The World's Smallest Laser & A Hot Year Ahead (Patreon)

ITER CEO Acknowledges Significant Delay

At the end of November, the nuclear fusion mega-project ITER reported cracks in several parts of their containment vessel (Science News WTG, Nov 2022, Week 5). The new CEO of ITER, Barabashi, now told The Guardian in an interview that fixing the problem “is not a question of weeks, but months, even years,” but that the experiment’s planned starting date in 2025 “wasn’t realistic in the first place”.

It’ll Be A Hot Year (Probably)

Our climate is strongly affected by a two-phase system of ocean and wind currents known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, ENSO for short. It switches back and forth between the warmer El Niño years and the colder La Niña years. The past few years were La Niña years. NOAA reported on Jan 3 that there’s a 71% chance we’ll enter a neutral phase in the next few months and a 66% chance that we’ll enter an El Niño phase by October. This makes it likely that 2023 is going to be the hottest year on record.

Tiny Laser With Tunable Color

Researchers from Columbia University have built the tiniest ever laser. Its color can be tuned from the near-infrared throughout the entire visible range. The entire chip is barely a millimeter. They succeeded with a narrow color output by using resonating rings to guide the waves and filter out a desired color. Press release here, paper here.