About 60 years have passed since Russian physicist Lev Artsimovich said nuclear fusion “will be ready when society needs it”. That moment is now drawing closer after the UK Atomic Energy Authority last week announced a “major breakthrough for fusion energy research”. 

Scientists at the government research organisation have stabilised the fusion process for the first time, in a world-first experiment in a spherical tokamak, a more compact fusion machine than those used in most research. This marks a “significant step forward” to a future of potentially unlimited clean energy, the authority said.

What is fusion?
Nuclear power can be produced in two ways:  fission creates energy by splitting heavy atoms, while fusion creates energy by fusing light atoms together.

In fusion, hydrogen isotopes are heated to extremely high temperatures until they form plasma – superheated, electrically charged gas. The atoms’ nuclei then have enough energy to overcome their repulsion and fuse together, forming helium. In the process, they lose a small amount of mass, which is converted into a massive amount of energy. It’s the same reaction that powers the stars.

Fusion offers a “virtually limitless, carbon-free source of energy”, said The Times. Scientists estimate that one glass of fusion fuel could produce enough energy to power a home for more than 800 years. And unlike fission, it produces no long-lived radioactive waste, and couldn’t cause a runaway nuclear accident like Chernobyl.

“If you know how to build a fusion power plant, you can have unlimited energy anywhere and forever,” said Bill Gates on his Gates Notes website this month. 

When might fusion deliver power to the grid?
The world’s biggest fusion experiment, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is under way in France. The publicly funded project is backed by 33 countries, including China, Russia and the US – but it has “suffered multiple delays and setbacks” and isn’t expected online before 2035, said The B1M. It’s also “basically a big experiment” to show how feasible fusion is at scale “and won’t provide electricity for people to actually use”.

Many private and state-backed Chinese enterprises are also “racing to build a commercial fusion reactor by 2035 or sooner”, said the South China Morning Post. But even if the most ambitious timelines are achieved, fusion power plants are not likely to be widespread until at least the 2040s.

Every national leadership position in Iceland – including president, prime minister, bishop and police chief – is now held by a woman, but there’s still “work to be done”, according to President Halla Tómasdóttir.

She spoke out as Icelanders went on strike last week to mark the 50th anniversary of the “Kvennafrí” (“women’s day off”), which drew attention to how essential – and how undervalued – women’s labour was to their society.

‘Sweeping change’
Before the historic strike, Icelandic women’s work was “valued less than men’s” and their earnings were about 40% lower, said The i Paper. On 24 October 1975, 90% of the country’s women stopped work in protest at this inequality, and 25,000 gathered in Reykjavík to demand equal pay and recognition of their contributions to keeping the nation running. The strikers refused to do both paid jobs and unpaid labour such as childcare and housework.

The protest paralysed the country, with schools, shops and offices closing, and led to “sweeping change”, said The Guardian. The world’s first female elected president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, took office in Iceland five years later.

‘Still no paradise’
Iceland is the only country to have closed the gender gap by more than 90%, according to the World Economic Forum. President Tómasdóttir has said that Iceland is now “powered by two sustainable energies: geothermal power and girl power”.

But the country’s women have warned that their country is still “no paradise”, said The i Paper. The pay gap has grown there in the past two years and the labour market “remains highly gender-segregated”. Women are still doing most of the unpaid care and housework, and more than 40% have suffered gender-based or sexual violence.

Women “must also be alert to the backlash we see today, with the rise of populist and extremist right-wing forces,” said Unnur Agustsdottir, who was 20 when the first strike took place. The rights won by women have been “achieved” through “hard struggle” and “must be defended”.

A costumed man joins in Mexico City’s Catrina parade of skeletons in the run-up to the Day of the Dead, or Día de Muertos. Families gather to celebrate their deceased loved ones during Mexico’s annual holiday, which kicks off on Friday evening.

Rodrigo Oropeza / AFP / Getty Images

It might seem “sacrilegious to abandon the ritual of opening a beautiful, weighty glass bottle sealed with a cork”, said Beth Brickenden in The Independent, but boxed wine has once again “become a vessel worthy of our attention” in the push for sustainability.

First developed in the 1960s with the goal of “keeping wine fresh for longer, without the risk of oxidation”, these boxes feature a “collapsible plastic bag” and easy-to-use tap. But the world “wasn’t quite ready to take it seriously” and the “goon bag” became synonymous with “cheap, headache-inducing wine”.

Consumers are increasingly receptive to the change, however, with the UK boxed-wine market expected to grow to more than £300 million by 2030 – “almost double what it was in 2021”, said Hannah Crosbie in The Guardian.

This “spike in interest” can be attributed, in part, to a change in drinking culture: many of us are drinking less, and the six-week freshness window of boxed wine is perfect for those who don’t finish an entire bottle within a week and end up pouring out the rest as a “little treat to the sink”.  Another bonus is that producing boxed wines uses “significantly less energy” than glass bottles as they are lighter to transport, giving them a lower carbon footprint.

As for boxed wines to look out for, said Jane MacQuitty in The Times, Marks & Spencer’s La Dame en Rose, offers “oodles of punchy” and “peppery spice” for only £13 for a 1.5-litre pouch. Or try Waitrose’s Blueprint New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, which is perfect for “fans of Kiwi ‘savvy’”, packing a “zingy lemon zest, grass and passion fruit-licked” punch.

Deporting the baby with the bathwater
Jane Eliot in The Critic
The Conservatives’ plan to strip many people of their settled status and force them to leave the UK is “vindictive” and “nonsensical”, writes Jane Eliot. It may sound good “to a tiny minority of hardliners”, but if enacted, it would cause “turmoil on an unprecedented scale”. Deporting “law-abiding people” is “not only socially, economically and ethically disastrous: it’s un-British” – and a “not very cleverly disguised admission” that the Tories are “out of ideas”.

Singing together is bringing us together
Jane Shilling in The Telegraph
Around 40,000 choirs are “operating across the UK, with 2.14 million regular singers – an all-time high”, writes Jane Shilling. “Choral singing is relentlessly inclusive” and, as Gareth Malone showed in his classic BBC series “The Choir”, “singing with others brings happiness”. And that’s not the only benefit: research has found that simply “lifting up your voice” can “help with everything from breathing, posture and muscle tension to pain, loneliness, depression and the symptoms of dementia”.

How to Make AI More Useful
Bhaskar Chakravorti on Foreign Policy
“As fears of an AI bubble grow,” it’s time to ask if “the industry can reset its priorities” from “building ever more powerful large language models” to focusing on “more immediate needs”, writes Tufts University’s dean of global business Bhaskar Chakravorti. AI could be used in poorer countries for “crop disease detection”, “predictive” infrastructure maintenance and “credit scoring systems”. These “small AI applications have a greater chance of delivering impact” and could help lift millions “out of poverty”.