Cold fusion is the term proposed to describe controlled nuclear fusion reactions occurring at or near room temperature. The attainment of cold fusion, with a net release of energy, was announced at a press conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 23, 1989, by B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleishman of Southampton University in England. The following day, a paper claiming the achievement of cold fusion at a much lower rate was mailed to the British journal Nature by Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University, and a group of his colleagues. The announcement by Pons and Fleishman received worldwide media coverage, but also a great deal of criticism as it did not provide adequate technical details for other scientists to independently verify what was claimed. As the details of the experiment became known, attempts to reproduce it...