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supernovae remnants of all shapes and sizes but have yet to understand why they are all so
different.
6. Powerful lasers compressed a diamond to simulate the centres of the giant planets
Jupiter and Saturn.
Jupiter and Saturn are the two largest planets in our solar system, and yet what is inside
them is mostly a mystery -- we don't even know if their centres are liquid or solid.
5. Researchers transferred information in light four times farther than ever before -- an
important step to quantum computers.
If we are ever to have a digital world run by quantum computers, then we must learn how to
transport information in the form of what scientists call quantum data, or qubits, which is
encoded inside of subatomic particles, such as ions or photons (light particles).
4. Physicists developed a new and better kind of fibre optics to transfer information.
Traditionally, when you're trying to transfer particles of light through a fibre optic cable, the
last thing you want are for the particles to be moving all about in a disorderly manner. But
there's an exception to this that scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and
Clemson University discovered the first time this year.
3. A physics team discovered a new particle, 80 years after it was first predicted.
After nearly 80 years since it was first predicted, the Majorana fermion was finally observed.
The physicists at Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin announced their
discovery last October in the journal Science.
2. The National Ignition Facility made a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy
than it used up -- a first .
Nuclear fusion is a nuclear reaction that generates up to four times more energy than
nuclear fission -- the process that fuels today's nuclear power plants. One big issue standing
in the way of harnessing this energy for electrical power is that it takes more energy to
create the reaction than we've gotten out of it, until now.
1. We've figured out how the sun generates energy through nuclear fusion in its core.
Energy from the sun is essential for life on Earth. Yet we were not certain of how the sun's
core works until just this year.