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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 07 2017, @12:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the top-bottom-up-down-charmed,-I'm-sure dept.

A practically useless form of quark fusion releases more energy than deuterium-tritium fusion:

A pair of physicists discovered a new kind of fusion that occurs between quarks – and they were so concerned with its power they almost didn't publish the results. [...] "I must admit that when I first realised that such a reaction was possible, I was scared," Marek Karliner of Tel Aviv University told Rafi Letzter at Live Science. "But, luckily, it is a one-trick pony."

[...] If we take deuterium (proton plus a neutron) and add energy to squish it against some tritium (proton plus two neutrons), it will scramble to make helium (two protons and two neutrons). That last neutron runs from the scene of the crime. For your effort, you get 17.6 megaelectron volts and an H-bomb.

Karliner and Letzter calculated the fusing of the charm quarks in the recent LHC discovery would release 12 megaelectron volts. Not bad for two itty-bitty particles. But if we were using another pair of heavy quarks? Bottom quarks, for example? That becomes an astonishing 138 megaelectron volts.

[...] Unlike atoms, bottom quarks can't be shoved into a flask and packed into a shell. They exist for something in the order of a picosecond following atomic wrecks inside particle accelerators, before transforming into the much lighter up quark. That leaves quark bombs and quark fusion drives to science fiction authors, and, thankfully, well out of the hands of rogue nations and terrorist cells.

Just what I needed for my pure fusion weapon design.

Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly heavy baryons (DOI: 10.1038/nature24289) (DX)


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Wednesday November 08 2017, @05:31AM (1 child)

    by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 08 2017, @05:31AM (#593969) Journal

    Very disappointing that some people actually involved in prior ST shows have been involved in that turd, and that so many fans have been defending it.

    That's the cool thing now. <gesture type="cough" class="coverup" id="3">Ghostbusters</gesture>

    too many penis jokes

    Sir, there is no such thing. You take that back right now!

    The optimism shown on Orville is really out-of-step with modern TV and modern sci-fi

    Yeah, there's a lot of brooding and super cereal right now. Everything's trying to be dark 'n' edgy. It's no wonder celebs are turning on each other at the moment; Hollywood's going through an emo phase! It's moved on to cutting itself.

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:19PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:19PM (#594045)

    No, the celebs are finally speaking out about a few asshole men in positions of power. Good for them; it's been long overdue. It's not like all men in Hollywood are like this; it's just a few producers and directors (Weinstein, Spacey, Ratner, probably Singer, and of course Polanski years ago), and maybe a few actors (Casey Affleck, Hoffman years ago). Out of all the men active in Hollywood, that's still a small minority, the problem is that too many of their associates turned a blind eye but that's changing now. This kind of mistreatment of women isn't unique to Hollywood; it's been a problem across society for a long time with women in the workforce, but it seems that that behavior hung on in Hollywood for longer. I don't think this is related at all to the dark-n-edgy trend in the last 2 decades; that's just a reflection of our society, just like everything Hollywood makes. They only create stuff that's going to be popular, and anything that isn't gets canned. The viewing public wants dark-n-edgy, so that's what Hollywood makes for them.