Even by his field's indulgent standards, Reich was surely one for the casebooks. Brilliant and charismatic, the Austrian-born psychoanalyst was an early disciple of Freud and produced a shrewd addition to analytic theory: a patient's character, he said, was revealed as much by body language--"muscular armoring," he called it--as by couch talk. Before long Reich split with Freud and went off on his own wobbly path. After dabbling with Marxism, he began theorizing about a universal life-giving "orgone energy"--which, he said, was expressed through neurosis-free orgasms. He fled to the U.S. and soon had followers like Norman Mailer sitting naked in orgone accumulators to achieve "orgastic potency" as well as relief from everything from anxiety to cancer. Meanwhile, Reich's own mental state became increasingly suspect when he blamed UFOs for a deadly counter-energy and said red fascists were out to get him. He died in 1957 while serving a two-year federal prison term for shipping his "dangerous" boxes across state lines.

Producing energy through nuclear fusion is easy enough to do--provided you have a reactor that can generate temperatures hotter than the sun's. If you could somehow achieve fusion at room temperature, you'd have an unlimited source of power that could retire petroleum, nuclear and solar energy for good.

In 1989 chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced to great fanfare that they had done just that, building a bench-top fusion percolator made up of two electrodes and a slug of heavy water. But Pons and Fleischmann were vague about how their "cold fusion" reactor worked, and when other scientists tried to duplicate the pair's results, they got mostly cold water for their trouble.

The University of Utah, which held the patent on the process, allowed it to lapse, and cold fusion fell from view. Pons and Fleischmann repaired to Europe to continue their work-- separately and quietly.