China Just Became the World Leader in Nuclear Fusion Research

China announced last week a major breakthrough in the realm of nuclear fusion research. The Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), was able to heat hydrogen gas to a temperature of near 50 million degrees Celsius for an unprecedented 102 seconds. While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research, that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius, it is the longest amount of time one has been maintained.

Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine just produced its first hydrogen plasma

German scientists have just switched on the Wendelstein 7-X (W7X) stellarator - the largest nuclear fusion machine of its kind - to successfully produce and sustain hydrogen plasma for the first time.

Why is this such a big deal? The production of hydrogen plasma is key to harnessing the clean, limitless energy of nuclear fusion - the process that powers our Sun. If we can achieve controlled nuclear fusion, it would quite literally change the world, because it would replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission facilities as a cheaper, more efficient, and more sustainable source of energy.

Physicists achieve early stages of a new, solid state of hydrogen

By subjecting hydrogen molecules to record pressures more than 3 million times that of Earth's atmosphere, physicists in the UK have achieved the early stages of a never-before-seen hydrogen phase, known as Phase V.

Observations of the chemical bonds that make up the resulting material suggest the possible appearance of a metallic form of hydrogen - something that was predicted back in 1935, but had failed to be convincingly recreated in the lab. It’s thought that this elusive hydrogen metal can conduct electricity with no resistance, and exists in large amounts inside Jupiter and Saturn.