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Webb’s NIRCam instrument recently captured this detailed image of the cloudy region around a very young protostar called L1527. Only about 100,000 years old, L1527 isn’t a star yet: it hasn’t fully pulled itself into a proper, stable sphere, and it hasn’t piled on enough mass to kickstart nuclear fusion and start pumping out its own energy. It’s more like “a small, hot, and puffy clump of gas, somewhere between 20 percent and 40 percent the mass of our Sun,” according to the European Space Agency.

But as the latest Webb photos reveal, the young protostar is making an ambitious start.

Why nuclear fusion may be the future of energy. Visit https://brilliant.org/undecided to sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium membership. Fusion energy is considered by many as the holy grail for supplying all of our clean electricity needs. However, the old joke is that nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, no matter what advances or promises are made. But now there are several privately funded startups that are accelerating nuclear fusion development with the ultimate goal of commercializing electricity production much sooner than you might think possible. There’s a lot of interesting developments and news around these companies to sift through. What makes each of these companies’ fusion promises unique compared to what’s come before? And will they finally break that 30 year curse?

Watch The Future of Solid State Wind Energy — No More Blades https://youtu.be/nNp21zTeCDc?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi4dFnLD9622FK77atWtQVv7

Continue reading “Why Nuclear Fusion is Closer Than You Think” »

Things can always get smaller.

That might also be true for one of our much-debated energy sources. Even though experts claim that nuclear energy is a reliable and sustainable energy source, the nuclear energy debate continues, with small-scale nuclear reactors being developed around the world. They are said to be a safer and less expensive form of nuclear power. On the other hand, full-scale nuclear reactors are large, expensive, and take a long time to build, and making them smaller, portable, cheaper, and safer could ensure that solar, wind, and hydro are not getting all the attention.

Continue reading “Could micro nuclear reactors be the future of nuclear energy?” »

We could be a step closer to the commercially viable production of limitless nuclear fusion energy.

A group of nuclear fusion researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved self-heating “burning plasma” for the first time ever in January, bringing commercially viable nuclear fusion one step closer.

Now, a new analysis of the plasma, published in a paper in the journal Nature Physics, reveals surprising new details that could help the scientific community finally achieve the holy grail of nuclear fusion — net energy production.

Continue reading “Limitless nuclear fusion energy is one step closer thanks to burning plasma experiment” »

Burning plasma fusion reactions, thought to be crucial for building working fusion reactors, are producing more high-energy particles than researchers expected. Solving the mystery of why could be key to making fusion viable.

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Every day brings us new technological advances, today we’ll explore many of those of such as robotics, automation, rapid delivery, education, medical science, nanotechnology, and more.

Episodes referenced in the Episode:
Power Satellites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBCbdThIJNE
Fusion Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM
Quiet Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvH-7XX6pkk.
The Santa Claus Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmgYoryG_Ss.
Synthetic Meat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NULFAItoBs.
Cyborgs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGYKCTFIZLI
Mind Augmentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQpYOVvU17Y
Mind-Machine Interfaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCLLzI4R3bc.
Life Extension https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKmdc2AuXec.
The Science of Aging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDpjv2z3dyE
Happily Ever After: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ypfzvQ-Q2w.
Attack of the Drones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oZCUtgnQkE
Advanced Metamaterials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0UZ6-oeiIE
Portable Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXqcf48D9Q
The Nuclear Option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aBOhC1c6m8
Moon: Industrial Complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y47MMNqKGxE
Machine Rebellion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHd22kMa0_w.
The Paperclip Maximizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mk7NVFz_88
Technological Stagnation: Coming Soon.
Non-Carbon Based Life: Coming Soon.

Continue reading “New Technologies that May be in the Cards” »

The US observed Russian naval vessels preparing for a possible test of a new nuclear-powered torpedo in recent weeks, a senior US official with direct knowledge told CNN.

Among the vessels which took part in the preparations was the Belgorod, a cruise missile submarine modified for special operations that is able to launch unmanned underwater vehicles including the Poseidon torpedo.

In the last week, the vessels were observed leaving the testing area in the Arctic Sea and heading back to port without carrying out a test. The US believes the Russians may have encountered technical difficulties.

A magnetic field can significantly boost the performance of a large-scale fusion experiment that may lead to a future source of clean power.

Nuclear fusion could provide a clean power source, but one of the technological challenges is maintaining the fuel at a high enough temperature for a long enough time. In a technique called inertial confinement fusion (ICF)—where lasers initiate the nuclear reaction—a magnetic field has been shown to improve heating. Now researchers have shown that a magnetic field can also help in a large-scale experiment with a more complicated design that produces far more energy [1]. The applied field increased the fuel’s temperature by 40% and tripled the fusion reaction’s efficiency. The work provides a step toward increasing the robustness and energy output of the fusion reaction and provides the first proof of concept of magnetization-assisted fusion in a large-scale experiment.

In the simplest version of ICF, synchronized laser pulses hit a capsule filled with cold hydrogen fuel, causing it to implode. The implosion heats the fuel and creates a spot of burning plasma (see Viewpoint: Fusion Turns Up the Heat). The “hot spot” serves as a spark that initiates burning throughout the fuel, driving a self-sustaining fusion reaction that releases energy. However, these implosions can fail to generate significant fusion energy if the fuel pellet has small imperfections on its surface or if the lasers are not perfectly timed. But if the fuel could be heated to temperatures higher than was possible in recent experiments, there would be more margin for error, which could alleviate the sensitivity to such details.

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is one of the pillars of the Standard Model of particle physics. It describes the strong interaction – one of the four fundamental forces of nature. This force holds quarks and gluons – collectively known as partons – together in hadrons such as the proton, and protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei. Two hallmarks of QCD are chiral symmetry breaking and asymptotic freedom. Chiral symmetry breaking explains how quarks generate the masses of hadrons and therefore the vast majority of visible mass in the universe. Asymptotic freedom states that the strong force between quarks and gluons decreases with increasing energy. The discovery of these two QCD effects garnered two Nobel prizes in physics, in 2008 and 2004, respectively.

High-energy collisions of lead nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) explore QCD under the most extreme conditions on Earth. These heavy-ion collisions recreate the quark–gluon plasma (QGP): the hottest and densest fluid ever studied in the laboratory. In contrast to normal nuclear matter, the QGP is a state where quarks and gluons are not confined inside hadrons. It is speculated that the universe was in a QGP state around one millionth of a second after the Big Bang.

The ALICE experiment was designed to study the QGP at LHC energies. It was operated during LHC Runs 1 and 2, and has carried out a broad range of measurements to characterise the QGP and to study several other aspects of the strong interaction. In a recent review, highlights of which are described below, the ALICE collaboration takes stock of its first decade of QCD studies at the LHC. The results from these studies include a suite of observables that reveal a complex evolution of the near-perfect QGP liquid that emerges in high-temperature QCD. ALICE measurements also demonstrate that charm quarks equilibrate extremely quickly within this liquid, and are able to regenerate QGP-melted “charmonium” particle states. ALICE has extensively mapped the QGP opaqueness with high-energy probes, and has directly observed the QCD dead-cone effect in proton–proton collisions. Surprising QGP-like signatures have also been observed in rare proton–proton and proton–lead collisions.

Continue reading “A ten-year journey through the quark–gluon plasma and beyond” »