Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Diamonds are the hardest naturally occurring material on Earth, but a supercomputer just modeled stuff that’s even harder. Called a ‘super-diamond,’ the theoretical material could exist beyond our planet—and maybe, one day, be created here on Earth.Do We Have to Send Humans to Mars for Exploration?Like normal diamonds, super-diamonds are made from carbon atoms. This specific phase of carbon, composed of eight atoms, should be stable at ambient conditions. In other words, it could exist in an Earth laboratory.The specific…

Supercomputer simulations predicting the synthesis pathways for the elusive BC8 “super-diamond”, involving shock compressions of diamond precursor, inspire ongoing Discovery Science experiments at NIF. Credit: Mark Meamber/LLNLResearchers are on a quest to synthesize BC8, a carbon structure predicted to be tougher than diamond, using insights from advanced simulations and experimental efforts. This material, theoretically prevalent in the extreme pressures of exoplanets, remains a scientific mystery with promising…

A UK-based nuclear fusion collaboration just produced a record amount of energy, a refreshing dose of good news in humankind’s quest for cleaner energy sources. The Joint European Torus facility, or JET, produced just over 69 megajoules of heat.'More People Need to Know About This History': A Black Astronaut Speaks About Race and SpaceA brief distillation of nuclear fusion: It is a reaction by which atomic nuclei fuse, turning into a new element while at the same time producing a huge amount of energy. It is a cleaner…

The Korea Institute of Fusion Energy has installed a new diverter in the KSTAR tokamak, allowing the artificial sun to sustain high-ion temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius for longer.Let’s Eat a Chocolate Xbox ControllerKSTAR—called an artificial sun because it does nuclear fusion, the same reaction that powers our star—was completed in 2007 and achieved its first plasma in 2008. It is about one-third the size of ITER, the massive experimental reactor being built in France. Both reactors are tokamaks:…

The biggest experimental nuclear fusion reactor in operation was inaugurated north of Tokyo today, as scientists continue to plug away at making nuclear fusion a viable source of the world’s energy.“Even AI Rappers are Harassed by Police” | AI UnlockedThe reactor—JT-60SA—is a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped reactor that can heat plasma to 360 million degrees Fahrenheit (200 million degrees Celsius). The reactor fired up for the first time in October; at the time, researchers affiliated with the project estimated that it will…

Are we closer to the “Holy Grail” of clean energy? Silicon Valley wants you to believe. Warning! Microsoft Wants ChatGPT to Control Robots NextThis week, nuclear fusion startup Helion announced that it had inked a first-of-its-kind deal with Microsoft to provide 50 megawatts of power from a yet-to-be built power plant, all within the next five years. Unlike nuclear fission, the process that powers all the nuclear power plants existing today, nuclear fusion could create potentially unlimited energy. It’s a dream that…

Commonwealth is working on a compact, relatively inexpensive reactor that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, instead of the billions it took to construct NIF. Its approach relies on superconducting materials to achieve super strong magnetic fields that can keep plasma in place for fusion reactions (the temperatures are far too high to use conventional materials to keep the fuel in place).  Some experts in fusion say practical reactors that can be used to generate significant amounts of power are still a few…

The U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday morning that scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction, a vaunted goal in humankind’s quest for a reliable, zero-carbon energy source.Successful fusion reactions are nothing new, but the field has struggled with a big problem since its inception: Scientists have not been able to get more power out of a reaction than they had to put in. Now, that has happened.The momentous result from the National Ignition Facility in…

The U.S. Department of Energy is expected to announce a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion research on Tuesday morning. Word of the expected news is already out, as the Financial Times reported yesterday that the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction. That means more energy was produced from the reaction than it took to power the reaction.Though the research finding is just that—i.e., a result with no immediate consequences for our energy…

Though the U.S. may be lagging behind other countries in terms of consumer broadband and wireless speeds, it can now at least claim the mantle as the top dog of supercomputers. Well, maybe anyway.That’s thanks to Frontier, a new supercomputer developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) which this week became the first machine capable of demonstrating “exascale” performance, a highly coveted computing benchmark roughly equivalent to one quintillion operations per second. That mind-boggling number comes out to roughly…