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A joint team of researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and private company Commonwealth Fusion Systems is predicting that they will have a viable nuclear fusion reactor generating electricity and attached to the electrical grid within the next fifteen years.

A recent breakthrough in superconductor technology that involves the use of steel tape coated with a compound called yttrium-barium-copper oxide (YBCO) allows reactor designers to shrink the size of the magnets that contain the super-hot plasma fuel within the reactor, making them more powerful, and thus lowering the amount of energy required to run the reactor.
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The study of space weather has taken on an increased importance in recent decades, as the importance of the effects of the day-to-day conditions of our immediate solar system continue to be uncovered, with the effects here on Earth ranging from the awe-inspiring beauty of an aurora borealis display, to the potential nightmare a large-scale solar flare could unleash on our technology.

However, in much the same way that human-based activity has affected Earth-based weather through climate change, it turns out that we’ve also been affecting the nature of space weather in the immediate vicinity around our planet, in the form of a forcefield-like bubble that has been pushing away the natural radiation bands that circle Earth, high in the magnetosphere.
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 Soon, the growing capability of your smartphone could be harnessed to detect cosmic rays in much the same way as high-end, multimillion-dollar observatories.

With a simple app addition, Android phones, and likely other smartphone brands in the not-too-distant future, can be turned into detectors to capture the light particles created when cosmic rays crash into Earth’s atmosphere.

“The apps basically transform the phone into a high-energy particle detector,” explains Justin Vandenbroucke, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of physics and a researcher at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC). “It uses the same principles as these very large experiments.”
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As though they don’t already spend enough time welded to their cellphones , Microsoft Mobile has now collaborated with menswear fashion designer A. Sauvage to create a pair of "techno-trousers" that will mean that a man never needs to be parted from his cell, even to charge its battery.
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