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Taiyô Tenno is a young Japanese student on a world tour of "art masterpieces"; Soléane is "a scientist at heart," presumably French, who speaks perfect Japanese. They meet at Cézanne's workshop in Aix-en-Provence and soon find themselves seated at the terrace of Les Deux Garçons, the town's most elegant café.

Soléane speaks Japanese because her work in "energy research" implies a lot of "professional dealings with Japan." Taiyô Tenno is impressed, especially when Soléane explains that her work is about "duplicating the energy-generating process in the Sun and stars"...

The first manga on ITER—"A small sun on Earth"—has just been published by ITER Japan and is available in Japanese, French and English.

Visit this website to download the manga.

The International Zvenigorod Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion is an annual rendezvous near Moscow for fusion research specialists from Russia and abroad. For one week in April, recent achievements in high and low temperature plasma research, the field of controlled fusion, and the development of plasma and beam technologies are presented through lectures, short talks and poster presentations.

Russian participation in the ITER Project was reported at the "ITER Project: Step to future energy" portion of the program under the direction of Anatoly Krasilnikov, director of the Russian Domestic Agency. Representatives of the research centres and the industrial companies involved in the procurement of ITER systems and components were present to report on the challenging technical specifications of the packages under Russian responsibility and the benefits of participation in ITER for the Russian research infrastructure overall.

More on the annual conference here.

--ITER Russia

Drawing inspiration from the robotic tasks that will be faced at ITER during installation and maintenance activities, the annual ITER Robots contest challenges students of different ages to imagine, design, and program Lego robots. Launched in 2012 by Agence Iter France and the ITER Organization, the program is growing every year.

As Newsline reported last June, the 2017 ITER Robots competition involved 600 students from 27 schools organized into 46 teams. This year, the competition will expand to about 70 teams and also offer a new program—ITER Robots Junior—for primary age students in 4th, 5th and 6th grade (12 additional teams). And who better to help design the new junior competition than 14-year-old Camylle Jordan, who spent one week as an intern in ITER's Remote Handling Section.

According to Jean-Pierre Martins, the ITER remote handling engineer who supervised Camylle, "she solved every issue she encountered in a pragmatic manner." In addition to becoming familiar with the complexity of the ITER Project, Camylle had to adapt her programming skills to work with a Thymio robot and to learn the basics of SolidWorks ®, a Computer Assisted Design tool.

The young intern left the ITER engineers impressed with her efficiency and confidence. She successfully tested the proposed curriculum and competition design, proactively suggesting and demonstrating ways to improve the robot mission. She participated in the official kick-off meeting of the ITER Robots Junior challenge, interacting with people from ITER, Agence Iter France and the French education system (Education Nationale). And she found time to fit in a tour of the ITER worksite and virtual reality room, and to give an on-camera Facebook interview to student journalists.

Most importantly, she documented her progress systematically, keeping a logbook of written records, photos, and videos, to ensure the contribution of her workweek at ITER would not be lost.