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His colleagues described him as a beacon of hope. Portuguese newspapers stumbled upon his story by chance. The scientific community was shaken to its core. The political establishment in Portugal set aside a minute for him — a single, paltry minute. Something doesn’t add up. Call me paranoid. Call me what you will. I’ve worked in security long enough to trust my instincts. They’re not always right, I admit, but I’ll take that chance. Last night, over dinner, when I heard the news of the acclaimed scientist’s death — a fellow Portuguese — I voiced my suspicions to everyone at...

MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was killed in a shooting at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts Monday night, the school confirmed. Loureiro, a nuclear science and engineering professor from Portugal, was 47 years old. A Brookline police spokesperson said officers responded to a call for gunshots at an apartment on Gibbs Street at about 8:30 p.m. "A victim was located who had been shot multiple times," Brookline police deputy superintendent Paul Campbell told WBZ-TV. Loureiro was taken by ambulance to a Boston hospital, where he died Tuesday morning. No other information about the shooting was immediately released and authorities did not...

(Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a new strategy in the quest to harness fusion to produce electricity: combining two existing methods of managing plasma to allow greater overall flexibility. The PPPL team’s new dual approach brings together electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) methods with resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP), marking the first time a simulation showing how they can be used together could facilitate greater control of plasma during fusion reactions. In simple terms, fusion produces energy by replicating the natural processes occurring on the surface of...

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...

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, working with Japanese researchers, made the observation on the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Japan, a twisty magnetic facility that the Japanese call a "heliotron." The results demonstrated for the first time a novel regime for confining heat in facilities known as stellarators, similar to the heliotron. The findings could advance the twisty design as a blueprint for future fusion power plants Researchers produced the higher confinement regime by injecting tiny grains of boron powder into the LHD plasma that fuels fusion reactions. The injection through a PPPL-installed dropper...