http://www.physorg.com/ en-us Physorg.com internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. If you keep twisting a straight elastic string, at some moment it starts kinking in a wild way. Something similar occurs when one increases the electrical current flowing in a magnetized plasma doughnut: it takes on a wild helical shape, which spoils its performance. This phenomenon concerns scientists exploring fusion power, who use powerful magnetic fields to confine plasma during their experiments. http://www.physorg.com/news176402729.html Physics Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:20:02 EST news176402729 In the quest to produce nuclear fusion energy, researchers from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have recently confirmed long-standing theoretical predictions that performance, efficiency and reliability are simultaneously obtained in tokamaks, the leading magnetic confinement fusion device, operating at their performance limits. Experiments designed to test these predictions have successfully demonstrated the interaction of these conditions. http://www.physorg.com/news176402578.html Physics Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:30:03 EST news176402578 Fusion is best known for powering the sun and stars. But researchers have long been studying ways to transform that power source into future "green" energy that can be used on Earth. A team of researchers from UC San Diego, MIT and UC Berkeley have received a $7 million research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that could lead us one step closer to making that a reality. The researchers will use the five-year grant for fundamental multiscale studies of plasma-material interactions. http://www.physorg.com/news172162391.html Physics Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:53:34 EST news172162391 Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), have demonstrated, for the first time, that the activation energy of impurities in semiconductor nanowires is affected by the surrounding dielectric and can be modified by the choice of the nanowire embedding medium. http://www.physorg.com/news160754028.html Nanotechnology Tue, 05 May 2009 14:54:34 EST news160754028 (PhysOrg.com) -- By confining water in nano-sized spaces, physicists from Leiden University in the Netherlands have turned water into ice at room temperature. While it`s not the first time scientists have created room-temperature ice, Dutch physicists K. B. Jinesh and Joost Frenken hope that their findings will put the controversial subject of water under nanoscale confinement in a new light. http://www.physorg.com/news137157127.html Physics Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:12:07 EST news137157127