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Three toroidal field conductor lengths left the Kurchatov Institute near Moscow, Russia for the ASG Superconductor plant in La Spezia, Italy on Friday 4 July. This delivery marks the halfway point in the shipment of Russian toroidal field conductor production lengths to the European winding facility.

Following this latest shipment (two 760-metre unit lengths and one 415-metre unit length), 14 unit lengths of toroidal field conductor remain to be delivered under the terms of the Procurement Arrangement signed between the ITER Organization and ITER Russia.

​Construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope has officially begun in the Atacama desert in , marking the first step in a true mega-project that could offer us answers to some of the most profound questions in science.

The event this week, the blasting of the top of Cerro Armazones — 3,000 metres high until Thursday, a few less now — was far less dramatic than many of the onlookers at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal facility 25 kilometres away had hoped for, but it was a significant first step in taking the E-ELT from the drawing board to reality.

The function of the blast was to loosen many thousands of tons of rock from the summit in order for the earth movers to begin clearing a flat, circular area for the foundations of the telescope. This really is just the first small step in a massively ambitious project to build the E-ELT that will take at least a decade to finish.

The science case for the E-ELT is quite easy to make, even to non-astronomers. While some of the great telescopes now in space and on the ground are designed to observe technical subjects such as the geometry of galaxies or the formation of stars, the E-ELT pitches itself as the telescope that will allow us to directly look at other planets around other stars.

The E-ELT science team reckon they have a good chance of being the first to directly observe little blue dots like Earth, if they exist.

Read more on website.  

CAMBRIDGE — Senator Elizabeth Warren placed her hand atop a large red button and pressed firmly, restarting a nuclear experiment that MIT believes could help save the planet — but which the Obama administration considered superfluous and tried to kill year after year.

More than 100 scientists, engineers, and technicians — most of whom had, until recently, been under layoff notices — had gathered on campus that cold February day, their eyes glued to the three projection screens hanging from the front of the control room.

Then as superhot plasma inside the fusion reactor next door reached its metal walls, a flash of light appeared on one of the screens. The grand energy experiment had throbbed back to life.

Read more on the website.

​On the way to designing and constructing the ITER Port Plug Test Facility, the ongoing gasket test campaign at the Russian company Cryogenmash marks an important milestone.

Click to view the video produced by ITER Russia.