This is news is a little old, but I think it is worth mentioning here, and I hadn’t posted about it yet. According to this document, on July 24th, the United States Patent Office issued a patent to George H. Miley for a process listed as “Dislocation site formation techniques”.
The abstract on the patent reads as follows:
“Techniques to form dislocation cores along the interface of a multilayer thin film structure are described. The loading and/or unloading of isotopes of hydrogen are also described in connection with core location. The described techniques can provide [sic] be applied to superconductive structure formation, x-ray and charged particle formation, nuclear reaction processes and/or inertial confinement fusion target.”
George Miley is Emeritus Professor of the University of Illinois, who has worked extensively over the years in the field of cold fusion, including work on the Patterson power cell which he claimed to have replicated. He recently published a report of showing the production of excess heat from a gas-loading cell. Miley’s process shows the production of excess heat when pressurized deuterium gas is applied to palladium rich nanoparticles. Miley recently started a company, LENUCO, in University of Illinois research park.
While this patent is not applicable only in cold fusion settings, including the terms “nuclear reaction”, and “fusion” indicate that there may have been a softening of the longstanding practice at the USPO of denying any patents to applications that involve cold fusion.