At an event on Nov. 21, Fabiola Gianotti, CERN's director general, and Sekhar Basu, chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission and secretary of India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), signed an agreement admitting India to CERN as an Associate Member.

Researchers have developed a new dry adhesive that bonds in temperatures ranging from -320°F to 1,832°F, a quality that could make the product ideal for space exploration where shade can be frigid and exposure to the sun blazing hot. It features vertically aligned carbon nanotubes with tops bundled into nodes that scientists say replicates the microscopic hairs on the foot of the wall-walking gecko.

Scientists have used the powerful X-ray laser at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), located at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, to take the first ever snapshots of an ultrafast riboswitch, a gene regulator that can switch individual genes on and off. According to the research team, the study, reported in Nature,unlocks both the game-changing potential of X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) for studying RNA and the ability to create a powerful weapon to fight disease.

Stanford researchers say communities would be better off investing in electric vehicles that run on batteries instead of hydrogen fuel cells, in part because a hydrogen infrastructure provides few additional energy benefits for communities beyond clean transportation.

At a ceremony held Nov. 8 in Beijing, representatives from the ARC Center for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP) and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish scientific exchange, collaboration and cooperation between the two organizations.

Scientists from CERN's ASACUSA experiment have announced a new precision measurement of the mass of the antiproton relative to that of the electron, a result based on spectroscopic measurements of approximately two billion antiprotonic helium atoms cooled to temperatures near absolute zero.

Over 1,600 researchers and engineers from 36 countries gathered in Denver September 4-9 for ASC 2016, attending plenaries, poster sessions and meetings under the watchful gaze of the Colorado Convention Center’s Blue Bear. Celebrating its 50th year, the conference covered a wide range of topics, from superconducting electronics detectors and magnets to a consideration of power applications and advances in materials. Nearly 1,700 abstracts were submitted, according to the program committee, most in large scale categories.

The Applied Superconductivity Conference's Best Student Paper Contest recognizes outstanding presentations made at ASC by full-time students. The ability to describe one’s research, by succinctly capturing key results and ideas in written form as well as by presenting and defending the work in front of an audience of experts, is an extremely useful skill for professional researchers. The contest format was created to encourage students to perform high quality research and present their work in a competitive environment.

Past and present superconducting magnet technology suggests that cheap, strong, available-by-the-ton Nb-Ti alloy conductors will always be used unless it’s absolutely necessary to use another superconducting material. In this decade “absolutely necessary” has taken on a clearer definition, thanks to ITER, the upgrade of LHC, 1 GHz NMR magnets, the desire for >30 T frontier-science user magnets, as well as superconducting magnet systems operating at well above the ~5 K limit of Nb-based superconductors.

Over the last couple of decades researchers around the world have been working on optical refrigeration, a new solid-state cooling scheme based on light-matter interactions, and a team of researchers from the University of New Mexico (UNM) and ThermoDynamic Films, LLC (TDF) is currently working to harness the physics of optical refrigeration to develop practical solid-state cryocoolers.

The James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) Mid InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) cooler subsystem features a closed cycle helium Joule-Thomson (JT) cryocooler pre-cooled by a three-stage pulse tube cryocooler. In this paper, researchers from Northrop Grumman discuss tests conducted on the CCA, a flight model sub-assembly that compresses and precools MIRI's helium working fluid.