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SPARC could be the first fusion reactor to produce net energy 10 years before ITER and in a machine 10 times smaller. CFS/MIT; T. Henderson
Fusion startup plans reactor with small but powerful superconducting magnets
Mar. 3, 2021 , 7:00 AM
A startup chasing the dream of plentiful, safe, carbon-free electricity from fusion, the energy source of the Sun, has settled on a site, timetable, and key technology for building its compact reactor. Flush with more than $200 million from investors, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy, 3-year-old Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced today that later this year it will start to build its first test reactor, dubbed SPARC, in a new facility in Devens, Massachusetts, not far from its current base in Cambridge. The company says the reactor, which would be the first in the world to produce more energy than is needed to run the reaction, could fire up as soon as 2025.
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When a supermassive black hole tears a star apart (imagined here), it produces copious light and maybe neutrinos, too. DESY/Science Communication Lab
Rare cosmic neutrino traced to star-swallowing black hole
Feb. 22, 2021 , 11:00 AM
Neutrinos are everywhere trillions of the virtually massless particles pass through your body every second but they’re notoriously hard to pin down, especially the rare high-energy ones from deep space. Only about a dozen of these cosmic neutrinos are detected annually, and scientists had connected only one to its source. Now, IceCube, the kilometer-wide neutrino detector nestled deep beneath the South Pole, has traced another one back to its far-flung birthplace: a supermassive black hole tearing a star to pieces in a galaxy 750 million light-years away.
Feb. 12, 2021 , 11:50 AM
For decades, nuclear physicists have blasted record-breaking superheavy elements into existence, extending the periodic table step by step beyond uranium, the heaviest natural element. Such heavyweights tend to be unstable, but theory predicts “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons that confer extra stability, and finding a long-lived superheavy has long been a holy grail for researchers.
Element 114, known as flerovium and first created in 1998, was considered the best candidate for extra stability, as theorists believed 114 was a magic number of protons. But researchers now report that it is no more stable than the superheavy elements near it on the periodic table. Element “114 is apparently not magic, or at least not as magic as classical predictions suggest,” says study leader Dirk Rudolph of Lund University.