Technology: Magnetic Metalworking

In their elegant laboratories near La Jolla, Calif., General Dynamics scientists are doggedly attacking a difficult problem: how to extract controlled power from hydrogen fusion. The pay off for their work is hidden in the future, but the powerful magnetic fields they have built to hold reacting hydrogen gas at 100 million degrees has already yielded a valuable practical “fallout.” Those same magnetic forces used on a smaller scale have proved remarkably versatile for shaping metal.Swift Action.

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Denmark’s Wind of Change

If you want to know why Denmark is the world’s leader in wind power, start with a three-hour car trip from the capital Copenhagen — mind the bicyclists — to the small town of Lem on the far west coast of Jutland. You’ll feel it as you cross the 4.2 mile-long Great Belt Bridge: Denmark’s bountiful wind, so fierce even on a calm summer’s day that it threatens to shove your car into the waves below

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Upgrading the Disaster

It’s the latest evidence that the health and environmental effects of the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant accident will be devastating and long-lasting. After a review of data on the amount of radiation leaked by the damaged plant following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Japanese nuclear-safety officials raised their assessment of the crisis to Level 7, the highest ranking on an international scale of nuclear-incident severity–which puts the Fukushima disaster on par with the Chernobyl explosion in 1986

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A Spanish Island’s Quest to Be the Greenest Place on Earth

At the moment, the project that will transform the future of El Hierro doesn’t look like much more than a hole in the ground. Or two, to be exact: one on top of a mountain, another smaller one down below, and in between, a long stretch of pipeline tinted the same color as the scrub that grows so abundantly on this volcanic island.

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