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WEST (Credit: CEA-IRFM). A new record in fusion has been achieved using a device internally clad in tungsten, a development that could set the pace for helping make fusion energy viable at the commercial scale. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facility, reports that the device was able to sustain hot fusion plasma nearing temperatures of 50 million degrees Celsius for a record-breaking six minutes. Relying on 1.15 gigajoules of power, the latest achievement saw a 15% increase in energy, as well as twice the density of previous experiments. The new milestone was set using...

(Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology) Levitation is the kind of superpower many researchers would love to get their hands on. While there are a number of ways to fight the forces of gravity, few are suitable for the kinds of ultrasensitive devices that would benefit from floating untethered in a vacuum. Led by a team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan, a team of researchers have found a way to shield thin wafers of graphite as they hover freely above a grid of magnets, making them far less susceptible to currents that interfere with...

President Biden has tucked another $500 million to fund production of the minerals used to make batteries for electric cars into the Ukraine aid bill passed by Congress. Both Biden and Ukrainian leaders had said that the $40 billion emergency aid package was essential for Ukraine's war against Russia. But tucked into that package was not only military aid but half a billion dollars to be allocated under the Defense Production Act to companies obtaining critical battery minerals like nickel, cobalt, lithium and graphite, Bloomberg first noted. That's in addition to the $750 million the Defense Department (DOD) was authorized...

COVID-19: It’s all we talk about, on the cable news, and in our 6-foot socially-distanced prison walks around our silent neighborhoods. And in nearly every conversation comes the intellectual shrug, “who could have seen this coming?” A single phrase that neatly absolves governments and experts alike of any responsibility of predicting the pandemic and, if not being able to stop it, at least cushioning its blow........ But is it unfair to engage in so much 20-20 hindsight? After all, who could see COVID coming? Well, we did. We — as in nodes within the U.S. Government tasked with tracking critical...

In his book "2061 - Odyssey Three" (the third of his Space Odyssey series), Arthur C. Clarke put forward the intriguing proposal that the core of the planet Jupiter was, in fact, a diamond the size of Earth. Now Clarke, even though a science fiction author of some repute, had a science background and always tried to bring rigorous scientific accuracy to his stories. So, could his proposition be possible? The somewhat predictable answer is - we don't know. But we can analyse the possibility within known scientific parametres, to see if it is, at least, possible. For diamond to...

Chongsu Nuclear-Grade Graphite Production Plant? North Korea may be proliferating controlled nuclear goods by David Albright April 20, 2018 During the last few years, North Korea has raised nuclear proliferation concerns by distributing abroad a commercial, English-language color handout that offered to sell nuclear-grade graphite, an internationally controlled nuclear dual-use material. This handout was distributed on a limited basis prior to January 2018 and could not be found on the internet, but Institute staff learned of the handout from someone who had access to one of them. Nuclear-grade, high-purity graphite, is controlled because it can be used in nuclear reactors....

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press. The two South American countries are known to have close ties with Iran, but this is the first allegation that they are involved in the development of Iran's nuclear program, considered a strategic threat by Israel.

You may have a "green" car, but it could be causing black rain in China from the graphite mined and used in its lithium ion battery. Two academics at Toronto's York University, Carla Lipsig-Mumme and Caleb Goods, applaud many of the new advances in green technology in recent years, but at the same time warn that those very technologies may come with a host of environmental issues. The pair issue a caution about “superindustrialization” in which the answer to climate change is a matter of “technological adjustment.” In an article recently published in The Conversation and picked up by the...

The atom-thick sheet of carbon, graphene already has a number of amazing properties to it, including strength and electrical conductivity. As impressive its conductivity is though, superconductivity is still greater and has been observed with graphene, but not explained. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have now found how graphene and calcium become a superconductor.Called calcium intercalated graphite, or CaC6 is produced by interweaving calcium and graphite, which is a means of isolating sheets of graphene. About ten years ago it was discovered that this material could become superconducting, but neither the exact means nor...

Document CMPC-2003-000537 is a secret and personal memo written in November 1999 by the director of the Iraqi National Monitoring Department (NMD) and addressed to the Minister of the Iraqi Military Industrialization Commission (MIC). The memo talks about a Neutron Source Device with High Radioactive Activity that was found in one Iraqi University and the NMD is asking that it should be returned to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Organization. The Neutron Source Device can be also called Neutron Generator or Neutron Initiator. This Neutron Generator device was not declared to the UN inspectors all the time they were in Iraq...

Finally! We have common sense in our public schools, at least in one Virginia school district anyway. After two boy were suspended for “using pencils like guns“, the Suffolk School Board decided to review their current weapons policy, which was a very strict zero tolerance policy which left no room for interpretation. According to 10News.com, Under the revised policy, school administrators can look at factors such as intentions of harm and whether the object is listed as a weapon to determine the punishment. Ordinary objects will not be considered weapons A local television station reports that school board members voted...

Researchers in China and Australia have observed superlubricity – the dropping of friction to near zero – on length scales much larger than before. They say that the phenomenon, which they measured in sheared pieces of graphite, could find applications in sensitive microscopic resonators or nanoscale gyroscopes. Superlubricity is sometimes used to mean simply very low friction, but the original meaning is that the friction between two surfaces disappears almost completely. Proposed in the early 1990s by Motohisa Hirano, then at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in Tokyo, Japan, and others, it relies on a special arrangement of atoms...

SNIPPET: "But the solicitor helped to nab a major international dealer to the Iranian missile programme since he came to the job two years ago. He said: "One of our first cases started with a suspected heroin trafficker, so the National Drugs Enforcement Agency got this information that this guy Dugash was heading out to Kenya to buy heroin and they met him at the airport and seized his cash, which was something in the order of $10,000 which was a huge sum for this jurisdiction. "As part of the explanation he said it was cash belonging to himself and...

A new ultra-hard form of carbon may exist between graphite and diamond.The structure of the new form of carbon resembles that of both graphite and diamond.Punchstock Carbon can exist in a form halfway between graphite and diamond, say researchers in China and the United States. And they believe this stuff is as hard as diamond itself.Yanming Ma of Jilin University in Changchun, China, and his colleagues think that the new carbon material they have predicted in theoretical calculations1 may have been made already, in 2003.At that time, Ho-kwang Mao of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington DC, a co-author...

A German businessman on trial for selling graphite to Iran to make rocket nozzles has admitted the offense. At the opening of his trial on April 8, the 63-year-old businessman on trial for selling Iran 16 tons of graphite to make rocket nozzles initially rejected all 12 counts of the indictment. However, in a statement read out by his lawyers, he has now admitted to the offense.

An engineer/salesman from India was charged Tuesday by federal prosecutors in Pittsburgh with conspiring to ship graphite products to the United Arab Emirates that possibly could be used for nuclear or military purposes. Manoj Bhayana, 39, of Green Tree, is charged with conspiracy. Federal authorities say from December 2003 through September 2004, Bhayana worked with another person and three companies -- all unnamed -- to conceal the origin of the graphite products sent to a trading company in the Middle Eastern country.

Scientists slice graphite into atom-thick sheets By Lucy Sherriff Published Thursday 21st October 2004 23:29 GMT An international team of scientists has made a new material just one atom thick, by extracting a single plane of carbon from a graphite crystal. Known as graphene, the new fabric effectively exists in just two dimensions, and could pave the way for computers built from single molecules.In the latest edition of Science, published tomorrow, the scientists from Manchester University and Chernogolovka, Russia, explain that the atomic sheet is a fullerene molecule. Fullerenes are a class of carbon molecules discovered in the last twenty...