Physicist recreates neutron star reaction, reveals how explosive stars forge elements
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 31-Mar-2026 16:16 ET (31-Mar-2026 20:16 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.
In AIP Advances, researchers simulate different evacuation scenarios in case of a dual-engine fire in an Airbus A320. They compare three different cabin layouts with three different ratios of passengers over the age of 60 and three different distributions of those passengers, finding that the proportion and location of elderly passengers have the largest effect on evacuation time. The fastest option — with 30 elderly passengers evenly distributed throughout the cabin — still required 141 seconds for all passengers to reach the ground.
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.