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The aim of researchers to bring nuclear fusion—the process that powers the stars—down to Earth has been bolstered after the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy’s Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor maintained super-hot plasma within a magnetic field for 30 seconds.

The achievement is a step forward in scientists’ desire to harness the fusion that occurs at the heart of the Sun and reproduce it on Earth in a controlled manner.

Should they succeed, fusion power will provide the world with a safe, sustainable, environmentally responsible and abundant source of energy.

Fusion is almost the reverse of nuclear fission, which powers the world’s nuclear reactors. Whereas fission consists of the breaking apart of heavy atoms such as uranium, fusion involves the smashing together of light atoms to make heavier atoms and energy.

Fusion is a cleaner process as it creates no radioactive waste, and proceeds with light and abundant materials such as hydrogen, which can be obtained from seawater, rather than expensive and rare elements, such as uranium or plutonium.

Theoretically, one liter of water could provide enough raw material for fusion to produce as much energy as the combustion of 300 liters of oil.

Nuclear fusion devices such as KSTAR, known as tokamaks, replicate plasma, a state of matter created under the massive gravitational pressure and intense heat of stars like the Sun.

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Bob Dole, the longtime lawmaker who overcame life-threatening injuries during World War II to become a shepherd of the Republican Party, died in his sleep Sunday at the age of 98.

Dole’s death was confirmed by the Elizabeth Dole Foundation in a statement Sunday.

“It is with heavy hearts we announce that Senator Robert Joseph Dole died early this morning in his sleep,” the foundation said. “At his death, at age 98, he had served the United States of America faithfully for 79 years.”

His family also released a statement about Dole’s death Sunday, saying that they have lost their rock, adding that they shared Dole with Americans “from every walk of life” over the decades.

“Bob Dole never forgot where he came from. He embodied the integrity, humor, compassion, and unbounded work ethic of the wide-open plains of his youth,” the statement said. “He was a powerful voice for pragmatic conservatism, and it was that unique Kansan combination of attributes and values that made him such a giant of the Senate.”

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Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., appears in Colorado for his presidential campaign in 1996. (Ira Wyman / Sygma via Getty Images file)

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The center of the Milky Way may be even more bizarre than astronomers thought, according to a new study.

For the study, a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing investigated a map of radioactive gamma-rays — the highest-energy form of light in the universe, which can arise when extremely high-speed particles called cosmic rays crash into ordinary matter — blasting in and around the center of our galaxy.

The map revealed that something near the center of the galaxy appears to be accelerating particles to mind-blowing speeds — very near the speed of light — and creating an abundance of cosmic rays and gamma-rays just outside the galactic center. However, even as the galactic center blows a constant storm of high-energy radiation into space, something near the Milky Way‘s core prevents a large portion of cosmic rays from other parts of the universe from entering, the team reported Nov. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.

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An artist’s impression of the Milky Way’s center, using data from the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA Goddard)

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