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It’s difficult to distill into simple concrete terms what dark matter is, and why it’s important, other than to say that dark matter is six times the size of the known universe, exists everywhere, and keeps the universe from flying apart. Nobody knows what it’s composition is, and until now, nobody has been able to see it. It’s presence can be directly inferred by its gravitational effect on nearby light and matter, much like black holes.

It’s the latter phenomenon that has allowed astronomers to exploit a loophole in the universe, as it were, and for the first time bring light to a dark subject. Taking advantage of the effect of gravitational lensing, A team of 70 astronomers from Europe, America and Japan used the Hubble space telescope to create a map of dark matter within a region of space that dates back to nearly 7 billion years.

The picture that emerges is much like seeing the skeleton of a human body, or the fishing line that keeps aloft a mobile. In essence, every floating, etherial object in space is connected to something else via dark matter. The same may be said of every particle in our existence. Dark matter is an invisible scaffold which holds the entire universe in place.

Great article about it in the UK Independent here.

And by fusion I don’t mean tilapia with miso rub sauce. You’ve been officially nerd warned.

One day in the year 1936, an inventor named Philo T. Farnsworth had a conundrum. He could continue working on his novel idea for a electrostatic fusion reactor, or he could work an another novel idea he had for an electronic gun that would spray a beam of electrons onto a phosphor-coated surface inside a vacuum chamber.

He decided to pursue the latter project and this is why he’s known in the history books as the Genius Who Invented Television(tm).

So what happened to his other invention? Farnsworth shelved it, and for a while the US dept. of defense took interest, but ultimately dropped the research. Over 70 years later, Farnsworth’s forgotten fusion reactor design is suddenly developing a storm of interest among fusion researchers, and for it’s promise of the previously unfathomable goal of practical fusion power.

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