Google has been funding cold fusion research for years

Researchers have been trying to recreate the power of the sun in a tabletop experiment.

What is cold fusion? Fusion is what happens at the heart of stars, where hydrogen atoms get squeezed together to fuse and create helium, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process. Cold fusion is the idea that you can get the same result at room temperature.

Sounds amazing, is it legit? Erm, not really. In 1989, the University of Utah scientists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann said they had seen heat and signs of fusion in a lab experiment. The claim was sensational. But no one could reproduce the result and the whole embarrassing debacle was (pretty much) forgotten.

Or so we thought: Turns out Google has spent $10m in the last few years looking at the idea. In an article in Nature on May 27, Google scientists said they were “motivated by the possibility that such judgment might have been premature.” Over the course of 4 years, the team looked at three different ways of generating cold fusion in the lab. Unfortunately, they saw no sign of it.

Oh. Now what? It looks like cold fusion really is dead this time. But the team’s work has seen advances in material science and chemistry that may be useful in more realistic technologies, such as hydrogen storage.