Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have created plasma that exceeds 2 billion degrees Kelvin -- that's hotter than the center of the Sun, which is only 15 million degrees Kelvin. The best part? They don't know why it happened. The article says they don't know how they did it, but they know exactly how, because they've been able to repeat it.
One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.
Get these guys to work figuring out how to do this cheaply, on a small scale, and then we can forget about all this foreign oil.
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[...] Last week, I linked to an article about an experiment that created plasma much hotter than the center of the sun. Here’s a picture of the machine that did it. The caption also includes this gem: During the unexpected powerful contained explosion, the Z machine released about 80 times the world’s entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second. [...]