Anya Groner

The sun is a nuclear reactor. For more than four and a half billion years, its dense gravity has been pulling hydrogen atoms towards its core where they collide and join, their nuclei merging to form helium and other elements. This process, nuclear fusion, releases tremendous energy, which rises out from the core towards the photosphere, the lowest layer of the sun’s atmosphere.

In just over eight minutes, the length of time it takes to hard-boil an egg, solar energy, in the form of electromagnetic waves, travels from the surface of the sun to Earth. Depending on their size and frequency, these waves cause unique effects. Longer infrared waves heat our planet. Medium waves create sunlight, (the only visible evidence of solar radiation). The shortest waves, invisible to the human eye, are ultraviolet light.

These three types of waves are responsible for all the energy on Earth. Plants use photosynthesis to convert light energy into chemical energy. This energy is dispersed when creatures nibble on leaves. Later, when plants and animals die, their stored energy becomes soil, which, through geologic accumulation and pressure, transform into fossil fuels such as oil or gas.

Recently, physicists in Germany and China have been racing to produce temperatures hotter than the sun in order to create and maintain hydrogen plasma, a critical ingredient for nuclear fusion. Their goal? For nuclear fusion to become viable sources of electrical power on Earth. While German physicists have created the hottest temperatures, reaching upwards of 80 million Kelvins (more than five times the estimated heat of the sun’s core), scientists at the Institute of Physical Science in Hefei have sustained hydrogen plasma for longer, clocking out at 102 seconds.

Both achievements are remarkable, but humans don’t have to recreate the sun in order to harness its power. After all, as Daylight Savings annually reminds us, the Earth and its inhabitants already make terrific use of the reactor in our sky.

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• The woman who hates children finds out she’s knocked up.

• Roommates take the tests together. The sticks get mixed up and an “almost virgin” assumes she’s expecting.

• A boy takes a test on a dare.

• The test’s packaging includes the warning: “May cause birth defects.”

Though pregnancy is a timeless source of narrative conflict, pregnancy tests on the screen are relatively new. Over-the-counter, take-home indicators didn’t hit the shelves until 1988. Before that, aside from obvious symptoms—missed periods and morning sickness—early verification was harder to come by. The 1927 A-Z test (named for inventors Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondak) involved injecting a woman’s urine into an immature mouse or rat. If the rodent went into heat, the woman was “in the family way.” In frogs and rabbits, the same procedure incited ovulation. While frog eggs are expelled from the body and easily visible, injected rabbits had to be cut open and inspected, a practice that gave rise to the euphemism “the rabbit died.”

When technology surrounding reproduction shifts, so do plots. Whether a character is “up the spout” is easily resolved, although responses to the news remain a source of drama. Newer innovations—surrogate parenting, hormone therapies, the likelihood of conception from two eggs—create opportunities for fresh narrative trouble. Appearing in the films Juno, Kill Bill II, Baby Mama, and Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason as well as in the TV shows Roseanne, Ellen, Friends, Sex and the City, The Simpsons, and Parks and Recreation, the pregnancy test is essential but tired—a trope and, increasingly, a joke.