Examples of Cold Fusion in nature.

Ah ha! Human hair is about 5% sulphur. Hair on you head. Hair in your nose. Hairy arms. Hair stands on end.
Little bit of ozone, and le voila, sulphur dioxide.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

and le voila, sulphur dioxide.

This (SO₂)is a negative green-house gas and does not smell... but can damage your lungs if it goes ( + water) to H₂SO_3.

According to Wikipedia, sulfur dioxide has a "pungent, irritating smell".

The irritating part of the smell is the acid formed burning the receptors and nasal cavity.

Quote from Frank Grimer

Adding up the atomic weights on either side of the above equation gives agreement to 0.15%
Since Fleischmann and Pons have shown that electrochemistry on the small scale can transmute the elements I see no reason why it shouldn't also transmute the elements on a large scale.

It is my hypothesis therefore that the above equation is correct and the smell of sulphur associated with lightning arises from the transmutation of water vapour and nitrogen to sulphur.

An interesting -if speculative -article here from New Scientist.

Part 1 of 3

IT IS the year 1868, the scene a tranquil valley in Donegal, Ireland. A man is tramping across the peat bogs. Glancing skywards, he sees a storm brewing on the horizon and decides to head for home.

As he retraces his steps, something makes him turn around, and he sees the strangest sight of his life. A bright red glowing orb half a metre across is floating down a nearby hillside. It bobs over the valley, then vanishes near a stream. No sound, no fire, no explosion - yet the ground beneath the red sphere's path has been churned up and torn to pieces.

“The glowing red orb left a square hole about 6 metres wide and ploughed up a 100-metre trench”
Cut to 2004, when a US government physicist finds a report of the incident, now gathering dust in the British Library in London. Though he has seen similar reports of ball lightning, there's something very odd about this one. Bit by bit, he comes to the conclusion that the glowing apparition has the hallmarks of something literally out of this world - an ancient black hole.

It sounds like a bizarre tale, but an Irishman called Michael Fitzgerald really did report a strange red glow to the Royal Society in 1868, and now physicist Pace VanDevender says he has gone through all the options, and he can't explain the phenomenon any other way. Of course it's a long shot. One physicist wryly comments that it's "as likely that ball lightning is communication from the spirit world". VanDevender himself knows it's on the wild side. "This is a long string of what-ifs," he admits, "it's very loosey-goosey." He reckons the odds of mini black holes existing are 1 in 10, the odds of catching one, maybe 1 in 1000, if he's optimistic. And that's what he wants to do: catch a black hole. "After stewing on it for years, I decided I did not want to die without knowing whether it was or was not real," he says.

Fitzgerald's report has become an inspiration for VanDevender, at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has a hunch that Fitzgerald saw ball lightning powered by a mini black hole created in the big bang. And he hopes to capture similar black holes and wire them up as power stations, which could provide plentiful clean energy for billions of years.

A plasma physicist, VanDevender used to work on thermonuclear fusion at Sandia until her retired last year to pursue research into his personal passions, including ball lightning.

No one has yet pinned down exactly what causes ball lightning. "I would say most scientists would accept that it does exist, based on about 10,000 carefully compiled case studies worldwide," says John Abrahamson, a chemical engineer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, who has studied probable causes of ball lightning. Thousands of eyewitnesses have described glowing spheres of various colours and sizes lasting several seconds or sometimes minutes. It tends to materialise when thunderstorms are close, but not always. It can appear outdoors, in buildings, wandering along the aisle of an aircraft or even on submarines. It usually floats around for less than 10 seconds before popping when it hits the ground or a wall. Occasionally, it is much more energetic, persisting for several minutes, and can penetrate walls and glass.

Part 2 of 3

Abrahamson thinks it occurs when ordinary lightning zaps the ground, freeing pure silicon from the soil and this glows as it reacts with oxygen in the air (Nature, vol 403, p 487). Another theory holds that ball lightning is a highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields.

Over the past nine years, VanDevender has analysed the various reports, and concludes there may be different types of ball lightning. He classes up to 10 per cent of the most energetic events as "extreme" ball lightning, which he thinks may have a different source to the milder kind. Because it can pass through walls and glass, VanDevender thinks its core must be subatomic in size.

The sighting in Ireland was a striking example of this. Circumstantial evidence suggests Fitzgerald was a land surveyor who was probably updating Ordnance Survey maps of Donegal. He describes how the glowing ball came down the side of the valley and hit the land, bobbing up and down into the peat a couple of times and gradually shrinking in size. He watched the ball for 20 minutes before it finally disappeared, then he immediately examined its route. Where it had first touched land, it left a square hole about 6 metres wide. It had also ploughed up a 100-metre trench and torn away 25 metres of the bank of a stream.

VanDevender visited the site with his son Aaron, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. With the help of a local historian and a University of Ulster geomorphologist they verified Fitzgerald's claims. They found a 6-metre wide square hole and a 90-metre trench exactly where he described. Carbon dating of the peat layers showed that it had been disturbed and mixed in a manner consistent with Fitzgerald's report.

Mystery forceThat convinced VanDevender that Fitzgerald had seen ball lighting displace more than 100 tonnes of peat. What force could possibly do this? If it was chemical or thermal energy, he speculated, perhaps it generated pockets of high-pressure steam in the bog and this displaced the peat. VanDevender ruled that out, though, because steam would have quickly vented to the surface and could not have created such a consistent furrow. Besides, Fitzgerald did not report seeing steam. Likewise, he rules out some kind of electrostatic mechanism in which electric charge somehow threw the peat upwards. The high electrical conductivity of the wet ground would have earthed any charge in less than a microsecond.

This is where VanDevender reaches a bizarre conclusion. He believes that what Fitzgerald witnessed just might have been a black hole with a mass of more than 20 tonnes. "So far, it's the only piece of physics that I have been unable to rule out," he says.

Sounds far-fetched? Suspend disbelief for a moment and the idea raises a host of mind-boggling questions. If he's right, where did the black hole come from? Why didn't it gobble up the whole Earth? If it was so heavy, why did it float? Why would it glow? VanDevender suggests answers to all of these, starting with the origin of the black hole, which he thinks was as ancient as the universe itself.

It is true that many astrophysicists think it possible that the universe was awash with mini black holes just after the big bang, 14 billion years ago. The superdense matter of the big bang fireball was lumpy, and the gravity of densest lumps could have been so huge as to crush them to a point - singularities with such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, could escape from them.

Unlike the massive black holes that can form when stars explode, these primordial black holes could be relatively light, with masses of a million tonnes, say, or even just a fraction of a gram. So their event horizons, the dark all-consuming regions around them, would be tiny too. The event horizon of any black hole less massive than 100 million tonnes would be smaller than an atomic nucleus.

But conventional theories suggest such puny primordial black holes wouldn't have survived to this day. Stephen Hawking came up with a theory that they should leak energy - now called Hawking radiation. A black hole weighing a million tonnes, for instance, should evaporate within about 30,000 years.

However, some physicists argue that we don't have a proper theory of quantum gravity, the ideal tool for showing with any certainty that black holes evaporate. And as yet there is no experimental evidence for Hawking radiation. In VanDevender's view, that leaves enough room to speculate that small primordial black holes might not evaporate, and if so - take a deep breath - they should still exist today.

Still, if Fitzgerald saw a black hole wandering around Donegal, why didn't it swallow Ireland, and for that matter the whole planet? Anything that touches a black hole is supposed to vanish for good. The VanDevenders argue that the black hole wouldn't swallow the Earth for the same reason that an atom doesn't collapse, despite the attraction between the positively charged nucleus and the surrounding negative electrons. Classically, you'd expect the whirling electrons to lose energy and fall into the nucleus, but quantum mechanics dictates that they must stay in quantised energy levels. Likewise, they say, a mini black hole could play the role of a nucleus, its gravity trapping atoms, rather than electrons, in orbit around it.

There's a helpful mathematical coincidence here. The potential energy of an electron trapped by the electrostatic field of a nucleus is inversely proportional to the electron's orbital radius, and so is the potential energy of a particle trapped in a gravitational field. So the VanDevenders borrowed the Schrödinger equation, which calculates the energy levels of an atom, to calculate the properties of the mini black hole system. They dubbed it the gravitational equivalent of an atom, or GEA.

Take a black hole weighing 1000 tonnes, its event horizon would be about 10-21 metres across. The VanDevenders calculate that a typical atom like oxygen orbiting around the hole would be trapped much further out, at a safe distance of about 10-13 metres and so would not fall in. They speculate that a black hole would occasionally eat an atom, in the same way that an atomic nucleus will occasionally absorb an electron, but no more.

So why would a GEA float? VanDevender believes the charged particles whizzing around the black hole generate a huge, oscillating magnetic field. As it neared the ground in a boggy region, the ball would induce currents in the Earth, setting up a magnetic field that would keep it above the ground - the same principle that levitates maglev trains (see Diagram).

As for the glowing, VanDevender believes the atoms circling the black hole would ionise and form blobs of plasma with electromagnetic instabilities that could in principle generate radio frequency radiation. A strong source of radio waves can excite the surrounding air and create an eerie luminous glow, especially with the help of free electrons produced by high electric fields during thunderstorms.

VanDevender is developing software to model the likely magnetic fields and radio emissions of GEAs. He's particularly keen to find out if the radio bands match those picked up by FORTE, a research satellite launched by Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in 1997 to study lightning. The satellite recorded brief radio flashes from normal lightning along with unexplained bursts of radio signals up to 20 minutes long. With only one sensor, the satellite couldn't locate the source of the bursts; VanDevender wonders if ball lightning might be behind them.

Trap it in a metal sphereWhich leads him to another wild conclusion: if the mysterious signals did indeed come from GEAs, thousands of them must hit the Earth each year. VanDevender hopes to establish a network of four sensor stations across the US to look for GEA signals. He also plans to investigate whether any seismic tremors accompany their impact. And if they exist, he reckons it might be possible to contain one in a metal sphere - the electric currents it would induce if it moved to try to leave the sphere would keep it inside. Rectifying antennas could then convert the black hole's radio emissions into electricity.

VanDevender's calculations suggest each GEA would generate about 1 gigawatt - the typical output of a nuclear power station. By feeding the hole with ions - only about 1 kilogram of matter per year - he thinks you could extract energy for billions of years. "It would be perfectly clean energy - if we were successful, it would be overwhelming," he says. "But we're at an early stage in a 30-year project, and this may well turn out to be wrong."

Part 3 of 3

Some physicists already think it's wrong. Peter Handel at the University of Missouri in St Louis, who has researched ball lightning for decades, says it doesn't gel with the simple observation that ball lightning is buoyant - it doesn't plummet to Earth at high speed as you'd expect a heavy object to do. He also thinks it would be difficult to make magnetic levitation work because there's no such thing as a spherically symmetric magnetic field. In other words, the GEA would need some specific orientation to levitate, which in practice it couldn't maintain.

Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, adds that it's difficult to see why GEAs would be stable. The binding energy of atoms or ions in the black hole's gravitational field would be much smaller than the binding energy of electrons in atoms. A GEA would just be too fragile to survive as it moved around.

He also thinks the black hole would be far greedier than VanDevender suggests. Electron capture by atomic nuclei is limited because it can only happen if a nucleus happens to be in the right quantum state to accept one electron and convert a proton to a neutron. The black hole can accept any number of particles. Krauss thinks this means it would gobble them up relatively quickly.

Krauss also questions how VanDevender dismisses conventional quantum arguments about black holes evaporating, yet reverts to quantum mechanics to build an atom out of a black hole. "I think speculative ideas are good, and I encourage him to keep thinking about it," says Krauss, "but I just think certain things smell right or wrong, and this just doesn't seem to hang together to me."

VanDevender knows it's an outside chance. "Frankly, until we find a black hole and do experiments on it, it reeks of speculation and inference." But he was encouraged by the response of his Sandia colleagues when he presented his theory to a large group of them in October. "At the end I asked the audience a question," he says. "Is this project so crazy that I should just take hemlock and get it over with? Or is it so potentially important that it deserves the attention of a national laboratory?" He was relieved to see the audience vote for the second option with a sea of hands.

“Until we find a black hole and do experiments on it, this reeks of speculation and inference”

Submit reports of extreme ball lightning that leaves physical evidence of its passage to Pace VanDevender at

www.gravityequivalentatom.net

Quote from axil

No one has yet pinned down exactly what causes ball lightning. "I would say most scientists would accept that it does exist, based on about 10,000 carefully compiled case studies worldwide," says John Abrahamson, a chemical engineer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, who has studied probable causes of ball lightning. Thousands of eyewitnesses have described glowing spheres of various colours and sizes lasting several seconds or sometimes minutes. It tends to materialise when thunderstorms are close, but not always. It can appear outdoors, in buildings, wandering along the aisle of an aircraft or even on submarines. It usually floats around for less than 10 seconds before popping when it hits the ground or a wall. Occasionally, it is much more energetic, persisting for several minutes, and can penetrate walls and glass.

In 2007 a Brasilian researcher was able to produce ball-lightening in his laboratory. Thus since 10 years is no longer a mystery!

Production of Ball-Lightning-Like Luminous Balls by Electrical Discharges in SiliconGerson Silva Paiva, Antonio Carlos Pavão, Elder Alpes de Vasconcelos, Odim Mendes, Jr., and Eronides Felisberto da Silva, Jr.Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 048501 – Published 24 January 2007

Hallo from Estonia,
im just a finemechanics engineer but interested in Lenr too. So , most stupid is notasked question - what will happend if working ( producing extra heat ) reactor will be covered with safe container with inside nuclear material ?

Quote from k.sass

Hallo from Estonia,
im just a finemechanics engineer but interested in Lenr too. So , most stupid is notasked question - what will happend if working ( producing extra heat ) reactor will be covered with safe container with inside nuclear material ?

Welcome to the forum k.sass!

If I understand your question correctly: If nuclear reactions are proven most countries will have laws regulating the use. If radioactive material is produced, the use will be restricted. If there is very little radiation (which is hard to understand) the device will be allowed like for instance smoke detectors. In any case it is very important that we understand exactly the physical process that creates the excess energy. This is of course important also to be able to optimize the process.

i mean if nuclear material will change the trajectory of muons - then will be possible to avoid muons hitting the reactor ? or there are even more easy ways to do it ?

Quote from k.sass

i mean if nuclear material will change the trajectory of muons - then will be possible to avoid muons hitting the reactor ? or there are even more easy ways to do it ?

Muons are heavy electrons. They can be managed in the same way that electrons are: electromagnetically.

You all are converging on reality. SO2 is the anydride of sulfurous acid. O3 (ozone) will not chemically produce anything other than an oxidation of ambient sulfur or reduced sulfur compounds such as H2S to form sulfites or sulfates. The original question still stands, why does one perceive a reduced sulfurous odor in these ball lightning event? The nucleosynthesis possibility still stands.

Why do I know anything about this? I own a house with CDW "Chinese drywall" or more euphemistically "corrosive drywall", due to its effect on copper wiring and plumbing. That house was purchased at a great discount, this status being a public fact.

The chemistry (and/or bacteriology) of CDW is fascinatingly complex. The potential for toxicity is perhaps exaggerated, except in those who are sulfite (the anion of sulfurous acid) sensitive, such as has been made famous in cases of such sensitivity rarely causing extreme, and often respiriatory distress from sulfite preserved wines and earlier from sulfite preservatives used in "salad bars" at serve yourself restaurants. We have attempted remediation of the CDW house using strong doses of ozone.... with only modest success. Warm weather and moisture reactivate the production of sulfurous compounds on a seasonal basis. Much easier to block the ingress of moisture to the corrosive drywall, and/or block its egress, than to oxidize all the sulfurs to sulfates (calcium sulfate being gypsum, the main component of the plaster layer).

One remaining uncertain toxicant in CDW may be CS2, carbon disulfide. Very nasty stuff. Might evolve in some way from CDW. By the way, Knauf, the producer of a barium containing drywall earlier cited, yesterday (?) on this forum... was the subject of a multiple hundred million dollar settlement in the US for its role in distributing, if not producing, this product mainly from about 2003 through 2006.

Not too relevant at this point. The "combined Federal report" of October 2011 (AFAIK), representing some 14 Federal agencies having jurisdiction or regulatory interest in the CDW problem is probably the best "go to" summary of relevant research on CDW. There is a lot of bogus and economically motivated "information" out there. Some of it understates the problems and health implications, other sources tend to overstate the problems. By and large the problem is no longer viewed with much public or legislative alarm. For one thing the level of H2S and CS2 evolution with time has diminished by attrition of the source sulfides within the drywall. Further, the bargains in CDW homes and condos are not nearly as attractive as they once were, due exactly to these changed chemical realities and changed perceptions in the marketplace. Warning: do not fall for XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) testing for strontium thought to co-occur with the sulfurous malefactors. The combined report is clear that some drywall may have high corrosivity and low strontium (the necessary but flawed surrogate for sulfur in drywall, which necessarily has high sulfur as the sulfate in gypsum, while other high strontium drywall may be free of corrosivity). The correlation is too poor from a scientific and toxicological perspective. That does not mean that such testing is ignored by local assessors, who can be snowed into believing the wonders of such testing and can be convinced by opportunistic owners to re-assess such houses as "safe" having tested as "non corrosive, non-CDW". The only truly reliable solution for testing is the "copper nail" test, where new shiny copper nails are driven into suspect panels and allowed to sit for 14 to 21 days. After that period, a shiny nail is prima facie evidence of non-corrosive drywall, likewise a black nail is indication of formation of black sulfides of copper and hence of corrosivity per se.

As it happens, I am expert on that subject. Basically I consider that issue to be solved in the new International Steam Tables that happens to make reference to some of my work. I'm not going to give an exact reference to my publication on this because I don't want to reveal my identity. I don't want to reveal my identity because of all the trolls and skeptics in the world. I'm old and like me356, I don't want to be pressured by anybody on the subject of LENR. I've been working on it for 5 years and this forum in the last week or so is the first time I've revealed anything.