Physicist recreates neutron star reaction, reveals how explosive stars forge elements
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 31-Mar-2026 15:15 ET (31-Mar-2026 19:15 GMT/UTC)
For decades, that thermal ceiling has been one of the hardest walls in engineering.A team at the University of Southern California may have just found a way around it. In a study in Science, researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC School of Advanced Computing report a new type of electronic memory device that kept working reliably at 700 degrees Celsius, hotter than molten lava and far beyond anything previously achieved in its class. The device showed no signs of reaching its limit. Seven hundred degrees was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go.
A new study conducted by Department of Physics researchers using the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory at Florida State University examined titanium-50 nuclei and showed that a long‑standing explanation for where magnetism in atomic nuclei comes from does not fully work for titanium‑50. The research, which was published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that scientists may need to rethink how they explain nuclear magnetism.
In the vastness of the Universe, any new object with interesting properties can spur the search for similar objects, potentially establishing a new class of stars. In a paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and an arXiv preprint, researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) describe two stellar remnants that share five properties, including X-ray emission, despite being isolated objects. According to the team, these two remnants are sufficient to define a new class of stars.
A team led by Rutgers University researchers has developed a security system that could change how people log in to virtual and augmented reality platforms by eliminating passwords, personal identification numbers and eye scans and replacing them with something far more seamless.
The system, a software program called VitalID, is based on the team’s discovery of a new biometric: tiny vibrations generated by breathing and heartbeats that resonate through the skull in patterns unique to each person’s bone structure and facial tissues.
Some Arctic regions regain their “greenness” within a decade of a sudden permafrost collapse, while others can take a century or more to recover, researchers report.