Plasma

Drill bits are out, death rays are in. On May 21, 2025, New Atlas hit up Quaise Energy’s literal groundbreaking demo in Houston, Texas where a mm-wave maser melted rock to unlock the deepest, hottest, cleanest energy anywhere.

Electricity is chaotic, and we normally need to constrain it to wires and circuits to make use of it. Scientists in Europe and Canada have now managed to guide sparks through thin air and even around obstacles using ultrasound waves.

Seeking to improve the tokamak fusion reactor known as ITER, researchers have found a way to stop rogue tungsten atoms from shearing off the walls and messing with the plasma. The finding is another important milestone on fusion's road to success.

The most abundant metal known to man is iron. It's everywhere. Not just on Earth, but in space as well. Astro engineers have just figured out how to use iron – or nearly any metal for that matter – as plasma rocket fuel.

Vantablack, which is the world's darkest material, could be in for some competition. Canadian scientists have created a super-black substance that has the potential to be cheaper, hardier and easier to manufacture … and it's made out of wood.

NASA and Howe Industries are working on a new rocket to make the trip to Mars much more manageable. The Pulsed Plasma Rocket could boast 100,000 N of thrust, unlocking speeds of up to half a million mph to cut months off a return trip to the Red Planet.

Researchers have devised an economical way of reducing the environmental impact of both the steel and aluminum industries by using hydrogen to melt down the toxic red mud left over from aluminum production to produce green steel in around 10 minutes.

Scientists have made a breakthrough in the way we study this plasma, managing to trap an ultracold form of it in a magnetic "bottle" for the first time, an achievement that could act as a springboard for research into nuclear fusion energy.

A crewed mission to Mars may be more practical thanks to a new rocket concept developed by Fatima Ebrahimi, a physicist at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), that uses magnetic fields to generate thrust.

A Chinese team has demonstrated a prototype of a microwave plasma thruster capable of working in the Earth's atmosphere and producing thrust with an efficiency comparable to the jet engines you'd find on modern airliners – under laboratory conditions.

Nuclear fusion could be an essentially unlimited energy source, but large eruptions in the plasma can damage reactors. But now physicists have found a way to prevent those large eruptions, by triggering lots of small ones through the injection of tiny pellets of beryllium.

Scientists have come up with a cold plasma technology to zap cooking odors at the source, which means you'll be able to eat at your favorite soul food joint without smelling like it.