A room-temperature superconductor that works in low pressure, and losing Spock’s Vulcan

ScientiFix, our weekly feature, offers you a summary of the top global science stories of the week, with links to their sources.

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 | Photo: Courtesy: University of Rochester

New Delhi: Scientists at the University of Rochester have created a room-temperature superconductor with pressure low enough for practical applications — a historic advance that can usher in a new era of faster electronics.

In a study published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride that exhibits superconductivity at 69 degrees Fahrenheit and 10 kilobars of pressure.

Superconducting materials have two key properties — electrical resistance vanishes, and the magnetic fields that are expelled pass around the superconducting material.

Achieving superconductivity at ambient temperature and pressure could enable us to prevent the loss of millions of megawatt hours of energy that takes place due to the resistance in the wires.

It could also be used to build frictionless, levitating, high-speed trains as well as affordable medical imaging and scanning techniques.

Researchers have been working on achieving superconductivity for over a century.

Tokamak machines use magnetic fields to confine plasmas to achieve fusion as a source of unlimited power.

Previously, the same team had reported creating two materials — carbonaceous sulfur hydride and yttrium superhydride — that are superconducting at 58 degrees Fahrenheit/39 million PSI (pound square per inch) and 12 degrees Fahrenheit/26 million psi, respectively.

However, doubts were raised about the findings because of data issues highlighted by other researchers. 

To head off criticism, this time, the team has gone to unusual lengths to document their research. The data was collected outside the lab, at the Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories in the US in front of an audience of scientists who saw the superconducting transition live. Read more.

Star Trek’s planet Vulcan does not exist

The exoplanet orbiting the star 40 Eridani A — which Star Trek fans wanted to think of as the planet Vulcan — has been found to be a discovery made in error.

Back in 1966, the television show Star Trek made its debut. One of the main characters was an alien named Spock, who hailed from the planet Vulcan, which orbited a star called 40 Eridani A.

That star and its fictional planet were based on the real star 40 Eridani A and a presumed exoplanet — a planet that revolves around a star which is not part of the solar system.

In 2018, an exoplanet was discovered orbiting 40 Eridani A — it was named 40 Eri b — though many “Star Trek” fans no doubt wanted it to be named Vulcan.

Unfortunately, it turns out that 40 Eri b does not really exist and that the discovery was a mistake.

A large international team of space scientists has discovered that the detection of the exoplanet was made in error. The group has published a paper on the arXiv pre-print server describing their reanalysis of the star and its exoplanet and how they discovered the error in the Astronomical Journal.

40 Eri b was thought to be a planet based on an analysis using radial velocity to study the wavelengths of light emitted from 40 Eridani A.  The team observed what they thought was a gravitational tug on the star, indicating a pull from an exoplanet. But in tracing features of the light spectrum from the star, the new team found that the pull that had been observed was actually due to activity on the surface of the star — not evidence of an exoplanet. Read more

A first complete map of an insect’s brain

Scientists have built the first-ever map showing every single neuron and their connections in the brain of the fruit fly larva.

This is expected to help scientists understand the basic principles by which signals travel through the brain at the neural level and lead to behaviour and learning. The new study was published in the journal Science.

The map of the 3,016 neurons that make up the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster’s brain, and the detailed circuitry of neural pathways within it, is known as a “connectome’”.

This is the largest complete brain connectome ever to have been mapped. Previous works have only mapped very simple brain structures, including the roundworm C. elegans, which only has several hundred neurons.

While imaging entire brains has been challenging, so far, new technological advances now allow scientists to image the entire brain of fruit fly larvae relatively quickly using electron microscopy. Read more

World’s first plasmonic paints can help save energy costs

Drawing inspiration from butterflies, researchers from the University of Central Florida have created the first environmentally friendly, large-scale and multicolour alternative to pigment-based colourants that can contribute to energy-saving efforts and help reduce global warming.

The research, published in the journal Science Advances, describes the innovation of a plasmonic paint, which utilises a nanoscale structural arrangement of colourless materials — aluminium and aluminium oxide — instead of pigments to create colours.

While pigment colourants control light absorption based on the electronic property of the pigmenting material, and hence, every colour needs a new molecule, structural colourants control the way light is reflected, scattered or absorbed based purely on the geometrical arrangement of nanostructures.

Structural colour serves as the primary colour-generating mechanism in several extremely vivid species where the geometrical arrangement of typically two colourless materials produces all colours.

Such structural colours are environmentally friendly as they only use metals and oxides, unlike present pigment-based colours that use artificially synthesised molecules.

The researchers have combined their structural colour flakes with a commercial binder to form long-lasting paints of all colours.

Additionally, because plasmonic paint reflects the entire infrared spectrum, less heat is absorbed by the paint, resulting in the underneath surface staying 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it would if it were covered with standard commercial paint.

This could be used in buildings to save energy costs by reducing the use of electricity for cooling. Read more.

Faba bean genome sequenced for the first time

For the first time, scientists have sequenced the full faba bean genome,  which is more than four times the size of the human genome.

The study, published in the journal Nature, will be crucial in the efforts to breed beans with optimum nutritional content and sustainability of production.

A consortium of scientists from Europe and Australia, led by the University of Reading (UK), Aarhus University (Denmark) and the University of Helsinki (Finland), worked together on this large-scale sequencing project.

The project to fully decode the genome went on to test out its usefulness by searching for genes involved in seed size. The team also looked at the colour of the hilum— the scar left when a bean detaches from the pod — to see if they could find the genes that determine this distinctive feature.

Faba beans are naturally high in protein, fibre, and iron. At a time when plant-based diets are an attractive prospect for those wishing to look after their planet and their own health, faba bean provides a viable protein source. Read more.

(Edited by Richa Mishra)