"Johnny Ryan's A History of the Internet and the Digital Future has just been released and is already drawing rave reviews. Ars Technica is proud to present three chapters from the book, condensed and adapted for our readers. This first installment is adapted from Chapter 1, "A Concept Born in the Shadow of the Nuke," and it looks at the role that the prospect of nuclear war played in the technical and policy decisions that gave rise to the Internet..."

North Korea has announced that it has made significant progress towards the development of thermo-nuclear power.

It is a claim that is likely to be met with some scepticism.

Despite hopes that the technology can produce large quantities of cheap, clean energy, no country has so far succeeded in making it work.

North Korea is one of the world's poorest countries and struggles to generate enough electricity for lighting and other basic needs.

Controlled nuclear fusion just got a whole lot closer to reality. This week, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory fired up 192 gigantic lasers to a mind-boggling level of 1 megajoule for the first time, approaching the hellish situation needed to ignite a controlled nuclear fusion reaction for the first time.

Now that they've broken the megajoule barrier, when will they reach that illusive goal of creating the first human-controlled sun?