Mick Hartley

Thirteen scientific problems, as listed by New Scientist (via Milt’s File). A good riposte to those who think that science has already answered all the interesting questions.

Surprisingly cold fusion isn’t quite as dead a duck as we all thought:

The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water – in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium – can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium’s molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.

That doesn’t matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there’s no reason to dismiss cold fusion. “The experimental case is bulletproof,” he says. “You can’t make it go away.”

Then there’s the placebo effect:

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

In the recent Edge Annual Question (what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?), John Skoyles had an interesting idea about the placebo effect: that we’d evolved such that our immune system was receptive to social factors, so if someone we believed had more expertise than us – a healer – gave us a “cure”, we reacted appropriately, ie our immune system gave up fighting and assumed the problem was over. Not sure how Benedetti’s finding would fit in with that, mind you.