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Superhuman hearing + Fusion startup plans reactor with superconducting magnets

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Alphabet’s moonshot lab is working on a device to give people superhuman hearing
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/4/223134...id-project

INTRO: Alphabet has attempted to take on some wild projects over the years, like a crop-sniffing plant buggy and fish-tracking cameras. But now, its X lab is working on a device that could give people superhuman hearing. As Insider first reported, the project, codenamed “Wolverine,” is exploring the future of hearing through sensor-packed hardware. The team, members of which spoke to Insider anonymously, say they’re currently trying to figure out how to isolate people’s voices in a crowded room or make it easier to focus on one person when overlapping conversations are happening around you. They’ve already iterated on the device multiple times... (MORE)


Fusion startup plans reactor with small but powerful superconducting magnets
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/...ng-magnets

EXCERPTS: A startup chasing the dream of plentiful, safe, carbon-free electricity from fusion, the energy source of the Sun, has settled on a site, timetable, and key technology for building its compact reactor. Flush with more than $200 million from investors, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy, 3-year-old Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced today that later this year it will start to build its first test reactor, dubbed SPARC, in a new facility in Devens, Massachusetts, not far from its current base in Cambridge. The company says the reactor, which would be the first in the world to produce more energy than is needed to run the reaction, could fire up as soon as 2025.

Commonwealth and a rival U.K. company have also chosen the technology they think will let them leap ahead of the giant, publicly funded ITER reactor under construction in France and ever further ahead of a U.S. pilot plant being considered by the Department of Energy: small but powerful magnets, made from high-temperature superconductors. Commonwealth is assembling its first nearly full-scale magnet and hopes to test it in June. “It’s a big deal,” CEO Bob Mumgaard says. “It’s beyond what everyone else aspires to.”

[...] Newer high-temperature superconductors—so called because they can superconduct at relatively balmy liquid nitrogen temperatures above 77 kelvins—were not around when ITER was designed. But they can carry much higher currents, tantalizing fusion designers with the prospect of smaller, cheaper reactors. Yet they are brittle, persnickety materials, so “a lot of people had given up on them,” says Rod Bateman of Tokamak Energy, the U.K. startup that is also betting on the technology. “They were just too unreliable.”

[...] Fusion scientists are accustomed to seeing paper designs come and go. But if the high-temperature superconducting magnets can actually achieve 20 tesla, Smith says, “It will be a phenomenal statement on the technology.” (MORE - details)
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