Scientists May Have Found a Shortcut to Reading the Ancient, Charred Scrolls of Herculaneum - ZME Science

The Sun at the center of our own Solar System is a great advert for nuclear fusion: ultra-high temperatures and pressures combining to fuse hydrogen nuclei together into helium nuclei, releasing a huge amount of energy along the way. If we can get the same reactions happening on Earth, nuclear fusion has the potential to drive a revolution in abundant, carbon-free energy – but replicating a star inside a science lab is proving as challenging as you might expect. Now, researchers from Princeton University have published a study in Physical Review Letters that details how we might get to nuclear fusion more quickly. It outlines what is effectively a shortcut to something called ignition, where plasma can maintain the necessary heat levels through its own fusion reactions. Thankfully for the non-physicists amongst us, the researchers provide an analogy. If ignition is a valley behind a mountain range, then their new idea is to circumvent the mountains, rather than trying to get over the top of them. "A lot of companies want to climb the mountain head-on and spend enormous energy to get there," says physicist Luis Delgado-Aparicio. "Go around the peak instead.

Scientists have uncovered thousands of previously overlooked chemical reactions that could help improve the conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) into valuable fuels and industrial chemicals. By combining machine learning with advanced computer simulations, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) identified 9,389 individual reactions occurring on a copper catalyst, revealing unexpected chemical pathways that conventional models had missed. The findings, published in Nature Communications, could help scientists develop more effective catalysts for transforming CO2 into useful products such as methanol. The research also uncovered a surprising way hydrogen can participate in these reactions, challenging established assumptions about how the process works.

Scientists at the U. S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have identified a potentially much more efficient way to achieve fusion ignition, a major milestone in the pursuit of practical fusion energy. Their calculations suggest that changing the order in which plasma is heated and compressed could dramatically reduce the energy needed to reach a self-sustaining fusion reaction. For more than seven decades, fusion researchers have relied on a mathematical rule to determine whether plasma can remain sufficiently hot and dense, for a long enough period, to sustain fusion without additional external heating. Known as the Lawson criterion, this equation defines the conditions required for ignition. However, it does not explain the most efficient way to achieve them.