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An international team of researchers has discovered the hydrogen atoms in a metal hydride material are much more tightly spaced than had been predicted for decades — a feature that could possibly facilitate superconductivity at or near room temperature and pressure.

Such a superconducting material, carrying electricity without any energy loss due to resistance, would revolutionize energy efficiency in a broad range of consumer and industrial applications.

The scientists conducted neutron scattering experiments at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory on samples of zirconium vanadium hydride at atmospheric pressure and at temperatures from −450 degrees Fahrenheit (5 K) to as high as −10 degrees Fahrenheit (250 K) — much higher than the temperatures where superconductivity is expected to occur in these conditions.

Circa 2016


Researchers build “teeny, tiny structures” that can change infrared to visible light.

Remember that famous Bin Laden raid? It would have been impossible without night vision — specifically, a pair of $65,000 L-3 Ground Panoramic Night Vision Goggles. But even those top-of-the-line NVGs — former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonette compared other night-vision systems to “looking through toilet paper tubes” — are heavy, clunky, and odd-looking. Now researchers from Australia have developed a material that can make infrared light visible, raising the possibility of night-vision goggles as thin as glass and free of external power.

A revolution is underway in the development of autonomous wireless sensors, low-power consumer electronics, smart homes, domotics and the Internet of Things. All the related technologies require efficient and easy-to-integrate energy harvesting devices for their power. Billions of wireless sensors are expected to be installed in interior environments in coming decades.

ROME (Reuters) — The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday.

“In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion.

“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television.