Cold fusion I: the discovery that never was - At last, the bubble of cold fusion has burst, leaving behind a sticky story of intrigue, false facts and wrong inferences

On 23 March 1989, two chemists working at the University of Utah, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, stunned the world with their claim to have harnessed nuclear fusion - the process that powers the Sun - in a test tube of water at room temperature. Pons and Fleischmann asserted that passing a...