Viable Superconducting Material Created

A one millimeter diameter sample of lutetium hydride against a white background to illustrate viable superconducting materials.
An approximately one millimeter diameter sample of lutetium hydride, a superconducting material created in the lab of Rochester scientist Ranga Dias, seen though a microscope. This composite image is the result of focus stacking and color-enhancing several images. (University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)

In a historic achievement, University of Rochester researchers have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications.

“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics...

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ALMA traces History of Water in Planet Formation back to the Interstellar Medium

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Scientists studying a nearby protostar have detected the presence of water in its circumstellar disk. The new observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) mark the first detection of water being inherited into a protoplanetary disk without significant changes to its composition. These results further suggest that the water in our Solar System formed billions of years before the Sun. The new observations are published today in Nature.

V883 Orionis is a protostar located roughly 1,305 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion...

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Potential New Therapeutic Target for Inflammatory Diseases such as Lupus and Sepsis

Trinity and Cambridge scientists unearth potential new therapeutic target for inflammatory diseases

Scientists working in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin have made an important breakthrough in understanding what goes wrong in our bodies during the progression of inflammatory diseases and – in doing so – unearthed a potential new therapeutic target.

The scientists have found that an enzyme called Fumarate Hydratase is repressed in macrophages, a frontline inflammatory cell type implicated in a range of diseases including Lupus, Arthritis, Sepsis and COVID-19.

Professor Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity is the lead author of the research article that has just been published in leading international journal, Nature. He said:

“No-one has made a link from Fumarate Hydratase to infla...

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Complex Oxides could Power the Computers of the future

Complex oxides could power the computers of the future
These are the devices for computer architectures ‘beyond CMOS’ created by Job van Rijn (upper panel) and Anouk Goossens (lower panel). Credit: Banerjee group, University of Groningen

As the evolution of standard microchips is coming to an end, scientists are looking for a revolution. The big challenges are to design chips that are more energy efficient and to design devices that combine memory and logic (memristors). Materials scientists from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, describe in two papers how complex oxides can be used to create very energy-efficient magneto-electric spin-orbit (MESO) devices and memristive devices with reduced dimensions.

The development of classic silicon-based computers is approaching its limits...

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