Yeah, there were some curious palladium-related anomalies that turned up in the Cold Fusion research, and while -- so far as I know -- none of them seem to hold great prospects inside them, there's some interesting research that should be done. Even knowing that, I was surprised to learn a year or two ago that one of the physics folks at my alma mater was working on what might broadly be called cold fusion -- in his case, using intense sound waves instead of just temperature to generate the pressures that seem to be needed.

For that matter, last I checked nobody had yet explained the original curious column formation that set off the whole polywater spectacle, though everyone's rather confident it wouldn't be polymerization of water that did do it.