Tag: south korea

Korean Fusion Reactor Breaks Record, Staying 7 Times Hotter Than The Sun’s Core

Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research, or KSTAR, is one of the most advanced test fusion reactors on the planet. Nicknamed the Korean artificial sun, it has now demonstrated sustained fusion temperature for almost a minute and the ability to contain extremely hot plasma for over 100 seconds.

Fusion is what powers stars, but in stars, it happens at lower temperatures than we need to do it here on Earth. That’s because gravity is keeping everything packed together so fusion is more likely to happen. So the temperature required on Earth for a Tokamak system – which is a donut-shaped reactor – is about seven times the temperature at the core of the Sun: 100 million °C (180 million °F).

KSTAR first reached this threshold in 2018 but only for 1.5 seconds. A year later, they were able to keep the plasma that hot for 8 seconds, increasing it to 20 seconds in 2020. The last record was in 2021, when the plasma was kept that hot for half a minute. Since then, the team at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) has upgraded the device by building a new tungsten divertor environment and they have pushed the temperature for longer.

Now, KSTAR can sustain 100 million °C for 48 seconds – and it can keep hot plasma in the high-confinement mode (also known as H-mode) for 102 seconds. The goal is to achieve 300 seconds of burning plasma by the end of 2026. 

“Despite being the first experiment run in the environment of the new tungsten divertors, thorough hardware testing and campaign preparation enabled us to achieve results surpassing those of previous KSTAR records in a short period,” Dr Si-Woo Yoon, Director of the KSTAR Research Center, said in a statement.

“To achieve the ultimate goal of KSTAR operation, we plan to sequentially enhance the performance of heating and current drive devices and also secure the core technologies required for long-pulse high performance plasma operations.”

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How young religious Australian women were ‘brainwashed’ and lured into a South Korean sex cult to become ‘spiritual brides’ of a convicted rapist

A South Korean cult has been accused of recruiting vulnerable young Australian women at shopping centres to be brainwashed and then sent abroad. 

The victims were told they were the ‘spiritual brides’ of Jung Myung Seok (JMS), the self-proclaimed second coming of Jesus Christ and messiah of the Providence church he founded in 1978.

But JMS is a convicted rapist and the women were sent to his Wolmyeongdong compound not for any spiritual reasons, but to allegedly be sexually assaulted.

The recruiters are reportedly told to find tall, slim white women for JMS, and two Australian survivors, Liz and Amy (not their real names) have spoken out to warn others to be aware they could be targeted too.

Amy was recruited while on her way to meet a friend to go bowling at Melbourne Central shopping centre, she told Channel 7’s Spotlight program.

‘All of a sudden, somebody tapped me on my shoulder, I turned around and two girls were smiling at me … they asked me to do a survey about my faith,’ she said. 

Amy was 22 at that time in 2014 and had a growing interest in Christianity. The chance encounter would change her life for the worst. 

‘I believed that this was a almost an elevated version of Christianity because that’s how they pitched it to me,’ she said.

Liz had just finished Year 12 when she was approached at the Canberra Centre and thought it ‘sounded really fun and exciting’.

‘I was on a gap year, so I was looking to travel, I was working part-time, and I was also thinking about what I was going do with my life. 

‘I was in a really good position to be susceptible to psychological coercion, and they definitely took advantage of that.’

The young women attended bible study classes and lecturers and eventually moved into cult houses in Australia, where their lives were strictly controlled, including getting up at 2am every day to pray to JMS. 

In time, their physical and mental resistance was worn away and the people they thought of as friends told them they were ‘faith stars’.

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South Korea: Hackers Steal ‘Naked Photos’ from over 700 Smart Home Devices, Sell for Bitcoin

An unknown party recently hacked at least 700 smart home devices across South Korea and sold explicit images and videos accessed through the devices on the dark web, South Korea’s National Police confirmed Monday when announcing a criminal investigation into the incident.

“After receiving a call from the Korea Internet & Security Agency and starting an inspection, it seems that there were about 700 shootings [recordings],” Nam Gu-Jun, the chief of South Korea’s National Investigation Headquarters — which is a branch of South Korea’s National Police Agency — told reporters on November 29.

“The police have requested the removal of the video from the website where it was posted,” Nam said, as quoted by South Korea’s Kukmin Ilbo newspaper.

“However, since it is a website with a server in a foreign country and a privately operated website, it is unclear whether the request for deletion will be accepted,” the official acknowledged.

“For this reason, the police are also discussing ways to prevent exposure on the domestic Internet with relevant domestic agencies,” he revealed.

The South Korean tech news website IT Chosun exclusively reported on November 15 that hundreds of smart home devices in apartments across Seoul, South Korea’s national capital, and on the southern Korean island of Jeju were recently hacked. Some of the video footage filmed during the hacking was later sold for “‘0.1 BTC” on the dark web. BTC stands for Bitcoin, a type of cryptocurrency. A sum of 0.1 BTC equals about 8 million South Korean won, or roughly USD $6,717.

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South Korea sticks to flu vaccine plan despite safety fears after 25 die

South Korean officials refused on Thursday to suspend a seasonal influenza inoculation effort, despite growing calls for a halt, including an appeal from a key group of doctors, after the deaths of at least 25 of those vaccinated.

Health authorities said they found no direct links between the deaths and the vaccines.

At least 22 of the dead, including a 17-year-old boy, were part of a campaign to inoculate 19 million teenagers and senior citizens for free, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said.

“The number of deaths has increased, but our team sees low possibility that the deaths resulted from the shots,” the agency’s director, Jeong Eun-kyeong, told parliament.

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