blake johnson

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The Feb 10th issue of Physical Review Letters included a paper by some researchers at Rensselaer which confirmed earlier experiments done at UCLA to achieve nuclear fusion at room temperature using pyroelectric crystals. I’ve only done a cursory reading of the paper, but it looks like what they do is take two crystals which develop a strong charge on their surface when heated or cooled. They put these crystals in vacuum and heat them a bit which causes a very strong electric field to develop between the crystals. The field drives electrons between the crystals with enough energy to create a fusion reaction. The authors state that this system is probably not useful as an energy source, but they do expect to be able to use the technology to create a hand-held neutron generator.

Phyllis and I watched the women’s snowboarding halfpipe competition earlier this week and were quite disappointed that Kelly Clark didn’t walk away with another medal. I’m not a particular fan of snowboarding, but watching her go was amazing because in one run she completely redefined my expectations of what women boarders can achieve. In that one run Kelly Clark put herself into a completely different class than the rest of the competitors because she was going at a level which more or less is equivalent to what the best men can do. In fact, she looked very much like Shawn White out there. And that is simply awesome.