Experts Inch Closer To 'Star In Jar' Reactor

Scientists have taken a big step towards developing a ‘star in a jar’ nuclear fusion reactor that can provide Earth with limitless clean energy in the same manner as the Sun and other stars. The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device currently operated by Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany is on track and working as planned, experts said. The system, known as a stellerator, generated its first batch of hydrogen plasma when it was first fired up earlier this year. A fusion reactor works by fusing the nuclei of lighter atoms into heavier atoms. The process releases massive amounts of energy and produces no radioactive waste. The ‘fuel’ used in a fusion reactor is simple hydrogen, which can be extracted from water. However, to achieve fusion, scientists must generated enormously high temperatures to heat the hydrogen into a plasma state, ‘Live Science’, reported. That is where the W7-X stellerator design comes in. the device confines the plasma within magnetic fields generated by superconducting coils cooled down to near zero. The plasma never comes into contact with the walls of the containment chamber.

Japan Launches Craft To Collect Space Junk

Japan launched a cargo ship on Friday bound for the International Space Station, carrying a ‘space junk’ collector that was made with the help of a fishnet company. The vessel, dubbed “Kounotori” (stork in Japanese), blasted off from the southern island of Tanegashima just before 10:27pm on 9 December local time attached to an H-IIB rocket. Scientists at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency are experimenting with a tether to pull junk out of orbit around Earth, clearing up tonnes of space clutter including cast-off equipment from old satellites and pieces of rocket.

Virus In Mummy May Rewrite Smallpox History

The discovery of smallpox DNA in a 17^th century child mummy may shorten the timeline of the deadly infectious diseases history, according to a study published on 8 December. Specimens of the smallpox causing variola virus now exist only in secured laboratory freezers. The highly contagious and sometimes fatal disease was eradicated in the late 1970s through a worldwide vaccination campaign. But the origins of the virus remain unknown. The discovery of the smallpox virus within the DNA of the mummy child, found in a crypt underneath a Lithuanian church, could shed light on how it began and developed, researchers said in the study published in the US scientific journal Current Biology. There have been signs that Egyptian mummies that are 3,000 to 4,000 years old have pock-marked scarring that have been interpreted as cases of smallpox. The new discoveries really throw those findings into question, and they suggest that the timeline of smallpox in human populations might be incorrect. The researchers reconstructed the genome of the ancient strain of the virus and compared it with versions of the variola virus genome dating from the mid-1900s and before its eradication.

Trove Of Water 400Km Beneath Earth's Surface

Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is water. But that’s what just meets the eye. A trove of water – in fact as much water as all the oceans on the planet’s surface combined – is hiding 400km beneath our feet. Geoscientists had earlier thought that below the transition zone where the Earth’s mantle meets the crust (at 410km), a water filled mineral called brucite was unstable and decomposed. As they decomposed; they released the water, which was recycled back to surface via volcanic activity. But this discovery of a new high-pressure phase of brucite indicates that water could be efficiently transported to far deeper realms without decomposition, reports LiveScience.com. But new research suggests that before brucite which is 50% magnesium oxide and 50% water – decomposes, it transforms into another, more stable 3D structure. The finding, which was detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means there’s a stash of water located deeper in the Earth than was previously thought. Unable to probe the deep Earth directly, researchers used quantum mechanical calculations, analyzing various possible structures for brucite in deep Earth conditions. After months of running various structure through their computer programme, the researchers found a previously unknown phase of brucite that would be able to withstand the high pressures found in the lower mantle. Current estimates suggest that the deep Earth may hold as much water as all the oceans on the planet. This water and the additional trove brucite may also hold, are vitally important to the movement of materials through the Earth. As water containing minerals travel down through the Earth’s layers, the materials decompose, releasing the water that makes its way back to the surface, often through volcanic activity.