Presumably the iPad creates transparently also

By Narr SD

We can edit and create here on this keyboard , and with these tools, better than ever with the laptop.

The editor works surprisingly well, in tandem with the Apple tools such as Images. Let's try the big one, what happens with Pages, what I have lying around there.

So, this works fine -- except for extra lines, and that hou have to put in your own formatting for headers.

I can make a tool to zap out the extra lines, and should do that soon.

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Can Fusion Solve the Climate Crisis?

A remarkable achievement

As my colleague Ken Chang wrote, scientists working on a mammoth experiment at Livermore, in which lasers are used to fuse two forms of hydrogen into helium, reported that, for the first time, it had released more energy than the lasers put in.

That’s a big deal. Scientists around the world have been trying to develop controllable fusion (as opposed to the out-of-control fusion of a hydrogen bomb) for the better part of a century. While there have been many advances, a fundamental stumbling block remained. Fusion requires so much power, with temperatures of millions of degrees needed for it to occur, that none of the experiments produced a net gain of energy.

That hurdle is now out of the way, at least for this kind of laser-instigated fusion. That makes it easier to envision a future of fusion power plants that would produce essentially no planet-warming carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. They would also have advantages over current nuclear plants that split, rather than fuse, atoms, because the fuel needed for fusion is more readily available and the radioactive waste produced is far less dangerous and problematic.

… but huge hurdles remain

An experiment like the one at Livermore, in which one tiny pellet was vaporized by 192 laser beams, is one thing, but a power plant that rapidly vaporizes thousands upon thousands of pellets and safely draws off the released energy for conversion into electricity is quite another. That’s not to say it can’t be done, it will just take time. Lots of time.

The same goes for the other major approach to developing fusion, which uses huge, powerful electromagnets to confine a cloud of hydrogen gas stripped of its electrons, raising temperatures to the point where fusion can occur. This is the so-called tokamak approach (taken from a Russian acronym for the doughnut-like chamber that contains the gas cloud).

In 2017, I visited the largest tokamak project, ITER, in southern France. It’s a mind­bogglingly complex machine, a multinational effort being assembled from parts produced in many countries. The project was first envisioned in the 1980s; the hope is that it will

produce fusion by the mid-2030s.

But ITER, like the Livermore project, is only an experiment. Even if ITER works, designing and building a plant that captures the energy from a tokamak and converts it to electricity is most likely very far-off.

And we can write after the picture with the simple trick, but remember to fix this