I think the most exciting part of this whole story is the glimmer of hope on offer to the party balloon industrial complex's future outlooks.

td11 wrote:

thephan wrote:Germany made a star today. Well, not completely, but at 0930 EST they ignited a fission reactor for 1 second. That is a star, an as they pulsed it with a laser to start the hydrogen reaction, then shut it down, it is technically a failed star. Bonus answer is that the out product of this fission reaction is helium. It is an awesome accomplishment.

Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/watch-germany-switch-their-experimental-fusion-reactor-live

not to be an ass (and JU already pointed it out) but it's a fusion reactor, not fission. pretty massive difference

really cool, though

wouldn't it actually be very hot? Fusion is exothermic IIRC.

Soren wrote:

td11 wrote:

thephan wrote:Germany made a star today. Well, not completely, but at 0930 EST they ignited a fission reactor for 1 second. That is a star, an as they pulsed it with a laser to start the hydrogen reaction, then shut it down, it is technically a failed star. Bonus answer is that the out product of this fission reaction is helium. It is an awesome accomplishment.

Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/watch-germany-switch-their-experimental-fusion-reactor-live

not to be an ass (and JU already pointed it out) but it's a fusion reactor, not fission. pretty massive difference

really cool, though

wouldn't it actually be very hot? Fusion is exothermic IIRC.

Soren used /bucky




It's not very effective

I thought it was ok

I liked it!

Let's start a poll. I'm not one for schismification

Not sure why I typed fission, twice much less aside from being in a bit of a hurry earlier, because fission would not be nearly as interesting as fusion (really, steam versus star power). It does produce a massive amount of energy including heat. They have a target of 202x (cant remember exactly when) of running it for 30 minutes. The heat is a significant problem as they currently cannot go into anything that looks like production without basically melting the building.

Aside from the fact that humanity has no real idea of how to get to a production safe status. The French in this gig were thinking that they had a route to clod fusion, the ultimate incomprehensible goal, but they ran into troubles in the spring.

bury it at the bottom of the marianna trench

Which comes first: Cold fusion, high-temperature superconductors, or quantum computing?

WheelsFellOff wrote:Which comes first: Cold fusion, high-temperature superconductors, or quantum computing?

Quantum computing, unless you mean quantum computing at a power/speed level comparable to what we can achieve now.

EPFL has a Tokamak reactor down in the valley. I don't know how close they've gotten to fusion, but they're trying. They have an open house and last year I went down and walked through the reactor. I was literally walking around the reactor and looking at all the wires and controls. Nobody was even watching me. I could have yanked out a few wires with no problem.

But the Germans used a Wendelstein reactor, which is a bit different, though it looks very similar. I don't know much else about it, except that it's very cool.

jamiethekiller wrote:bury it at the bottom of the marianna trench

did that, never could get a "Ginger" though

I was just coming here to post about that. I was going to post the NYT article. Check out the short video about it at the top of the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/scien ... ailed&_r=1

There's been rumblings about the discovery for so long it doesn't feel like news to me.

yeah, that newton guy had it a few years back

Not really, they're evidence of Einstein's space-time.

Man, WFO loves to poo poo everything in this thread. Lighten up, Bill Nye The Poo Poo Guy!

We had a discussion on here about whether or not life on Mars would necessarily indicate a separate genesis of life because of cross "pollination" between the planets by meteorites, etc. It's actually talked about a bit in this video about Saturn's moons

6:30 to 7:15

http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/sp ... title-area

Slowhand wrote:Man, WFO loves to poo poo everything in this thread. Lighten up, Bill Nye The Poo Poo Guy!

Science discussions are the one place I feel it matters when "someone is wrong on the internet."