When a gull dive-bombs your picnic, paleontologist Steve Brusatte sees more than a bird thief: he sees a small dinosaur with unmistakable velociraptor attitude. In this New Scientist interview, the author of the new book The Story of Birds makes a bold claim — birds aren't just descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs, the only branch that survived the asteroid.
For fifty years the tokamak — the classic donut-shaped reactor — has dominated fusion research. Now a Munich startup called Proxima Fusion, spun out of the Max Planck Institute and freshly funded with €411 million including checks from Google and energy giant RWE, is betting everything on the shape the field walked away from half a century ago: the stellarator, a twisted "donut" so absurdly complicated it was long believed impossible to build. This is the story of why fusion is so hard, why the tokamak has a fatal flaw, and how Europe's most ambitious energy bet plans to build the first stellarator power plant in history.
Imagine sitting at your desk, but instead of staring at a blinking cursor and manually typing out lines of code, you feel more like an orchestra conductor. You aren't writing the notes anymore; you are guiding an entire crew of AI agents.
That is precisely the shift software creator Peter Steinberger highlights in his work. Rather than casual "vibe coding," he calls his approach agentic engineering. He barely writes code by hand anymore; instead, he designs systems, establishes the core architecture, and lets AI agents handle the boring plumbing work.