The World's First Nuclear Clocks Are Ticking, Opening a New Way to Investigate Dark Matter and Other Mysteries of Physics

Columbus hosts two-time Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ira Helfand

Humankind is the closest we have ever been to nuclear catastrophe. The Doomsday Clock symbolizes how close humans are to destroying our planet. As of January this year the Doomsday Clock, set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science andSecurity Board (SASB), is currently set to 85 seconds before midnight. Midnight is the time Earth becomes uninhabitable. Since the Cold War, the United States and Russia have dismantled more than 50,000 nuclear warheads, but 15,000 of these weapons still exist.

Conflicting Claims Complicate Iran-U.S. Talks

Nuclear inspections are emerging as a central sticking point as Washington and Tehran negotiate the terms of a final agreement. The post Conflicting Claims Complicate Iran-U.S. Talks appeared first on World Politics Review.

China fires up world’s biggest superconducting magnet for nuclear fusion project

The world’s biggest superconducting magnet for a nuclear fusion reactor has passed final tests as part of China’s CRAFT “artificial sun” project, eclipsing international performance benchmarks. The assembly comprises two coils: a toroidal-field magnet that acts as a magnetic cage, and a central solenoid that serves as the igniter. The results, achieved by researchers with the Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, clear a major engineering hurdle on the path to confining a...

The first ticking ‘nuclear clocks’ are here

These radical new devices keep time using fluctuations in the energy states of an atom’s nucleus, rather than those of its electrons, which atomic clocks currently use to define the length of a second

New superconducting X-ray detector is up to 1,000 times more sensitive

A groundbreaking superconducting X-ray spectrometer has begun operation at BESSY II, giving Europe its first TES-based system and boosting photon detection efficiency by up to 1,000 times. The advance enables scientists to explore atomically thin materials, nanostructures, and ultra-dilute samples with remarkable speed and sensitivity.