Pressure puts a new twist on magic-angle bilayers.

Circa 2015

Physicists have created a wormhole device that can tunnel a magnetic field through space. It sounds like Star Trek, but we won’t be zapping humans across the universe anytime soon. Still, the breakthrough could revolutionize certain magnet-based technologies, including MRIs.

The kit has been granted approval under ‘emergency use’ provisions, and should help to ease testing backlogs in the country.

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.

Conventional night vision goggles look a bit like binoculars and require electricity. Here’s how they work: An “objective lens” in front collects low-level and near-infrared light, whose photons are converted by a photocathode into electrons. The goggles use thousands of volts of electricity to send the electrons down a vacuum-sealed tube into a plate with millions of tiny holes. Pushing the electrons through the holes releases other electrons in a chain reaction called cascaded secondary emission. The effect: where there was one electron, there are now hundreds, all in the same pattern as the original photons. When the electrons hit the final layer, which is covered in phosphorescent material, what was dark becomes light.

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.

The International Space Station has hosted a variety of spacecraft shuttling crews and delivering supplies.

Elon Musk’s “biggest concern” is reentry — the final stage of SpaceX’s biggest mission for NASA, when its astronauts must hurtle back to Earth.

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.

Einstein’s equations describe three canonical configurations of space-time. Now one of these three — important in the study of quantum gravity — has been shown to be inherently unstable.