What's New Friday November 28, 2008

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 28 Nov 08   Washington, DC

1.  COLD FUSION:  OR IS IT THE "FLEISHMAN-PONS EFFECT"?
It’s been almost 20 years since the March 23, 1989 announcement that cold 
fusion had been discovered by two chemists at the University of Utah.  By 
June, cold fusion was an object of ridicule.  A small band of embattled 
defenders retreated to holding annual conferences of like-minded 
scientists to which skeptics were not welcome.  The story now seems to be 
entering a new chapter.  Believers have begun showing a willingness to 
confront skeptics, submitting papers to open meetings of major scientific 
societies.  They no longer use the term "cold fusion," preferring the less 
contentious "low-energy nuclear reactions" (LENR) to describe their field; 
LENR more accurately describes what, if anything, is going on.  However, 
the use of LENR has been undone by referring to "excess heat" as the 
Fleischmann-Pons effect.  This only serves as a reminder of the outrageous 
conduct of the university administration and the incredibly sloppy 
research on which the claim was based.  This year, there is great 
excitement over the work of Yoshiaki Arata, a respected professor at Osaka 
University.  In May Arata demonstrated the production of excess heat to an 
audience of 80, but there have been many such claims over the years and 
until it is replicated by someone outside the LENR community and a 
plausible explanation is advanced, it will change few minds. 

2. SCIENCE ADVISOR: NO, I HAVEN’T HEARD A WORD.  
It was clear back in mid-September that Wired had a brief article naming a 
group of scientist who were advising the Democratic candidate: Harold 
Varmus, 1989  Nobel in Medicine and former director of NIH, led the group, 
which included Gilbert Omenn, 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine, professor of 
medicine at the University of Michigan, Peter Agre, 2003 Nobel Prize in 
Chemistry, dean of medicine at Duke, Donald Lamb professor of astronomy 
and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who does not yet have the 
Nobel Prize, and Sharon Long, plant biologist and former dean of  science 
and humanities at Stanford.  It is a sterling group of independent 
thinkers.  Heavy on the bio-medical end perhaps, reflecting the great 
progress in that area in recent years.  But their names have not come up 
since, and the focus in Obama’s camp has been on technologists.

3. ISS TURNS TEN: TIME TO CHANGE THE WALLPAPER.
It was a busy week on the lSS which had its tenth birthday.  The space 
shuttle Endeavor was docked to the station to help with the remodeling, 
which added two bedrooms and a second toilet.   It took four space walks 
to free a rotating joint on a solar panel that must face directly toward 
the sun to provide additional power, needed to double the crew from three 
to six.  My joints don’t work like they used to either.  They look great 
on the evening news, but space walks are the most dangerous part of an 
astronaut’s job.   Inside the ISS they tinkered with a device to convert 
urine and perspiration to drinking water.  The technology is not exactly 
new; the city of Washington takes its water out of the Potomac above the 
city, passes it through the guts of two million people, and returns it to 
the river below the city as pure as bottled water sold as "pure spring 
water," but that’s another story.  The extra water is needed for a crew of 
six.  

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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