Word: fusion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first generation of nuclear weapons were the fission bombs of the 1940s and early '50s. In their quest for more powerful blasts, scientists developed fusion bombs, which became the second generation of nuclear weapons. Now a third generation is being developed that stresses finesse and pinpoint targeting...
...backwaters of science: superconductivity. That discovery, most scientists believe, could lead to incredible savings in energy; trains that speed across the countryside at hundreds of miles per hour on a cushion of magnetism; practical electric cars; powerful, yet smaller computers and particle accelerators; safer reactors operating on nuclear fusion rather than fission and a host of other rewards still undreamed of. There might even be benefits for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which could draw on efficient, superconductor power sources for its space-based weapons...
...still other applications, the intense magnetic fields that might someday be generated by the new superconductors should benefit any device that now uses electromagnetism in its operation -- medical diagnostic imaging machines, magnetically levitated trains, fusion-energy generators -- and will undoubtedly spawn a host of new machines. Electric motors could increase in power and shrink in size...
Electromagnets are also crucial to fusion energy, which depends on fusing atoms (the same process that powers the sun), rather than splitting them. Key to one promising fusion process, which is under development in several countries, is a "bottle" composed not of any material substance but of powerful magnetic fields, generated at great expense by conventional electromagnets. Such fields are the only envelopes that can contain and squeeze atoms together at the hundred-million-degree temperature required to initiate fusion. But superconducting magnets, especially warm-temperature ones, could produce more intense fields at less expense and thus could "help make...
...common in the Milky Way, it is part of a binary star system. If it is, the white dwarf's powerful gravity can draw gaseous matter away from its companion. In some cases, as the dwarf becomes bloated with its companion's substance, gravitational pressure triggers a fusion reaction in the captured gases, which are blown off in the explosion, resulting in a garden-variety (nonsuper) nova. According to Astrophysicist Branch, about 50 novas are observed flaring up each year in the Milky...