"You're a nuclear engineer with a problem. The plasma in your fusion chamber
keeps slipping through the magnetic force field, foiling your efforts to
sustain a energy-producing reaction. What do you do?
The twisting, swirling, rising and falling thing you just witnessed is a
polar crown prominence photographed by Japan's Hinode spacecraft. It is,
essentially, a gigantic sheet of hot plasma exquisitely controlled by solar
magnetic force fields. Hinode's unprecedented high-resolution images of
these prominences reveal plasma falls, "van Gogh vortices", and dark
tadpole-shaped bubbles--things the sun can do with plasma and magnetic
fields, but nuclear engineers can't. Not yet. Further studies of the sun may
eventually reveal the the secrets of plasma control."
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/images/polarcrown/2006_11_30_CaH_prom_lev1_rotated_short...
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/17sep_polarcrown.htm 
