In the Japanese art of Kintsugi, an artist takes the broken shards of a bowl and fuses them back together with gold to make a final product more beautiful than the original.
Condensed Matter
Mar 5, 2024
1
31
In the predawn hours of Sept. 5, 2021, engineers achieved a major milestone in the labs of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), when a new type of magnet, made from high-temperature superconducting material, achieved ...
Superconductivity
Mar 4, 2024
6
363
Most of the energy from the sun and other stars comes from a chain of nuclear fusion reactions. The end of this chain is marked by the fusion of protons with beryllium-7 to form boron-8. This process is key in determining ...
General Physics
Feb 26, 2024
3
367
Fusion is a natural phenomenon that provides our planet with much of its energy—generated millions of miles away in the center of our sun.
Plasma Physics
Feb 24, 2024
0
22
With its tangle of pipes and pumps leading to a metal pot the size of a five-storey building, Japan's JT-60SA machine looks to the untrained eye like a contraption from 1970s sci-fi.
Plasma Physics
Feb 22, 2024
0
24
In the blink of an eye, the unruly, superheated plasma that drives a fusion reaction can lose its stability and escape the strong magnetic fields confining it within the donut-shaped fusion reactor. These getaways frequently ...
Plasma Physics
Feb 21, 2024
0
97
The Joint European Torus (JET), one of the world's largest and most powerful fusion machines, has demonstrated the ability to reliably generate fusion energy, while simultaneously setting a world record in energy output.
Plasma Physics
Feb 8, 2024
4
175
Five independent teams of researchers have reviewed the work and claims made by a group at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) who announced in December 2022 that they had achieved the first laser-powered fusion reaction ...
Scientists from the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) led experiments to demonstrate an effective "spark plug" for direct-drive methods of inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In two studies published ...
Plasma Physics
Feb 5, 2024
3
232
Our planet sits in the habitable zone of our sun, the special place where water can be liquid on the surface of a world. But that's not the only thing special about us: we also sit in the galactic habitable zone, the region ...
Astrobiology
Jan 29, 2024
0
58
