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One of the greatest and most versatile scientists of the twentieth century, Hans Bethe (1906-2005), is portrayed in a new biography Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe by Silvan Schweber.

The sheer magnitude of Bethe's scientific accomplishments range across almost every field of theoretical physics; he was probably the last "universalist", a man who could solve virtually any physics problem that came his way.

It was at the end of the 1930s that he made his most lasting contribution — an explanation of the origin of the sun's energy generated through nuclear fusion. As Schweber tells us, Bethe was inspired to solve this problem during a conference, working out the essential details in short order. This was one of those puzzles that scientists had grappled with for more than a hundred years and Bethe solved it in a characteristically direct way. For this achievement he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Read the full article at .

Dr. Saša Novak, a researcher at the Jožef Stefan Institute (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and an active member of the Slovenian Fusion Association, has been presented with the Zois Award in recognition of her scientific achievements in the field of materials. The Zois Award, awarded annually, is the highest national prize awarded for lifetime achievements in science.

The award cited Dr Novak's scientific work on the colloidal processing of composite materials, in particular the achievement of her group in developing a ceramic composite for the first-wall blanket in future fusion reactors.

Dr. Novak has been involved in fusion research since the establishment of the Slovenian Fusion Association in 2005. Besides investigating and developing fusion-relevant materials, SiC/SiC and W-based composites, she is also active in the area of public information. She is a member of the Public Information Network (PIN) and a member of the Coordination Team of the Fusion Expo.

 --The Zois Award ceremony on 22 November 2013

​Deuterium oxide has properties that are quite different from light water, the normal water we deal with every day. In general, it will be more dense, have a higher freezing point and boiling point, higher viscosity, higher activity, and most importantly, a higher heat of vaporization and heat of fusion. Check out  to compare the differences.

If the change happened suddenly, then there would be all sorts of problems...

Read more on Slate .

​The surface of the sun has been surprisingly calm of late, with fewer sunspots than anytime in the last century, prompting curious scientists to wonder just what it might mean here on Earth.

Sunspots have been observed for millennia—first by Chinese astronomers and then, for the first time with a telescope, by Galileo in 1610.

The  appear in roughly 11-year cycles—increasing to a daily flurry and then subsiding drastically, before amping up again.

But this cycle, dubbed cycle 24, has surprised scientists with its sluggishness.

The number of spots counted since it kicked off in December 2008 is well below the average observed over the last 250 years. In fact, it's less than half.

Read more on PhysOrg .

​If you want to catch a firefly, any old glass jar will do. But when you're trying to bottle a star-the goal of fusion energy research-the bottle needs to be very special. A tokamak is one type of fusion bottle, capable of holding extremely hot plasma (10 times hotter than the sun) and keeping it stable while harvesting the prodigious amounts of energy produced in the fusion process. Of course, the trick is to keep the hot stuff in. And this is a complicated task.

Read more on Space Daily .

​As the global energy economy makes the transition from fossil fuels toward cleaner alternatives, fusion becomes an attractive potential solution for satisfying the growing needs. Fusion energy, which is the power source for the sun, can be generated on earth, for example, in magnetically-confined laboratory plasma experiments (called "tokamaks") when the isotopes of hydrogen (e.g., deuterium and tritium) combine to produce an energetic helium "alpha" particle and a fast neutron — with an overall energy multiplication factor of 450:1.

Read more on HPC ( High Productivity Computing) .

The 55th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics concluded on 15 November in Denver, Colorado. Reports of some of the most exciting plasma physics developments reported at the meeting can be consulted at the APS press release .  

​More than 1,500 researchers, including scientists from the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), gathered in Denver, Colorado this week for the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) for a five-day conference concluding 15 November.

PPPL scientists will present a host of cutting-edge results at the conference from their latest experiments and theoretical advances in fusion and plasma science. 

Read more about these results on the  website.

​Russian Public TV recently aired this 38-minute documentary on the history of fusion research and on the present state of collaboration within ITER.

Click here to "Our thermonuclear tomorrow" (in Russian)

​Researchers at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics this week have reported on efforts at the Alcator C-Mod and DIII-D experiments to investigate ways of dispersing the energy of disruptions.

Results suggest that the rotation of instabilities spreads the heat more evenly than the injection of gases like argon or neon. The rotation, which appears to be driven by smaller-scale instabilities, ends up moving the radiating regions around the vessel quickly and thus lowering the average heat load. Further research will determine if scientists can control or encourage this spontaneous rotation, and thus distribute the heat more uniformly to the wall.

Read the full article and access the APS abstracts at .

​US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi visited MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and the Alcator C-Mod Tokamak, currently in "warm shutdown" status due to budget constraints.

Staff at the experiment are ready to restart operations should funding became available based on Congressional action on the fiscal year 2014 budgets.

Read more at .

​Could fusion someday help power faster trips to Mars?

New propulsion technologies may blast astronauts through space at breakneck speeds in the coming decades, proponents say, making manned Mars missions much faster and safer.

Souped-up electric propulsion systems and rockets or fission could end up shortening travel times to the Red Planet dramatically, potentially opening up a new era in manned space exploration.

"Using existing rocket fuels, it's nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth," John Slough of the University of Washington, leader of a team developing a fusion-driven rocket, said in a statement earlier this year. "We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace."

Read more on

Fusion energy research is serious business. Generally, it is a lifelong commitment, involving long hours and weekends, along with optimism and dogged determination.

Recently, fusion research has been increasingly in the news, as construction moves forward on ITER in France, which is being designed and built by nations which together encompass most of the world's population. As an inexhaustible source of power, using seawater-derived fuel which is universally available, fusion 
energy is recognized as an urgent requirement for the future.

John Sheffield, who has been involved in fusion research for more than 50 years, has seen it all, including the foibles, missteps, failed experiments, and mistranslations that a global scientific research effort create. He has written "Fun in Fusion Research" to capture the very human and fun side of serious science.

Read a review in the attached pdf.

Most scientific breakthroughs have occurred in boring buildings. Can a new generation of architects change that?

Today, expensive new physics buildings are being planned all around the world. The question is, are they any different from—or better than—their shabby predecessors? Should they express something of the wonder of the world they are built to examine? And will they help answers to the biggest questions emerge?

Like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the ITER Tokamak will be a monumental piece of machinery, a container capable of generating—and containing—a mini sun. ITER's Headquarters building, designed by Marseille-based architect Rudy Ricciotti and completed last year, features a dramatic undulating facade. There are many more buildings planned for the site, some more extravagant than others, but the box containing the Tokamak (the plasma-filled doughnut-shaped ball-of-fire container) is disappointingly utilitarian, looking like a big, boxy waste incinerator. Yet here, together with CERN, we have buildings searching for the holy grails of science—the Higgs boson, or "God particle", and the power of the sun. These really are our contemporary cathedrals, buildings embodying the power and strangeness of the subatomic world. Yet they express nothing of the wonder that the cathedrals tried to convey.

Read the full article on the  of the Financial Times Magazine.​

Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer Jr. (1914-1997) was among the 20th century's most visionary scientists. His major influences range from founding the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and its quest for fusion energy, to inspiring the development of the Hubble Space Telescope and its images of the far corners of the universe.

To honor Spitzer's achievements, some 60 scientists from around the world gathered at Princeton University 18-20 October for a 100th birthday celebration of the pioneering physicist. The event, sponsored by the Princeton Department of Astrophysical Sciences and hosted by Princeton astrophysicist and department chair David Spergel, ranged from personal reminiscences of Spitzer the man, to discussions of the latest developments in the fields of fusion, astrophysics and laboratory plasma science that he heavily influenced.

Read more on the .​

A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion. Visualizers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. combined two days of satellite data to create a short movie of this gigantic event on the sun.

In reality, the sun is not made of fire, but of something called plasma: particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields. 

These were captured on Sept. 29-30, 2013, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which constantly observes the sun in a variety of wavelengths. ​

Often the food analogies applied to tokamaks centre around doughnuts, due to the shape of magnetic field that confines the hot fusion plasma. But as one delves deeper into the complicated world of gyrokinetics, the simplistic doughnut transforms into a more complex banana orbit in a journey from the ideal to the real world.

The premise of the tokamak is to construct a doughnut shaped magnetic field and then the plasma particles will merrily spiral around it for ever. Enter an uncomfortable reality of geometry; as you can see in the main image above, the magnets are closer together in the centre of the torus (the hole of the doughnut) than they are around the outside. This means the magnetic field is not uniform: it is stronger in the inside part of the ring.

This means that the helical path the particle follows is not symmetrical. A tighter turn on the high field (inner) side of the line and looser on the outside leads to a drift either upwards or downwards (depending on the direction of rotation). This is the beginning of our banana orbit, as shown in the projected cross-section at the left-hand side of the figure. As an example, let's follow a particle on the inside of the banana halfway up, gradually creeping downwards to trace the banana's inner edge.

Read the full article on the EFDA-JET .

Last Friday's report from the confirms the huge danger from our continued dependence on fossil fuel. But one simple thing can break this dependence. It needs to be cheaper to produce non-carbon than it is by digging up coal, gas or oil. Once this happens, most of the coal, gas and oil will automatically be left undisturbed in the ground.

To make non-carbon energy become competitive is a major scientific challenge, not unlike the challenge of developing the atom bomb or sending a man to the moon. Science rose to those challenges because a clear goal and timetable were set and enough public money was provided for the research. These programmes had high political profile and public visibility. They attracted many of the best minds of the age.

The issue of and energy is even more important and it needs the same treatment. In most countries, there is at present too little public spending on non-carbon energy research. Instead, we need a major international research effort, with a clear goal and a clear timetable.

Read the full article by David King and Richard Layard in .

Scientists at the UK's Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) have run final experiments on the MAST tokamak on Friday 27 September before starting a major overhaul of the device that will pave the way for a prototype fusion plant.

"It's a bittersweet moment for us because we are saying goodbye to the old machine but at the same time, we are already looking forward to the new one," said the CCFE spokesman Nick Holloway.

"At 4pm today, we will run the last plasmas and within minutes after that, engineers will move in to shut down the tokamak for the next 18 months. By Monday, the roof beams in the MAST machine area will have been taken off before the 25-tonne MAST vessel will be lifted on a big crane and moved to the assembly hall."

The £30m upgrade is set to make MAST (the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak), a cutting edge facility. It will increase its power and enable testing technologies that will improve the knowledge base needed for the construction of ITER, but also to test systems for the DEMO prototype fusion power plant.

Read the full article at .

The European Domestic Agency (Fusion for Energy) has produced a new clip on ITER site works. See the two-minute video on ITER's critical networks .