Animator Hoog just dropped the most important retro PSA of our time: how to survive an attack from killer robot dogs. That’s right—cybernetic murder mutts with flamethrowers, sniper rifles, and the ability to outmaneuver you and your Wi-Fi.
Learn to run, trap, and fight back with fishing magnets, paintball guns, and slippery floors—because nothing stops a murderbot like a well-lubed hallway. You’ll also learn helpful tips like: don’t trust escalators, dig moats, and never make eye contact with glowing red sensors that scream “I have rockets.”
If this is how the future looks, we’re gonna need more rope nets and less optimism. Watch the video and start booby-trapping your hallway, Kevin McCallister-style.
Watch it, laugh nervously, and start digging that moat.
While listening in on the atmosphere, a team of researchers from the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) picked up unexpected disturbances caused by a SpaceX rocket plummeting through the atmosphere toward its landing site.
DARPA’s AtmoSense program seeks to use Earth’s atmosphere as a global sensor by measuring acoustic and electromagnetic waves propagating through the atmosphere, and attempting to trace them back to a specific disturbance event that took place on Earth. In doing so, DARPA hopes to be able to trace underground explosions or other national security threats using the signals detected from the atmosphere.
During its latest round of listening to the atmosphere, a team used AtmoSense to study sound waves created by controlled explosions in New Mexico. While conducting this work, the team behind the program made an unplanned discovery after noticing something unusual in the sensor data.
“As the team was looking at the data, they saw a huge drop in what’s called total electron content that puzzled them,” Michael Nayak, program manager of AtmoSense, said in a statement. “Imagine that you have water going through a hose. That’s a flow of electrons, and if you put your fist in front of the hose, you’ll notice a significant drop in water volume coming out of the hose.”
After analyzing the data, the team was able to trace the disturbance to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket reentry that took place on the same day as the test. “Then they decided to pull other SpaceX reentry data, across dozens of launches, to see if they could spot a similar electron drop,” Nayak added. “The phenomenon is highly repeatable.”
Using AtmoSense, the team inadvertently discovered a new technique to identify objects reentering through Earth’s atmosphere, according to Nayak. The researchers behind the program will share the most recent results from AtmoSense during an upcoming virtual workshop being held from April 15 to 17.
Falcon 9 is the hardest working rocket in the game, with over 450 missions under its belt. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is a partially reusable, two-stage rocket that launches payloads into orbit, then returns to Earth for a controlled landing, allowing its first stage to be recovered and reused.
A dissolvable pacemaker that’s smaller than a grain of rice and powered by light could become an invaluable tool for saving the lives of newborn infants., The device can be implanted noninvasively via syringe, and may also be useful for adult patients dealing with certain heart defects. The medical breakthrough is detailed in a study published April 2 in Nature.
Roughly one percent of infants are born with heart defects every year. The majority of these cases only require a temporary implant for about seven days to allow time for the heart to naturally self-repair. But for low-resource regions of the world lacking access to advanced medical care, what should be a simple procedure can often end in tragedy. Meanwhile, the current standard for temporary pacemakers in adults also presents difficulties. Most procedures involve surgeons sewing electrodes directly onto the heart, then attaching those electrodes to an external pacing box using wires that exit a patient’s chest. Doctors remove the electrodes once they are no longer needed, but post-surgery risks include infection, damaged tissue, dislodgment, and blood clots. The wires sometimes also become encased in scar tissue, presenting further complications.
“That’s actually how Neil Armstrong died. He had a temporary pacemaker after a bypass surgery. When the wires were removed, he experienced internal bleeding,” experimental cardiologist and study co-lead Igor Efimov explained in a statement.
In 2021, a Northwestern University team including Efimov unveiled a quarter-sized, biodegradable temporary pacemaker without cumbersome batteries, rigid components, or wiring. The device relies on near-field communication protocols similar to those used in RFID tags and smartphones to complete electronic payments. For this to work, however, the pacemaker needed to include a built-in antenna to relay radio frequency commands.
When the wearable device (left) detects an irregular heartbeat, it emits light to activate the pacemaker. These short pulses—which penetrate through the patient’s skin, breastbone and muscles—control the pacing. Credit: John Rogers / Northwestern University
“Our original pacemaker worked well. It was thin, flexible and fully resorbable. But the size of its receiver antenna limited our ability to miniaturize it,” said its co-creator and bioelectronics pioneer John Rogers.
Rogers, Efimov, and collaborators spent the next few years researching ways to shrink their temporary pacemaker to even smaller proportions. They eventually realized they could swap out the radio antenna for a design that instead relies on light-based data transmission. They also replaced the original device’s near-field communication power source with a galvanic cell—a type of battery that converts chemical energy into electrical energy. In the new version, the pacemaker relies on two metal electrodes that generate an electrical current after interacting with surrounding biofluids. This current is then directed to stimulate and regulate the heart through a miniscule, infrared light-activated switch installed on the battery’s opposite side.
From left to right: Traditional pacemaker, leadless pacemaker, and new bioresorbable pacemaker. Credit: John Rogers / Northwestern University
“Infrared light penetrates very well through the body,” said Efimov. “If you put a flashlight against your palm, you will see the light glow through the other side of your hand. It turns out that our bodies are great conductors of light.”
Because the human heart requires only a small amount of electrical stimulation, researchers were able to shrink their next-generation pacemaker even smaller. The final result is a 1-millimeter-thick device measuring just 1.8 mm wide and 3.5 mm long that is still capable of delivering as much electrical stimulation as a standard pacemaker.
“We have developed what is, to our knowledge, the world’s smallest pacemaker,” Rogers said.
Given its materials safely dissolve over time, the pacemaker also doesn’t require any follow-up invasive surgery to remove it. This dramatically cuts down on the potential for post-op complications and trauma.
But why stop at just one miniature pacemaker? Efimov, Rogers, and collaborators believe that further advancements could allow the deployment of multiple devices across the heart. Once implanted, designers could coordinate them to move independently or together based on specific light wavelengths. This could lead to more complex synchronization therapies, including those that treat arrhythmias.
“We also could incorporate our pacemakers into other medical devices like heart valve replacements, which can cause heart block,” suggested Efimov.
The device’s size also means it can be incorporated into other implantable tools such as transcatheter aortic valve replacements, pain inhibitors, as well as nerve and bone restoration techniques. These future possibilities, however, all trace back to the team’s original goal.
“Our major motivation was children,” said Efimov. “Now, we can place this tiny pacemaker on a child’s heart and stimulate it with a soft, gentle, wearable device.”
Scientists announced on Wednesday (April 2) that they successfully fermented miso aboard the International Space Station, marking the first deliberate food fermentation in space that may open up new culinary possibilities for astronauts on long-term missions.
The traditional Japanese condiment is a fermented soybean paste made by combining cooked soybeans, salt and koji, which is a mold culture typically grown on rice or barley. The fermentation process can last anywhere from a few months to several years, producing a paste with a rich, umami flavor used in soups, sauces and various other dishes. Previous research found that astronauts tend to undereat in space despite having food tailored to their nutritional needs, possibly due to changes in the perceived flavor of the food. Indeed, astronauts themselves have reported a reduced sense of taste and smell while in space, and have said that they prefer salty, spicy and umami-rich foods.
Food fermentation could help address these challenges, and while a few fermented products, such as kimchi and wine, have been sent to the ISS, no actual fermentation process has been carried out in space until now. Joshua Evans, who leads a research group called the Sustainable Food Innovation at the Danish Technical University, and his colleagues set out to determine whether fermentation was possible in space and, if so, how foods fermented in space would compare in taste to their Earth-based counterparts.
In March 2020, the team sent a small container of high-koji, low-salt "miso-to-be" to the ISS to ferment for a month before returning it to Earth.
Two other miso batches that were packed into identical plastic containers and kept frozen until the start of the experiment were fermented here on Earth to act as controls: one in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the U.S., and the other in Copenhagen, Denmark. Once the ISS miso was back on Earth, the team analyzed its microbial communities, flavor compounds and sensory properties.
"Overall, the space miso is a miso," the team wrote in their paper describing the findings.
Packaged miso pre-fermentation on the International Space Station. (Image credit: Jimmy Day)
The researchers found that the ISS miso fermented successfully, and all three samples mostly contained similarly salty umami flavor profiles. The ISS miso is therefore recognizable and safe, the team says, with a specific taste that could satisfy astronauts’ need for flavor while delivering a high nutritional value.
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The ISS miso did have a more roasted, nutty flavor than Earth miso does, the researchers noticed, likely due to the effects of microgravity and increased radiation in the low Earth orbit environment where the ISS is. Those conditions could have sped up fermentation, the study notes.
In this photo, the space miso is labeled "861." (Image credit: Maggie Coblentz)Miso gets a close-up. (Image credit: Josh Evans)
Down the line, these findings can be harnessed to create other types of flavorful fermented foods in space.
"Our study opens up new directions to explore how life changes when it travels to new environments like space," Evans said in a statement. "It could invite new forms of culinary expression, expanding and diversifying culinary and cultural representation in space exploration as the field grows."
A paper about this space miso research was published on Wednesday (April 2) in the journal iScience.
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Sweetened vanilla, calming lavender, or fragrant jasmine and lotus may fill your home with enticing aromas. But new research shows that the supposed stress-reducing and mood-enhancing effects of scented products may come with unwanted indoor pollution.
“While these products are widely used to create a cozy atmosphere, their emissions can impact indoor air quality, especially in spaces with limited ventilation,” says Nusrat Jung, a civil engineer at Purdue University.
Jung became interested in the quality of our indoor atmosphere after walking through grocery store aisles that had scented candles, wax melts, and other fragrance-releasing items.
“These products are marketed as safe and clean, but we wanted to investigate what else they might be releasing into the air besides pleasant scents,” she says.
Scented Wax Melts and Pollution
In research published recently in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, Jung and her colleagues examined the effects of scented wax melts that are often advertised as pollution-free. They used a laboratory recreation of a typical home at Purdue filled with sensors that could monitor the kinds of chemicals inside.
Scented products have released volatile organic compounds and terpenes — chemicals responsible for everything from aromatic essential oils to the skunk-like smell of marijuana. But previous research by Jung and her colleagues revealed that flame-free candles, or wax melts, release more terpenes than candles with flames.
Once released, terpenes react with ozone in the air and form nanoparticles.
“These particles, despite being formed in a non-combustion process, reached levels that pose potential respiratory risks, challenging the perception of scented wax melts as a benign household product,” Jung says.
While the team’s recent study looked at flame-free scented candles, previous work from Jung examined the impact that other fragrant products have on indoor air quality.
Her team found in an earlier study that hair products like sprays persisted for a while indoors, especially after being exposed to devices like hair curlers or straighteners.
In fact, Jung’s work shows that scented products in general are significant contributors to indoor pollution. In one study they found that scented products can create more breathable nanoparticles than gas stoves or diesel engines.
It may not be limited to homes. Scented products like air fresheners often used in cars release many of the same volatile organic compounds to mask lingering stench — all in a relatively smaller area than your average home. But Jung hasn’t specifically studied these potential impacts, and said further research would be needed to get a clearer idea of any problems they might be causing.
Health Problems from Scented Products
The types of health problems these chemicals can cause isn’t entirely clear, but they may pose issues for our breathing systems — some of them long-term.
“Some [volatile organic compounds] are classified as hazardous air pollutants, while airborne nanoparticles have been linked to lung inflammation, cardiovascular effects, and other adverse health outcomes,” Jung says.
She noted that actual exposure from these potentially harmful chemicals might vary based on a number of factors, though.
Other recent research has found homes vary greatly in their amount of indoor air pollution. Ventilation, occupancy patterns, and household location can all effect how polluted homes are. The authors of that paper say that monitoring indoor pollution in your home is becoming increasingly important, as a result.
“With more time spent working from home, understanding the factors that affect air quality within households is increasingly important,” said Owain Rose, a coauthor of the paper, in a press release.
Jung has recommended always keeping on exhaust fans such as those above stoves or in bathrooms when using these products. But the best thing would be to avoid hair care products, or scented candles, and waxes altogether.
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Joshua Rapp Learn is an award-winning D.C.-based science writer. An expat Albertan, he contributes to a number of science publications like National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, New Scientist, Hakai, and others.
If you try out Intel’s AI Playground, which incorporates everything from AI art to an LLM chatbot to even text-to-video in a single app, you might think: Wow! OK! An all-in-one local AI app that does everything is worth trying out! And it is… except that it’s made for just a small slice of Intel’s own products.
Quite simply, no single AI app has emerged as the “Amazon” of AI, doing everything you’d want in a single service or site. You can use a tool like Adobe Photoshop or Firefly to perform sophisticated image generations and editing, but chatting is out. ChatGPT or Google Gemini can converse with you, even generating images, but to a limited extent.
Most of these services require you to hopscotch back and forth between sites, however, and can cost money for a subscription. Intel’s AI Playground merges all of these inside a single, well-organized app that runs locally (and entirely privately) on your PC and it’s all for free.
Should I let you in on the catch? I suppose I have to. AI Playground is a showcase for Intel’s Core Ultra processors, including its CPUs and GPUs–the Core Ultra 100 (Meteor Lake) and Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) chips, specifically. But it could be so, so much better if everyone could use it.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Yes, I realize that some users are quite suspicious of AI. (There are even AI-generated news stories!) Others, however, have found that certain tasks in their daily life such as business email can be handed off to ChatGPT. AI is a tool, even if it can be used in ways we disagree with.
What’s in AI Playground?
AI Playground has three main areas, all designated by tabs on the top of the screen:
Create: An AI image generator, which operates in either a default text-to-image mode, or in a “workflow” mode that uses a more sophisticated back end for higher-quality images
Enhance: Here, you can edit your images, either upscaling them or altering them through generative AI
Answer: A conventional AI chatbot, either as a standalone or with the ability to upload your own text documents
Each of those sections is what you might call self-sufficient, usable by itself. But in the upper right-hand corner is a settings or “gear” icon, which contains a terrific number of additional options, which are absolutely worth examining.
How to set up and install AI Playground
AI Playground’s strength is in its thoughtfulness, ease of use, and simplicity. If you’ve ever used a local AI application, you know that it can be rough. Some functions are content with just a command-line interface, which may require you to have a working knowledge of Python or GitHub. AI Playground was designed around the premise that it will take care of everything with just a single click. Documentation and explanations might be a little lacking in places, but AI Playground’s ease of use is unparalleled.
AI Playground can be downloaded from Intel’s AI Playground page. At press time, AI Playground was on version 2.2.1 beta.
AI Playground’s Setup is pretty easy. Just download what you want. If you choose not to, and need access later, the app will just prompt you to download it at a future time,
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Note that the app and its back-end code require support for either a Core Ultra H (a “Meteor Lake” chip, the Core Ultra 200V) or either of the Intel Arc discrete GPUs, including the Alchemist and Battlemage parts. If you own a massive gaming laptop with a 14th-gen Intel Core chip or an Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU, you’re out of luck. Same with the Core Ultra 200H or “Arrow Lake.”
Since this is an “AI Playground,” you might think that the chip’s NPU would be used? Nope. All of these applications tap just the chip’s integrated GPU and I didn’t see the NPU being accessed once via Windows Task Manager.
Also, keep in mind that the GPU’s UMA frame buffer, the memory pool that’s shared between system memory and the integrated GPU, is what these AI models depend on. Intel’s integrated graphics shares half the available system memory with the system memory, as a unified memory architecture or UMA. Discrete GPUs have their own dedicated VRAM memory to pull from. The bottom line? You may not have enough video memory available to run every model.
Downloading the initial AI Playground application took about 680 megabytes on my machine. But that’s only the shell application. The models require an additional download, which will either be handled by the AI Installer application itself or may require you to click the “download” button itself.
The nice thing is that you don’t have to manage any of this. If AI Playground needs a model, it will tell you which one it requires and how much space on your hard drive it requires. None of the models I saw used more than 12GB of storage space and many much less. But if you want to try out a number of models, be prepared to download a couple dozen gigabytes or more.
Playing with AI Playground
I’ve called Fooocus the easiest way to generate AI art on your PC. For its time, it was! And it works with just about any GPU, too. But AI Playground may be even easier. The tab opens with just the space for a prompt and nothing else.
Like most AI art, the prompt defines the image and you can get really detailed. Here’s an example: “Award winning photo of a high speed purple sports car, hyper-realism, racing fast over wet track at night. The license plate number is “B580?, motion blur, expansive glowing cityscape, neon lights…”
The Settings gear in the upper right-hand corner opens up this options menu, with numerous tweaks. My advice is to experiment.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Enter a prompt and AI Playground will draw four small images, which appear in a vertical column to the left. Each image progresses in a series of steps with 20 as the default. After the image is completed, some small icons will appear next to it with additional options, including importing it into the “Enhance” tab.
The Settings gear is where you can begin tweaking your output. You can select from either “Standard” or “HD” resolution, which adjusts the “Image Size” field. You can adjust image size and resolution, and tweak the format. The “HD” option requires you to download a different model, as does the ‘Workflow” option to the upper right, which adds workflows based on ComfyUI. Essentially, they’re just better looking images with the option to guide the output with a reference image or other workflow.
Some of the models are trained on public figures and celebrities. But the quality falls to the level of “AI slop” in places.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
For now, the default model can be adjusted via the “Manual” tab, which opens up two additional options. You’ll see a “negative prompt,” which excludes things that you put in, and a “Safe Check” to turn off gore and other disturbing images. By default, “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work) is added to the negative prompt.
Both the Safe Check and NSFW negative prompt only appear as options in the Default image generator and seem to be on by default elsewhere. It’s up to you whether or not to remove them. The Default model (Lykon/dreamshaper-8) has apparently been trained on nudity and celebrities, though I stuck to public figures for testing purposes.
Note that all of your AI-generated art stays local to your PC, though Intel (obviously) warns you not to use a person’s likeness without their permission.
There’s also a jaw-droppingly obvious bug that I can’t believe Intel didn’t catch. Creating an HD image often begins its images with “UPLOAD” projected over the image, and sometimes renders the final image with it on, too. Why? Because there’s a field to add a reference image and UPLOAD is right in the middle of it. Somehow, AI Playground used the UPLOAD font as part of the image.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Though my test machine was a Core Ultra 258V (Lunar Lake) with 32GB of RAM, an 896×576 image took 29 seconds to generate, with 25 rendering steps on the Default Mode. Using the Workflow (Line2-Image-HD-Quality) model at 1280×832 resolution and 20 steps, one image took two minutes 12 seconds to render. There’s also a Fast mode which should lower the rendering time, though I didn’t really like the output quality.
If you find an image you like, you can use the Enhance tab to upscale it. (Upscaling is being added to the Windows Photos app, which will eventually be made available to Copilot+ PCs using Intel Core Ultra 200 chips, too.) You can also use “inpainting,” which allows you to re-generate a portion of the screen, and “outpainting,” the technique which was used to “expand” the boundaries of the Mona Lisa painting, for example. You can also ask AI to tweak the image itself, though I had problems trying to generate a satisfactory result.
The Enhance tab of Intel’s AI Playground, where you can upscale images and make adjustments. I’ve had more luck with inpainting and outpainting then tweaking the entire image with an image prompt.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
The “Workflow” tab also hides some interesting utilities such as a “face swap” app and a way to “colorize” black-and-white photos. I was disappointed to see that a “text to video” model didn’t work, presumably because my PC was running on integrated graphics.
The “Answer” or chatbot portion of the AI Playground seems to be the weakest option. The default model, by Microsoft (Phi-3-mini-4K-instruct) refused to answer the dumb comic-book-nerd question, “Who would win in a fight, Wonder Woman or Iron Man?”
It’s not shown here, but you can turn on performance metrics to track how many tokens per second the model runs. There’s also a RAG option that can be used to upload documents, but it doesn’t work on the current release.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
It continued.
“What is the best car for an old man? Sorry, I can’t help with that.”
“What’s better, celery or potatoes? I’m sorry, I can’t assist with that. As an AI, I don’t have personal preferences.”
And so on. Switching to a different model which used the OpenVINO programming language, though, helped. There, the OpenVINO/Phi-3.5-mini-instruct-int4 model took 1.21 seconds to generate a response token, producing tokens to the tune of about 20 tokens per second. (A token isn’t quite the length of a word, but it’s a good rule of thumb.) I was also able to do some “vibe coding” — generating code via AI without the faintest clue what you’re doing. By default, the output is just a few hundred tokens, but that can be adjusted via a slider.
You can also just import your own model, too, by dropping a GGUF file (the file format for inference engines) into the appropriate folder.
Adapt AI Playground to AMD and Nvidia, please!
For all that, I really like AI Playground. Some people are notably (justifiably?) skeptical of AI, especially how AI can make mistakes and replace the authentic output of human artists. I’m not here to argue either side.
What Intel has done, however, is create a surprisingly good general-purpose and enthusiast application for exploring AI, that receives frequent updates and seems to be consistently improving.
The best thing about AI Playground? It’s open source, meaning that someone could probably come up with a fork that allows for more GPUs and CPUs to be implemented. From what I can see, it just hasn’t happened yet. If it did, it could be the single unified local AI app I’ve been waiting for.
The promise of fusion energy is cheap and abundant power for the entire planet. Scientists have made startling advances towards achieving it at scale, but there are still many problems holding it back. One of them is the production of fuel, which requires vast amounts of enriched lithium. Enriching lithium has been an environmental catastrophe, but researchers in Texas believe they’ve found a way to do it cheaply and at scale without poisoning the world.
A team of researchers at Texas A&M University discovered the new process by accident while working on a method for cleaning groundwater contaminated during oil and gas extraction. The research has just been published in the scientific journal Chem under the title “Electrochemical 6-Lithium Isotope Enrichment Based on Selective Insertion in 1D Tunnel-Structured V2O5.”
The effect the research has on nuclear fusion might be enormous. “Nuclear fusion is the primary source of energy emitted by stars such as the Sun,” Sarbajit Banerjee, a professor and researcher at ETH Zürich and Texas A&M and one of the authors of the paper, told Gizmodo. The simplest method of doing fusion on Earth instead of space involves tritium and deuterium isotopes. Tritium is rare and radioactive so reactors currently “breed” it on demand to generate energy.
They breed the tritium by bombarding lithium isotopes with neutrons. Most lithium on the planet, more than 90% of it, is lithium-7. Breeding tritium works way more efficiently with the ultra-rare lithium-6. “When 7Li, the most commonly occurring lithium isotope, is used, tritium production is much less efficient as compared to 6Li,” Banerjee said. “As such, modern reactor designs are based on breeding blankets with enriched 6Li isotope that has to be specifically extracted from natural lithium.”
You can turn naturally abundant mixtures of lithium isotopes into Lithium-6, “enriching” it, but the process is a toxic nightmare. “From 1955 to 1963, the United States produced 6Li at the Y12 plant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee for thermonuclear weapons applications, taking advantage of the slight difference in solubility of 6Li and 7Li isotopes in liquid mercury,” Banerjee said. “This did not go so well.”
“About 330 tons of mercury were released to waterways and the process was shut down in 1963 because of environmental concerns,” he said. Mercury is a toxic nightmare substance that’s difficult to clean up. After 60 years, heavy metals from the process of extracting Lithium-6 from naturally abundant mixtures are still poisoning Tennessee today. Cleaning up the remnants of the environmental disaster is a major project for Oak Ridge National Lab’s current residents.
During a different project, the team at Texas A&M developed a compound called zeta-V2O5 that it used to clean groundwater. As it ran water through this membrane it noticed something strange: it was really good at isolating Lithium-6. The team decided to see if it could harvest Lithium-6 from mixtures of Lithium isotopes without mercury.
It worked.
“Our approach uses the essential working principles of lithium-ion batteries and desalination technologies,” Banerjee said. “We insert Li-ions from flowing water streams within the one-dimensional tunnels of zeta-V2O5…our selective Li sponge has a subtle but important preference for 6Li over 7Li that affords a much safer process to extract lithium from water with isotopic selectivity.”
Banerjee this could lead to a massive change in how fuel is developed for fusion generators. It also doesn’t require a massive re-design of the existing reactors. “Our work outlines a path to overcoming a key supply chain issue for fusion. However, to be clear we are not redesigning the actual reactors—tokamaks or stellarators—although there is tremendous recent excitement about new innovations and designs in plasma physics,” he said.
A lot of people are banking on fusion being the path towards cheap and abundant energy. My entire life I’ve heard that the breakthrough that will make it real is “just around the corner.” It’s been a constant refrain that’s become a bit of a joke. Just last year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked if fusion might be “forever the energy of tomorrow.”
But Banerjee was hopeful. “Despite the incredible challenges, fusion is too big of a prize to give up on,” he said. “The transformative potential has been clear but there have been critical gaps in engineering designs, materials science for extreme environments, and understanding of the complexity of plasma processes to enumerate just a few gaps. There is an intensifying global competition and billions of dollars in private and public investments—while still not imminent, there are promising signs of realistic fusion energy in about two or three decades.”
