Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Fusion Discovered
prostoalex writes "Both USA Today and The New York Times are reporting on research group from UCLA led by Seth J. Putterman which has discovered a form of nuclear fusion. The impact of the discovery? 'While the device is probably too inefficient to produce electricity or other forms of energy, the scientists say, egg-size fusion generators could someday find uses in spacecraft thrusters, medical treatments and scanners that search for bombs.' The findings are published in Nature magazine."
Heh. It's kind of a funny to watch us scientists who're interested in some particular natural phenonmenon to come up with the weirdest reasons why further research on the subject might help in the WAR AGAINST TERRORISM(!!1!one!).
No, actually it's not funny. It's sad.
The truely frustrating part is the moment I saw this a good 15 minutes ago (using my subscription plume to see stories early), I wrote an email immediately to the requested address (daddypants -at- slashdot) and told of the dupe.
This was 'supposed' to help them clean up dupes, yet we find that they are not only failing to check dupes, tehy are also failing to check the account so that those of us (that are paying, not being paid) can help out...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Why don't the /. administrators install some software that will help prevent these dupes from happening? For example, before allowing a /. admin to post an article, require a search of the past x days/weeks/months of /. posts and use document clustering to rank the top 5 or so most likely pages that are similar to the one about to be posted. Then before the /. poster makes his final decision, force him to look at the titles and summaries of those previous articles to make sure that he (or she..?) is not creating a dupe post. It's a simple and effective solution.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
slashdot is a great site and a few dupes every now and then is NOT the end of the world as some spastic types would suggest
the only thing that puzzles me about dupes though is how it is possible that me, a very casual reader, is easily struck by their appearance, when an editor, supposedly editting their own website, fails to be struck by the duplication
i don't understand the mechanism by which that works
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>Third, this isn't even the discovery of table-top laboratory scale fusion. As an undergraduate, I worked on a muon catalyzed fusion experiment at TRIUMF in Vancouver.
Just to be nit-picky: While the cell in which the muon catalyzed fusion takes place may fit on a normal table-top, it would take an awfully large table to hold the proton accelerator, the production target, and the system of vacuum pipes and magnets that decay the pions and select and degrade the muons.
I'd bet your computer runs much hotter than 100F and that is considered room temperature.
But the device may one day become a cheaper and more precise way to screen airport baggage or to propel small spacecraft, say the device's creators.
If someone claims two applications of a new technology that are so exteremly unrelated to each other in one sentence I find it hard to take him/her serious. But hey, maybe it can be used to propel a car, cheaply and environmentally friendly.
-- Cheers!
Sure, superconductors have proven useful for a **few** niche uses, but the big hype was all about superconducting power lines etc... Twenty years on and the only place I've really seen superconductors has been in my flying car.
Why do scientists, supposedly conservative types, make these wild predictions? Is it to hype for funding?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Dear Craig,
Since you're a knowledgeable physics guy, would you take a moment and respond to my question?
Is there any way to create a Bose-Einstein Condensate of 'fuseable' gas such that the density of the gas is so high that quickly transitioning the gas out of the condensate state would result in fusion?
I.e., if two tritium molecules occupy the same location in a quantum state and are quickly transitioned from that state could their 'proximity' to each other be enough to induce the fusion process without requiring them to have a lot of kinetic energy to overcome protonic repulsion?
If not, is it still possible in theory that if you packed 1000 tritium atoms into a space large enough to only contain a few dozen such atoms at ~Zero Kelvin, would fusion occur?
Thanks.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky