The most amazing "starting point" about this paper to me, and maybe it is the ending point for Iwarmura since he emphasizes it so often but refuses the temptation to go further (even at ground "Zero" it's called job-security)... is the nuclear transmutations of Ba into Sm.... but some of us (who have less job security to worry about) can go much further out on a limb.
"When mass-137-enriched Ba (monoisotopic Ba) was applied, the mass distribution of Sm that we obtained depended on the starting isotopic distribution of Ba." ... and the unsaid thread of this work... and the "potential" generalization which appears here and elsewhere is perhaps not simply an anomalous "transmutation" but that these high Z transmutations occur at ridiculously low energy and not simply as a small step-wise change, such as a beta decay for instance. Instead we have a MASSIVE and apparent one-step change of 12 nucleons !!!... (excuse the typo-hyperbole, but can we emphasize the importance of this finding enough?) IOW *carbon* again appears... like the "smile of the Cheshire cat"... peering through from another dimension. And, going even further, perhaps the waiting-to-be-discovered 'sine qua non' of this work and others similar to it... is not just the recurrence of the "carbon unit" but instead it is the more generic *triad accumulation of operative units*. Which is to say that the operative methodology is not just adding deuterons, or adding carbon but... just as with quarks (at the next lower scale), the nucleons here are following suit, becoming a step-up in the mirrored self-symmetry of quantum reality. ERGO it is the "triad of operative units" which could be the ultimate secret to high Z transmutaion, not to mention other peculiarities of LENR. Jones BTW is there a Kanji equivalent to "we've gotta protect our phoney-baloney jobs" and wouldn't Mel Brooks be a hoot running the Zero lab with Cleavon Little in charge of the "Kan"
