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Category: climatology

Lightning strikes 12 times per minute on fusion engineering test platform

Zap Energy has advanced its Century fusion engineering test platform to operate for more than one hundred plasma shots at 0.2 Hz, or one shot every five seconds, with the resulting heat captured by surfaces coated with circulating liquid metal.

Concentrated inside a about the size of a hot water heater, each plasma carried up to 500 kA of current—about 20 times stronger than a bolt of lightning—discharged into a vessel lined with flowing liquid bismuth. During the record run, Century’s total input power was 57 kilowatts, with 39 kilowatts delivered directly to the cables leading to the .

Compared with Century’s commissioning milestone in 2024, this achievement represents an increase of 20 times in sustained average power and is a major step toward developing commercial power plants using repetitive pulsed power and .

Agrivoltaics: Electricity and Agriculture

Agrivoltaics describes a process for the simultaneous use of agricultural land for food production and PV power generation. The technology enables the efficient dual use of agricultural land: photovoltaics on open spaces can be substantially expanded without significantly using up valuable resources of fertile arable land. Targeted light management optimizes the yields from PV and photosynthesis. In addition, value creation in the region and rural development are promoted, as agrivoltaic projects are ideally suited to be supported in a decentralized by farmers, municipalities and small and medium-sized enterprises. This results in new, economically viable farming options for agriculture.

We are working on the implementation and further development of agrivoltaics in industrial and research projects.

Opportunities in Agrivoltaics.

Agrivoltaics offers great opportunities for agriculture and climate protection. In their foreword, the two Federal Ministers Anja Karliczek and Julia Klöckner support the promising concept of combining agricultural production and renewable electricity generation on the same land.

The guideline provides information on the possibilities and advantages of agrivoltaics, offers an overview of its potential and the current state of technology, and presents practical advice for agriculture businesses, municipalities and companies.

Aside from more efficient land use, agrivoltaics can help reduce water consumption in agriculture, generate stable additional sources of income for farms, and make many farms more resilient against harvest losses. The early involvement of local citizens is a key criterion for success in the concrete implementation of agrivoltaics. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/agrivo…ition.html

Continue reading “Agrivoltaics: Electricity and Agriculture” | >

Satellites Detect Mysterious Changes in the Earth’s Core

A team of scientists has detected a colossal geological anomaly, a massive and mysterious change that took place nearly 2,900 kilometers deep, right at the boundary between the Earth’s mantle and the core, an event that measurably altered the planet’s gravitational field and that has been captured, indirectly but unequivocally, by instruments in orbit.

The finding, published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the structure of rocks in the depths of the lower mantle can transform dynamically, a process that could have fundamental implications for our understanding of planetary dynamics, from the origin of major earthquakes to the generation of the magnetic field that protects life on the surface.

The research, led by Charlotte Gaugne Gouranton of the City University of Paris and with the notable participation of geophysicist Isabelle Panet of Gustave Eiffel University, focused on the meticulous analysis of data collected by the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite mission, a joint project between the United States and Germany that operated between 2002 and 2017.

Google DeepMind discovers new solutions to century-old problems in fluid dynamics

For centuries, mathematicians have developed complex equations to describe the fundamental physics involved in fluid dynamics. These laws govern everything from the swirling vortex of a hurricane to airflow lifting an airplane’s wing.

Experts can carefully craft scenarios that make theory go against practice, leading to situations which could never physically happen. These situations, such as when quantities like velocity or pressure become infinite, are called ‘singularities’ or ‘blow ups’. They help mathematicians identify fundamental limitations in the equations of fluid dynamics, and help improve our understanding of how the physical world functions.

In a new paper, we introduce an entirely new family of mathematical blow ups to some of the most complex equations that describe fluid motion. We’re publishing this work in collaboration with mathematicians and geophysicists from institutions including Brown University, New York University and Stanford University.

Scientists Discover Ordinary Ice Has Extraordinary Electrical Properties

Ice can generate electricity when bent, a process called flexoelectricity. The discovery connects to lightning formation and future device applications. Ice is among the most common materials on Earth, covering glaciers, mountain ranges, and the polar regions. Despite its familiarity, ongoing res

Stony Brook Simulations Help Explain Lightning’s Mysterious Origins

STONY BROOK, NY — September 5, 2025– A recent study in Nature Physics reveals how ordinary ice can generate electricity, providing crucial insight into the origins of lightning. It was discovered that ice exhibits strong flexoelectricity—an electromechanical effect that occurs when the material is bent. At Stony Brook University, PhD student Anthony Mannino, working under

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