The Canadian firm General Fusion is to lay off about 25% of its 140-strong workforce and reduce the operation of its fusion device dubbed Lawson Machine 26 (LM26). The announcement was made in an open letter published on 5 May by the company’s chief executive Greg Twinney. The moves follows what the firm says is an “unexpected and urgent financing constraint”.

Founded in 2002 by the Canadian plasma physicist Michel Laberge, General Fusion is based in Richmond, British Columbia. It is one of the first private fusion companies and has attracted more than $325m of funding from both private investors, including Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and the Canadian government.

The firm is pursuing commercial fusion energy via Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology, based on the concept of an enclosed, liquid-metal vortex. Plasma is injected into the centre of the vortex before numerous pistons hammer on the outside of the enclosure, compressing the plasma and sparking a fusion reaction, with the resulting heat being absorbed by the liquid metal.

LM26 switched on in 2023 and is designed to achieve fusion conditions of over 100 million kelvin. Over the past couple of years, the machine has claimed a number of milestones, including generating a magnetised plasma in the machine’s target chamber in March. Last week, General Fusion also said that LM26 had successfully compressed a large-scale magnetized plasma with lithium.

The firm was hoping to achieve “scientific breakeven equivalent” in the coming years with the aim of potentially building a commercial-scale machine with the technology in the 2030s. But that timescale now looks unlikely as General Fusion announces plans to downscales its efforts due to funding issues. In his letter, Twinney said the firm has “proven a lot with a lean budget”.

Challenging environment 

“Today’s funding landscape is more challenging than ever as investors and governments navigate a rapidly shifting and uncertain political and market climate,” says Twinney. “We are ready to execute our plan but are caught in an economic and geopolitical environment that is forcing us to wait.” But he insists that General Fusion, which his seeking new investors, remains an “attractive opportunity”.

Andrew Holland, chief executive of the non-profit Fusion Industry Association, told Physics World that the “nature of private enterprise is that business cycles go up and go down” and claims that excitement about fusion is growing around the world. “I hope that business cycles and geopolitics don’t interrupt the good work of scientific advancement,” he says. “I’m hopeful investors see the value being created with every experiment.”

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Roses have been cultivated for thousands of years, admired for their beauty. Despite their use in fragrance, skincare and even in teas and jams, there are some things, however, that we still don’t know about these symbolic flowers.

And that includes the physical mechanism behind the shape of rose petals.

The curves and curls of leaves and flower petals arise due to the interplay between their natural growth and geometry.

Uneven growth in a flat sheet, in which the edges grow quicker than the interior, gives rise to strain and in plant leaves and petals, for example, this can result in a variety of shapes such as saddle and ripple shapes.

Yet when it comes to rose petals, the sharply pointed cusps – a point where two curves meet — that form at the edge of the petals set it apart from soft, wavy patterns seen in many other plants.

While young rose petals have smooth edges, as the rose matures the petals change to a polygonal shape with multiples cusps.

To investigate this intriguing difference, researchers from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem carried out theoretical modelling and conducted a series of experiments with synthetic disc “petals”.

They found that the pointed cusps that form at the edge of rose petals are due to a type of geometric frustration called a Mainardi-Codazzi-Peterson (MCP) incompatibility.

This type of mechanism results in stress concentrating in a specific area, which go on to form cusps to avoid tearing or forming unnatural folding.

When the researchers supressed the formation of cusps, they found that the discs reverted to being smooth and concave.

The researchers say that the findings could be used for applications in soft robotics and even the deployment of spacecraft components.

And it also goes some way to deepen our appreciation of nature’s ability to juggle growth and geometry.

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A series of spectacular images of the cosmos has been released to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope‘s 35 years in space. The images include pictures of Mars, planetary nebulae and a spiral galaxy.

Hubble was launched into low-Earth orbit in April 1990, stowed in the payload bay of the space shuttle Discovery. The telescope experienced a difficult start as its 2.4 m primary mirror suffered from spherical aberration – a fault that caused the curvature of the mirror to not bring light to focus at the same point. This was fixed three years later during a daring space walk in which astronauts successfully installed the COSTAR instrument.

During Hubble’s operational life, the telescope has made nearly 1.7 million observations, studying approximately 55,000 astronomical targets. Its discoveries have resulted in over 22,000 papers and over 1.3 million citations.

Operating for three decades, Hubble has allowed astronomers to see astronomical changes such as seasonal variability on the planets in our solar system, black-hole jets travelling at nearly the speed of light as well as stellar convulsions, asteroid collisions and expanding supernova bubbles.

Despite being 35 years in orbit around the Earth, Hubble is still one of the most sought after observatories with demand for observing time oversubscribed by 6:1.

“[Hubble’s] stunning imagery inspired people across the globe, and the data behind those images revealed surprises about everything from early galaxies to planets in our own solar system,” notes Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of NASA’s astrophysics division. “The fact that it is still operating today is a testament to the value of our flagship observatories.”

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“Fusion is now within reach” and represents “one of the economic opportunities of the century”. Not the words of an optimistic fusion scientist but from Kerry McCarthy, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

She was speaking on Tuesday at the inaugural Fusion Fest by Economist Impact. Held in London, the day-long event featured 400 attendees and more than 60 speakers from around the world.

McCarthy outlined several initiatives to keep the UK at the “forefront of fusion”. That includes investing £20m into Starmaker One, a £100m endeavour announced in early April to kickstart UK investment fusion fund.

The usual cliché is that fusion is always being 20 years away, perhaps not helped by large international projects such as the ITER experimental fusion reactor that is currently being built in Cadarache, France, which has struggling with delays and cost hikes.

Yet many delegates at the meeting were optimistic that significant developments are within reach with private firms racing to demonstrate “breakeven” – generating more power out than needed to fuel the reaction. Some expect “a few” private firms to announce breakeven by 2030.

And these aren’t small ventures. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based in Massachusetts, US, for example, has 1300 people. Yet large international companies are, for the moment, only dipping their toe into the fusion pool.

While some $8bn has already been spent by private firms on fusion, many expect the funding floodgates to open once breakeven has been achieved in a private lab.

Most stated that a figure of about $50-60bn, however, would be needed to make fusion a real endeavour in terms of delivering power to the grid, something that could happen in the 2040s. But it was reiterated throughout the day that fusion must provide energy at a price that consumers would be willing to pay.

On target

It is not only private firms that are making progress. Many will point out that ITER has laid much of the groundwork in terms of fostering a fusion “ecosystem” – a particular buzzword of the day – that was demonstrated, in part, by the significant attendence at the event.

And developments are not just being confined to magnetic fusion. Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is home to the National Ignition Facility, noted that the machine had recently achieved a fusion gain for the eighth time.

In a recent shot, she said that the device had produced 7 MJ with about 2 MJ having been delivered to the small capsule target. This represents a gain of about 3.4 – much more than its previous record of 2.4.

NIF, which is based on inertial confinement fusion rather than magnetic confinement, is currently undergoing refurbishment and upgrades. It is hoped that this will increase the energy input to about 2.6 MJ but gains of between 10-15 will be demonstrated if the technique can go anywhere.

Despite the number of fusion firms ballooning from a handful in the early 2010s to some 30 today, the general feeling at the meeting was that only a few will likely go on to build power plants, with the remainder using fusion for other sectors.

The issue is that no-one knew what technology would likely succeed, so all to play for.

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The CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva has released plans for the 15bn SwFr (£13bn) Future Circular Collider (FCC) – a huge 91 km circumference machine. The three-volume feasibility study, released on 31 March, calls for the giant accelerator to collide electrons with positrons to study the Higgs boson in unprecedented detail. If built, the FCC would replace the 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will come to an end in the early 2040s.

Work on the FCC feasibility study began in 2020 and the report examines the physics objectives, geology, civil engineering, technical infrastructure and territorial and environmental impact. It also looks at the R&D needed for the accelerators and detectors as well as the socioeconomic benefits and cost.

The study, involving some 150 institutes in over 30 countries, took into account some 100 different scenarios for the collider before landing on a ring circumference of 90.7 km that would be built underground at a depth of about 200 m, on average.

The FCC would also contain eight surface sites to access the tunnel with seven in France and one in Switzerland, and four main detectors. “The design is such that there is minimal impact on the surface, but with the best possible physics output,” says FCC study leader Michael Benedikt.

The funding model for the FCC is still a work in progress, but it is estimated that at least two-thirds of the cost of building the FCC-ee will come from CERN’s 24 member states.

Four committees will now review the feasibility study, beginning with CERN’s scientific committee in July. It will then go to a cost-review panel before being reviewed by the CERN council’s scientific and finance committees. In November, the CERN council will then examine the proposal with a decision to go ahead taken in 2028.

If given the green light, construction on the FCC electron-positron machine, dubbed FCC-ee, would begin in 2030 and it would start operations in 2047, a few years after the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) closes down, and run for about 15 years.  It’s main aim would be to study the Higgs boson with a much better precision that the LHC.

The FCC feasibility study then calls for a hadron machine, dubbed FCC-hh, to replace the FCC-ee in the existing 91 km tunnel. It would be a “discovery machine”, smashing together protons at high energy with the aim of creating new particles. If built, the FCC-hh will begin operation in 2073 and run to the end of the century.

The original design energy for the FCC-hh was to reach 100 TeV but that has now been reduced to 85 TeV.  That is mostly due to the uncertainty in magnet technology. The HL-LHC will use 12 T superconducting quadrupole magnets made from niobium-tin (Nb₃Sn) to squeeze the beams to boost the luminosity.

CERN engineers think it is possible to increase that to 14 T and if this was used for the FCC it would result in a collision centre-of-mass energy of about 85 TeV. “It’s a prudent approach at this stage,” noted Fabiola Gianotti, current CERN director-general, adding that the FCC would be “the most extraordinary instrument ever built.”

The original design called for high-temperature superconducting magnets, such as so-called ReBCO tapes, and CERN is looking into such technology. If it came to fruition in the necessary timescales and was implemented in the FCC-hh then it could push the energy to 120 TeV.

China plans

One potential spanner in the works is China’s plans for a very similar machine called the Circular Election-Positron Collider (CEPC). A decision on the CEPC could come this year with construction beginning in 2027.

Yet officials at CERN are not concerned. They point to the fact that many different colliders have been built by CERN, which has the expertise as well as infrastructure to build such a huge collider.  “Even if China goes ahead, I hope the decision is to compete,” says CERN council president Costas Fountas. “Just like Europe did with the LHC when the US started to build the [cancelled] Superconducting Super Collider.”

If the CERN council decides, however, not to go ahead with the FCC, then Gianotti says that other designs to replace the LHC are still on the table such as a linear machine or a demonstrator muon collider.

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Disabled people in science must be recognized and given better support to help reverse the numbers of such people dropping out of science. That is the conclusion of a new report released today by the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks (NADSN). It also calls for funders to stop supporting institutions that have toxic research cultures and for a change in equality law to recognize the impact of discrimination on disabled people including neurodivergent people.

About 22% of working-age adults in the UK are disabled. Yet it is estimated that only 6.4% of people in science have a disability, falling to just 4% for senior academic positions. What’s more, barely 1% of research grant applications to UK Research and Innovation – the umbrella organization for the UK’s main funding councils – are from researchers who disclose being disabled. Disabled researchers who do win grants receive less than half the amount compared to non-disabled researchers.

NADSN is an umbrella organization for disabled staff networks, with a focus on higher education. It includes the STEMM Action Group, which was founded in 2020 and consists of nine people at universities across the UK who work in science and have lived experience of disability, chronic illness or neurodivergence. The group develops recommendations to funding bodies, learned societies and higher-education institutions to address barriers faced by those who are marginalised due to disability.

In 2021 the group published a “problem statement” that identified issues facing disabled people in science. They range from digital problems, such as the need for accessible fonts in reports and presentations, to physical concerns such as needing access ramps for people in wheelchairs or automatic doors to open heavy fire doors. Other issues include the need for adjustable desks in offices and wheelchair accessible labs.

“Many of these physical issues tend to be afterthoughts in the planning process,” says Francesca Doddato, a physicist from Lancaster University, who co-wrote the latest report. “But at that point they are much harder, and more costly, to implement.”

We need to have this big paradigm shift in terms of how we see disability inclusion

Francesca Doddato

Workplace attitudes and cultures can also be a big problem for disabled people in science, some 62% of whom report having been bullied and harassed compared to 43% of all scientists. “Unfortunately, in research and academia there is generally a toxic culture in which you are expected to be hyper productive, move all over the world, and have a focus on quantity over quality in terms of research output,” says Doddato. “This, coupled with society-wide attitudes towards disabilities, means that many disabled people struggle to get promoted and drop out of science.”

The action group spent the past four years compiling their latest report – Towards a fully inclusive environment for disabled people in STEMM – to present solutions to these issues. They hope it will raise awareness of the inequity and discrimination experienced by disabled people in science and to highlight the benefits of having an inclusive environment.

The report identifies three main areas that will have to be reformed to make science fully inclusive for disabled scientists: enabling inclusive cultures and practices; enhancing accessible physical and digital environments; and accessible and proactive funding.

In the short term, it calls on people to recognize the challenges and barriers facing disabled researchers and to improve work-based training for managers. “One of the best things is just being willing to listen and ask what can I do to help?” notes Doddato. “Being an ally is vitally important.”

Doddato says that sharing meeting agendas and documents ahead of time, ensuring that documents are presented in accessible formats, or acknowledging that tasks such as getting around campus can take longer are some aspects that can be useful.“All of these little things can really go a long way in shifting those attitudes and being an ally, and those things they don’t need policies that people need to be willing to listen and be willing to change.”

Medium- and long-term goals in the report involve holding organisations responsible for their working practice polices and to stop promoting and funding toxic research cultures. “We hope that report encourages funding bodies to put pressure on institutions if they are demonstrating toxicity and being discriminatory,” adds Doddato. The report also calls for a change to equality law to recognize the impact of intersectional discrimination, although it admits that this will be a “large undertaking” and will be the subject of a further NADSN report.

Doddato adds that disabled people’s voices need to be hear “loud and clear” as part of any changes. “What we are trying to address with the report is to push universities, research institutions and societies to stop only talking about doing something and actually implement change,” says Doddato. “We need to have a big paradigm shift in terms of how we see disability inclusion. It’s time for change.”

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Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in the UK have built a prototype “hairy robotic gripper” that is inspired by the hairs found on ant jaws.

Ants are not only excellent nest builders but are also expert foragers, able to carry food and other items that can be many times their own weight.

Part of that ability lies in their powerful jaws, with snap-jaw ants able to close their mandibles at a top speed of 400 kmph.

Ant jaws also feature small hairs that are used to sense items but also to mechanically stabilise their grip on the objects.

Edinburgh researchers filmed ants and the sequence of movements they do when picking up seeds and other things. They then used this to build a robot gripper.

The device consists of two aluminium plates that each contain four rows of “hairs” made from thermoplastic polyurethane.

The hairs are 20 mm long and 1 mm in diameter, protruding in a v-shape. This allowing the hairs to surround circular objects, which can be particularly difficult to grasp and hold onto using parallel plates.

In tests picking up 30 different household items including a jam jar and shampoo bottle (see video), adding hairs to the gripper increased the prototype’s grasp success rate from 64% to 90%.

The researchers think that such a device could be used in environmental clean-up as well as in construction and agriculture.

Barbara Webb from the University of Edinburgh, who led the research, says the work is “just the first step”.

“Now we can see how [ants’] antennae, front legs and jaws combine to sense, manipulate, grasp and move objects – for instance, we’ve discovered how much ants rely on their front legs to get objects in position,” she adds. “This will inform further development of our technology.”

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The first direct evidence for auroras on Neptune has been spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Auroras happen when energetic particles from the Sun become trapped in a planet’s magnetic field and eventually strike the upper atmosphere with the energy released creating a signature glow.

Auroral activity has previously been seen on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus but not on Neptune despite hints in a flyby of the planet by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989.

“Imaging the auroral activity on Neptune was only possible with [the JWST’s] near-infrared sensitivity,” notes Henrik Melin from Northumbria University. “It was so stunning to not just see the auroras, but the detail and clarity of the signature really shocked me.”

The data was taken by JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph as well as Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. The cyan on the image above represent auroral activity and is shown together with white clouds on a multi-hued blue orb that is Neptune.

While auroras on Earth occur at the poles, on Neptune they happen elsewhere. This is due to the nature of Neptune’s magnetic field, which is tilted by 47 degrees from the planet’s rotational axis.

As well as the visible imagery, the JWST also detected an emission line from trihydrogen cation (H3+), which can be created in auroras.

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