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(Jacob Long/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) In December 2022, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility announced a historic milestone: for the first time, their laser-powered fusion reaction had 'broken even', producing more energy than it consumed. But advances as big as this need to be rigorously checked – and that can take some time. Importantly, a series of papers detailing the experimental design, technological advancements, and results of the initial breakthrough reaction have just passed peer review, meaning researchers not involved in the work have vetted the methods and findings in order to check the sums. "This achievement is the...

University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics researchers achieved the first observation of de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets by exploiting a loophole in 1980’s-era laser physics theorem. A research paper by CREOL and Florida Photonics Center of Excellence professor Ayman Abouraddy and research assistant Layton Hall ’22MS has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Nature Physics. Observation of optical de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets highlights the team’s research using a class of pulsed laser beams they call space-time wave packets. In an interview with Dr. Abouraddy, he provides more insight into his team’s research and what it may hold...

This latest experiment was performed near a telecommunications tower on the Säntis mountain in Switzerland that is frequently struck by lightning - roughly 100 times a year, although the tower itself is protected by a lightning rod. The results from the study found the lightning flowed almost in a straight line near the laser pulses, but the lightning strikes were more randomly distributed when the laser was off. While this study is not the first attempt to direct lightning paths it is the first to show it can be done. The scientists have attributed this to the high power laser...

Powerful, radio-wavelength laser light has been detected emanating from the greatest distance across deep space yet. It's a type of massless cosmic object called a megamaser, and its light has traveled for a jaw-dropping 5 billion light-years to reach us here on Earth. The astronomers who discovered it using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have named it Nkalakatha – an isiZulu word meaning "big boss". The discovery has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available on preprint server arXiv. "It's impressive that, with just a single night of observations, we've already found a record-breaking megamaser,"...

New Fissure Erupted at Fagradalsfjall More awesome live cam coverage.

Ian Brown, Van Morrison and Noel Gallagher have been objecting to lockdown rules, is this the start of a dangerous trend?The timing looks a bit suspicious, right? Just days after I published a column about the dangers of falling for Ian Brown’s Covid conspiracy rants on Twitter, Noel Gallagher – a man never knowingly muffled – joined the anti-mask fray, insisting that going maskless could only affect himself, like a resident of Bethnal Green in 1941 arguing “well, if everybody else has got their lights off I’m not going to be hit by any of their bombs, so if I...

There are a number of theories about where the moon came from. Our best guess is that it was formed when the Earth was hit by a large object known as Theia. The impact threw up huge amounts of debris into orbit, which eventually coalesced to form the moon. There’s a problem with this theory. The mathematical models show that most of the material that makes up the moon should come from Theia. But samples from the Apollo missions show that most of the material on the moon came from Earth. A paper out earlier this week in Nature Geoscience...

YELLOWSTONE volcano could be about to erupt and challenge humanity’s existence as a spate of mini-quakes have been felt around the fearsome caldera. During the month of April, a total of 63 earthquakes struck around the Wyoming based supervolcano. All of the tremors were relatively small, with the largest registering at 2.6 on the Richter scale, hitting on April 29. But experts have warned that it is not necessarily about the strength of an earthquake around a volcano, but more the quantity of them. Some scientists believe that tremors around a volcano could be a sign that it might blow....

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and novelist MacKenzie Bezos are getting a divorce. The couple announced the breakup over Jeff's Twitter account on Wednesday. The couple did not mention how Jeff Bezos' $140 Billion fortune will be split. Together, the Bezos are said to own more property than anyone in the US.

WASHINGTON (WJLA) — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, have announced that the two are seeking a divorce. The billionaire executive and his wife of 25 years announced the news on Wednesday -- just three days before his 55th birthday -- in a tweet signed by both of them. "We want to make people aware of a development in our lives. As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," the tweet says.

Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said that he will divorce his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, in a tweet on Wednesday. "As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," the couple wrote in the statement. "If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again," it continued.

In order to erupt, volcanoes need a source of magma — melted, liquid rock — containing relatively few solid crystals. Traditionally, this magma was thought to be formed and stored in a magma chamber. Recent studies of magma chemistry have challenged this view, leading to the suggestion of the 'mush' reservoir model, where smaller pools of magma sit in the small gaps between solid crystals. However, the mush reservoir model could not explain how magmas containing relatively few crystals arise and are delivered to volcanoes in order for them to erupt at the surface. Now, with sophisticated modeling of mush...

“Harnessing the mysterious property that Albert Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ is a crucial step toward exploiting quantum quirks for technology such as new kinds of sensors or computers,” the physicists said. “Entanglement is not just some academic curiosity; it’s also something you can harness as a basis for doing useful things with quantum mechanics,” Professor Clerk added. Entangled states are typically extremely fragile — especially so when they involve large objects. So Professor Clerk and his colleague, Dr. Matt Woolley from the University of New South Wales, developed a theoretical proposal for how to keep the motion...

The knots in question, the researchers wrote in their paper, were visible enough in images of the light wave data for them to identify the figure eights and toruses. ... To create the knots, the researchers carefully tuned the up-and-down and side-to-side wave motion (the polarization) of two beams of light, partly using technology not unlike that found in polarized sunglasses. The knots formed around "polarization singularities" where the beams intersected, places where the side-to-side and up-and-down wavelengths were exactly equal, and a number of other wavelengths of light looped around them. At those points, light bent in the way...

It's not only a possibility in the Hawaiian Islands. A chain of about 40 volcanos runs along the West Coast between Canada and Mexico and all have the potential to become active. (The potential for each peak is outlined in the gallery above.) They've all erupted at least once in the past 10,000 years and they all have a supply of magma under them.

The Chinese are building a laser that is 10 trillion times more intense than the sun and could rip apart space. Physicists say that this laser could be operational as early as 2023. Physicist Ruxin Li and colleagues are breaking records with the most powerful pulses of light the world has ever seen. At the heart of their laser, called the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF), is a single cylinder of titanium-doped sapphire about the width of a Frisbee. After kindling the light in the crystal and shunting it through a system of lenses and mirrors, the SULF distills...

A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain. The major scientific project will follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider and will answer questions about the universe. The laser will be capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it will be similar to the light the earth receives from the sun but focused on a speck smaller than a pin prick. Scientists say it will be so powerful they will be able to boil the very fabric of space and create a vacuum. A vacuum fizzles with...

Boffins in Shanghai, China, have been designing the world's most powerful laser. The team has already made history with its earlier invention, the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility have already set records. The machine is small enough to fit on a tabletop, and contains a disc, the width of a frisbee, which is made of titanium-topped sapphires.(Snip)This year physicist Ruxin Li and his team are planning on building a laser that will pack a mind-boggling 100 petawatt burst. Called the Station of Extreme Light, the team hopes the laser will be able to tear a hole in the fabric of...

Controversy erupted over Christmas week when the Washington Post tweeted out an opinion article by Raphael Lataster they had published in 2014. It claims to show that the existence of Jesus as a historical figure is likely no more than a myth. Critics questioned the timing of the tweet as a slap in the face to Christians preparing to celebrate one of their holiest days.Possibly more importantly, many seized on the reaction to the 2014 publication. Historians, including a professor who had taught Lataster in a class about the historical Jesus, demolished the claims. Its ideas were described as...