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An international team of scientists uncovered exotic quantum properties hidden in magnetite, the oldest magnetic material known to mankind. The study reveals the existence of low-energy waves that indicate the important role of electronic interactions with the crystal lattice. This is another step to fully understand the metal-insulator phase transition mechanism in magnetite, and in particular to learn about the dynamical properties and critical behavior of this material in the vicinity of the transition temperature.

Magnetite (FeO4) is a common mineral, whose strong magnetic properties were already known in ancient Greece. Initially, it was used mainly in compasses, and later in many other devices, such as data recording tools. It is also widely applied to catalytic processes. Even animals benefit from the properties of magnetite in detecting magnetic fields – for example, birds are known to use it in navigation.

Physicists are also very interested in magnetite because around a temperature of 125 K it shows an exotic phase transition, named after the Dutch chemist Verwey. This Verwey transition was also the first phase metal-to-insulator transformation observed historically. During this extremely complex process, the electrical conductivity changes by as much as two orders of magnitude and a rearrangement of the crystal structure takes place. Verwey proposed a transformation mechanism based on the location of electrons on iron ions, which leads to the appearance of a periodic spatial distribution of Fe2+ and Fe3+ charges at low temperatures.

As countries around the world begin lifting pandemic lockdowns, researchers are entering a new phase of work — donning masks with their lab coats, staggering hours in laboratory spaces and taking shifts on shared instruments. Some universities have created detailed plans to track and test staff, and many have limited the capacity of indoor spaces and the flow of people through hallways and entrances. For others, post-lockdown plans are still taking shape. And whereas some universities have worked in lockstep with governments to formulate safety plans, others have charted their own paths.


As scientists around the world return to work, they’re encountering new safety rules and awkward restrictions — and sometimes writing the protocols themselves.

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Batteries that use a sodium-ion chemistry rather than the commonplace lithium-ion could offer a number of advantages, owing to the cheap and abundant nature of the element. Scientists at Washington State University have come up with a design billed as a potential game changer in this area – a sodium-ion battery offering a comparable energy capacity and cycling ability to some lithium-ion batteries already on the market.

In a way, sodium-ion batteries function just like lithium-ion batteries, generating power by bouncing ions between a pair of electrodes in a liquid electrolyte. One of the problems with them in their current form, however, is that while this is going on inactive sodium crystals tend to build up on the surface of the negatively-charged electrode, the cathode, which winds up killing the battery. Additionally, sodium-ion batteries don’t hold as much energy as their lithium-ion counterparts.

“The key challenge is for the battery to have both high energy density and a good cycle life,” says Washington State University’s Junhua Song, lead author on the paper.

Bitcoin has been struggling to break over the $10,000 per bitcoin level since its highly-anticipated supply squeeze —but that could be about to change.

The bitcoin price, up around 30% since the beginning of the year and on track to be one of the year’s best performing assets, has swung wildly over the last few months.

Now, one of the most closely-watched bitcoin analysts, an anonymous strategist who claims to be a member of an institutional investment team that manages around $100 billion in assets, has released an update to his so-called stock-to-flow model, suggesting the bitcoin price could be about to surge to around $100,000.

An analysis of more than 200,000 spiral galaxies has revealed unexpected links between spin directions of galaxies, and the structure formed by these links might suggest that the early universe could have been spinning, according to a Kansas State University study.

Lior Shamir, a K-State computational astronomer and computer scientist, presented the findings at the 236th American Astronomical Society meeting in June 2020. The findings are significant because the observations conflict with some previous assumptions about the large-scale structure of the universe.

Since the time of Edwin Hubble, astronomers have believed that the universe is inflating with no particular direction and that the in it are distributed with no particular cosmological structure. But Shamir’s recent observations of geometrical patterns of more than 200,000 galaxies suggest that the universe could have a defined structure and that the early universe could have been spinning. Patterns in the distribution of these galaxies suggest that spiral galaxies in different parts of the universe, separated by both space and time, are related through the directions toward which they spin, according to the study.