Several privately funded companies and small university-based research groups pursuing novel fusion reactor designs have delivered promising results that could shorten the timeline for producing a prototype machine from decades to several years.
but the outlines of such a reactor can now be perceived. Traditional fusion research has centered on large, doughnut-shaped machines called tokamaks,
which exert powerful magnetic fields to compress high-temperature plasmaoiling balls of charged particles that fuse to form helium, releasing large amounts of energy in the process.
The challenge is to contain the hot plasma and keep it stable; the fusion reactors of today,
such as the one at the International Thermonuclear Experimental reactor (ITER) project in southern France, use giant coils of electromagnets that consume much more energy than the machine actually produces.
ITER (pronounced ater, which combines scientists and funding from China, the European union, India, Russia, Japan, South korea,
and the United states, is projected to cost dozens of billions of dollars to produce a working reactor sometime in the 2030s.
Maybe. Two recent developments, offering new and faster pathways to energy-producing fusion reactors, have galvanized the fusion community.
Tri Alpha Energy based in Foothill Ranch, California, said in early August that it has succeeded in keeping a high-energy plasma stable for five millisecondsuch less than the blink of an eye,
but alf an eternityon the scale of fusion reactions, according to chief technology officer Michl Binderbauer. Tri Alpha, says Binderbauer,
is bringing the principles of high-energy particle accelerators, such as the Large hadron collider, to bear on the problems of fusion reactors.
Specifically, the team has built a device, 23 meters long, that fires two clouds of plasma at each other to form a ring of plasma.
The magnetic field that holds the ring together is generated by the plasma itself technique known as a field-reversed configuration.
The plasma is sustained by the injection of high-energy particles from accelerators. The challenge for Tri Alpha design, says Binderbauer,
is ot enough and long enough? keeping the plasma stable at a high-enough temperature to achieve energy-positive fusion.
The recent experiment indicated that the companyhich has attracted millions of dollars in funding from investors including Goldman sachs and Vulcan Inc,
. the investment fund of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allenas solved the long-enough problem. Making the plasma hot enough is the next key challenge.
Next year, Tri Alpha will begin building a new and more powerful version of its experimental device to test the process at higher temperatures.
At MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, a group headed by Dennis Whyte a professor of nuclear science and engineering and the center director, published a conceptual design in July for a machine called the ARC reactor (ffordable, robust, compact.
The novelty of the ARC design is the nature of the electromagnets that confine the plasma.
Using recently developed, flexible superconducting tapes made of rare-earth barium copper oxide, the ARC reactor can achieve magnetic fields with much higher energyhus enabling a reactor design much smaller than other tokamak-based machines.
The researchers also envision a liquid lanketsurrounding the plasma that will absorb neutrons without damage
and provide an efficient heat-exchange medium to produce electricity. Increasing the amplitude of the surrounding magnetic field raises the amount of fusion power produced in the plasma to the fourth power dramatic increase that could lead to a commercial prototype in a matter of years,
according to Whyte. t well known that you can make very compact devices if you raise the magnetic field to very high levels,
he says, ut the electromagnets had to be coppero superconductor could tolerate that magnetic field. Now the advent of advanced superconductor tapes could enable a compact reactor that produces fusion continuously.
Published in Fusion Engineering and Design, the ARC reactor paper stresses that, for the moment, it a conceptual design only.
Whyte is hoping to attract funding to build an experimental machine over the next few years.
Meanwhile a clutch of private companies including not only Tri Alpha, but also Tokamak Energy Ltd.,based in England,
and Vancouver-based General Fusion, are working on related -but-different designs to bring fusion to the prototype stage (see New Approach to Fusion. e are getting closer to working machines,
says Michel Laberge, the founder and chief scientist at General Fusion. or many years, fusion research was the realm of big government labs that did great work
and established the basis for fusion to work. But there was not a great sense of urgency. ow the urgency has risen,
and these companies are testing new ideas and new approachesnd attracting the investment to do so.
General Fusion recently landed $27 million in new funding from a group of investors led by the sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia. ight now
what happening is a rethinking, says Burton Richter, who won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1976
and is an advisor to Tri Alpha. Budget cuts in the 1990s forced the shutdown of alternative approaches outside of ITER and the U s. Department of energy National Ignition Facility.
Companies like Tri Alpha offer a path to fusion paved not with taxpayer dollars but with private-sector moneyhich ultimately is the only way to actually get something built.
Jonathan Menard, a plasma physicist at the Princeton Plasma physics Laboratory, directs the National Spherical Torus Experiment,
which is pursuing a tokamak shaped like a beach ball instead of a doughnut. Menard whose own program recently completed a $94 million upgrade of its experimental machine,
has followed closely developments with the Tri Alpha and ARC efforts and believes that these innovations should be pursued further.
With the wariness of a veteran fusion scientist, though, he advises caution: ill you build it, you don know for sure. g
#Trick That Doubles Wireless Data Capacity Stands Up in Cell Network Tests Major wireless carriers have begun testing a technology that can double the capacity of any wireless data connection.
Recent tests by one of America largest wireless carriers and by Deutsche telekom, the German telecom giant that owns a majority stake in U s. carrier T-Mobile,
have shown now that doubling is feasible in real cellular networks. The results suggest that products Kumu Networks has in the works for cellular operators could help expand the capacity of mobile data networks.
In the longer term, the company hopes to deliver further capacity boosts by making its technology compact enough to fit inside mobile devices.
Kumu originated in research that refuted the long-held assumption that radios cannot transmit and receive at the same time.
For this reason, the radios in our phones and computers either use separate channels to send
Kumu founders developed hardware and software that enables a radio receiver to filter out interference from outgoing signals.
or making it possible to use one where two were needed before (see he Clever Circuit That Doubles Bandwidth.
This summer, Kumu worked with major wireless carriers on the first tests of its technology in real cellular network conditions.
Earlier this month, Deutsche telekom, Germany largest telecom provider, installed a small LTE cell tower containing Kumu technology on a rooftop in Prague.
Devices with Kumu technology mounted on top of cars played the role of cell phones linking to the network.
or blocked by buildings, cars, or people from making a direct line-of-site connection with the tower.
On the whole, the capacity-doubling trick worked in those varying conditions, says Steven Hong, director of product and a cofounder of Kumu.
when one of the largest U s. carriershich Kumu declines to namearried out similar but smaller tests on its own LTE network in the area around Kumu office in Sunnyvale, California. e
Harish Krishnaswamy, an associate professor at Columbia University, says Kumu trials suggest that the idea of full-duplex wireless connections can be practical,
For example, when the devices playing the role of phones in the trial were close together, they sometimes interfered with each other.
when a car went by. Kumu first product will be aimed at wireless carriers and is a version of the small mobile base stations, known as small cells,
used to improve coverage in busy locations such as stadiums. Small cells usually link back to a carrier network using cable.
and make a high-powered LTE link back to the core network. Making small cells fully wireless should help carriers deploy them in a wider range of places
and improve data coverage and capacity, says Hong. He expects that carriers will test that product in the field,
serving live traffic, next year. Kumu is also working on a chip that will make it possible to shrink down the package containing the company technology from roughly the size of a hardback book to something more akin to a credit card.
Earlier this year, Krishnaswamy group at Columbia demonstrated a full-duplex chip smaller than a fingertip.
He confident that the technology will eventually arrive in phones. It is already being talked about in the industry as one part of a future 5g wireless data standard. ee maybe one
or two years away from having something that can be deployed in mobile, says Krishnaswamy b
#Paralyzed Man Arm Wired to Receive Brain signals Scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio say theye used electronics to get around a paralyzed man spinal injury,
permitting him to use an implant in his brain to move his arm and hand.
The test represents the first time that signals collected in the brain have been conveyed directly to electrodes placed inside someone arm to restore movement,
says Robert Kirsch, a biomedical engineer at Case Western. He also directs the Cleveland FES Center,
which develops technologies for people with paralysis. The project, described today at the meeting of the Society for neuroscience in Chicago,
is a step toward a wireless system able to transmit brain signals through the air to electronics sewn into the limbs of paralyzed people,
thereby restoring the ability to carry out simple daily tasks. People familiar with the study results said the volunteer movements are still rough,
a consortium that is developing brain-computer interfaces and includes the Case Western team. ut the fact that they got a person to control their own body,
Volunteers in brain-implant studies have moved previously computer cursors and controlled robotic arms. Last year, a different Ohio man with partial arm paralysis received a brain implant
and was able to mentally open and close his hand using strips of external electrodes placed around his forearm.
That effort, called Neurobridge, is led by Ohio State university and Battelle Memorial Institute. The Case Western project goes a step further
because the new volunteer has a spinal injury that prevents him from moving his arms at all.
Bolu Ajiboye, the Case Western researcher who presented the team data in Chicago today, says that nine months ago surgeons implanted two bunches of silicon electrodes, called Utah arrays, into the volunteer motor cortex.
That is the part of the brain where movements are planned. Wires from each array emerge from the skull through metal ports
and connect to computers that interpret the signals. To complete the bridge of the man spinal cord injury,
doctors then inserted more than 16 fine wires into the volunteer right arm and hand. Electrical impulses sent to those electrodes cause different muscles to contract,
creating movement in the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, an approach known as functional electrical stimulation, or FES.
According to Kirsch, the volunteer is able to very accurately control a computer simulation of his wired-up arm using his brain signals.
Moving the real arm under brain control has proved more challenging. he virtual setup is perfect,
Efforts to combine brain-computer interfaces with FES systems began 20 years ago. In a 1998 experiment, also at Case Western, a volunteer named Jim Jatich used signals collected from an EEG cap he wore over his head to trigger an early FES device known as Freehand,
which opened and closed his hand using stimulators (see ind over Musclesand aralyzed Again. That device required only a simple on/off signal,
which Jatich was able to generate by modulating his EEG wave. Implants placed in contact with the brain motor cortex can gather far more detailed information
however, including estimates of what limb movements a person is thinking about. In experiments using robotic arms,
Ian Burkhart, the participant in the Ohio State study, says he still works with researchers three days a week
#Google powers up highly scalable cloud-based Nosql database Google has introduced a new cloud-based Nosql database powered by Bigtable that is automatically scalable and designed specifically for large-scale implementations with an eye on the Internet of things.
Cloud Bigtable runs on Google's powerful Bigtable data storage system that already powers Gmail, Google search and Google analytics plus there's the added bonus that it's compatible with the Apache HBASE API.
The latter configuration means that it can be used with almost all existing applications in the Hadoop system whilst at the same time supporting Google's own Cloud Dataflow.
Google boasts that the solution offers its customers single-digit millisecond latency and double the performance per dollar when set against HBASE and Cassandra, according to Tech Crunch.
Cloud Bigtable is by no means Google's first trip into the cloud-based Nosql database space.
but is rather different in that it targets read-heavy workloads for mobile and web apps.
For example, if an organization needs to stream data into run analytics on and serve data out of a single database at scale Cloud Bigtable is the right system,"Cory O'Conner,
Google Cloud platform product manager told Tech Crunch, adding that many customers start on Cloud Datastore
and move up to Cloud Bigtable. Google is offering Cloud Bigtable in beta right now and until it is released fully there is no service level agreement or technical support available l
#This is the first FDA-approved 3d printed drug The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first-ever 3d printed drug,
Spritam is an epilepsy medication used to treat seizures in children and adults. It's porous thanks to the 3d printing process,
noted Spritam is designed to help epilepsy patients adhere to their treatment regimen and should help children and seniors in particular.
Hackers sorry, security experts at mobile cybersecurity firm Lookout have compromised successfully a Tesla Model S. This is the third connected car hack in the last two weeks,
Researcher Kevin Mahaffey published his findings on the Lookout blog conveniently on opening day of the 23rd annual Def Con hacking conference in Las vegas
Mahaffey was quick to point out that this hack required"initial physical access to the car."
or white hats Mahaffey and partner Marc Rogers of web performance and security firm Cloudflare have worked already with Tesla to issue an over-the-air security update the week of Def Con before publishing their findings.
Mahaffey goes into exhaustive detail in his blog entry regarding the specifics of the hack.
While the researcher commends Tesla for how well it separated its massive infotainment system from the rest of the car's controls at a top level,
Mahaffey and his partner in crime (for good) were able to perform any action possible from the car's touchscreen or Tesla's accompanying smartphone app.
On one occasion, the security guru successfully turned the car off while it was driving."
"At low speeds, the car applies the parking brake and it immediately comes to a stop,
"At speeds above about 5 miles per hour, the Model S gracefully shuts off its engineust like shifting a gasoline car into neutralhile still providing the driver full control over steering
and brakes so they can safely bring the car to a stop.""Good to know!
especially when cars are only to become more connected? For starters, Mahaffey tells auto makers to start putting their cars'critical systems into closed networks that are isolated from the infotainment systems or information clusters.
This is the third reported hack on connected cars in the last two weeks alone. First, security experts assumed direct, remote control of a new Jeep cherokee,
causing parent company Fiat Chrysler to recall 1. 4 million vehicles. And it's only worse press for the firm from there.
Short after, another white hat hacker revealed a flaw in Onstar's connected system that left any General motors car equipped with the service wide open to remote door unlocks and ignition starts.
In short, for who knows how long, any Onstar-equipped GM car could be jacked hands Free of course,
this string of scary but ultimately good hackings is no coincidence, with Def Con 2015 well under way as of this writing.
But nevertheless, if this past month hasn't opened everyone's eyes to the folly surrounding security in connected cars right now,
then nothing will
#Laser-printed holograms could enable'smart windows'Making holograms isn't easy-it requires expensive equipment, complex physics and time-consuming recording techniques.
But a new method developed at the University of Birmingham is about to change all that.
Some progress was made with a recently-developed technique for hologram creation, which splits a laser pulse into two beams to create an interference pattern on a surface.
and then recombine them to produce holograms and nanopatterns, "Butt told Phys. org.""Here we use only a single beam,
and this interference pattern is used for writing/printing holograms. The technique requires far fewer optical components,
"It's hoped this new hologram-creation method could be miniaturized into a smartphone, or even used to create 3d artwork and"smart windows".
"It also has applications in holographic data storage.""We and our collaborators are currently pursuing all these research paths
and achieving good results, "said Butt. The team published its results in Applied Physics Letters s
#This software sees if your brain is busy before interrupting There's a modern-day malady that everyone suffers from-getting distracted by phone notifications in the middle of something important and struggling to regain focus again.
But now computer scientists have developed software that automatically screens out low-priority emails or texts. It's called Phylter,
and uses a headband to detect when you're concentrating on something. Changes in blood flow in the prefrontal cortex can signal brain activity,
A machine-learning algorithm calibrates the system to different brains while tests using Google glass helped the team calibrate
A prototype of the system was shown off at the Human computer interaction International Conference in LA. As well as offering a barrier to concentration loss,
-and perhaps even monitor other data besides brain activity. Now, what was I doing before I started writing this again n
If you've been anxiously wondering what the future holds for Project Ara after Google became one part of Alphabet,
Over the course of seven rather cryptic tweets on@Projectara, the modular smartphone team confirmed that they're still"busy making stuff
The phone was scheduled to debut in Puerto rico sometime later this year. It looks like those plans might have changed,
"so it obviously still features in Google's plans in some way. The bottom line is we'll have to wait for the promised updates next week.
"so don't give up your dreams of a modular mobile just yet t
#How Siri will learn to recognise your voice at a crowded party AI assistants like Siri,
but they're notoriously bad at it in noisy environments-a problem researchers have dubbed the"cocktail party"conundrum.
but until recently, computers lacked the same ability. That's changing, thanks to engineers at Duke university, who are developing a microphone with the same ability to zone out background noise.
They used metamaterials-materials arranged in repeating patterns that exhibit weird behaviour -and a technique called"compressive sensing"to work out the direction that a sound is coming from
and pull it out of the background noise. Right now, their prototype is about 15 cm across,
but the engineers believe it could be scaled down into a smartphone or similar device.""We've invented a sensing system that can efficiently,
"We think this could improve the performance of voice-activated devices like smartphones and game consoles while also reducing the complexity of the system
#The iphone 6s release date has leaked, but no points for guessing it Apple is set to launch two new phones at the start of September in the form of the iphone 6s and iphone 6s Plus,
with an announcement heavily rumoured for September 9. Two out of the three major carriers in Germany have told German publication Macerkopf that both phones will be ready to pick up in store on September 18.
It makes sense as it'll be the second Friday after the announcement-that's the date Apple has been letting its phones loose on the wider public in recent years.
Germany is a first-tier launch country for the iphone so it's likely many other countries will get the phone on the same day.
These countries include Australia, Canada, France, Hong kong, Japan, Singapore, the UK and the US. At the moment rumours of the iphone 6s suggest the design will stay the same with big changes coming in the form of the A9 processor
and Force Touch being adapted for the new phone's display y
#Algae inspiration could boost your phone's battery Materials engineers trying to work out a way of boosting the performance of lithium-ion batteries have hit upon an unlikely inspiration-algae from a local pond.
In nature, single cells of algae can grow to huge sizes. Now, a team at Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research has developed a new type of battery component out of carbon that mimics the way that single-celled algae forms,
and early testing shows a solid improvement on traditional batteries.""In nature, a great number of microorganisms, like diatoms, can assemble biominerals into intricate hierarchical three-dimensional architectures with great structural control,
"said Xi Li, who heads up the research group that made the discovery. Li and his team examined how the algae forms,
then used a similar process to develop tiny carbon spheres that act as a battery's anode.
When compared to normal lithium-ion cells, the new batteries showed high reversible capacity, good cycling stability and high-rate performance."
"The carbon spheres can only be prepared on a laboratory scale, however, we are optimizing the synthetic conditions to scale up fabrication,
"said Li.""We envisage that batteries composed of these anode materials could be charged faster than those fabricated using conventional carbon materials."
"The team's research has been published in the journal Chemistry of Materials s
#New robotic hand restores the feeling of touch US defence agency DARPA has invented a new kind of robotic prosthetic limb that it says can give the wearer the sensation of touch again.
Thanks to a connection straight into the brain, the paralysed patient in question has been given back the ability to actually feel objects around him.
It's a significant step forward for the technology and for prosthetics, enabling patients to not only pass down commands to an artificial limb
Built in partnership with the Applied Physics laboratory at John Hopkins University the attachment has been called affectionately Luke (after Luke Skywalker.
this work shows the potential for seamless biotechnological restoration of near-natural function, "adds Sanchez.
who has been paralysed for more than a decade after a spinal cord injury, was able to detect with nearly 100 percent accuracy which of his robotic fingers were being touched by researchers.
Black Friday deals in 2015 will lead to the biggest day of spending the internet has seen ever It's now only 71 days until Black Friday!
On Black Friday last year, websites crashed, sales records were smashed and shoppers ravenously scooped up deals on tech, games and clothing in
Adobe crunched the numbers and reported that on Black Friday in the US last year consumers spent a record-breaking $2. 4 billion-up an extraordinary 24%on the previous year.
where shoppers spent £810m ($1. 2 billion) last year, John Lewis celebrated its biggest sales week of all time, shifting one Nutribullet food processor every 30 seconds.
while GAME's website was selling PS4 and Xbox One consoles to British gamers at a rate of 3, 600 per hour.
of which the internet had seen never before. So what's in store for Black Friday 2015? Well despite MPS having urged UK retailers to boycott Black Friday this year,
The numbers on Black Friday in 2014 were so big that websites fell over like Victorian ladies on a hot day, with HP, Best Buy, Currys, Tesco, Argos,
Boots and Game's websites all requiring smelling salts. The Currys website in the UK crashed
despite the company having implemented a system where users had to queue to use it,
a queue that was still over an hour long by lunchtime. The chaos isn't over, either.
when most people in the US have time off work for Thanksgiving. And while Black Friday chaos online led to websites crashing, bedlam on the highstreet tends to be a lot more troublesome.
Last year, fighting broke out in many stores in the UK, with Police being called to supermarkets including a number of Tesco stores
which were criticised heavily afterwards by police. In Scotland one supermarket had to be closed due to the excessive number of people trying to push their way inside.
While in the US, it's not unheard of for bargain hunters to pepper spray each other in an attempt to get the best deals...
Clearly-it's much safer to stay at home and pick up your deals on the internet, and that's what the majority of people did on Black Friday 2014.
To give you an idea of just how busy the sites were, John Lewis and Currys-two of the UK's biggest retail websites-both saw their web traffic triple compared to Black Friday 2013.
Meanwhile, Techradar's own Black Friday pages attracted more than 1. 6 million page views. So it's no exaggeration to say that the pre-Christmas retail landscape was changed forever on November 28 last year.
"Some retailers like Amazon planned promotions well in advance, but others were sucked in when they saw the scale of Black Friday
and realised that without promotions, they would lose out on footfall or website hits in a key spending weekend."
"The upshot? Those retailers cut prices even though they hadn't originally planned to.""Those retailers ended up losing margin as they typically went for a percentage cut across numerous or even all lines,
rather than having planned promotions that they could have organised with the help of their suppliers,
the Black Friday money is moving to Thanksgiving instead. According to IBM, Black Friday sales were 63.5%higher than Thanksgiving day sales
-but last year they were 70%.%For US consumers, Black Friday is increasingly becoming a shopping weekend that starts on Thanksgiving and ends on Cyber Monday Indeed,
Where does all the money come from? One of the most interesting questions about Black Friday is created
"while GAME issued a profits warning because its heavy discounting on games and consoles had a negative effect on its bottom line.
In the US, IBM reported that while overall sales were up, the average order value was down across both Black Friday and Thanksgiving.
That might explain why John Lewis boss Andy Street has poured cold water on the idea of Black Friday,
telling the BBC that"We've got to ask if it's right to concentrate trade so much in that one periodi don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle
"Street predicts that Black Friday 2015 will still see lots of deals around electronics and computing,
and other kinds of retail would be"more confident holding their price.""As Patrick O'brien points out,
not least because it gives retailers less room to manoeuvre if sales closer to Christmas need some extra oomph.
But as John Lewis's Andy Street said, the genie's out of the bottle-so if retailers don't take part,
bigger headline promotions and even more chaos."Black Friday is here to stay, "Patrick O'brien says,
"You can be sure that retailers are already talking to their suppliers about the kinds of promotions they can support,
and upsetting to full price goods rather than across the board percentage discounts.""What deals can we expect this year?
One of the hottest products on Black Friday last year was the ipad mini and that will likely be the case again in 2015.
but also because there is room for manoeuvre in their prices. Last year in the US we saw the Macbook Pro and 21.5-inch imacs selling for $900 a pop
In the UK the ipad mini was going for under £150 practically everywhere. It's worth retailers offering us these headline products with big discounts
because they expect that we'll buy more than one item once we're on their site.
If you fancy buying your kids a console this Christmas, wait until November 27. We saw many amazing deals on TVS last year
so if you're interested in buying a 4k TV in time for Christmas, again you'd be wise to wait for the Black Friday deals madness to begin.
Last year in the we also saw amazing soundbar deals, Dualshock 4 game controllers for under half price, Google Chromecasts for under $23/£18, huge savings on iphones, amazing deals
on cameras of all shapes and sizes from all the biggest brands, headphones, fitness bands, speakers.
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