Something on Earth reached a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius – seven times hotter than the sun – and it lasted for 18 minutes. That's the latest achieved in a nuclear reactor by Chinese researchers in Hefei, who broke their previous record of 403 seconds in April 2023.

Such experiments are sometimes referred to as creating an "artificial sun", because the goal of generating such extreme heat is to trigger nuclear fusion, which is how the sun powers itself.

The possibility of producing cheap, virtually unlimited and environmentally friendly energy via nuclear fusion is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It may soon become a matter of science and economics.