Plasma

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.

As researchers rekindle a more than 100-year-old therapy, using blood from recovered COVID-19 subjects as a treatment for newly infected patients, a team in New York is thrusting this old, experimental treatment into the 21st century.

Rather than trying to see dark matter, a new experimental design from Stockholm University listens for it instead, using an “axion radio.”

A cold atmospheric plasma system designed to prevent cancer relapse has been approved for human clinical trials by the FDA.

When scientists need to learn about something, recreating it in the lab is often one of the best ways – and now that even applies to the Sun itself. Physicists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have built a mini-Sun in the lab, and used it to probe the secrets of the real thing.

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.

​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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.