Oak Ridge Today
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An international fusion energy project that involves Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be discussed in an online meeting on Wednesday, May 19.
The featured speaker will be David Rasmussen, the leader of the technical integration of the U.S. contributions to the international fusion project, which is under construction in France and known as ITER.
Rasmussen’s areas of responsibility have included the ITER plasma heating and fueling systems, a press release said. He has been a plasma research scientist at ORNL since 1981. He has more than 35 years of fusion and plasma science experience in diagnostic measurements and the technology development needed for magnetic confinement fusion and other plasma technology applications, the release said. Rasmussen received a Ph.D. in applied science, specializing in plasma physics, from the University of California at Davis in 1981 where his graduate work was a study of inertial laser fusion wave plasma interact
Meet the Other Social Influencers of the Animal Kingdom
Culture, once considered exclusive to humans, turns out to be widespread in nature.
A chimpanzee in the Chimfunshi wildlife sanctuary in Zambia, where one chimp began a tradition of wearing a blade of grass in the ear, which carried on after her death.Credit.David Pike/Alamy
May 7, 2021
Julia, her friends and family agreed, had style. When, out of the blue, the 18-year-old chimpanzee began inserting long, stiff blades of grass into one or both ears and then went about her day with her new statement accessories clearly visible to the world, the other chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi wildlife sanctuary in Zambia were dazzled.
Nanostructured Device Stops Light In Its Tracks
MIT researchers develop compact on-chip device for detecting electric-field waveforms with attosecond time resolution.
Understanding how light waves oscillate in time as they interact with materials is essential to understanding light-driven energy transfer in materials, such as solar cells or plants. Due to the fantastically high speeds at which light waves oscillate, however, scientists have yet to develop a compact device with enough time resolution to directly capture them.
Now, a team led by MIT researchers has demonstrated chip-scale devices that can directly trace the weak electric field of light waves as they change in time. Their device, which incorporates a microchip that uses short laser pulses and nanoscale antennas, is easy to use, requiring no special environment for operation, minimal laser parameters, and conventional laboratory electronics.
Groundbreaker and Innovator Event
On
Wednesday, July 21, Asia Society Northern California will host an off-the-record Executive Roundtable program on the Myanmar Conflict and Crisis with the
Honorable
Scot Marciel, former U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar and Visiting Scholar, Visiting Practitioner Fellow of Southeast Asia at Stanford University s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and
Consul General Toru Maeda, Consul General of Japan in San Francisco and former Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy of Japan in Myanmar. Managing Director of Asia Society Policy Institute
Debra Eisenman will moderate the discussion.
The executive roundtable discussion will assess Myanmar’s current challenges, security issues, the ongoing humanitarian crisis, hampered economic reform, strained bilateral relationships, and governance challenges that have hampered its progress as a nation. Are there opportunities for Myanmar going forward with the Biden A