Fusion. It Is The Way.

Clean, safe, energy generated by nuclear fusion is just around the corner!

Well, not really. It’s more like on the other side of the world, figuratively speaking. Literally, from the U.S. perspective, it’s on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Still, the good folks at the U.K’s JET laboratory proved nuclear fusion, the same engine that powers the sun, can be replicated on Earth. Ain’t easy, though. The sun gravitational pressure at its core produces fusion at a temperature of around 10 million Celsius. On Earth, that rockets up to over 100 million Celsius. And the fusion energy the experiment produced only 11 megawatts of power that lasted for 5 seconds.

Putting the sun in a bottle.

But they did it. For now, that’s what counts.

And of course, bigger is better. A new fusion reactor, ITER, is currently under construction in France, and will be 10 times the size of the one housed at JET. The JET reactor produced fusion at an energy deficit. It’s hoped that ITER will break even. With improvements, what comes after will run a energy surfeit. That’s important because it’s the surfeit that’s fed into the electric grid. In other words, commercially viable.

Great as it is, fusion still has a long way to go before it can be scaled up enough provide enough energy to power the world. Some have said fusion is the power source for the second half of the 21st century, not before. Guess I don’t have to worry, then. By the time it does, the puny sapling I’m going to feed will have grown into a mighty oak.

Michio Kaku calls fusion “putting the sun in a bottle.” A perfect way to describe it because that’s exactly what it is.

Now for something that’s literally on the other side of the world…

Biohybrid engineers (think cyborg moms) in Japan covered a robot finger in living human skin strong enough to withstand the finger’s bending and stretching movements. The skin is self-healing, too. The moms cut the robot’s finger, slapped a collagen bandage on it, and hey, presto! good as new!

Move over, Ahnie. You won’t be bock.

From cyborg moms, to cyborg surgeons, pilots, and whatever else you can think of. And people are worried about robots. Wonder if we’ll reach the point where you can’t tell a cyborg from a human.

R. Daneel Olivaw, anyone?