U.S. scientists replicated the power of the sun, if only for a fleeting moment, creating a miniature star that has rekindled hopes that nuclear fusion could one day offer a source of cheap and boundless energy on Earth. In experiments done at a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory last fall and published in a scientific journal Wednesday, researchers blasted the world’s most powerful laser at a target the size of a small pea. It triggered a fusion reaction that unleashed a vast amount of energy—for a fraction of a second. “For the first time anywhere, we’ve gotten more energy out of the fuel than what was put into the fuel” when using this technique, said Omar Hurricane, physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and lead author of the study in the journal Nature. The research is a long way from achieving what’s known as ignition, where the overall […]