A MONTH after two chemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, claimed that they carried out nuclear fusion in an electrolytic cell at room temperature, the situation is as confusing as ever. Scores of experiments are generating a patchwork of contradictory results.
Last week, Indian, Brazilian and Chinese scientists all said that they had confirmed the chemists' results, as did a group at Stanford University in California. But chemists working at major American companies failed to detect fusion. The chemists at Texas A&M University who had previously announced that they obtained the same results as Pons and Fleischmann retracted their claim. Then, two days later, they retracted their retraction.
The most spectacular claim was made by an Italian group which said it had shown that an electrolytic cell was not necessary to realise cold fusion.
Working at the University of Utah, Fleischmann and Pons began the rush to demonstrate cold fusion ...
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