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China Tests Artificial Sun China's "artificial sun" will finish its first engineering adjustment around August 15 2006. The plasma discharge test on China's experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak (EAST), or the so-called "artificial sun", will be conducted at the Science Island in Hefei, in east China's Anhui Province. Once the test succeeds, it will mean that the world's first nuclear fusion device of its kind is completed and will be able to go into actual operation.  So how does the "artificial sun" work? It can make plasmas from deuterium or tritium (two isotopes of hydrogen) that have been put into its vacuum hall. Then the device will increase the intensity of plasmas and raise their temperature, resulting in fusion reaction between them and producing huge quantities of energies. In the future, these energies are useable to humans after they are transformed and transmitted by certain devices in a fusion plant. It is said that deuterium to be extracted from one liter of sea water can produce as much as the amount of heat energy derived from 300 liters of gasoline through burning in the process of complete fusion reaction. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Colleges Go Cellular to Contact Students Link With 90% of all college students possessing mobile phones, campuses are ripping out money-losing land-line phone jacks in dorms and in some cases providing students with free or subsidized cell phones. At some campuses, students can get real-time alerts about class assignments, cafeteria menus, and shuttle schedules. Some also provide GPS-enabled mobile phones that, among other things, allow students to activate a tracking service so campus police know their whereabouts for safety purposes. "Police can track a student's trip on a large screen in a bread-crumb sort of way until the student deactivates the service," said Edward W. Chapel, who helped implement a GPS system at Montclair State University. [ permanent link to this entry ]
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