Cool

Youngest kid to achieve nuclear fusion.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center's director--You gotta see this kid!--Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn't understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family's garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core--becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.

Hat-tip: @ariarmstrong

David Deutsch, call your office!

Technology Posted by John Kranz at February 16, 2012 2:10 PM