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Researchers could be one step closer to producing energy through nuclear fusion with word that a device called the stellarator is set to go online later this year in Germany. The largest contraption its kind, the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device is housed in a branch of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) near Munich. It won’t actually produce energy, the Institute said, but will be used to test the “specially shaped magnet coils which produce a magnetic cage which confines the plasma and keeps it away from the walls of the plasma vessel.”

Taylor Wilson has a Geiger counter watch on his wrist, a sleek, sporty-looking thing that sounds an alert in response to radiation. As we enter his parents’ garage and approach his precious jumble of electrical equipment, it emits an ominous beep. Wilson is in full flow, explaining the old-fashioned control panel in the corner, and ignores it. “This is one of the original atom smashers,” he says with pride. “It would accelerate particles up to, um, 2.5m volts – so kind of up there, for early nuclear physics work.” He pats the knobs. It was in this garage that, at...

Elma “Pem” Farnsworth, widow of the man credited with inventing electronic television and a former longtime Fort Wayne resident, died Thursday in Bountiful, Utah. She was 98. Farnsworth married Philo T. Farnsworth in 1926. On Sept. 7, 1927, he transmitted the first image on television in San Francisco, the concept for which he came up with while plowing his father’s Idaho potato field at age 14. When she married Philo, whom she called Phil, he told her he had another woman in his life – television, said Bob Metcalf of Fort Wayne, who formerly held her power of attorney. Pem...

LOS ANGELES — Brian Kappus, a physics graduate student at U.C.L.A., tipped the clear cylinder to trap some air bubbles in the clear liquid inside. He clamped the cylinder, upright, on a small turntable and set it spinning. With the flip of another switch, powerful up-and-down vibrations, 50 a second, started shaking the cylinder. A bubble floating in the liquid — phosphoric acid — started to shine, brightening into an intense ball of light like a miniature star. The shining bubble did not produce any significant energy, but perhaps someday it might, just like a star. A few small companies...

LOGAN — A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.     Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.     Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah State University hovering (and arguing) over an apparatus he had cobbled together from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops.     The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's...

The energy contained in even a small quantity of fusionable material is so vast that only a tiny amount would provide the power needs of an entire city. He often cited some calculations performed by Fritz Furth with engineers at Con-Edison, the New York City power company, indicating that all the power necessary to run a city the size of New York for an entire month could be produced by Fusor fuel at the cost of about a nickel; accounting for inflation, that amount is probably up to about a dollar by now... At home, Phil expected that individual dwellings...

DETROIT — On the surface, Thiago Olson is like any typical teenager. He's on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills, Mich. He's a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college. But to his friends, Thiago is known as "the mad scientist." In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township, Mich., home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two...

ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich., Nov. 19 (UPI) -- An ambitious teenager in Rochester Hills, Mich., is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion -- combining atoms to create energy. The Detroit Free Press reported that 17-year-old Thiago Olson set up a machine in his parents' garage and has been working exhaustively for more than two years. His machine creates nuclear fusion on a small scale.

Fish don't know they're living in water, nor do they stop to wonder where the water came from. Humans? Not much better, as we share a world engulfed by television. And the deeper our immersion becomes, the less likely it seems we'll poke our heads above the surface and see there must have been life before someone invented TV. That invisible someone was Philo T. Farnsworth, who was fated to live and work, then die, in sad obscurity. Now, on the centennial of his birth on Aug. 19, 1906, his invention plays an increasingly powerful role in our lives --...