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[Iduno]

It would be great if there was some sort of government group protecting consumers of phone utilities from scams that wasn't so full of regulatory capture that it's run by someone who spent his whole life working for the people who profit from these scams.

[Folly]

Scientists at CERN found a way to trap hydrogen’s mirror twin, antihydrogen, long enough to study it in greater detail than ever before.

I'm optimistic that this will either give us flying cars, or the Reverse Flash.

[Telgin]

I'm at least hopeful it will let us find some discrepancies with the behavior of antimatter so that we can help fill in the holes in our understanding.  Maybe including finding explanations for the matter/antimatter imbalance.

[Max™]

Wonder if they did the drop test yet. Naturally I expect it to fall down but it would be terrifyingly exciting if it doesn't.

Exciting because hey, antigravity tech that might explode, fun!
Terrifying because wait, if that is possible, shouldn't interstellar flight be much more feasible, and if so where is everyone else?

[Madman198237]

So far as I know, antimatter is not expected to fall up. It would be very hard to use for anything, though, because electromagnetic effects are very difficult, if not outright impossible, to use to make a perfect container that wouldn't leak the most volatile material it is physically possible to create, let alone one capable of responding to a "push" from the contained material, and anything other than electromagnetic means can't really contain antimatter because, y'know, "boom".

If it did fall up that would break some models of physics, for sure. Like, I dunno, the Standard Model, which would actually be really helpful since we've been thinking the Standard Model is wrong somewhere for a long time.

[wierd]

As far as I know, theory suggests that antimatter will interract with the Higgs field identically to normal matter.

Where it differs is either the strong or weak force. (honestly, I forget which one).  This is already documented, and was how positrons were first detected. There is a natural asymmetry there between the two.

*edit, looked it up, it's weak force.

They want to test falling up for completeness, as far as I know.

[Reelya]

There's a new fusion start-up company that's spun off Australia's University of New South Wales and has patents on a new method for hot fusion

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31080902/fusion-energy-hydrogen-boron/

From what I understand from reading a couple of articles on this, they're using lasers but instead of heating up a mixture with sustained lasers and trying to get it to 100 million degrees for fusion to start occurring naturally between dueterium atoms, what they do is blast some hydrogen with short pulses from a type of laser that won a Nobel Prize in 2018, called a Chirped Pulse Laser. This is supposed to accelerate the hydrogen atoms through a boron target at very fast speeds, and what they claim to get on the other side is helium, but with a shortage of electrons (since Proton+Electron = Neutron). Since the helium is charged you can create a voltage difference directly for power instead of needing to heat up water for a steam generator.

[Iduno]

Maybe including finding explanations for the matter/antimatter imbalance.

Matter's whole thing is "being there most of the time." Antimatter is the opposite of matter. Therefore, antimatter's whole thing is "not being there most of the time."

[Madman198237]

There's a new fusion start-up company that's spun off Australia's University of New South Wales and has patents on a new method for hot fusion

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31080902/fusion-energy-hydrogen-boron/

From what I understand from reading a couple of articles on this, they're using lasers but instead of heating up a mixture with sustained lasers and trying to get it to 100 million degrees for fusion to start occurring naturally between dueterium atoms, what they do is blast some hydrogen with short pulses from a type of laser that won a Nobel Prize in 2018, called a Chirped Pulse Laser. This is supposed to accelerate the hydrogen atoms through a boron target at very fast speeds, and what they claim to get on the other side is helium, but with a shortage of electrons (since Proton+Electron = Neutron). Since the helium is charged you can create a voltage difference directly for power instead of needing to heat up water for a steam generator.

That sounds really neat but they WILL still use a heat - > electricity conversion of SOME kind, almost certainly a steam generator unless they're also going to pull a super effective thermocouple-based system or whatever out of their back pockets.

If you don't use the heat generated by fusion, you're kind of wasting most of the energy even IF the products are charged.

[Telgin]

Right, you'll want to get all of the possible power out of it, and I'm curious how they'll build a heat exchanger for such a design.

It's a cool idea though, and I hope it goes somewhere.  Fusion is so rife with promises of useful power in the next X decades so it would be nice for one of those claims to come true sometime soon.

[Iduno]

Right, you'll want to get all of the possible power out of it, and I'm curious how they'll build a heat exchanger for such a design.

It's a cool idea though, and I hope it goes somewhere.  Fusion is so rife with promises of useful power in the next X decades so it would be nice for one of those claims to come true sometime soon.

We'd better hurry so we can power our jetpacks, flying cars, and clonal meat factories (for the people who don't want all of their nutrition in a pill form).

[wierd]

Thermocouple seems silly to me.

That is a fusion plasma, it is going to glow very brightly, and be spraying out charged energetic particles.  Coating the inside of the tokamak with a scintillating material, then a high efficiency photovoltaic seems more efficient, as it keeps the heat in the system to help sustain the plasma, and collects energy from the emissions instead.

*shrug*

[Telgin]

I guess it depends on what waste products the fusion process makes, but it does sound like the intended reactions are aneutronic so if most of the products are charged particles it might be possible to capture most of the energy directly.

Speaking of tokamaks though, this wasn't based on the tokamak, was it?  Much like other laser based fusion ideas, I'm not really sure how you build a reactor that's well contained, allows you to extract energy from the process and also allows you to introduce fuel.  Presumably the boron is used up by the process so it'll have to be replaced periodically.  I'm curious how fast it's used up.

[Reelya]

If it works, or even if it only partly works, this hydrogen + boron reaction may not be the only possible one. It's possible that the idea itself could spawn a new way of looking at the problem. Ideally you could do something with the helium by-product, and fuse to larger elements.

[Kagus]

Speaking of the byproduct, would there be enough helium generated to help prop up our diminishing supply?