5 Reasons Cold Fusion is Bunk

                                              Fusion, the same process that powers stars including the sun, would be a relatively clean, safe and near-limitless source of power. Unlike the fission of nuclear reactors that splits atoms to make energy, fusion fuses atoms. In nature, a star's immense gravity works to do the job of crushing hydrogen nuclei, protons, to create the reaction. But on Earth, crushing hydrogen atoms is no easy matter. It typically requires a machine that generates plasma -- atoms stripped of their electrons -- and runs at ultra-high temperatures in the millions of degrees Fahrenheit range. In short, more energy gets put in than what comes out, and that is not efficient.

But some scientists are trying to figure out how to get a fusion reaction to occur at room temperature. If successful, a so-called "cold fusion" machine would require little energy to run, but conversely produce a tremendous amount. In 1989, two scientists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman, said they managed to achieve cold fusion, but after some initial excitement, the general consensus was that they didn't achieve cold fusion and in fact probably never would.

In the last couple of years, Italian inventor and entrepreneur, Andrea Rossi, claims he has achieved cold fusion with his "Energy Catalyzer," or "E-Cat" machine. The latest news is a supposedly independent test that validates his claims of a machine that somehow emits more energy (as heat) than it gets from the electrical outlets it is plugged into. A paper describing the test was posted on the ArXiv, a site where scientists post research before it goes for full peer-review.

Although Rossi staged demonstrations in 2011 attended by several journalists and a few scientists, he hasn't shared details about the machine or any of the data with other scientists nor has he allowed independent parties to confirm that a nuclear reaction has happened. In fact at one demonstration, he specifically disallowed a physicist from testing for the presence of gamma radiation. Despite the criticism, there are still supporters; among them Nobel laureate Brian Josephson, who pioneered superconductivity research.

Some types of nuclear reactions can theoretically occur at near-room temperatures, and there's a lot of active research into low energy nuclear reaction, or LENR. But that type of reaction isn't the same as cold fusion. "Cold fusion has no merit," said Steven B. Krivit
, publisher and senior editor, of the New Energy Times, who has covered LENR research for nearly a decade and authored books on the subject.

The difference, Krivit said, is that low-energy nuclear reactions operate according to known principles of physics, largely involving weak nuclear force interactions and capturing neutrons. While there is still a good deal of scientific controversy over LENR, the research exploring it doesn't invoke any new physics. Cold fusion requires that at least a few basic principles, such as the Standard Model, be wrong. So far no experiments have shown that they are.

Here are five reasons that cold fusion probably can't work, at least according to the laws of physics.

Read more »

Victorian Era Brits Were Smarter Than Us

The average intelligence level of Victorian Era individuals was higher than that of people today, according to a new study.

We’re not all dumb, however, as another study in the same journal, Intelligence, found that intelligence has steadily increased in Saudi Arabia over the past four decades.

Why study these parts of the world in the first place? For the new study on Victorians vs. us, lead author Michael Woodley of Umea University in Sweden and colleagues Jan te Nijenhuis and Raegan Murphy offered the following:

“The Victorian Era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study.”
The latter refers to reaction times to visual stimuli (called RT), which were measured in tests administered to people from the late 1800’s until 2004. The researchers couldn’t compare standard IQ tests because those have changed over the years.

The RT tests supposedly can reflect a person’s IQ. The faster the person reacts, the smarter he or she supposedly is.

Intelligence as we think of it today, though, is very complex, encompassing hard-to-measure traits like creativity, ability to reason, communication skills and more. A person’s thinking ability can also be influenced in the moment by nutrition, amount of sleep, distractions, stress and other factors.

Nevertheless, the researchers posit that RT can indicate the inherent intelligence of a person, likely referring to that individual’s genetically inherited brainpower. This is therefore not affected by things like education level, environmental influences and individual health.

At any rate, the study found that RT rates have dramatically increased over time, basically meaning people are becoming mentally more slow and stupid. Men went from 183 ms in the Victorian Era to 253 ms in modern times. Women went from 188 ms to 261ms.

I have to wonder that there was a glitch in the way that the times were measured, but will assume the increases are accurate.

The authors concluded, “These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g (the measure of general intelligence) the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.”

Read more »