Earlier this week, Yoshiaki Arata, a retired physics professor at Osaka University, Japan, gave a successful demonstration of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion" target="_blank">cold fusion</a> to an audience of physicists:

From a Japanese eyewitness writing on the <a href="http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/05/coldfusion_demonstration_a_suc_1.html" target="_blank">Physicsworld</a> blog:

<em>"Arata's demonstration...was successfully done. There came about 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and few foreign people. Six major newspapers and two TV [stations] (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) were there...Demonstrated live data looked just similar to the data they reported in [the] papers...This showed the method highly reproducible. Arata's lecture and Q&amp;A were also attractive and active.</em>

<em>... after Arata had started the injection of gas, the temperature rose to about 70 °C, which according to Arata was due to both chemical and nuclear reactions. When the gas was shut off, the temperature in the centre of the cell remained significantly warmer than the cell wall for 50 hours. This, according to Arata, was due solely to nuclear fusion.</em>

More news is promised soon, but this could be big...