Professor Kervran performed many experiments with chickens deprived of calcium - and these come up for discussion here, on occasion. These experiments actually have validations and replications, but also a few results that are contrary. Kervran also did a careful experiment on humans in the Sahara Desert. This one is not as well-known.
He documented a strong anomalous bodily cooling effect, based on calorie and water intake, the evaporation of sweat and so on - but importantly, found much higher potassium in the urine of the test subjects than was possible, based on their diet. Because the ambient temperature in that location - day and night - was always above body temperature, Kervran was able to provide accurate calorimetry simply on the assumption that calories consumed were digested and utilized in the usual way for some kind of energy, even when the energy was ostensibly unneeded to maintain body heat and instead provided cooling. Perhaps that assumption needs a closer look, but anyway... we can probably trust the finding of large excess potassium in urine. That is rather astounding in itself. The men should have died from the heat, if not from potassium depletion - yet they were Bedouins adapted to these conditions, and the only thing they consumed differently from most of us was extra sodium (salt containing known levels of potassium) and lots of extra calories (considering they did not need the calories for body heat). The potassium content of the food and water was monitored. Yes, dates have a lot of calories and K - but nothing like what was being excreted. At the end of the study the subjects had normal potassium levels despite having lost many excess grams of it in their urine. To make a long story shorter - the test subjects somehow shed excess energy in the range of 1860 kilocalories per day, so where did this excess heat go? Kervran "came to the conclusion that it was due to dietary sodium which was being converted continuously to potassium in an endothermic reaction" (thus causing internal body heat to be absorbed in the process of elemental transmutation). He said that humans instinctively consume far more salt in dry, hot conditions. He mentions the emphasis placed upon salt in the Bible, and notes that salt was used as money in many desert climates. The inevitable conclusion was that a population of humans had adapted to desert heat due to natural selection of an ability to transmute Na -> K. The one thing which Kervran did not do - this was in the early 1950's - was an isotopic analysis of the potassium excretion in the urine. Had he done so, and had this analysis showed the expected large increase in the isotope 41K, then he could have convinced almost everyone. As it stands - he is ignored. The idea is that oxygen combines with sodium in a novel endothermic reaction which uses food calories and possibly hemoglobin to provide endothermic CANR - thus an internal cooling effect. When this happens the normal 6.7% of the isotope 41K should be highly skewed - possibly as much as doubled in the urine - if this was the transmutation route. That kind of discovery would have been huge. The potential importance of Kervran's experiment (if it is valid) to the confusion which is currently happening in LENR, is to introduce the possibility that certain elements, particularly those in columns one in the periodic table are subject to easy or anomalous transmutation... either slight exotherm or slight endotherm by chemical means. And also there is a more controversial expectation - that when alkalis are present in any experiment, there can be a mix of endotherm and exotherm CANR. When an LENR experiment shows net exotherm, it could easily be a situation where there is both endotherm and exotherm at the same time - but more of the later than the former. The follow-on suggestion is that "nature" wants a balanced situation, and if humans want an imbalance - they will have to engineer it, or else stumble on it serendipitously - such as is happening now. How do you engineer for alkali asymmetry ? That is the $64 question. The history of sodium in Randell Mills' experiments provides a hint. My hypothesis for one possible way to "engineer endotherm to accomplish exotherm in alkali metals" awaits future testing. Jones
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