The flag bearer for cold fusion is throwing in the towel. The University of Utah has said it will not defend its patents on cold fusion, a move that will allow the intellectual property of professors Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, of Southampton University (England), to lapse.
Pons and Fleischmann once held the attention of the scientific community after their 1989 revelation that they had found a cheap, easy way to produce hydrogen energy, another name for cold fusion. Ordinarily, nuclear fusion can be safely achieved for only fractions of a second with equipment producing intense electromagnetic fields and heat at very high cost. Pons and Fleischmann maintained that they could achieve fusion at room temperature with a large energy gain.
Their announcement touched off a controversy in the scientific community which largely maintained that cold fusion was a hoax. Still, researchers around the world tried to duplicate the efforts of Pons and Fleischmann. It also spawned the development of cold fusion laboratories, including one in Tokyo. For believers in cold fusion, the US government killed off much of the potential work in the country by denying grants and funding for any research.
Nevertheless, millions have been spent trying to make cold fusion a reality. Japan cut off funding for cold fusion research last summer after spending US$20 million. For their own efforts, the University of Utah has spent more than $1 million on the project.
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__Growing Decaffeinated Coffee Beans:__The home of Kona Coffee could become the land of the world’s first decaffeinated coffee bean, reports New Scientist. Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who successfully isolated the genetic culprit that lends java beans their amphetamine-like buzz. They will plant tissue cultures based on their work this summer in the hopes of brewing their first cup of coffee early in the next century.
The key to making the plant kick the caffeine habit is to stop the process before it starts. To do this, researchers found the gene that makes xanthosine-N7-methyl transferase, the enzyme that starts the caffeine production in a coffee bean plant. To stop the gene, the scientists used a bacterium, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, as the agent for transferring a gene to turn off the caffeine production. In laboratory experiments, researchers found that plants with this altered gene produce 3 percent of their normal amount of caffeine. With a caffeine-free plant, the researchers hope to produce a bean that will retain its full flavor, an element that is sometimes lost in post-harvest treatments to make decaf beans.
