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Dubbed the compact fusion reactor (CFR), the device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling—ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.

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The worker was immediately isolated after reporting a fever on Tuesday.

“Health officials have interviewed the latest patient to quickly identify any contacts or potential exposures, and those people will be monitored,” the department said.

At a press briefing on Wednesday morning, Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings said the city’s fire-rescue department has begun decontaminating common areas of the new patient’s apartment and outside the building, and has informed neighbors of the diagnosis. The new patient lives alone and has no pets, Rawlings said.

“The only way that we are going to beat this is person by person, moment by moment, detail by detail,” Rawlings said. “We want to deal with facts, not fear … It may get worse before it gets better, but it will get better,” he added.

A nurse, 26-year-old Nina Pham, was the first person to have been infected with Ebola in the US, and was diagnosed this weekend. She had cared for Duncan during much of his 11 days as a patient at Texas Health Presbyterian hospital in Dallas. He died in an isolation ward on 8 October.

The hospital said on Tuesday that Pham was in good condition.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it was performing confirmation testing of Texas’s preliminary examinations on the new patient.

Brent crude for November slid earlier and lurched lower toward the end of the day, dropping by more than $4 a barrel to dip below $85 a barrel for the first time since 2010. It was the biggest one-day drop in prices since 2011. The benchmark settled at $85.04, $3.85 lower on the day.

Oil dived more than $4 a barrel on Tuesday, its biggest drop in more than two years as mounting evidence of slackening demand and unrelenting U.S. shale output left traders struggling to peg a floor for crude’s four-month rout.

The companies are covering up to $US20,000 ($NZ25,526) for the procedure and annual storage costs, NBC said on Tuesday, citing sources at the Silicon Valley firms.

Queried about the reports by AFP, Facebook and Apple declined to comment.

According to the online forum eggsurance.com, the procedure is gaining popularity as more women delay plans to start a family.

“Women today are at a cultural and generational crossroads. We have the same career expectations and demands as men,” says a post on the website.

Eight years ago, it was a war that Zook appeared to be losing. The crops on his 66-acre farm were riddled with funguses and pests that chemical treatments did little to reduce. The now-39-year-old talked haltingly about the despair he felt at the prospect of losing a homestead passed down through five generations of his family. Disillusioned by standard agriculture methods, Zook searched fervently for an alternative. He found what he was looking for in the writings of an 18-year-old Amish farmer from Ohio, a man named John Kempf.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also reconsidering its existing infection control protocols and will boost health-worker training with a series of calls and online seminars, officials said yesterday.

Capping an investigation that began almost two years ago, separate trials are scheduled this month in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., for a civilian Navy intelligence official and a hot-rod auto mechanic from California who prosecutors allege conspired to manufacture an untraceable batch of automatic-rifle silencers.

The exact purpose of the silencers remains hazy, but court filings and pretrial testimony suggest they were part of a top-secret operation that would help arm guerrillas or commandos overseas.

The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents. The directorate is composed of fewer than 10 civilian employees, most of them retired military personnel.

Confirmatory testing will be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The employee helped care for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person ever diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. Duncan died Wednesday.

“We knew a second case could be a reality, and we’ve been preparing for this possibility,” Dr. David Lakey, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, said in a statement Sunday morning.

“We are broadening our team in Dallas and working with extreme diligence to prevent further spread.”

The health care worker reported a low-grade fever Friday night and was isolated, the health department said. The preliminary test result came in late Saturday.

Mali has no Ebola cases but it borders Guinea, where the outbreak began. The trials are taking place to determine whether the potential vaccine is safe and that it does at least have some sort of protective effect.

It is particularly important to test its effects on health workers, who in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are at the sharp end of the battle against the virus.

Safety trials began at Oxford University and in the US a couple of weeks ago. The healthy people who volunteered have so far shown no ill effects, so the trials have moved into Africa itself.

“This research will give us crucial information about whether the vaccine is safe, well-tolerated and capable of stimulating adequate immune responses in the highest priority target population – healthcare workers in west Africa,” said Prof Myron Levine, director of the centre for vaccine development at the University of Maryland, which is running the trial in conjunction with the Malian ministry of health.

“If it works, in the foreseeable future it could help alter the dynamic of this epidemic by interrupting transmission to healthcare and other exposed frontline workers.”

At this point, the researchers hope to establish that there are no significant ill effects, beyond perhaps a temporarily sore arm. But they will also be testing blood samples of the volunteers to ensure there is an antibody response, which is the signal that the vaccine may teach the immune system to recognise the virus and fight it off. Until it is used in health workers treating people with Ebola, however, there will be no real proof that it works.

The documents, leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also indicate that the agency has used “under cover” operatives to gain access to sensitive data and systems in the global communications industry, and that these secret agents may have even dealt with American firms. The documents describe a range of clandestine field activities that are among the agency’s “core secrets” when it comes to computer network attacks, details of which are apparently shared with only a small number of officials outside the NSA.

“It’s something that many people have been wondering about for a long time,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, after reviewing the documents. “I’ve had conversations with executives at tech companies about this precise thing. How do you know the NSA is not sending people into your data centers?”

Previous disclosures about the NSA’s corporate partnerships have focused largely on U.S. companies providing the agency with vast amounts of customer data, including phone records and email traffic. But documents published today by The Intercept suggest that even as the agency uses secret operatives to penetrate them, companies have also cooperated more broadly to undermine the physical infrastructure of the internet than has been previously confirmed.

In addition to so-called “close access” operations, the NSA’s “core secrets” include the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to weaken their encryption systems; the fact that the NSA spends “hundreds of millions of dollars” on technology to defeat commercial encryption; and the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to penetrate computer networks, possibly without the knowledge of the host countries. Many of the NSA’s core secrets concern its relationships to domestic and foreign corporations.