On 19th-20th of May 2016, the fusion group was off to the beautiful town of Altafulla in the Costa Daurada, Tarragona, for the annual Retreat of the Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE).
The Symposium of Multidisciplinarity
On May 4th – 6th, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center held the 3rd BSC International Doctoral Symposium. The opening was done by Mateo Valero, founder and director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
The Symposium, aimed mostly to PhD and Postdoc students, gave them an opportunity to show their work and understand more about the research done in different fields interrelated with High Performance Computing.
Did you know this about plasma?
Ten things you may not know about the plasma:
- It’s the fourth state of matter: Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasma is a super-heated gas, so hot that its electrons get out of the atom’s orbit and roam free. A gas thus becomes a plasma when extreme heat causes its atoms to shed their electrons.
- It’s everywhere. Plasma is the most abundant form of visible matter in the universe – it is thought to make up 99 percent of what we see in the night sky. Plasma populates and dominates the vast regions of interstellar and interplanetary space.
- Stars, like the sun, are gigantic balls of plasma. And there are billions of them, so studying plasma can help us understand the cosmos.
Help, My Fusion Reactor’s Making A Weird Noise
At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, the film maker Tom Scott talks to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.
Nature Physics Insight in Fusion
Harnessing the energy produced in nuclear fusion reactions is an ongoing grand challenge. Recent Nature Physics Insight focuses on the achievements made so far and the trials ahead, highlighting that at the core of nuclear fusion lies some fascinating physics.
Unknown Wealthy Funding of Fusion
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The quest for Fusion Energy has been approached through decades in different manners. Most of the contributions are done by the governmental sector, National Laboratories and Universities given that its duration is expected to be long and therefore not so well suited for normal investors.
This scenario has recently started to change with the Venture Capital, where investors are free to speculate in high-risk and high-compensation projects, as explained by BBC Future its recent article.