February 05, 2016 at 02:26AM

Today I Learned: 1) Anders Knight is on a roll recently -- tonight, he is responsible for information on the Wendelstein (pronounced "vendelshtein"), the Max Plank Institute for Plasma Physics' brand new fusion power research facility. You can get a lot of information here (http://ift.tt/1VTi8GW), but I'll relay some of it anyway. The Wendelstein is a fusion reactor of the stellarator type (for a comparison of stellarators to the more common tokamak designs, see http://ift.tt/1SwHUD7. This is also a really good fast introduction to how a fusion reactor works, in its broadest strokes). It will not produce power. It is instead designed as a research facility to test different configurations of magnetic containment* so we can figure out how to optimally build fusion reactors that might, in a few decades, produce power. One of the cool things about the Wendelstein is how long it can operate -- the facility has already performed runs as long as a quarter second, and plan to ramp up to thirty seconds. For a fusion reactor, this is an eternity. Another cool thing about the Wendelstein is the insane exactness required to build it. For example, each of the 50 non-planar (I'm not sure what that means) superconducting coils of the Wendelstein's magnetic containment system measures roughly 3.5m x 2.5m x 1.5m and is machined to a precision of *three millimeters*. Speaking of the magnetic containment system, another cool thing about the Wendelstein is how *awesome* it looks. I mean, check this out: http://ift.tt/1VTi8GY. That's not science fiction, that's engineering that's being done *right now*. * Fusion reactions only happen at super-high temperatures, temperatures which are hot enough to destroy literally any known physical material you put them in. Fusion reactors contain their plasma with complex magnetic traps. You know in Star Trek when ships lose magnetic containment and explode? That's because the plasma in their fusion reactors escapes the reactor and briefly exposes the rest of the ship to temperatures not dissimilar to the interior of the sun. 2) When E. coli cultures are infected with bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria), it apparently often causes the culture to form visible clumps or filaments. There's also some rumor that phage-infected cultures tend to get really foamy, from all the protein released by dying cells. 3) In a drug (or medical device) trial, each subject costs, on average, about $10,000. The total cost of passing regulation for a medical device averages around $150 million. Source: a lecture by a senior guy from Medtronic.