CLAIMS that bubbles popping in a simple benchtop experiment can produce nuclear fusion may be overinflated. In March, researchers led by Rusi Taleyarkhan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee said they could make hydrogen nuclei fuse to produce tritium and energy by making tiny bubbles in acetone collapse, reaching temperatures of millions of degrees Celsius.
Now Ken Suslick at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues say they’re worried about tritium found in and around the experimental apparatus. “It appears to us that their lab was contaminated by low levels of tritium,” says Suslick. But Richard Lahey…
