Allies, interrupted: on India-U.S. ties

There are enough signs that relations between India and the United States have suffered, with officials in both capitals now freely conceding that their interests are diverging. From the U.S. side, policy decisions by President Donald Trump to walk out of the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran, and the U.S. Congress’s CAATSA law sanctioning Iran and Russia have set up an inevitable conflict. Mr. Trump’s insistence on tough sanctions against all those continuing to engage with Iran and Russia limits India’s options on energy security and defence procurement. During her visit last week, Nikki Haley, the U.S. envoy to the UN, told India to “revise” its relationship with Iran; this line is expected to be reiterated by U.S. interlocutors in the coming days. Added to this confrontation is the U.S.’s tough policy on trade tariffs, applied to ally and adversary alike, including India. For its part, the Narendra Modi government has taken a policy turn away from four years of a pro-U.S. tilt. Mr. Modi’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue last month, in which he invoked the long-lapsed phrase “strategic autonomy”, set at rest any doubt that there is a reset in his foreign policy. Since January, he has personally reached out to the Chinese and Russian Presidents in informal summits, and invited the Iranian President to Delhi. At variance with the U.S. position on limiting engagement with these very countries, India promised to raise oil imports from Iran this year, committed to far greater engagement on the Chabahar port project and oilfields in Iran, while negotiating a $5.5 billion deal with Russia for the S-400 Triumf missile systems. These will trigger U.S. sanctions unless the two countries reach a compromise.

What is more troubling for bilateral ties is that despite the obvious problems, the political will to address these issues is now considerably diminished. In contrast to his meetings with the Russian and Chinese leaderships, Mr. Modi has had little contact with Mr. Trump since their meeting in Manila last November, which by all accounts did not go well. Now, the postponement of the Indian Foreign and Defence Ministers’ “2+2” dialogue with their U.S. counterparts has denied the governments a chance to gather together the fraying bilateral threads. It is imperative that the dialogue be quickly rescheduled. While the U.S. has traditionally applied pressure on its allies to limit their engagement with countries it considers to be threats to the international order, the manner in which deadlines have been publicly issued by the State Department twice this week will only make its demands more difficult for India to even consider. India must now decide how best to deal with the ultimatums, with U.S. sanctions kicking in by November. The clock is ticking on the relationship.

The German Chancellor averts the government’s fall with a compromise

Angela Merkel, now in her fourth term as German Chancellor, has weathered many crises without jeopardising the stability of the government in Berlin, or the integrity of the eurozone. After an inconclusive election in September 2017, she held firm against the demands of smaller parties that seemed incompatible with her moderate and accommodative stance. In March, the initially reluctant centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) saw wisdom in reviving the grand coalition with Ms. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union as the only realistic option to avert another poll. This week she resolved a row on the refugee question that could have ended the CDU’s 70-year alliance with its sister party from Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, and risked her government’s fall. Horst Seehofer, the Interior Minister from the CSU, wanted migrants to be immediately turned back to the country of their original registration in the European Union. The Chancellor held that the proposal was at odds with the bloc’s principle of free movement as embodied in the Schengen passport-free zone and would undermine EU unity. Under the latest compromise, asylum seekers registered outside Germany would be accommodated in transit centres on the border with Austria and sent directly to the respective states. The step represents a victory for Mr. Seehofer, a staunch opponent of the open-doors approach on migration who had threatened to resign form his party and government positions. The compromise is a further dilution of Ms. Merkel’s bold 2015 move to allow about a million refugees into Germany, which was subsequently softened by setting annual limits to curb inflows. As a junior partner in the current coalition, the SPD had expressed scepticism over the latest proposal, insisting that it fell outside the scope of the original agreement with the CDU. While echoing the concern that the transit centres not be reduced to internment camps, Ms. Merkel has given an assurance that people could not be held for long periods under the country’s constitution.

Clearly, Germany’s major mainstream parties are faced with the dangers that liberal and centrist forces are up against across the EU and elsewhere. The number of refugee arrivals into Germany has fallen significantly since 2016. But the issue has acquired renewed urgency in view of elections scheduled for October in Bavaria. The CSU is anxious to arrest the erosion of its popular base in favour of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and has been lurching further to the right itself. The perilous consequences of that slant have been evident in several EU states, the hollowing out of the political middle-ground and strengthening of extreme forces. On the other hand, the reality of mass immigration today calls for a concerted approach on conflict resolution and respect for the rule of law.

A political ploy: on the hike in MSPs

he Centre has cleared a hike in the minimum support prices (MSPs) for the kharif summer crop, ranging from a modest 3.7% increase for urad to as much as a 52.5% for the cereal ragi over the previous season. The NDA government says this ‘redeems’ its promise of assuring farmers a price at least 150% of the cost of production. The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices is said to have gone by this cost-plus-50% principle, in line with the farm sector strategy announced in this year’s Budget. While making calculations, it relied on estimates of input costs actually paid by farmers and the imputed value of unpaid family labour engaged in the field. Yet, the final hikes announced for some crops are even higher – with the MSP for bajra pegged 97% over estimated costs. On an average, the MSP hike notified for 17 kharif crops is about 25% higher and constitutes the biggest hike since 2013-14. All in all, the announcement is an olive branch to farmers who over the past year spearheaded widespread protests over the rural distress. With less than a year to go for the general election, the NDA government has clearly opted to reverse the abundant, inflation-weary caution it had exercised while fixing MSPs. In fact, soon after assuming office in 2014, it had even admonished State governments for granting bonuses over and above the MSPs.

Given that the MSP mechanism is primarily enforced through official procurement only for wheat and paddy, mere announcement of prices for other crops is unlikely to suffice in ensuring farmers get those returns. Anticipating this, the Budget had promised that Niti Aayog would work with the Centre and States to put a fool-proof mechanism in place so that farmers get adequate remuneration if market prices slip below the MSP. This could be through government purchases or a gap-funding mechanism whereby the difference between MSPs and market prices is transferred to farmers. Little is known on the status of this endeavour, or the Centre’s procurement strategy for this year. As things stand, the impact of these hikes on consumer price inflation is expected to vary between 0.5% and 1% by the end of 2018-19. On the other hand, the Centre’s fiscal arithmetic may not be too adversely affected if its outlay on procurement is around ₹15,000 crore, about 0.1% of GDP. But these costs could mount based on the procurement strategy and the new mechanism for MSP enforcement. While rural incomes may rise from this farm-friendly gesture, concomitant reforms to free agricultural markets are vital to prevent a distortionary effect on farmers’ choices on account of MSPs. Easing onerous stockholding limits under the Essential Commodities Act and avoiding frequent curbs on farm exports are key.

Someone Just Killed One of the Last Remaining Jaguars in the US

One of just three jaguars known to be living in the U.S. was recently killed by poachers. Experts identified the jaguar's pelt in a recent photo and say it is Yo'oko, a male jaguar (Panthera onca) that was known to roam the Huachuca Mountains in southern Arizona, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

The rosette patterns on a jaguar's pelt are unique to each individual, a trait that allowed officials with the Arizona Game and Fish Department to identify Yo'oko's pelt in a photo sent to them from the Tucson-based Northern Jaguar Project. The endangered carnivore had been photographed near the Mexican border in Arizona several times in 2016 and 2017, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting endangered species.

It's unclear when Yo'oko died or who killed him, but the Arizona Daily Star reported today (June 28) that he may have been killed by a mountain lion hunter. A local rancher, Carlos Robles Elias, told the Arizona Daily Star that he heard from a friend that the jaguar was trapped and killed six months ago somewhere in Sonora, Mexico, near the U.S. border. [Photos: Elusive Jaguars Take Center Stage]

It's illegal to hunt or kill jaguars, which are an endangered species, and a jaguar may not have been what Yo'oko's killer was after. Elias told the Arizona Daily Star that he suspects a hunter was hired to trap a mountain lion, which are legal to kill in Arizona, but caught Yo'oko instead. Ranchers in the area go after mountain lions and other predators that eat calves and threaten the ranchers' livelihood, the Arizona Daily Star reported.             

The Northern Jaguar Project, a nonprofit working to conserve jaguars, has declined to share the source of the pelt photo. The group doesn’t want to risk losing the trust of ranchers and farmers in the area, whose support the group depends on for conserving endangered native species like jaguars, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

Seven jaguars have been photographed in the U.S. in the past 20 years, although in the last three years, experts have spotted only three of the wild cats, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. However, jaguars once lived throughout the Southwest, from Louisiana to Southern California. Hunting and habitat loss over the past 150 years has decimated the population and jaguars have been listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since 1972.

s the World's First Nuclear Fusion Plant Finally on Track? the new question qrrive in the mind of the scientist<><<><><><>

The world's first nuclear fusion plant has now reached 50 percent completion, the project's director-general announced Wednesday (Dec. 6).

When it is operational, the experimental fusion plant, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), will circulate plasma in its core that is 10 times hotter than the sun, surrounded by magnets as cold as interstellar space.

Its goal? To fuse hydrogen atoms and generate 10 times more power than goes into it by the 2030s.

Ultimately,  ITER is meant to prove that fusion power can be generated on a commercial scale and is sustainable, abundant, safe and clean.

"With ITER and fusion energy, we have a chance to leave a powerful and positive legacy for future generations, instead of the current energy outlook," Bernard Bigot, director-general of ITER, told Live Science. [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas]

Nuclear fusion, the same reaction that occurs in the heart of the sun, merges atomic nuclei to form heavier nuclei. Nuclear fusion has been a long-sought goal because fusion reactions generate far more energy than burning fossil fuels do. For example, a pineapple-size amount of hydrogen atoms offers as much energy as 10,000 tons of coal, according to a statement from the ITER project.

Unlike today's nuclear fission plants —which splits large atoms into smaller ones — a fusion plant would not generate high levels of radioactive waste. And in contrast to fossil fuel plants, fusion energy does not generate the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, or other pollutants. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

ITER aims to use superconducting magnets to fuse hydrogen atoms and produce massive amounts of heat. Future nuclear fusion plants can then use this heat to drive turbines and generate electricity.

The experimental reactor will not use conventional hydrogen atoms, whose nuclei each consist of one proton. Instead, it will fuse deuterium, whose nuclei each possess one proton and one neutron, with tritium, whose nuclei each have one proton and two neutrons. Deuterium is easily extracted from seawater, while tritium will be generated inside the fusion reactor. The supply of these fuels is abundant, enough for millions of years at current global energy usage, according to ITER.

And unlike fission reactors, fusion is very safe: If fusion reactions get disrupted within a fusion plant, fusion reactors will simply shut down safely and without need of external assistance, the ITER project noted. In theory, fusion plants also use only a few grams of fuel at a time, so there is no possibility of a meltdown accident.

Unprecedented challenge, big delays

Although fusion energy has many potential benefits, it has proved extraordinarily difficult to achieve on Earth. Atomic nuclei require huge amounts of heat and pressure before they fuse together.

To overcome that huge challenge, ITER aims to heat hydrogen to about 270 million degrees Fahrenheit (150 million degrees Celsius), 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. This superheated hydrogen plasma will get confined and circulated inside a donut-shaped reactor called a tokamak, which is surrounded by giant superconducting magnets that control the electrically charged plasma. In order for the superconducting magnets to function, they must be cooled to minus 452 degrees F (minus 269 degrees C), as cold as interstellar space.

Industrial facilities around the world are manufacturing 10 million components for the reactor. The reactor is often billed as the most complicated piece of engineering ever built. For example, magnets more than 55 feet high (17 meters) must get fitted together with a margin of error of less than 0.04 inches (1 millimeter).

"So many of the technologies involved are really at the cutting edge," Bigot said. "We are pushing the boundaries in many fields – cryogenics, electromagnetics, even the use of giant tooling devices. Cooling 10,000 tons of superconducting magnet material to minus 269 degrees, for example, is unprecedented in scale."

A scientific partnership of 35 countries is building ITER in southern France. All members share in ITER's technology, and they receive equal access to the intellectual property and innovations that come from the effort.

The idea of a scientific partnership to build a fusion plant was first conceived at the 1985 Geneva Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The ITER project began in earnest in 2007, and was originally due to be completed in 10 years for $5.6 billion. However, the project is more than a decade behind schedule, and its estimated cost has ballooned to about $22 billion.

"When the original ITER project was established and agreed upon by members, their understanding was that the design was nearly complete and ready for construction, and that wasn't even close to being accurate," said William Madia, vice president at Stanford University, who led an independent review of ITER in 2013.

Bigot took over the troubled project in 2015. "It's making better progress for sure," Madia, a former director of the Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national laboratories, told Live Science. "I'm a big supporter and fan of Bernard Bigot — I think he's done a good job. In two or maybe three more years, if he continues to make progress, we may see real changes in attitude regarding ITER."

Circulating plasma

ITER is now halfway toward its initial goal of circulating plasma.

"It is definitely a big milestone for us," Bigot said.

Bigot said ITER remains on schedule for first plasma in 2025. "When we set that schedule in November 2015, we had many skeptics," Bigot said. "This schedule has no 'float' or contingency, meaning it is the best technically achievable schedule. This means we are constantly working to anticipate and mitigate risks that could cause additional delay or cost. It is not easy. But in the past two years, we have met every milestone, and we remain on track. We have also learned a lot about working as a team. This gives us confidence as we face the remaining 50 percent."

The final goal, of course, is not just circulating plasma, but fusing deuterium and tritium to create a "burning" plasma that generates significantly more energy than goes into it. The ITER tokamak should generate 500 megawatts of power, while commercial fusion plants would house larger reactors to generate 10 to 15 times more power. A 2,000-megawatt fusion plant would supply 2 million homes with electricity, the according to a statement.. [Quiz: The Science of Electricity]

"Optimistically, they'll get a burning plasma in the 2030s," Madia said.

If the project proves successful, ITER scientists predict that fusion plants may start coming online as soon as 2040, with a 2 gigawatt fusion plant built to last 60 years or more, according to the statement. The capital costs of building a nuclear fusion plant should be similar to those of current nuclear fission plants ― about $5 billion per gigawatt. At the same time, nuclear fusion plants just use deuterium and tritium, and so avoid "the costs of mining and enriching uranium, or the costs of caring for and disposing of radioactive waste," Bigot said.

Although building a nuclear fusion plant costs more than building a fossil fuel plant, "fossil fuel costs are very high, and fuel costs for fusion are negligible, so over the life of the plant, we expect it will average out," Bigot said.

At the same time, fossil fuels have costs other than financial ones. "The huge cost of fossil fuels is in the environmental impacts, whether due to mining, pollution or release of greenhouse gases," Bigot said. "Fusion is carbon-free."

Nuclear Fusion Power Could Be Here by 2030, One Company Says

A private nuclear-fusion company has heated a plasma of hydrogen to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit  (15 million degrees Celsius)  in a new reactor for the first time — hotter than the core of the sun.

UK-based Tokamak Energy says the plasma test is a milestone on its quest to be the first in the world to produce commercial electricity from fusion power, possibly by 2030.

The company, which is named after the vacuum chamber that contains the fusion reaction inside powerful magnetic fields, announced the creation of the superhot plasma inside its experimental ST40 fusion reactor in early June.

The successful test – the highest plasma temperature achieved so far by Tokamak Energy – means the reactor will now be prepared next year for a test of an even hotter plasma, of more than 180 million degrees F (100 million degrees C).

That will put the ST40 reactor within the operating temperatures needed for controlled nuclear fusion; the company plans to build a further reactor by 2025 that will produce several megawatts of fusion power.

"It's been really exciting," Tokamak Energy co-founder David Kingham told Live Science. "It was very good to see the data coming through and being able to get the high-temperature plasmas — probably beyond what we were hoping for." [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]

Tokamak Energy is one of several privately funded companies racing to create a working fusion reactor that can supply electricity to the grid, perhaps years before the mid-2040s, when the ITER fusion reactor project in France is expected to even achieve its "first plasma."

It could be another decade after that before the experimental ITER reactor is ready to create sustained nuclear fusion — and even then, the reaction will not be used to generate any electricity.

Star in a jar

The nuclear fusion of hydrogen into the heavier element helium is the main nuclear reaction that keeps our sun and other stars burning for billions of years — which is why a fusion reactor is sometimes likened to a "star in a jar."

Nuclear fusion also takes place inside powerful thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs, where hydrogen is heated to fusion temperatures by plutonium fission devices, resulting in an explosion hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than a fission bomb.  

Earthbound controlled fusion projects like ITER and the Tokamak Energy reactors will also fuse hydrogen fuel, but at much higher temperatures and lower pressures than exist inside the sun.

Proponents of nuclear fusion say it could make many other types of electricity generation obsolete, by producing large amounts of electricity from relatively small amounts of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, which are relatively abundant in ordinary seawater.

"Fifty kilograms [110 lbs.] of tritium and 33 kilograms [73 lbs.] of deuterium would produce a gigawatt of electricity for a year," while the amount of heavy hydrogen fuel in the reactor at any one time would be only a few grams, Kingham said.

That’s enough energy to power more than 700,000 average American homes, according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration.

Existing nuclear-fission plants generate electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions, but they are fueled by radioactive heavy elements like uranium and plutonium, and create highly radioactive wastethat must be carefully handled and stored. [5 Everyday Things That Are Radioactive]

In theory, fusion reactors could produce far less radioactive waste than fission reactors, while their relatively small fuel needs mean that nuclear meltdowns like the Chernobyl disaster or Fukushima accident would be impossible, according to the ITER project.

However, veteran fusion researcher Daniel Jassby, who was once a physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, has warned that ITER and other proposed fusion reactors will still create significant amounts of radioactive waste.

Road to nuclear fusion

The ST40 reactor and future reactors planned by Tokamak Energy use a compact spherical tokamak design, with an almost round vacuum chamber instead of the wider donut shape being used in the ITER reactor, Kingham said.

A critical advance was the use of high-temperature superconducting magnets to create the powerful magnetic fields needed to keep the superhot plasma from damaging the reactor walls, he said.

The 7-foot-tall (2.1 meters) electromagnets around the Tokamak Energy reactor were cooled by liquid helium to operate at minus 423.67 degrees F (minus 253.15 degrees C).

The use of advanced magnetic materials gave the Tokamak Energy reactor a significant advantage over the ITER reactor design, which would use power-hungry electromagnets cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, Kingham said.

Other investment-funded fusion projects include reactors being developed General Fusion, based in British Colombia and TAE Technologies, based in California.

A Washington-based company, Agni Energy, has also reported early experimental success with yet a different approach to controlled nuclear fusion, called "beam-target fusion," Live Science reported earlier this week.

One of the most advanced privately funded fusion projects is the compact fusion reactor being developed by U.S.-based defense and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin at its Skunk Works engineering division in California.

The company says a 100-megawatt fusion reactor, capable of powering 100,000 homes, could be small enough to put on a truck trailer and be driven to wherever it is needed.

Beam of Invisibility' Could Hide Objects Using Light

Once thought of as the province of only "Star Trek" or "Harry Potter," cloaking technologies could become a reality with a specially designed material that can mask itself from other forms of light when it is hit with a "beam of invisibility," according to a new study.

Theoretically, most "invisibility cloaks" would work by smoothly guiding light waves around objects so the waves ripple along their original trajectories as if nothing were there to obstruct them. Previous work found that cloaking devices that redirect other kinds of waves, such as sound waves, are possible as well.

But the new study's  researchers, from at the Technical University of Vienna, have developed a different strategy to render an object invisible — using a beam of invisibility. [Now You See It: 6 Tales of Invisibility in Pop Culture]

Complex materials such as sugar cubes are opaque because their disorderly structures scatter light around inside them multiple times, said study senior author Stefan Rotter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna.

"A light wave can enter and exit the object, but will never pass through the medium on a straight line," Rotter said in a statement. "Instead, it is scattered into all possible directions."

With their new technique, Rotter and his colleagues did not want to reroute the light waves.

"Our goal was to guide the original light wave through the object, as if the object was not there at all. This sounds strange, but with certain materials and using our special wave technology, it is indeed possible," study co-author Andre Brandstötter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna, said in the statement.

The concept involves shining a beam, such as a laser, onto a material from above to pump it full of energy. This can alter the material's properties, making it transparent to other wavelengths of light coming in from the side.

"To achieve this, a beam with exactly the right pattern has to be projected onto the material from above — like from a standard video projector, except with much higher resolution," study lead author Konstantinos Makris, now at the University of Crete in Greece, said in a statement.

The pattern that is projected onto an object to render it invisible must correspond perfectly to the inner irregularities of that item that usually scatters light, the researchers said.

"Every object we want to make transparent has to be irradiated with its own specific pattern, depending on the microscopic details of the scattering process inside," Rotter said in a statement. "The method we developed now allows us to calculate the right pattern for any arbitrary scattering medium."

Rotter and his colleagues are now carrying out experiments to see whether their idea will actually work. "We think that an experiment would be easiest to perform in acoustics," Rotter told Live Science. For instance, loudspeakers could generate sound waves to make a tube "transparent" to other forms of sound.

"For me, personally, the most surprising aspect is that this concept works at all," Rotter said. "There may be many more surprises when digging deeper along these lines."

Eventually, similar research could also experiment with light, he said. Such work could have applications in telecommunication networks, Rotter said. "It is clear, however, that considerable work is still required to get this from the stage of fundamental research to practical applications," Rotter said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Sept. 8 in the journal Light: Science & Applications.