Fusion Energy in action.

Clean electrical power from a fusion reactor remains a distant goal, but it's one step closer following a test in which fusion energy output exceeded the energy pumped into a fuel pellet.

This close-up photo shows the container, about the size of a pencil eraser, that contains a tiny pellet of deuterium-tritium fuel. Ultraviolet lasers pound it with enough energy to trigger fusion.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have reported an important step on the way to fusion energy: a reaction in which fusing hydrogen gave off more energy than the lasers put in to initiate the reaction.
Fusion, the reaction that powers the sun and the more powerful part of thermonuclear explosions, combines lightweight atoms like hydrogen and releases a lot of energy in the process. In contrast, heavy elements such as uranium are split to release energy in the fission reactions that powered the first atomic weapons and today's nuclear power reactors.
Scientists long have hoped to harness fusion's power to produce energy free from the radioactive byproducts that are so troublesome with fission reactors. But controlled fusion has been extremely hard to create: it requires an extraordinarily high concentration of energy to get the reaction started and to produce enough extra energy to achieve a self-sustaining reaction.

The researchers at LLNL's National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved "fuel gains," meaning they got more energy out of fusion from a tiny capsule about a millimeter across that contains deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen with one and two neutrons, respectively. It's machined with extremely high precision and mounted at the center of 192 ultraviolet lasers that pack a walloping 1.85 megajoules of energy.
The results, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, yielded results 10 times better than previous deuterium-tritium experiments, the researchers said.
However, it was still well short of "ignition," in which the energy produced exceeds what the entire experiment used, not just the smaller amount that actually reached the fuel. Controlled fusion has proved a famously elusive idea, and NIF has worked for years to get this far.
The researchers did see progress on another front called boot-strapping, a phenomenon that's part of achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction. The boot-strapping process takes place when helium nuclei -- each one a pair of protons and a pair of neutrons produced by the fusion reaction -- impart energy to further fusion rather than escaping.
"We also see...evidence for the 'bootstrapping' required to accelerate the deuterium-tritium fusion burn to eventually 'run away' and ignite," the researchers said.
NIF's funding comes from the US government's Stockpile Stewardship program, designed to ensure nuclear weapons' reliability and storage safety even without underground nuclear tests. Improving the country's energy security, though, also is a goal.

World's largest solar thermal plant.

The "tower power" plant, which uses more than 300,000 mirrors to reflect sunlight, starts delivering electricity to customers in California.

While the East Coast feels the brunt of yet another winter storm, Southern California's abundant sunshine is getting put to good use. On Thursday, the world's largest solar thermal plant began delivering electricity to customers.
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System -- jointly owned by NRG Energy, Google, and Bright Source Energy -- can produce 392 megawatts of solar power at full capacity. According to NRG Energy, that's enough "electricity to provide 140,000 California homes with clean energy and avoid 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to removing 72,000 vehicles off the road."

Construction started on the Ivanpah solar plant in October 2010.

Sprawled across roughly 5 square miles of federal land in California's Mojave Desert, the plant has more than 300,000 software-controlled mirrors that reflect sun to boilers at the top of three 450-foot high towers. The focused blasts of sun rays turn water in the boilers into steam, which then drives power generators. It's basically a large-scale version of using a magnifier to melt army men -- except this version creates usable electricity.
For Google, which put $168 million into the project, investing in green energy is nothing new. The Web giant has invested in several solar and wind projects and says that over 34 percent of its operations are currently powered by renewable energy.
While the companies behind the plant are touting the benefits of clean energy, it has raised other environmental concerns. Apparently, some birds that fly through the intense heat around the towers -- which can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- are dying or suffering from burned feathers, reported The Wall Street Journal.

'Terminator'-style cube robots swarm and self-assemble

Robotics researchers at MIT show off the capabilities of small cube-shaped robots with no external moving parts.

The M-block with its innards and flywheel exposed.

If you look down and see a series of colorful cubes crawling toward you, don't panic. It's not Tetris come to real life, but rather the creation of robotics researchers at MIT. The M-Blocks robots are cube-shaped modular bots with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they can move, crawl over each other, and self-assemble.

The secret to the robots' movements lies under the skin. Each little cube hides a small flywheel that can hit speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute. Magnets embedded in strategic locations help the M-Blocks stick together.

The current M-Blocks are about the size of wood alphabet blocks, but one goal is to miniaturize the technology. MIT likens the potential resulting microrobots to the liquid-metal androids from the "Terminator" movies. These could end up being the ultimate Transformers, with massive groups of robots altering their shape to suit changing needs.

Watching the radio-controlled M-Blocks move is fascinating. They spin, jump, click together, and fly off each other. The researchers hope to eventually turn the blocks into autonomous robots that can make their own decisions about how they turn into different shapes. Let's just hope they don't develop sentience and start making up their own shapes geared for overthrowing the human race.

Zuckerberg: Let's make the Internet 100x more affordable

Working with his Internet.org partners, Facebook's CEO outlines what needs to be done to drop the cost of Web access worldwide.

Two-thirds of the world's population doesn't have access to the Internet, and this is something Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a coalition of tech companies want to change. Their goal: Bring the Internet to every single person on Earth.

While the partnership between the companies, dubbed Internet.org, was announced last month, Zuckerberg released a video on Monday explaining how the coalition aims to bring the Web to nearly 5 billion new people.

"Our plan is to make basic Internet services affordable so that everyone with a phone can join the knowledge economy," Zuckerberg said. "In order for this to be economically feasible we need to make the Internet 100 times more affordable."

To bring down the price of Internet service, Zuckerberg suggested a combination of lowering the costs associated with infrastructure and the amount of data used.

To cut infrastructure costs, he said, cell phone towers need to be upgraded so signals can travel further, spectrum needs to be used more efficiently, and smartphone hardware prices need to be lowered. For data, he said that apps should cache data instead of request it and that compression algorithms should be used.

The Internet.org coalition partners include Facebook and a number of mostly mobile tech companies such as Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung. At its launch, this group said it plans to bring Web access to the unconnected world by focusing on a small number of goals, such as affordability, efficient data use, and backing new business models.

A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released last week looked at the 15 percent of people in the US who still don't go online. According to the study, one of the contributing factors that limits people's access to the Internet is affordability.

"When I was getting started with Facebook, I could build it because I had access to the Internet and a few basic tools that gave me what I needed to build it for the world," Zuckerberg said in the video. "If we can get to a point where everyone around the world has access to those same tools, then everyone is going to be able to benefit from the innovation and ideas and hard work of billions of people around the world."

Stephen Hawking: The afterlife is a fairy tale (but your brain might go on)

Speaking at the premiere of a documentary about his life, the famed physicist said the human brain might be able to be copied and therefore preserved. But the body? No chance.

In the next life, we will all correct the things we got wrong in this one.

We'll be better, nicer people, calmer and more knowing. Or we'll be horses in a field, grazing away our days.

Please, keep fantasizing. But it isn't going to happen. At least according to Stephen Hawking.

He knows that many fantasize about an afterlife. But he'd like to answer that with: "Oh, phooey."

Actually, what he said at a premiere of a documentary about his life was: "I think the conventional afterlife is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark."

As the Guardian reports, Hawking said he's had to live his whole life with the threat of an early death. So he has tried not to waste time.

Hawking has never been much of a believer in God. Earlier this year, he gave a speechoutlining how everything was created without a deity.

In 2010, he explained to Diane Sawyer that science and religion were entirely irreconcilable.

He did, though, offer a tiny glint of hope in his movie speech for those who fancy that they'd like a do-over.

It's not one that will please Celine Dion. For though Hawking believes our hearts will not, in fact, go on, our brains might. At least in some form.

He said: "I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer. So it's theoretically possible to copy the brain on to a computer and so provide a form of life after death."

But what kind of a life would that be? We'll soon be living in Googleworld. Google is rather keen to take our brains over and use them for its own devices. (Quite literally.)

So all that will be left of us to preserve is a history of our searches and our mental record of being driven around in a Prius.

 

Pebble smartwatch goes on sale at AT&T on September 27

The customizable smartwatch spreads its reach as it becomes available on the mobile carrier's Web site and in select retail stores.

The Pebble smartwatch.

 

AT&T announced that it will be hawking the Pebble smartwatch come September 27. It will be the first mobile carrier to sell the watch, which not only tells the time but also wirelessly connects to users' smartphones.
Pebble was one of the first smartwatches to debut after its massive Kickstarter campaignlast year. The watch reached its funding goal of $100,000, and then quickly surpassing it to raise a total of $10.2 million.

The $150 Bluetooth enabled smartwatch can alert users to e-mails and social-networking updates, as well as display caller ID information. The watch face is made of e-paper technology, allowing users to see what's on the display in direct sunlight. It's also water resistant.

AT&T has touted itself as the "exclusive" carrier of the smartwatch, but it's been available at Best Buy for a couple of months now. Pebble will be available on AT&T's Web site and in some of its retail stores on September 27 and will eventually roll out to more AT&T stores in October.

 

!! Clinton Global Initiative !!

 Hosted by President Bill Clinton, the 2013 Annual Meeting
will bring CGI members together under this year's theme of
“Mobilizing for Impact,” which focuses on involving the right people
and resources needed to drive effective action on global challenges.

CGI's 2013 theme, Mobilizing for Impact, explores ways that CGI members and member organizations can be more effective in leveraging individuals, partner organizations, and key resources in their commitment efforts. Mobilizing the right entities—and allowing them to reach their full potential—creates lasting and scalable success. This builds on CGI’s 2012 theme, Designing for Impact, which encouraged the design of purposeful commitments from the outset.

 

Clinton Global Initiatives - from New York