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In a new world record, China’s “artificial sun” project has sustained a nuclear fusion reaction for more than 17 minutes, reports Anthony Cuthbertson for the Independent. In the latest experiment, superheated plasma reached 126 million degrees Fahrenheit—that’s roughly five times hotter than the sun, which radiates a scorching 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface and about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core.

Coal and natural gas are the primary energy sources currently used around the world, but these materials come in limited supply. Nuclear fusion could be the cleanest energy source available because it replicates the sun’s physics by merging atomic nuclei to generate large amounts of energy into electricity. The process requires no fossil fuels, leaves behind no radioactive waste, and is a safer alternative to fission nuclear power, per the Independent.

“The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental foundation towards the running of a fusion reactor,” says Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a statement.

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Babies rapidly develop this ability by soaking up data from their external environments, forming a sort of “common sense” about the dynamics of the physical world. When things don’t move as expected—say, in magic tricks where objects disappear—they’ll show surprise.

For AI, it’s a completely different matter. While recent AI models have already trounced humans from game play to solving decades-old scientific conundrums, they still struggle at developing intuition about the physical world.

This month, researchers at Google-owned DeepMind took inspiration from developmental psychology and built an AI that naturally extracts simple rules about the world through watching videos. Netflix and chill didn’t work on its own; the AI model o nly learned the rules of our physical world when given a basic idea of objects, such as what their boundaries are, where they are, and how they move. Similar to babies, the AI expressed “surprise” when shown magical situations that didn’t make sense, like a ball rolling up a ramp.

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Astronomers hope to explain how galaxies like this one can grow magnetic fields that stretch for thousands of light-years — and what affect they have on galactic evolution.

The finding came out of a project to study radio signals from spiral galaxies that are tilted so we see them edge-on from Earth’s point of view. For these galaxies, astronomers can more easily separate what’s happening outside of the galaxies’ disks, in the gas-filled “haloes” that surround them.

Using observations from a radio telescope in New Mexico called the Very Large Array, the astronomers measured properties of the radio emission coming from the halo of the galaxy NGC 4631. They’d known from past observations that there were large-scale magnetic fields that extended out of the disk into the halo of this galaxy.

But with the new data, they could see the directions these fields pointed across multiple dimensions. Their measurements revealed that the fields pointed alternately in and out of the galaxy’s disk along the flat view of the sky from Earth’s point of view. Another measurement showed that the fields also alternated in pointing toward and away from Earth along our line of sight to the galaxy.

Continue reading “Astronomers find surprisingly complex magnetic fields in a galaxy’s halo” | >

Researchers from China have developed a powerful new adhesive that grips strongly in extreme temperatures, from the deep freeze of liquid nitrogen to the sweltering heat of an oven. Better yet, it can be broken back down into its component parts and reused without losing strength.

The new adhesive belongs to a class known as supramolecular adhesives, which are made up of molecular components specially designed to self-assemble into strong bonds during curing. One is a ring-shaped molecule called a crown ether, which can wrap around the second component, a small protein produced by bacteria.

When these are combined and the mixture is heated, the crown sticks to the surface of the protein tightly, strengthening the bond through several molecular interactions, including their opposite charges. The team described it as “welding” the molecules together, giving them an incredibly strong interlocking structure.

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Ice giants like Neptune are a potential treasure trove of scientific discoveries.

There’s also Triton’s cryovolcanic activity, resulting from tidal flexing in its interior caused by Neptune’s gravitational pull. However, this activity increases when Triton is closest to the Sun (perihelion), resulting in greater eruptions from the interior. This will leave higher concentrations of nitrogen and other gases in the moon’s tenuous atmosphere, which could be studied to learn more about its interior composition and structure. As for the rings, the team noted several objectives there:

“Establish a complete list of planetary rings and their inner Shepherd satellites, study the characteristics, formation mechanism, material exchange, and gas transport of planetary rings of different orbital types, analyze the origin of different celestial bodies, and detect possible organic matter… The multiple planetary rings of Neptune are not uniformly distributed in longitude. Instead, it presents an arc-block-like discrete structure. Why these arc-block structures can exist, and whether they exist stably without spreading out, are all interesting dynamical problems.”

China’s space agency has made some rather impressive moves in recent years that illustrate how the nation has become a major power in space. These include the development of heavy launch rockets like the Long March 9, the deployment of space stations (the Tiangong program), and their success with the Chang’e and Tianwen programs that have sent robotic explorers to the Moon and Mars.

Continue reading “China’s space agency could send a mission to Neptune — major discoveries await” | >

An XPrize competition funded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk just awarded teams of students $5 million to develop their ideas for carbon removal systems — and it still has another $95 million to give away.

The challenge: Between our cars, factories, and everything else, humans are pumping about 43 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.

To combat climate change, we not only need to cut that figure way down, we also need to capture and store a lot of the CO2 that’s already out there.

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