Word To Use Today: tokamak.

 This word looks as if it comes from one of the languages of the far North. In fact it is northern, though not quite as northern as that.

A tokamak is a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) space:

Here's someone doing some maintenance inside a tokamak owned by General Atomic. Photo by Rswilcox

As you can see, something could fly round inside the thing for ever without getting to the end of the space, and for this reason a tokamak is used when you need electrons to go a long way without losing them.

Why might this be necessary? Well, in this case, in order to persuade them to fuse together. This process occurs all the time in the sun, and if we could manage to set up such a process on Earth we would have a source of limitless non-polluting power more or less forever.

We can't do that yet, but we are gradually solving some of the problems. One problem is that the plasma - the stuff with the electrons in it - has to be so hot that it will melt anything it touches (including the walls of the tokamak). Scientists have just managed to make a magnet so strong that it keeps the electrons safely in the right place.

So one day, you never know, I might not feel obliged to wear mittens as I type this in order to help save the planet.

Word To Use Today: tokamak. The first tokamak was designed by the Soviet scientists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, inspired by Oleg Lavrentiev. The first working one was built by Natan Yavlinsky in 1958. 

The Russian word токамак is an acronym of either тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками (toroidal'naya kamera s magnitnymi katushkami) toroidal chamber with magnetic coils, or тороидальная камера с аксиальным магнитным полем (toroidal'naya kamera s aksial'nym magnitnym polem), toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field.