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Billion-times more efficient nuclear fusion could be unlocked with low-frequency lasers
(interestingengineering.com)
Lasers make everything better
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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They can even cheer up ill-tempered sea bass.
Everyone needs a frickin bone tossed their way here and there.
Except blindness.
If it's merely legal blindness and not total blindness, they can still make it better.
That's just how cool they are. Gotta specify the type of blindness, even.
Idk man lasers definitely made my vision better. Better than 20 20 now
How much did that cost? I would just be afraid of them making it worse with a mistake, but I knew a girl that said it was the best decision she ever made.
$6.5k AUD 3 years ago for lasik. Prk would have been 5k. I wouldn't be worried about mistakes, the opthamologist does the procedure like 15 times a week and the laser machine is tracking your eye movement at 1kHz. Mistakes are almost unheard of. Where your issue may lie is if your eye is physically not good for the surgery, like if your prescription is too strong or cornea too thin. They do a bunch of tests and discuss what's right for you.
I think...$5,500 in 2005? Probably not relevant to today's prices. I would imagine the equipment has made things a bit safer and easier, which would probably ... Well I'm sure it wouldn't drop the price because who ever does that? But it probably kept it from rising too much.
Oh there are lasers big enough to cure everything. Well, the person doesn't worry about the disease and you can't get it. Yes the person does disintegrate in the process but they are working on it. No wait, they're done working on it. Anyway, anyone else needs curing? No? Its a laser miracle!
Anyway seriously, lasers are dangerous if the person using them does not known what they're doing. If that's you, stop.
Mark rober has a laser versus lightning video, they test burning through stuff with a powerful laser and tesla coil or whatever.
It is cool, too bad eye protection costs so much, as much as the laser itself I hear.
Cool for anyone researching in that field. For the general public this doesn't exist until it's actually happening.
Getting closer: probably about 30 years away with this new development.
It's always been 30 years away.
thatsthejoke.jpg
This is c/science, not c/engineering
Yeah, but c/science is popscience not real science.
Then why isn’t it c/popscience
Well, if it was real science, then popscience links like interestingengineering.com wouldn't be allowed. Instead, research papers would be linked directly.
Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling... No info on who actual did the reearch...
Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling,... Finally see a link to a the actual press release...
and it happened in China.
There are soo many amazing breakthroughs happening in China every week, how are they not living on Mars and teleporting yet?
I hate that there is so many bullshit research development reports out of China that my go to reaction is to assume it's a big fucking lie.
Is it really that big of an issue? I just presume it scales in China. More people, more actual research and more faux science news, but all in the same proportions as in the western world.
Genuinely curious.
Yep, the days where China simply copied other scientists is mostly over. They have more people, and many of their scientists were educated by the best US universities. It’s not surprising that they are making huge leaps in science.
As for this headline? I couldn’t tell you if it’s true or not. But “Ha, China! Gottem!” is a naive take in the modern world.
Did you even read my last line? I lament that this is my reaction.
Seriously. Your response just makes me think you are not interested in the issue and just want to undermine my statement.
Show me one fucking "breakthrough", in the last two years" that was actually something and did didn't just vanish.
I'll wait.
Or are you just attacking people who are tired of all these bullshit "breakthroughs" that never go anywhere?
The CCP sucks, but this 'everything from China is a lie' mentality is pretty dumb.
China clearly runs pr on their tech stuff, engineering. They do cool stuff I bet but something like this is suspect.
they get fudging thier numbers thats why. probably the brain drain during the cold war has costed china alot.
fudging tier numbers
Well now.
This is kind of a silly paper, we don't directly hit thermonuclear fuel with lasers, nor do we use x-ray band lasers, like anywhere. Also, you should always take new fusion ideas with a grain of salt. A million fusion startups have popped up in the past year, and 99% of them exist solely to drain venture capitalists of money while they accomplish nothing. Each startup needs to come up with a unique idea that's never been tested to convince their investors they're actually onto something.
Since it sounds like you know what you're talking about, out of curiosity, how do you feel about SPARC?
Tokamak's get their own section at fusion conferences, the rest of us don't go to their talks, and those talks never seem to change. The most important thing to remember is that any success in a tokamak is absurdly irreproducible. Next time you see an article about a tokamak breaking a record, remember to add the context that it failed to set that record the last 1000 times they turned it on, and they didn't really do anything different the time it worked.
Is it the same with stellarators?
Yeah, pretty much. The problem is they're always focusing on their own problems. It's always a hardware problem, and there's no physics to be learned from it, so it's not useful work to anyone who isn't building a similar system. If you pretend that fusion is purely an engineering problem, that would be fine, but we still don't really have a solid physics understanding of everything that goes into a fusion system.