Jong-Kyu Park and colleagues predicted a set of distortions that could control ELMs without any additional instabilities. They then tested these distortions at the Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR)—a ring-shaped magnetic fusion confinement device. Their experiments worked.
“We show for the first time the full 3D field operating window in a tokamak to suppress ELMs without stirring up core instabilities or excessively degrading confinement,” Park said. “For a long time we thought it would be too computationally difficult to identify all beneficial symmetry-breaking fields, but our work now demonstrates a simple procedure to identify the set of all such configurations.”
In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute.
The U.S. space agency National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon May 30–31 dedicated to putting open data to work in developing solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the global Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge, participants from around the world will create virtual teams that – during a 48-hour period – will use Earth observation data to propose solutions to COVID-19-related challenges ranging from studying the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and its spread to the impact the disease is having on the Earth system. Registration for this challenge opens in mid-May.
“There’s a tremendous need for our collective ingenuity right now,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “I can’t imagine a more worthy focus than COVID-19 on which to direct the energy and enthusiasm from around the world with the Space Apps Challenge that always generates such amazing solutions.”
The unique capabilities of NASA and its partner space agencies in the areas of science and technology enable them to lend a hand during this global crisis. Since the start of the global outbreak, Earth science specialists from each agency have been exploring ways to use unique Earth observation data to aid understanding of the interplay of the Earth system – on global to local scales – with aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak, including, potentially, our ability to combat it. The hackathon will also examine the human and economic response to the virus.
Scientists from Princeton University and the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have used radio frequency waves and temperature to stabilize the white-hot and volatile plasma that swirls inside of fusion reactors like tokamaks and stellarators.
The radio waves disrupt the magnetic islands that form and disrupt the plasma flow, and temperature magnifies the stabilizing effect. As the saying goes, the disruptor of your disruptor is your friend.
As if this contagion movie we are living can not get any more strange. A University of Pittsburgh researcher who claimed to have been on the verge of a significant breakthrough in his research on the coronavirus was killed in what appears to me a murder-suicide…
While police are treating the death as a homicide, they have yet to find any evidence that it was related to his research.
Rhesus macaques don’t monkey around when it comes to HIV; they have a protein that effectively disables invading HIV particles.
A group of University of Chicago scientists announced an innovative study that explains how the macaques’ immune protein, called TRIM5α, works its magic. It also represents a significant step forward in the science of modeling how complex biological proteins assemble themselves, the scientists said.
“These proteins work together to encase the HIV capsid in a hexagonal net and restrict viral activity,” said postdoctoral fellow Alvin Yu and lead author of the study, which was published in Nature Communications.
Molecules are some of life’s most basic building blocks. When they work together in the right way, they become molecular machines that can solve the most amazing tasks. They are essential for all organisms by, for example, maintaining a wide range of cellular functions and mechanisms.
What if you could create and control an artificial molecular machine? And make it perform tasks that serve us humans?
Many researchers are looking for ways to create and control such molecular machines, and research is going on in labs all over the world.
As the holder of more than 270 patents in 27 countries—including 112 in the US alone—Tesla rightfully earned his place in history, but not every invention of Tesla made it to production. With that in mind, we combed through the records and found 7 of Tesla’s most substantial inventions that never got built.
