Earlier this month, the director-general of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) announced that construction of the project had reached the halfway point. It’s an important milestone for the multi-billion-dollar facility being constructed in southern France. The goal is to begin generating plasma, an essential component of nuclear fusion reactors, by 2025.
ITER (Latin for “Way”) is a partnership of 35 countries, all hoping to share in the scientific rewards. “This gives us confidence as we face the remaining 50 percent,” Dr. Bernard Bigot of ITER told the journal Live Science.
When completed, the plasma circulating in the core of the reactor will be 270 million degrees Fahrenheit, or about ten times hotter than the sun. The massive superconducting magnets surrounding the core will be cooled to minus 452 degrees, as cold as the depths of space. “So many of the technologies involved are really at the cutting edge,” Bigot said.
Unlike traditional nuclear reactors, which generate power by splitting larger atoms into smaller ones, the ITER fusion reactor will combine hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium). At extremely high temperatures, hydrogen gas can become plasma — sometimes called the fourth state of matter — where the electrons are separated from their nuclei.
Most experimental fusion reactors use a tokamak, which is a superheated donut-shaped device surrounded by superconducting magnets that control the plasma inside. It’s basically a steam engine — the heat generated by the reaction is absorbed by the walls of the reactor and used to produce steam for electricity generation.
It takes a lot of power to create fusion, and the challenge is to make the reaction self-sustaining so it produces more power than is put into it. There are other fusion reactors in operation, but ITER is the largest, with ten times more plasma capacity than any other reactor. Still, it’s just a prototype. If successful, commercial fusion reactors would produce 10 to 15 times more power.
Wendelstein 7-X, a fusion reactor in Germany, recently went online for the first time, and may be able to generate self-sustaining plasma. However, Jonathan Menard of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab told Business Insider that it’s unlikely to generate enough surplus energy to create electricity.
Another experimental concept envisions fusion reactions powered by lasers, but most scientists think the ITER project is the most promising. “So far, the laser based systems are pretty inefficient and we think the [plasma] fusion systems are closer to having net energy,” Menard said.
ITER is on schedule for “first plasma” in 2025, and by the 2030s they hope to generate ten times more power than goes into it, laying the groundwork for a clean energy revolution. “With ITER and fusion energy, we have a chance to leave a powerful and positive legacy for future generations,” Bigot said.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.