Cold Fusion

Blizzard is remaking Diablo II, with a number of quality of life improvements. Revisit one of the greatest hybrid RPG titles ever made. Fight the Lords of Hell. Then, kick back, stay awhile, and have yourself a listen.

Blizzard's remaster train keeps rolling, with a new restored version of Diablo II expected to drop by the end of the year -- if rumors are true, anyway.

A new article on gaming dives into how developers and players see difficulty differently -- and explains why I spent several thousand hours modding Diablo II, once upon a very long time ago.

The Navy just patented a major potential breakthrough on compact fusion reactors, but the patent is long on claims and short on implementation specifics.

Andrea Rossi's E-Cat -- the device that purports to use cold fusion to generate massive amounts of cheap, green energy -- has been verified by third-party researchers, according to a new 54-page report. The researchers observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, or 'far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.'

While the world's only major fusion power effort -- ITER -- continues to trundle along, with an eventual first-fusion date of 2027 at a cost of more than $20 billion to taxpayers, there's a small lab in New Jersey that says it can produce fusion power within a year, with a total spend of just a few million dollars. To be honest it sounds too good to be true -- but rest assured that Focus Fusion, at least to my eyes, is the real deal. This isn't some kind of magical, inexplicable witchcraft like cold fusion: Focus Fusion appears to be based on cold, hard science. This could actually be it.

We have big news today in the world of cold fusion: a large US investment company has acquired the rights to Andrea Rossi's E-Cat cold fusion/LENR technology. That investment company, Cherokee Investment Partners, appears to be interested in deploying the cold fusion tech commercially in both China and the US. But we still lack proof that Rossi's E-Cat actually works.

Believe it or not, the first cold fusion power plant is now available to pre-order. The E-Cat 1MW Plant, which comes in a standard shipping container, can produce one megawatt of thermal energy, using low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) -- a process, often known as cold fusion, that fuses nickel and hydrogen into copper, producing energy 100,000 times more efficiently than combustion. It sounds like E-Cat is now taking orders for delivery in early 2014, priced fairly reasonably at $1.5 million. Has cold fusion -- the answer to all our energy needs -- finally made its way to market?

Against all probability, a device that purports to use cold fusion to generate vast amounts of power has been verified by a panel of independent scientists. The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline.

The cold fusion dream lives on: NASA is developing cheap, clean, low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) technology that could eventually see cars, planes, and homes powered by small, safe nuclear reactors.