"putting lead in one's pencil" is an old idiom which survives into an era where the pencil is becoming obsolete. Perhaps it will be reworded for 'alternative energy' some day.
The recent paper which is cited below may be of interest to both hydrino-philes, as well as LERN-philes as one of the main points of interest could be in the explication of a predecessor state for QM fusion - involving certain forms of carbon; and it can serve to explain why some forms of carbon seem to work, and some do not; even when two experiments seem to be almost identical. "Graphene" not graphite, would be the key variable. Graphene is the near 2-dimensional form of Carbon allotrope, made up of single layer of carbon atoms; and it can form on graphite easily ... or not, depending on the surface treatment. The paper is from India, and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, in Calcutta - a country which rightfully has enormous interest in both LENR and the hydrino. "Hydrino like states in graphene and Aharonov-Bohm field" http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.3309v1.pdf ABSTRACT We study the dynamics of fermions on graphene in presence of Coulomb impurities and Aharonov- Bohm field. Special emphasis is given to the formation of hydrino like states and its lifting of degeneracy due to the presence of AB field. The flux of the AB field can be tuned to make the low angular momentum hydrino states stable against decay. END As I understand it, the problem with the Les Case technique was that his "standard palladium on activated carbon catalyst" which he once thought was totally foolproof, turned out to be too variable. This was long before "graphene" had entered the consciousness of science, as it has of late. Graphene was known of course, by name for a long time, just not well-known nor well-appreciated. Old quote from IE by Case: "One-half percent by weight of palladium loaded on this activated carbon this is the key. You change this just a little bit and it doesn't work at all! But if you stay within the approved ranges, it works basically all the time." "This is my contribution - to find that specific catalyst, within a certain limited range, operates under these standard conditions." END of Case quote. Perhaps in retrospect, Case was a few years ahead of his time, and perhaps his technique will work all the time once we can fully equate and engineer the "activated" descriptor with "graphene". In 2002-2003 the interest and study of graphene accelerated like rocket due to the possible uses in semiconductors. The seminal article by Novoselov in "Science" only appeared in 2004. In can be argued, with punworthy intentions, that prior to 2004, we were in the dark ages of graphite. Everything change with this article and the hundreds which have followed it. It is now presumed that tiny fragments of graphene sheets are produced whenever graphite is abraded, such as when drawing a line with a pencil. Planar graphene itself (the flat benzene ring variety) had prior to 2004 been presumed NOT even to exist in the free state so Case could not have known of this simple expedient back in 1999-2000. Perhaps it is time to revisit Case's work with an emphasis on graphene as the active form of carbon... and as he was also quick to point out in an IE article: with an emphasis on finding NON-Pd or Pt metal catalysts like titanium, which will always be required to get the proton into transient contact with the graphene. However, when one looks at the dynamics of LENR from the graphene perspective -- i.e. surface activation in the confines of a flat benzene ring - such as we can imagine that it must appear from the perspective of the two protons or two deuterons, then it is provocative to consider that water vapor in partial vacuum conditions, might serve that purpose rather elegantly. Jones
