News-Record.com

True story: I almost majored in physics rather than English ... not only because I was thinking about astronomy as a career, but also because of cool stuff like this:

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine -- the former dark horse among accelerators meant to produce conditions required for nuclear fusion -- have increased the machine's X-ray power output by nearly 10 times in the last two years.

The most recent advance resulted in an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts -- for billionths of a second, about 80 times the entire world's output of electricity.

The figure represents almost a 40 percent increase over the 210 trillion watts -- itself a world record -- reported last summer.

Strangely, the power used in each trial is only enough to provide electricity to about 100 houses for two minutes. Electricity is provided by ordinary wall current from a local utility company. ...

In a different series of experiments, the accelerator achieved a temperature of approximately 1.6 million degrees Celsius (140 electron volts) in a container the size of a spool of thread. [Just for comparison purposes the surface temp of the sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius -- Lex]

Wordsworth was cool, but if he ever talked about holding a thimbleful of sunlight in his hand, he probably was only speaking metaphorically. And sometimes, metaphors just ain't enough.

UPDATE: Biology and its derivatives, on the other hand, never appealed to me as a vocation. This thread gives you an idea of why. (NSFW: language)