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Must have been a very successful experiment. All the "H" are indeed gone!

i mean, i would have looked for helium-4 as a proof of cold fusion, but elium-4?! that's incredible! did they use dilithium crystals to do that? adamantium? unobtanium?

I found this article on the demonstration:

http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/05/coldfusion_demonstration_a_suc_1.html

A little more here:

http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm

Not a first hand account, but still.

Wouldn't that be nice? After years of delays for a new experimental fusion reactor (ITER) because they could not agree on where it should be built, a Japanese professor finds a way to get cold fusion to get work and the reactor is obsolete before built! Science can move ahead in strange and unpredictable ways as well...

...and what do we get on Slashdot? Nothing but posts about a fracking typo in the summary. Grow up and get some perspective.

If found older (English) peer-reviewed papers by this Author here [jst.go.jp] and here [jst.go.jp]. He doesn't seem to have published much on this since then [google.co.uk], except for a very vague patent application to be found here [wipo.int].

It seems unlikely to me that the first move an earnest discoverer of a new energy source in Japan would be to call an Italian newspaper. All the more since he seems to be working in academia and would thus have a strong incentive to publish in a peer-reviewed journal first (you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"). But, here are the papers. Form your own opinion...

The article seemed to be sparse on the details of what was actually going on, but if indeed the only evidence that they had a fusion reaction happening is the presence of helium-4, then they may have just detected naturally occurring helium [wikipedia.org] that is present in the atmosphere (0.000524%).

A better test to see whether fusion reactions are taking place is to try to detect the a stream of neutrons which are being produced. The neutrons flux and the energy should be able to be used to differentiate the fusion neutrons from the background neutron sources, such as those caused by spontaneous fission [wikipedia.org] events of heavy elements like uranium. Also, nuclear fusion reactions tend to produce high-energy, or fast neutrons [wikipedia.org] (upwards of 14 MeV with deuterium-deuterium fusion) which isn't too common unless you have some type of nuclear reaction taking place. (Here's a list of important nuclear fusion reactions important fusion reactions [wikipedia.org] for those who are curious.)

Detecting helium on the other hand, seems not so out of the ordinary since there is helium in the atmosphere.

here http://atomic-motor.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

A huge breakthrough of a japanese scientist... ... end of as a story in a italian economy newspaper?

Doesnt that seem a bit fishy?
See me again when they actually published something somewhere...

Could we please restrict all further "cold fusion" articles to at least the level of "cold fusion experiment of X successfully reproduced by Y"?. That would help keeping the noise level down.

If you would follow this field more closely you would find that there is a small but steadily growing number of scientists from around the world working in this field.

Since cold fusion has such a bad reputation, they are calling it Low -Energy Nuclear Reactions. It's not only a better name, but it describes more accurately what those scientists are seeing: Transmutations and excess energy in low energy conditions.

The offical LENR webcine New Energy Times has all the info:

http://www.newenergytimes.com/ [newenergytimes.com]

Is at http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jhts/33/3/33_142/_article [jst.go.jp]. You will need to be able to read Japanese, but at least it's the actual research.

... not the opinions.

No, you don't get Nobels for publishing Japanese cold fusion work in Italian economics journals. You don't get them from publishing any cold fusion work in any peer reviewed physics journal because they don't get published as such, for much the same reasons that make people claim absence of evidence is evidence of absence even though the evidence was only absent in some of the replications. You do, however, publish articles about Japanese cold fusion work in an Italian economics journal when a Japanese company is building cold fusion equipment in an Italian factory purchased from Fiat, said company having hired Pons and Fleischmann as design consultants.

Neutron flux is a sign of some fusion reactions, but not all. 2 * (1p + 1n) --> (2p + 2n): two deuterium go to one helium. The energy released is from the conversion of mass of two deuterium (2 * 2.014 = 4.028) into one helium (4.002). The difference (.026) is is given off as energy measured in ergs, calculated from the amount of mass "lost" in grams times the speed of light in a vacuum in centimeters per second times itself. The source of the energy is the release of binding energy in the nuclei; the binding energy required grows at a lesser rate than the number of nucleons. This is the mass difference stated in another way. The energy is this particular reaction comes.

And if cold fusion were as much a hoax as those educated by hearsay rather than science would have you believe, then you wouldn't have symposia on the subject at scientific conferences hosted by the selfsame journals that refuse the publish such articles unless they're written so speculatively as to seem almost fiction, and the phenonemon examined is called something else.

Regardless of the barriers caused by pathological disbelief masquerading as skepticism, or worse, education at the hands of the pathological disbelievers, over 3,000 articles peer reviewed articles on cold fusion have been published. Enough evidence has been accumulated to convince both the US Many and the US Dept. of Energy that the phenonenon is real, though inadequately understood, and deserved more investigation and funding.

Those who are so certain that cold fusion is bogus would probably be glad to know that once the bogus cold fusion reactors built at the bogus Fiat plant are primed they crank out 270 kiloboguswatts over 90 bogusdays with no additional input of energy.

Answer for yourself: if you had something important, but the mention of it made those who were the supposed experts in the field run screaming, just how would you go about bringing the knowledge out into the open without getting quashed? Through many different kinds of channels, a tiny bit at a time, which would by necessity mean some of the announcements would be of results and discoveries from some considerable time prior. The SETI people assert this is how alien contact and/or news of such would proceed and nobody blinks at that. Claim that this same process of being used on news of replicable tabletop physics and their eyes get stuck wide shut.

Here is an unofficial translation by an
Italian reader .. I apologize for my English :)
Moreover, the article is very focused on
telling the amazing story and embellishing
it with Japanese stereotype. The "Sole 24 ore"
is a well reputed economical journal, but
it is nothing about technical.
Indeed, they miss any reference to the original
news.

The revenge of the Samurai.

Yoshiaki Arata, 85 years old is a Japanese Professor Emeritus,
a leading pioneer of the advanced nuclear program in Japan and one of the fathers of research about hot fusion.
He is a strong NATIONALIST (he speaks only Japanese in public),
awarded by the Emperor and has now won his 20 years long battle as a Samurai.
He never gave up about the topic [cold fusion] since 1989, when Fleishmann and Pons announced a possible "constrained" fusion of deuterium inside a palladium cathode.
[They use] lightweight molecules, made traveling by a moderate anode-to-cathode electron flux in the fluid towards
palladium exhagonal structures.
There, they collide, pushing over themselves and trapping them causing the spontaneous pressure to reach million of atmospheres,
and then breaking nucleus, producing heat and finally converting into Helium-4.
A genuine nuclear fusion, obtained without the need of the big, high energy toroids as Iter, just like it happens
in stars.
Instead, they needed just a bottle with a little "heavy water" (easy to find in nature), a rare metal and the
same electric power you need at home.
Without radiations and with the final production of a inert gas, helium, useful to fill balloons.
Too beautiful to be true. Fleishmann and Pons shocked the whole community but they never managed to reproduce an experiment that would have changed
the life of humanity , if not in a few, sporadic cases.
They were defined cheaters, pretenders, not scientific, together with their entourage, up to being marginalized by the scientific community.

But samurai Arata went straight along the line. Also because
since the fifties he was amazed by the deuterium supercompression technique,
due to anomalies that happened using certain metals. So he decided
to take another line of research while working on low-energy fusion, the
one of electro-chemic. By simply pushing the deuterium inside palladium
nanoparticles with more and more atmospheres, up to creating the
same "crowded" situation and pressure increase of that experiment.
Today [5/22/2008] he made a public demonstration of his reactor in
Osaka, moving a Stirling engine with a few grams of palladium.
The reactor has been partially realized using ideas of Francesco
Celani and his group at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics
(INFN) in Frascati: the second-ranked laboratory actively working on Arata's line.
In the next few days Arata will try to increase the amount from 7 to 60
grams of palladium, expecting hundreds of Watts in thermal power, that is,
enough for your house lights for months.

But the very outstanding news, given in front of a multitude of scientific
reporters, someone coming even from the USA, is to have proved the production,
inside palladium hexagons, of a non-neglegible quantity of Helium-4,
the sign of deuterium transmutation and nuclear fusion.
This resulted in the reporters' crowd started talking about the "Arata
Phenomenon", a term he kindly accepted taking a bow, just like an old Samurai.