Scientists at the Lawerence LIvermore National Labs are working on a new way to generate power by essentially making a miniature sun in a controlled setting.

From the Newsweek article:

Scientists have been trying to produce energy with fusion for decades. So far, they keep failing. It's not that fusion itself can't be achieved. Fusion takes place in every hydrogen-bomb explosion. The trick is controlling fusion so that instead of a one-time blast you get a series of tiny, controllable explosions. The joke is that fusion energy is only 40 years away, and will always be only 40 years away.

Moses believes, however, that his lab, which is called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, has cracked the problem. The big challenge fusion has faced is lack of power. Even the biggest lasers in the world could not generate enough energy to smash nuclei together and make them stick. But the reason the building we're in is so huge—it covers the area of three football fields—is that it contains an enormous laser, or actually a system that combines 192 identical lasers and zaps them into a round chamber, about 30 feet in diameter, where the tiny pellet of fuel awaits the blast. NIF's laser, which took a decade to build and was completed earlier this year, can produce 60 times more energy than any other laser ever built. Right now it's still being tested. But next year Moses and his scientists will fire it up with a full load of deuterium-tritium fuel, and Moses feels confident it will achieve "ignition," meaning a controlled burn in which you get out more energy than you put in. Moses, an award-winning laser scientist with a wry sense of humor, explains the whole thing as he leads me on a tour through the NIF facility. It's a vast, beautiful, awe-inspiring machine, mind-blowing in its complexity, with miles of metal tubes—all part of a system that starts with a tiny pulse of light, channels that light through machines that amplify its intensity and rocket the beam along using specially grown crystals and thousands of lenses and mirrors, and finally focuses these beams down to hit a target that is the size of a peppercorn—all in one millionth of a second.

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Read the full article here.

A new quantum theory is making waves in the Physics community and may offer answers to some of the most pressing questions.

From the Scientific American article:

The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage against which matter dances but never being affected by its presence. These two conceptions of time don’t gel.

The solution, Hořava says, is to snip threads that bind time to space at very high energies, such as those found in the early universe where quantum gravity rules. “I’m going back to Newton’s idea that time and space are not equivalent,” Hořava says. At low energies, general relativity emerges from this underlying framework, and the fabric of spacetime restitches, he explains.

Hořava likens this emergence to the way some exotic substances change phase. For instance, at low temperatures liquid helium’s properties change dramatically, becoming a “superfluid” that can overcome friction. In fact, he has co-opted the mathematics of exotic phase transitions to build his theory of gravity. So far it seems to be working: the infinities that plague other theories of quantum gravity have been tamed, and the theory spits out a well-behaved graviton. It also seems to match with computer simulations of quantum gravity.

Hořava’s theory has been generating excitement since he proposed it in January, and physicists met to discuss it at a meeting in November at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. In particular, physicists have been checking if the model correctly describes the universe we see today. General relativity scored a knockout blow when Einstein predicted the motion of Mercury with greater accuracy than Newton’s theory of gravity could.

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Read the full article here.

I'm just gonna let the article blip take care of the explaining of this one.

From the Scientific American article:

Named for a Dutch physicist, the Casimir effect governs interactions of matter with the energy that is present in a vacuum. Success in harnessing this force could someday help researchers develop low-friction ballistics and even levitating objects that defy gravity. For now, the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a two-year, $10-million project encouraging scientists to work on ways to manipulate this quirk of quantum electrodynamics.

Vacuums generally are thought to be voids, but Hendrik Casimir believed these pockets of nothing do indeed contain fluctuations of electromagnetic waves. He suggested, in work done in the 1940s with fellow Dutch physicist Dirk Polder, that two metal plates held apart in a vacuum could trap the waves, creating vacuum energy that, depending on the situation, could attract or repel the plates. As the boundaries of a region of vacuum move, the variation in vacuum energy (also called zero-point energy) leads to the Casimir effect. Recent research done at Harvard University, Vrije University Amsterdam and elsewhere has proved Casimir correct—and given some experimental underpinning to DARPA's request for research proposals.

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Read the full article here.

A phenomenon called "quantum tunneling" may mean faster than light travel, meaning you arrive somewhere before you even leave.

From the Telegraph article:

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

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Read the full article here.

Researchers in the south of France are building a new kind of fusion reactor that promises a future of clean fusion power.

From the New Scientist article:

THE balmy south of France has always been a magnet for sun worshippers. So it is perhaps fitting that here, not far from the Côte d'Azur, an international team of researchers is building a machine to recreate the sun. It will take tens of thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete, plus a whole host of more unusual materials: beryllium, niobium, titanium and tungsten; frigid liquid nitrogen and helium. Oh, and a supply of burnt coconuts.

This eclectic mix of ingredients will be turned into ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor - the next big thing in nuclear fusion research. When completed in 2018, the reactor will fuse together two heavy isotopes of hydrogen to release vast quantities of energy. In theory, the result will be clean electricity galore with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than today's nuclear fission reactors leave behind.

So why we are not already flooding our electricity grids with fusion energy? While the concept of nuclear fusion is simple, the practicalities are anything but. That's because the nuclei themselves are reluctant participants: each carries a positive electrical charge and these repel one another, so forcing two nuclei together is almost impossible. Only at stupendously high temperatures do the nuclei acquire enough energy to overcome their mutual aversion, smash into one another, and fuse.

It is much the same picture in the sun. There, heat is generated from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei. But the fuel barely smoulders even at 15 million kelvin, the temperature of the sun's core. It is consumed so slowly that the supply lasts for billions of years.

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Read the full article here.

Physicists have found a way of compressing information and thus boosting the data rate, which could lead to fater internet speeds.

From the BBC News article:

The idea uses silicon waveguides as the lenses.

A long, 10-GHz pulse containing bits of data and a much shorter laser pulse with no information pass through one of these waveguides.

A race is then set up between the halves of the pulse, with the back speeding up and the front slowing down as it passes through an opitcal fibre.

That is due to complex interactions with the silicon, forcing the data-rich pulse to take on the temporal properties of the shorter pulse.

Just like an optical telescope, combining two of these temporal lenses creates a time telescope that can take a standard 10 GHz pulse and create and "image" of it.

That jams the same information into a pulse just one twenty-seventh as long.

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Read the full article here.

Ever since I was a kid, I would think long and hard about the question, "If you could have any superpower, what would it be and why?" I always wanted to be able to become invisible.

Now researchers at Boston College have come one step closer to helping me to achieve my dream: they've developed a new metamaterial that can bend light around objects.

From the Softpedia article:

Physicists at the Boston College have recently managed to use new metamaterials to successfully control a beam of light employing a set of complex instructions. The achievement could have significant applications in the field of bending light around corners or other objects, and could contribute significantly to producing the soon-to-be-achieved invisibility cloak. The amazing thing about the research is that it makes the wave of light appear as if it is traveling in a straight line, when in fact it is bent around a structure, and then redirected to the other end, where it regains its original properties.

Read the full article here.

Read the research article from Optics Express here (open access).

I'm no physics expert, but from what I remember from college, once you get past the basic laws of physics governing movement and massive bodies and descend into the nitty gritty, logic seems almost to disappear. "What do you mean particles are waves? That can't possibly be true!" But this is why physics is beautiful to me. While the math is entirely over my head, the findings never cease to amaze me.

Here's a really cool attempt at explaining the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics from the Scienceblogs website.

Read that and tell me your brain doesn't hurt.