In recent years, shoebox-sized "CubeSats" have made satellite technology available to groups that could otherwise never afford it. A new propulsion system, developed at Indiana's Purdue University, could now also make the devices more reliable.
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Particle accelerators have plenty to teach us, but these facilities involve kilometers of tunnels and equipment. Now, researchers at Imperial College London have developed a new way to accelerate antimatter particles using common equipment already found in many labs, in a much smaller space.
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Waiting for water to boil is a minor inconvenience that we’ve all experienced. Maybe next time try the world’s most powerful X-ray laser, which has now been used to boil water to 100,000° C in 75 millionths of a billionth of a second, turning it into a new plasma-like state of matter in the process.
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Researchers have broken the efficiency record for nuclear fusion on the micro-scale. Using an ultra-fast, high-powered laser, the results were about 500 times more efficient than previous experiments. The researchers blasted arrays of nanowires to create incredibly hot, dense plasmas.
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Ball lightning has been consistently reported for centuries, and yet we still know very little about it. Now, scientists have created quantum ball lightning by knotting together the magnetic spins of atoms, which could help unlock the secrets of the phenomenon, or make more stable fusion reactors.
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An international team of astronomers has found that a strange repeating fast radio burst is even odder than previously thought. The radio waves from FRB 121102 are being “twisted” to an extreme degree, indicating that highly-magnetized plasma could be interfering.
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A team of engineers from Caltech have created a stable ring of plasma in open air, using just a high-pressure jet of water and a crystal plate. The technique could, in the long run, unlock the potential for plasma to be used for storing energy.
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Google and Tri Alpha Energy, the world’s largest private fusion company, have joined forces to use machine learning algorithms in an attempt to bring us closer to achieving the dream of clean, unlimited fusion power.
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Scientists at Rutgers University have created paper-based plasma generators that could one day be worn on clothing or fitted to equipment to zap any bug they come into contact with, cheaply and easily.
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The ESA's Swarm satellites have found a strange system at work in the upper atmosphere. Electrical fields created as solar winds interact with the planet’s magnetic field have been found to drive supersonic plasma jets, which can heat the ionosphere to temperatures as high as 10,000º C (18,032º F).
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