Like children on a sidewalk focusing the sun’s rays with a magnifying glass, the scientists used the laser to concentrate 100 times the world’s electricity production into a spot the width of a human hair for a trillionth of a second. They wanted to observe what happens to matter at that temperature in order to understand how an even more powerful laser—one capable of reaching 100 million degrees—could potentially ignite a fusion reaction. The achievement of controlled nuclear fusion would be a great boon to human energy production. Unlike the nuclear energy we produce through fission—the splitting of atomic nuclei—nuclear fusion would produce no radioactive waste. Via BBC
