ITER has arrival

On Monday 3 June the first ITER load made its way from the docks in Fos-sur-Mer, near Marseille, to the ITER construction site. Its precious cargo: 14.5 tons of copper conductor manufactured in China. The 737-metre copper ...

Trillion particle simulation on hopper honored with best paper

An unprecedented trillion-particle simulation, which utilized more than 120,000 processors and generated approximately 350 terabytes of data, pushed the performance capability of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing ...

Brittle material toughened: Tungsten-fibre-reinforced tungsten

Tungsten is particularly suitable as material for highly stressed parts of the vessel enclosing a hot fusion plasma, it being the metal with the highest melting point. A disadvantage, however, is its brittleness, which under ...

Researchers explain magnetic field misbehavior in solar flares

When a solar flare filled with charged particles erupts from the sun, its magnetic fields sometime break a widely accepted rule of physics. The flux-freezing theorem dictates that the magnetic lines of force should flow away ...

Cassini sees Titan cooking up smog

(Phys.org)—A paper published this week using data from NASA's Cassini mission describes in more detail than ever before how aerosols in the highest part of the atmosphere are kick-started at Saturn's moon Titan. Scientists ...

Solar variability and terrestrial climate

(Phys.org)—In the galactic scheme of things, the Sun is a remarkably constant star. While some stars exhibit dramatic pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of ...

New antimatter method to provide 'a major experimental advantage'

(Phys.org)—Researchers have proposed a method for cooling trapped antihydrogen which they believe could provide 'a major experimental advantage' and help to map the mysterious properties of antimatter that have to date ...

ELISE investigating new type of heating for ITER

(Phys.org)—Tests for the heating that is to bring the plasma of the ITER international fusion test reactor to a temperature of many million degrees can go ahead from today: After three years of construction, Max Planck ...

Could plasma jet thrusters 'kickstart' interplanetary travel?

A great offshoot from commercial space companies getting a foothold in real missions to orbit is that the old entrepreneurial space spirit seems to have been revived. People are attempting to develop and build what could ...

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