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YOU'RE driving down the motorway at night when you pass a truck that's glowing purple. Don't worry, it isn't leaking toxic chemicals: it just has a clever way of reducing drag by using plasma.

Trucks are sometimes fitted with devices such as spoilers to reduce drag. Panels underneath the body are known as "side skirts", while "rear tail fairings" are fitted to the back.

"Streamlining a truck with the system will pay for itself in months. The only side effect is the glow"

The aerodynamics of trucks is bad, says Hyeok-bin Kwon of the Korea National University of Transportation in Chungju, whose own work uses plasma to streamline high-speed trains. Fortunately it's easier to reduce drag on a truck than on a train, he says, because there are so many are many shape modifications you can use.

Bajjuri's team is working to optimise the system for trucks before wind tunnel tests later this year.

But now, finally, the joke may no longer be true: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor - and it's one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming near.

Using these new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils "just ripples through the whole design," says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "It changes the whole thing."

The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma - that is, the working material of a fusion reaction - but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned. The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design. The proposed reactor, using a tokamak (donut-shaped) geometry that is widely studied, is described in a paper in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, co-authored by Whyte, PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom, and 11 others at MIT. The paper started as a design class taught by Whyte and became a student-led project after the class ended.

Power plant prototype

The new reactor is designed for basic research on fusion and also as a potential prototype power plant that could produce significant power. The basic reactor concept and its associated elements are  based on well-tested and proven principles developed over decades of research at MIT and around the world, the team says.

"The much higher magnetic field," Sorbom says, "allows you to achieve much higher performance."

Fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, involves fusing pairs of hydrogen atoms together to form helium, accompanied by enormous releases of energy. The hard part has been confining the superhot plasma - a form of electrically charged gas -  while heating it to temperatures hotter than the cores of stars. This is where the magnetic fields are so important-they effectively trap the heat and particles in the hot center of the device.

While most characteristics of a system tend to vary in proportion to changes in dimensions, the effect of changes in the magnetic field on fusion reactions is much more extreme: The achievable fusion power increases according to the fourth power of the increase in the magnetic field. Thus, doubling the field would produce a 16-fold increase in the fusion power. "Any increase in the magnetic field gives you a huge win," Sorbom says.

Tenfold boost in power

While the new superconductors do not produce quite a doubling of the field strength, they are strong enough to increase fusion power by about a factor of 10 compared to standard superconducting technology, Sorbom says. This dramatic improvement leads to a cascade of potential improvements in reactor design.

The world's most powerful planned fusion reactor, a huge device called ITER that is under construction in France, is expected to cost around $40 billion. Sorbom and the MIT team estimate that the new design, about half the diameter of ITER (which was designed before the new superconductors became available), would produce about the same power at a fraction of the cost and in a shorter construction time.

But despite the difference in size and magnetic field strength, the proposed reactor, called ARC, is based on "exactly the same physics" as ITER, Whyte says. "We're not extrapolating to some brand-new regime," he adds.

Another key advance in the new design is a method for removing the the fusion power core from the donut-shaped reactor without having to dismantle the entire device. That makes it especially well-suited for research aimed at further improving the system by using different materials or designs to fine-tune the performance.

In addition, as with ITER, the new superconducting magnets would enable the reactor to operate in a sustained way, producing a steady power output, unlike today's experimental reactors that can only operate for a few seconds at a time without overheating of copper coils.

Liquid protection

Another key advantage is that most of the solid blanket materials used to surround the fusion chamber in such reactors are replaced by a liquid material that can easily be circulated and replaced, eliminating the need for costly replacement procedures as the materials degrade over time.

"It's an extremely harsh environment for [solid] materials," Whyte says, so replacing those materials with a liquid could be a major advantage.

Right now, as designed, the reactor should be capable of producing about three times as much electricity as is needed to keep it running, but the design could probably be improved to increase that proportion to about five or six times, Sorbom says. So far, no fusion reactor has produced as much energy as it consumes, so this kind of net energy production would be a major breakthrough in fusion technology, the team says.

The design could produce a reactor that would provide electricity to about 100,000 people, they say. Devices of a similar complexity and size have been built within about five years, they say.

"Fusion energy is certain to be the most important source of electricity on earth in the 22nd century, but we need it much sooner than that to avoid catastrophic global warming," says David Kingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy Ltd. in the UK, who was not connected with this research. "This paper shows a good way to make quicker progress," he says.

The MIT research, Kingham says, "shows that going to higher magnetic fields, an MIT speciality, can lead to much smaller (and hence cheaper and quicker-to-build) devices." The work is of "exceptional quality," he says; "the next step ... would be to refine the design and work out more of the engineering details, but already the work should be catching the attention of policy makers, philanthropists and private investors."

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

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As the cost of solar energy falls, more and more buildings are being outfitted with photovoltaic systems -- and some even generate more electricity than they use. Structures like that are called "energy positive" and it's a pretty impressive feat. If your home or business can produce more power than it needs, it can actually turn a profit, since local utility companies can buy that excess electricity from you and feed it into the grid for others to use. We've rounded up some of the most incredible energy-positive buildings from around the world -- read on for a closer look.

The spinning, sun-chasing Heliotrope Our first stop is an amazing and eye-catchingsolar home in Germany designed by Rolf Disch. The aptly named Heliotrope is one of the world's first energy-positive homes, and it can generate up to five times as much power as it needs to operate. The home sports a giant angled solar array on the roof and the entire structure is mounted on a pole timed to rotate 180 degrees each day as it follows the sun.

Australia's first carbon-positive homeDesigned by architecture firm ArchiBlox, theCarbon Positive House is a green dream that features passive heating and cooling as well as smart approaches for recycling rainwater. And it's not just impressive because of its energy-positive status, but also because it's a prefabricated building. Measuring just 800 square feet, it combines eco-conscious design with a cozy, contemporary interior where residents can enjoy the cool air pumped in from the shaded south side of the home. This one's just a prototype, but we're eagerly awaiting the day when a home like this can be ordered and built anywhere in the world.

Sometime this week a large milk refrigerator will arrive in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Since Bangladesh produces nearly four million tons of milk per year, that hardly seems remarkable; but this is a special kind of refrigerator.

Made by Promethean Power Systems, a company based in Pune, India, and Boston, the system keeps milk chilled with a thermal battery that stores energy and releases it, as cooling power, over the course of a day. Like India, Bangladesh has an outdated power grid that supplies electricity sporadically-often as little as a few hours per day. Rural dairy farmers on the subcontinent bring their milk to village collection centers that typically rely on diesel generators, a costly, dirty way of providing electricity.

"We've been at this for eight years," says White, and "we've gone through all sorts of different technologies, attempts, and failures to figure out a solution."

At first, he says, they were determined to craft a technology that relied on solar power-a noble attempt that ultimately failed because solar power, like grid power in India and Bangladesh, is by its nature intermittent, and refrigerators need constant power. Eventually they settled on a thermal energy storage system that uses a phase-change material to store energy in the form of ice. When the grid is operating, a portion of the material freezes, and the battery circulates that thermal energy into a heat exchanger to keep milk chilled over the course of the day. The thermal battery can store up to 28 kilowatt-hours of energy.

"We're not delivering new forms of energy; we're simply storing the intermittent power that they do get and parceling it out over time," says White. Promethean Power has sold around 150 systems in India to date. The dairy collection center in Chetawala, in the state of Rajasthan, estimates that it saves around 40,000 rupees ($628) a month on diesel fuel and reduced milk spoilage since installing a Rapid Milk Chiller from Promethean Power. The center has increased its average daily milk production from 500 liters a day to around 800.

That's a huge improvement in a country where more than 300 million people live without access to electricity and even villages that are nominally electrified often have spotty service at best. Prime minister Narendra Modi, who took office last year, has pledged to bring reliable electricity to the full population by 2022.