In March 1989, two chemists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann, stunned the world by claiming that an electrical current from a palladium electrode immersed in a test tube of water had resulted in nuclear ‘cold fusion’ at room temperature.1 For many years, attempts to understand and reproduce this seemingly impossible result- with sketchy information from

When I started my PhD one of my then colleges spent months trying to make something that was sitting on a shelf in the chemical store room less than ten feet from their bench. Could there really be anything more frustrating? Well yes there could. Imagine finding a new catalytic process or synthetic transformation only