Greg Nichols reporting for ZDNet: A company that makes propulsion systems for small satellites, Orbion Space Technology, has announced $9.2M in Series A funding. The round was led by Material Impact, a venture firm focused on translating early stage materials technologies into products and companies. Orbion has developed a very Star Trek-sounding technology that may prove to be a crucial component…
Tag: plasma
Remember Autorun.inf Malware In Windows? Turns Out KDE Offers Something Similar
Long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov writes: A security researcher has published proof-of-concept (PoC) code for a vulnerability in the KDE software framework. A fix is not available at the time of writing. The bug was discovered by Dominik “zer0pwn” Penner and impacts the KDE Frameworks package 5.60.0 and below. The KDE Frameworks software library is at the base of the…
Enormous ‘cannonballs’ of plasma spotted hurtling around the sun
Huge blobs of hot plasma are flying around at high speeds on the sun, and they may help us figure out why the sun’s outermost layers are so surprisingly hot Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2212723-enormous-cannonballs-of-plasma-spotted-hurtling-around-the-sun/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Magnetic plasma pulses excited by UK-size swirls in the solar atmosphere
An international team of scientists led by the University of Sheffield have discovered previously undetected observational evidence of frequent energetic wave pulses the size of the UK, transporting energy from the solar surface to the higher solar atmosphere. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-08-magnetic-plasma-pulses-uk-size-swirls.html…
Epic ‘Terminator’ Events Could Result in Gargantuan Solar Tsunamis, New Studies Suggest
What causes the sun’s 11-year cycle of sunspot activity? According to two new studies, it could be literal tsunamis of plasma. Source: https://www.livescience.com/66055-terminator-creates-solar-tsunamis.html
In a first, physicists re-created the sun’s spiraling solar wind in a lab
Some of the sun’s fundamental physics have been re-created with plasma inside a vacuum chamber Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/physicists-solar-wind-inside-lab4…
Researchers recreate the sun’s solar wind and plasma ‘burps’ on Earth
The sun’s solar wind affects nearly everything in the solar system. It can disrupt the function of Earth’s satellites and creates the lights of the auroras. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-07-recreate-sun-solar-plasma-burps.html…
World’s Largest Nuclear Fusion Experiment Clears Milestone
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: A multination project to build a fusion reactor cleared a milestone yesterday and is now six-and-a-half-years away from “First Plasma,” officials announced. Yesterday, dignitaries attended a components handover ceremony at the construction site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France. The ITER project is an experiment aimed at reaching the…
The age of giant particle accelerators like the LHC may be over
Enormous particle colliders probe the nature of reality, but much smaller laser-powered plasma accelerators could soon render them obsolete Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332400-900-the-age-of-giant-particle-accelerators-like-the-lhc-may-be-over/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
‘Terminators’ on the Sun trigger plasma tsunamis and the start of new solar cycles
In a pair of new papers, scientists paint a picture of how solar cycles suddenly die, potentially causing tsunamis of plasma to race through the Sun’s interior and trigger the birth of the next sunspot cycle only a few short weeks later. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-07-terminators-sun-trigger-plasma-tsunamis.html…