"Fusioneers"

Because you never know what your neighbor is concocting in his basement ...

TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: Creates fusion in his home

"Thiago Olson, 17, stands near his nuclear fusion reactor, which he calls "the Fusor," at home in Oakland Township on Friday.

Radioactive Boy Scout

For two years, Olson researched what he would need and scrounged for parts from eBay and the hardware store. Flanges and piping? Check. High-voltage X-ray transformer? Check. Pumps, deuterium source, neutron bubble dosimeter? Check, check, check.

You can read more at The secret world of amateur fusion (pdf) and The Open Source Fusor Research Consortium.

But before Thiago, there was Micheal Li:

Tianhui "Michael" Li, 17, of Portland, submitted a physics entry to the Intel Science Talent Search based on his three-year study of inertial-electrostatic confinement (IEC), a radically different and significantly less costly way of confining nuclear fusion than conventional methods. Michael had already built two IEC reactors prior to the most recent phase of his research, which was conducted at the Propulsion Research Laboratory of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center....

University of Wisconsin-Madison IEC Device

What's Michael doing now?

Four seniors named Marshall Scholars

Princeton seniors Tamara Broderick, Neir Eshel, Tianhui (Michael) Li and P.G. Sittenfeld have been awarded 2007 Marshall Scholarships for graduate study in England....

Li, who is from Portland, Ore., is a computer science major and a certificate candidate in mathematics. He will enroll in a one-year master's program in mathematics at Cambridge, and then plans to pursue doctoral research in mathematics, focusing on information theory.

Now you know ...