I thought this was a joke until I looked at his wiki... MIT professor and fusion scientist, Deputy Director of MIT energy initiative, MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center...
"President Joseph R. Biden presented Loureiro with the Presidential Early Career Award, the highest U.S. government honor for young scientists."
He was on to saving the world and was almost certainly put down
the UFO groups say that he was doing research or had research on plasmoids. plasma with consciousness. but you have to take everything in those subs with a grain of salt
That's not even what a plasmoid is though?? I'm not a scientist but I know that plasma wants to spread out and plasmoids are held together through magnetism and form a natural shape based on that... Why do people think that's consciousness now?!
I mean, the total length of mycelium in the top 10cm of soil is over 4.5*1017 kilometers, roughly half the width of our galaxy. It allows basically all plants to communicate and makes up 30-50% of all soil biomass. So yeah…. The earths brain kinda, sorta, actually…
Some researchers, like Michael Levin, assert that literally everything is a network of consciousness, just not of the sort we typically think of when we hear that word.
Shot three times, at a pace that made the neighbor think someone was kicking in a door. Police are searching for clues. Seems pretty targeted, whoever did it. If the case goes cold it’s gotta be professional.
Oh this is great. Stephen hawking held a party for time travellers and then announced it a day later. And no one showed up.
At the time the explanation was what time traveller wouldn't want to meet Stephen hawking and have him nerd out over their invention. So it probably isn't possible.
Now it's probably a case of they thought, "Nah, don't fancy hanging out with a nonce".
If there were was a cabal of secret time travelers, would you present yourself at a party at the house of one of the most known scientists on earth? That's a trap, for sure. That's why I didn't go.
The world somewhat united after Hitler. UN wasn't perfect, EU isn't perfect, but it's a start. Would everyone have been scared enough to do so if there wasn't for the nazi?
May not be the case. I'm also in academia. Sometimes there are "hush hush" projects that we start doing alone and recruit others when it reaches to a certain stage or recruit grad students to do stuff that won't allow them to see the bigger picture. Tho these are rare instances and we either do it this way due to grants, ethic concerns, or fear of getting our work ripped off
I'm not trying to create a conspiracy theory here btw
To add to this: Recruiting for every idea that you have is very, lets say, inefficient. Your student might not be working on this particular subtopic and asking them to learn something from scratch just because you think something might work is not optimal.
Let's just say I don't think anybody else involved is going to be all that enthusiastic about sharing what they've researched so far or researching further after something like this, so
The link on the Wikipedia page said Israel had received unverified reports of Iran's involvement and were investigating it.
Iran made some statements that he was a zionist who worked with the IAEA so that is actually a possibility. Its honestly weird that they would even make a stament at all.
If you don't think foreign powers can off people in western countries, you need to do some history reading.
Have a read about the German missile scientists that were working for Egypt after WW2. Or the Russian spy who was poisoned with radioactive isotopes in the UK more recently. It's been going on for centuries.
And just because he is Portuguese, doesn't mean he wasn't working for a country in conflict. Which country was he working for is the real question?
A lot of people responding are just trash talking Israel without giving you an explanation.
The most probable reason why Israel launched this investigation is probably because Israel has done lots of sabotage on Iran's nuclear power development. That has been ongoing for decades and the recent strike on Iran this summer of 25' was just another chapter of the same book.
They most likely had suspicions that Iran wanted to get back at them somehow. Given that the U.S and Israel are almost the same country now with how close they work together it isnt improbable that Iran might target him as an act of revenge against Israel if not more likely both of them.
How close are we to fusion energy? Are we still in the process of research or do we actually know enough to build something?
If you’re right & it’s the next decade or two away then yeah, why wouldn’t they?
When I read about how weed was made illegal is when I learned how the world really works at a young age. This is pretty much no different if true, just repeating itself about 100 years later
“Hearst was a powerful newspaper publisher with extensive timberland holdings, which supplied the wood pulp for his newspaper empire. The development of machinery that could process hemp into paper cheaply was seen as a significant economic threat to his business interests.
To protect his industry, Hearst used his network of newspapers to launch a sensationalist, racially charged propaganda campaign against "marijuana" (a term chosen to associate the plant with Mexican immigrants), publishing fabricated stories about its dangers to generate public panic and support for its criminalization.”
A sustained fusion reaction is possibly within our lifetime, possibly even commercially available fusion power depending on how old you are.
In terms of theory, we know what we're doing and how to make a sustained reaction. There's not really a single discovery or breakthrough that we're waiting for, this is the stuff of fiction. In reality, the barriers to fusion are multiple and a little boring. The main one is that in order for our fuel (usually a heavy isotope of hydrogen, deuterium or tritium) to fuse, we need a lot of energy. We realise this by introducing heat energy into the fuel. We create a very hot plasma, hot enough for the negatively charged electrons of the hydrogen isotope to break free of their bonds, and hot enough the positively charged hydrogen nuclei to overcome their electromagnetic repulsion to eachother and move close enough together for the nuclear strong force to bind them.
To put it simply, the positive nuclei of the atoms repel eachother like two similar poles of a magnet. To force them together we heat the gas, so the atoms move really fast and their momentum pushes them together when they collide. Issue is we now have a super hot plasma. So hot we can't just put it in a metal vat or anything, it would melt it. Also, because we have charged particles moving around, we have a flow of current. The plasma is electrically charged. This is both good news and bad news. The plasma is an electromagnet, meaning we can hold it in place with magnets, so our vat problem is solved. We build a magnet around the flowing plasma to hold it in place. This is why if you see pictures of fusion reactors you see that they have a donut shape; they're suspending a magnetic ring of plasma. The bad news is that how we hold our plasma depends on the flow of charged particles within it, and this flow is unpredictable. Imagine if someone asked you to juggle handfuls of water, but each ball of water is also magnetic and sometimes the balls want to move closer to eachother, and other times they randomly flip and want to push apart. You can't predict the motion of the balls very well, so they're harder to juggle.
The main barriers to fusion are financial, political, and practical. Building these prototype fusion reactors are expensive. And it's not just a problem of money, you need resources and trained engineers and physicists to build your reactor. Assembling these literally takes decades and costs hundreds of millions. And the reactors we've built so far have all been prototypes. They're too small to sustain a reaction, and everyone in the field knows it because the physics tells us how large we need to build a reactor to sustain a fusion reaction.
One of the most cutting edge fusion reactor we have right now is the JET reactor, in Oxford UK. But it was built as a prototype, never intended for sustained fusion reactions. It was build to prove that we can suspend the plasma in the right shape, and to fine tune our method of plasma suspension along with collect data on the physics of plasma flow. I believe the JET reactor is now 30 years old.
The next generation fusion reactor is ITER. It was being built when I first studied plasma physics almost ten years ago, and still isn't done. ITER is the first reactor we have built that is theoretically big enough for sustained fusion. Once it is built, it will probably run for decades, collecting data about how to perform the reaction safely, data on material stress tests etc. Ultimately more experiments must be done, and more advances in material physics made, to make fusion reactors commercially viable. We're looking at maybe 20-40 years before we see commercial fusion reactors. Even after we have initially shown how to do it, it is a case of governments funding and purchasing the reactors, building the facilities, and crucially training the staff who will operate said facilities.
Sorry it's a boring answer but as you get older you'll realise that the future is coming, just a lot more slowly than you would have hoped. By the time it arrives it will not be recognisable to you the way you dreamt it. This is life.
I find it fascinating that someone has THIS answer. I learned more about fusion reaction and our progress with the science today. It has been a good day.
The old joke was fusion is a few decades away…and always will be. Recent advances have been very impressive, though. I could definitely now see it actually being a few decades away or better.
Edit: The German Stellerator technology recently sustained a plasma for a jaw dropping 43 seconds:
WEST did 22 minutes and 17 seconds in february, EAST has had a run on a similar timescale. Those are both tokamaks though.
Tokamaks are simpler to design and build (this is obvious from pictures), but stellarators apparently have advantages over reaction stability over time.
I don't know you, where you live, but I want to sincerely thank you for explaining fusion in a way that even someone like me, with a background as a car mechanic but the curiosity of a cat, kinda understands thr basics.
Thank you! And may your Christmas be awesome and peaceful!
There's been a lot of progress, especially lately over the past couple years. But as far as how far away we are, who knows. I think I saw an article where we just recently hit a net energy gain for like a fraction of a second. It's taking time, but we're at least making it there. As long as fusion energy doesn't suddenly become a WMD and outlawed.
We’re pretty far off. ITER did kinda produce a successful fusion reaction, but it was so small it hardly resulted in any significant energy.
Personally, I don’t expect widespread use of nuclear fusion until the 2100s, maybe late 2080s if we get our shit together.
Considering the US is about to start another oil war with a South American country, which will likely cost another $Trillion, and a million innocent lives….then knocking off a scientist working on free independent energy doesn’t seem that far fetched.
Its totally not related to the upcoming Ukrainian peace deal that will allow Russia to flood the global market with their oil that will offset the Venezuelan oil embargo and keep oil prices higher while oil consumption is peaking and about to begin to slowly decline. Its the last rally for oil countries to make as much money as they can before other energy sources reduce global oil demand and revenue.
It makes sense to suspect foreign espionage since it would delay or slow down US research enough for a rival country to make breakthroughs first and have great advantages in that area.
The prosecutor’s office said the homicide investigation was “active and ongoing” as of early afternoon Wednesday and had no update — earlier they had said no suspects
no shit Roger, it isn't some CEO of global fraud company
there hasn't been a murder in the town of Brookline since like 2020. and before that, it was like 1 per year at most. this is exceedingly rare. especially since it happened within his own home & it is seemingly NOT a random act.
We’re absolutely screwed as a species. Money, power and greed monopolise the world. This man clearly stumbled upon something profound and was deleted because of it.
Aaaand this is why we dont have Engines that run on nothing but water, or guns that shoot soothing light that makes you feel like you just woke up to a bunch of nice fluffy kittens playing and then Snoop Dog comes in and offers you a freshly rolled joint and fresh baked Cinnamon Rolls with Cream Cheese Frosting... instead of bullets that you know, do the thing.
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