic particles have a tiny magnetic field – a property physicists call "spin" – and electrical resistance...

DETROIT (WWJ) – A major power outage is affecting Wayne State University, the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, the City-County building, the Detroit Historical Museum, and the People Mover in downtown Detroit. “Some institutional public lighting customers are experiencing service interruption caused by extreme heat, cable failure, and routine maintenance — all combining causing system overload,” said Robert Warfield, a spokesman for the Detroit Mayor’s Office. Wayne State spokesperson Jessica Archer said the campus would be closed for the rest of the day, Wednesday, after about half of all buildings — maybe 40 or 50 — lost power. She said...

Doped graphite may superconduct at more than 100 ºC. Researchers in Germany have claimed a breakthrough: a material that can act as a superconductor — transmit electricity with zero resistance — at room temperature and above. Superconductors offer huge potential energy savings, but until now have worked only at temperatures of lower than about -110 °C. Now, Pablo Esquinazi and his colleagues at the University of Leipzig report that flakes of humble graphite soaked in water seem to continue superconducting at temperatures of greater than 100 °C1. Even Esquinazi admits that the claim “sounds like science fiction”, but the work...

Got mass? Scientists observe electrons become both heavy and speedy Electrons moving in certain solids can behave as if they are a thousand times more massive than free electrons, but at the same time act as superconductors. A new study led by Princeton scientists shows that this happens because of a process known as quantum entanglement that determines the mass of electrons moving in a crystal. The discovery can help improve understanding of how certain materials become superconducting, which may have applications in areas such as power network efficiency and computing speed. Credit: the Yazdani Group A Princeton University-led team...

A violation of one of the oldest empirical laws of physics has been observed by scientists at the University of Bristol. Their experiments on purple bronze, a metal with unique one-dimensional electronic properties, indicate that it breaks the Wiedemann-Franz Law. This historic discovery is described in a paper published today in Nature Communications. In 1853, two German physicists, Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz, studied the thermal conductivity (a measure of a system’s ability to transfer heat) of a number of elemental metals and found that the ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities was approximately the same for different metals...

In eight magnetization tests a small amount of the compound (Tl5Pb2)Ba2MgCu10O17+ consistently produced sharp diamagnetic transitions (the Meissner effect) near 20 Celsius (see above graphic), and resistive transitions that appeared near 18.5C. These temperatures are believed accurate +/- 2 degrees. In 2008 a Sn-In-Pb-Tm cuprate produced superconductivity near 195K . That material had a C-axis lattice constant around 33 angstroms. Attempts to go beyond 33 Å within that system failed to produce signs of superconductivity. That fact pointed to 33 Å being a rough upper size limit for a superconductive unit cell within this family of copper perovskites. Since the...

It's rare that hot booze does anything more than get you drunk, and possibly make you sick, but according to Dr. Yoshihiko Takano, the drink you're sucking on could facilitate the levitation of a train. After a party for a colleague, the Japanese scientist found that FeTe0.8S0.2 (composed of iron, tellurium, and tellurium sulfide), when soaked in warm booze overnight, shows signs of increased superconductivity -- another in a long line of liquor-enhanced discoveries that could have far reaching effects on everything from consumer electronics to public transportation. Dr. Takano decided to test the material (known to become a superconductor...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Japanese scientist who "likes alcohol very much" has discovered that soaking samples of material in hot party drinks for 24 hours turns them into superconductors at ambient temperature. The scientist, Dr. Yoshihiko Takano of the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, made the discovery after a party, soaking samples of a potential superconductor in hot alcoholic drinks before testing them next day for superconductivity. The commercial alcoholic beverages, especially wine, were much more effective than either water or pure alcohol.

The modern world -- with its ubiquitous electronic devices and electrical power -- can trace its lineage directly to the discovery, less than two centuries ago, of the link between electricity and magnetism. But while engineers have harnessed electromagnetic forces on a global scale, physicists still struggle to describe the dance between electrons that creates magnetic fields. Two theoretical physicists from Rice University are reporting initial success in that area in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Their new conceptual model, which was created to learn more about the quantum quirks of high-temperature superconductors...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- When high-temperature superconductors were first announced in the late 1980s, it was thought that they would lead to ultra-efficient magnetic trains and other paradigm-shifting technologies. That didn't happen. Now, a University of Florida scientist is among a team of physicists to help explain why. In a paper set to appear Sunday in the online edition of Nature Physics, Peter Hirschfeld, a UF professor of physics, and five other researchers for the first time describe precisely how the atomic-level structural elements of high-temperature ceramic superconductors serve to impede electrical current. Their explanation for how "grain boundaries" separating rows...

Researchers in Japan have created the first superconducting material based on a molecule of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Although the superconducting transition occurs at a chilly 18K, the simplicity of the molecule, which consists of just five benzene rings, suggests that it will open the door to other molecules that have higher transition temperatures.Superconductivity occurs when a material is cooled below a certain transition temperature (Tc) so that its electrical resistance disappears. The first superconductors were pure metals and had Tc  values close to absolute zero, but over the past 25 years scientists have begun to discover various 'high-Tc' materials, including...

> For this to work, the wire's surface must be extremely clean, allowing electrons to move freely and spread along the wire to create a uniform temperature. A material with a critical temperature of -193 °C could superconduct at room temperature, provided some sections were kept to -253 °C, they found. In principle, the colder these refrigeration points are, the fewer you need, Dubi says. >

Baroque field gets fresh lease of life in condensed-matter physics. String theory - more than just a 'theory of everything'?Alamy Until recently, string theory — long heralded as a 'theory of everything' — hadn't been particularly good at explaining anything.But at a workshop this month at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, scientists have been using the theory to make progress in tackling one of the biggest puzzles in condensed-matter physics: the origin of high-temperature superconductivity. String theory suggests that vibrating strings that exist in 10 dimensions underpin the observable Universe. Although that basic premise is still...

The rare earth metal is the 53rd naturally occurring element to possess the property An old element just learned a new trick under pressure. When cooled and squeezed very hard, the soft metallic element europium turns into a superconductor, allowing electrons to flow unfettered by resistance, a study appearing May 13 in Physical Review Letters shows. The results make europium the 53rd of the 92 naturally occurring elements to possess superconductivity, which, if harnessed, could make for more efficient energy transfer. Europium, a rare earth metal with a silver color, is strongly magnetic at everyday temperatures and pressure. Study coauthor...

Enlarge ImageStrange swirls. The vortices in the type-2 superconductor niobium diselenide form an orderly pattern (bottom); those in the "type-1.5" superconductor magnesium diboride form a disorderly pattern filled with stripes and voids. Credit: V. V. Moshchalkov and M. Menghini/K. U. Leuven Superconductors, materials that carry electricity without resistance, can be divided into two broad groups depending on how they react to a magnetic field--or so physicists thought. New experiments show that one well-studied superconductor actually belongs to both groups at the same time. "If the experiment is true, this would add a whole new class of superconductors," says Egor...

When chilled to 77 kelvins (–321 degrees Fahrenheit) or colder, so-called high-temperature superconductors such as the ceramic YBCO (yttrium barium copper oxide) begin to carry electricity without resistance, which produces a strong magnetic field without wasting energy. Liquid hydrogen (20 K, or –424 degrees F) could chill the superconductor as well as power a hydrogen fuel cell to send electricity through it, he and co-workers report in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology. Masson says that based on their designs, a YBCO turbine would generate as much power as a single-engine Cessna aircraft for roughly half of the mass. A...