Following the bouncing fusion ball.

Following the bouncing fusion ball

Because of extended inaction by chemist B. Stanley Pons and the cold-fusion players at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the Department of Energy's Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory says it has ended negotiations with them for collaborative tests of the claims by Pons and British co-worker Martin Fleischmann of triggering energy-releasing, nuclear-fusion reactions at room temperature by immersing palladium rods in heavy water. "They don't call, they don't write," remarks a Los Alamos spokesman. In another no-confidence vote, the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority's Harwell Laboratory announced it was abandoning its months-old, labor-intensive and costly studies of the claims, despite help from Fleischmann in getting the experiments going.

On a more positive note that researchers say could turn out as misplayed, Los alamos scientists doing cold-fusion studies have observed higher-than-expected levels of the possible fusion by-product tritium during an experiment, a suggestive but inconclusive sign that fusion reactions may be responsible. The researchers say they will feel confident about the result only after they replicate the finding and rule out alternative sources of the tritium observations.