Today is the start of a symposium in France on LERN -- as has been reported on several sites, but so far - few details have emerged.
One topic of special interest to anyone who has followed Holmlid's work is this one: "Synthesis of a Pico-hydride of Iron" by Jacques Dufour et al. I hope the paper will be published soon, if it has not been already. and especially that it contains useful data instead of hypothesis. A pico-hydride is somewhat akin to the molecule which would be formed by a transition metal bound to fractional hydrogen - e.g. the Mills' hydrino, Holmlid's UDD, Meulenberg's DDL and/or Arata's "pychno". I doubt if there is any significant difference, in the final accounting, between any of these conceptions of f/H; which means that much of the theoretical credit will eventually go to Mills. However, Mills has failed miserably to bring anything to market in 25 years, nor produced many convincing papers - at least none that point at a usable implementation or can be promoted as being proof of an anomaly. Notably Mills has avoided iron as catalyst - despite it looking better in ionization properties than nickel. The Rydberg vacancies are at lower ionization, and the fit is closer. The use of structured hematite, with or without nickel - as a replacement for nickel only - could be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back of ingrained skepticism. As for looking deeper: Is there a general reason that evolution has chosen iron and not nickel or cobalt or copper as the key ingredient in blood. (besides the greater supply of Fe in the environment)? Maybe. Most of the iron in mammals is found in red blood cells which transport oxygen. A few cold-blooded species use copper instead, because it carries oxygen better than iron. Horseshoe crabs use copper and their blood is blue. Yet, no vertebrate uses anything except iron, as found in hemoglobin and myoglobin despite its inferiority in the main function of oxygen transport. Iron has been strongly selected by evolution, a million-fold over copper because it has superior chemical properties OTHER than oxygen transport. perhaps, more properties than meets the eye. In short, there could be hidden reasons (such as slight excess energy) which we are not yet documenting in biology. Wouldn't it be "ironic" so to speak, if it turns out that the use of palladium or nickel going back to the early days of LENR - was less than optimal, and has in fact held the field back by several decades? And doubly ironic for Mills, whose theory predicts iron oxide would be a superior catalyst - yet he didn't benefit from that insight.
