NO CORRELATION EXISTS BETWEEN SOLAR NEUTRINOS AND SUNSPOTS, says Gunther Walther, a mathematician at Stanford. Neutrinos provide the only direct link between the sun's core and the Earth's surface, so physicists are eager to extract maximum information from their meager neutrino inventory, especially from the long-running detector in South Dakota. Walther (415-723-3066, walther@stat.stanford.edu) argues that studies which perceive an anti-correlation (sunspots go up when neutrino flux go down and vice versa) in this data are using statistical tests that are not really applicable to solar neutrino observations which are gathered over time, and that claims of correlation in this case are erroneous. Moreover, Walther feels that the dangers in using standard statistical tests for such time-series measurements are not properly treated by statistics textbooks and that therefore this problem has generally gone unrecognized in many parts of scientific work. (Upcoming article in Physical Review Letters, tent. 24 November 1997.)

RECORD HIGH LEVELS OF FUSION POWER AND ENERGY have been observed at the Joint European Torus (JET) device in England. A peak power of 13 MW was reached and a power output of 10 MW was sustained for at least a half second, pretty impressive achievements for a fusion experiment. The burning of the deuterium-tritium fuel inside the chamber, and the production of alpha particles (which, if they can be contained, aid the heating), went according to schedule, bolstering expectations that the proposed International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) would work as planned. (Nature, 6 Nov.)

CHARGE CLOUDS IN A BOTTLE. It is now possible to store rare ions (such as antiprotons and bare uranium) indefinitely, potentially increasing the accuracy of atomic clocks based on ions. In work to be described at next week's meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics in Pittsburgh, UC-San Diego and NIST researchers (Pei Huang, NIST, 303-497-3508) have developed a new technique for controlling a "non-neutral plasma," a gas made entirely of positive particles such as magnesium ions or negative particles such as electrons. Charged plasmas are often held in Penning traps, devices that use electric and magnetic fields to trap them. However, the plasma slowly loses angular momentum while rotating around such a trap, and particles eventually leak out of the trap. By introducing additional electric fields that revolve around the trap's magnetic field, the researchers effectively add angular momentum to the plasma, preventing the particles from escaping. This result may also help in the more difficult task of controlling the gases of positive and negative particles that co-exist in magnetic fusion devices. (For more information, see item and picture in the plasma meeting press release at the Physics News Preview site.)

CHANNELING OF PARTICLE BEAMS USING NANOTUBES may be possible. Tests at Fermilab and elsewhere have shown that high-energy beams can be deflected by the rows of atoms in suitably bent crystals (see Update 261). Now scientists at the Erevan Physical Institute in Armenia have proposed that crystals, or "ropes," of single-walled nanotubes (SWNT's) would be even better as efficient beam channeling materials since the carbon nanotubes' large bore (13.8 angstrom diameter) allows plenty of room for the passage of particle beams. (L.A. Gevorgyan et al., 10 Sept. 1997, JETP (Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics) Letters, a Russian journal, with English translation published by AIP.)