Behold: The Z Machine

Here is a previous post, now that there is a picture:
Scientists Hit 3.6 Billion Degrees in Lab - Paris Hilton Says "That's Hot"
I never know when these science articles are kidding anymore. In case you haven’t read your copy of Physicist Review Letters magazine this month, a lab in New Mexico has achieved a temperature of 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit. Actually, I was unimpressed. My high school science lab partner and I came close to that years ago. In fact, I should look at the line-up down at Sandia Labs, to see if he’s involved in this. It'd be nice to see him working again.
There are several big deals here. First, they have attained perfection in a science name: The temperatures were recorded using something called the Z Machine. Not the X Machine or the Y Machine, but the Z Machine. If said wrong, the Z Machine sounds like a bore, like snoring or catching some “Z”s. If you’ve ever heard Al Gore talk in person, you know that he's the human Z Machine. Oh no, now he’ll claim he invented this.
But if said with the right level of intrigue, the Z Machine is a breakthrough, at least in scientific names.
The other big deal is that there is an unexplained burst of energy from an unknown source. Anytime more energy shows up than we put in, it is very exciting. That’s why Cold Fusion at that ridiculous lab in Utah got everybody so carried away. Right during those days when that story broke, I happened to be at an event with Carl Sagan present. I got to ask him a question, and I asked him about cold fusion in Utah. He was skeptical and sure enough the story fell apart within a few days. I thought my old science lab partner would be proud that my one chance to ask Carl Sagan something, turned into a dumb-ass question. Cold fusion would be great in the sense that the byproducts aren’t radioactive and you don’t have the China Syndrome possibilities of having something as hot as the sun here on earth. The interior of the sun, by the way, is 15 million degrees Kelvin, and this experiment reached 2 billion degrees Kelvin.
As exciting as that sounds you have to worry when something that hot exists on earth. If that Bad Boy got loose, it would melt through to China in a heartbeat. This was 4 times hotter than our nuclear fusion experiments. You don’t have to be Paris Hilton to know that’s hot. And yes, it sounds dangerous, but so grave is our need for a new energy source, that at this point, we have to chance it. My favorite line in the whole article was, “Sandia researchers still aren’t sure how the machine achieved the new record.”
Don’t sweat it. Me and my old high school science lab partner didn’t know what we were doing either