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bubble fusion

jerrypournelle.com/mail: "We need more Taleyarkhans and less illiterate migrant workers. Too bad no one has quite such a nuanced position on immigration.

Background: Taleyarkhan was the guy who caused the bubble fusion controversy a few years back, with the claim that he could get 10^6 K temperatures by subjecting deuterated acetone bubbles in a beaker to shock waves.

Physicists who were gun shy after cold fusion demanded replication. So Taleyarkhan and guys at ORNL, Purdue, RPI, and the Russian academy of science replicated and extended the results, which are going to be published in Physical Review E (one of the truly pimp journals in physics). Looks like this stuff is for real.

Anyway, given that Taleyarkhan is an IIT Madras grad, somehow I intuit that this news isn't going to show up on VDare's front page."

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