What the late Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione loved almost as much as a hot piece of ass was cold fusion. At one point during his outsize life, Guccione, along with wife Kathy Keeton, funded a lab staffed with dozens of scientists studying the hypothetical nuclear reaction. From a 2004 New York article by Anthony Haden-Guest: 

“Omni also attests to the couple’s shared enthusiasm for the scientific fringe. Cold fusion, for instance. In 1989, two scientists claimed that they had proved experimentally that limitless free energy could be harmlessly produced from water. Mainstream scientists failed to duplicate the results and condemned the claims as piffle —which did not deter Bob and Kathy. ‘At one point, Penthouse magazine was supporting 82 scientists in San Diego,’ Guccione told me. ‘Eighty-two scientists from around the world. We had Russians, Israelis, computer experts, physicists. They were all working on this fusion project.

‘And we were doing very well. But we had reached a point where we needed to create a device which would ignite the plasma. That device would have a life of about one ten-thousandth of a second and cost about $35 million to build.

‘And since I was the sole supporter, I couldn’t go any further.'”