The Brookhaven National Laboratory has announced a $15 million allocation from New York State to fund a cryo-electron microscope at the Long Island Facility for Electron Microscopy, a new facility on its campus. The microscope will operate at 77 K and will provide researchers with a new look at molecular structures, perhaps revealing the root causes of many medical conditions.

MIT physicists have found that a flake of graphene, when sandwiched between two superconducting materials, can inherit some of those materials’ superconducting qualities. The electronic state of the graphene changes dramatically here, even at its center, as the particles pair up in Andreev states—a fundamental electronic configuration that allows a conventional, nonsuperconducting material to carry an electric “supercurrent" that flows without dissipating energy.

Cooling has proven to be a major concern for engineers developing quantum computers, but now a research team at Finland's Aalto University says it has invented a quantum circuit refrigerator that could reduce errors in quantum computing. Quantum computers differ from the computers that we use in that, instead of computing using normal bits, they use quantum bits, or qubits. To obtain correct computational results, every qubit has to be reset at the beginning of the computation. If the qubits are too hot, they cannot be initialized because they are switching between different states too much.

NASA has chosen Ball Aerospace to design and build a cryostat for its Galactic/Extragalactic Ultralong Duration Balloon (ULDB) Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory mission, or GUSTO. The mission, led by the University of Arizona, will measure emissions from the interstellar medium, helping scientists to determine the life cycle of interstellar gas in the Milky Way galaxy. Researchers also hope to witness the formation and destruction of star-forming clouds and to understand the dynamics and gas flow in the vicinity of the center of the galaxy.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) celebrated the completion of its Linac 4 during a ceremony on May 9. The new accelerator is expected to allow the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to reach higher luminosity by 2021. The machine is almost 90 meters long, sits 12 meters below the ground and took nearly 10 years to build. Engineers will now begin an extensive test period and hope to connect the instrument to CERN’s accelerator complex over the facility's long technical shutdown in 2019-20.

As space flight missions move away from tanks filled with cryogenic liquids towards cryocoolers to provide cooling for cryogenic payloads, new heat transport technologies are needed to cool distributed systems. Researchers have recently investigated pulsating (or oscillating) heat pipes (PHPs) at laboratories and universities in several countries. Possible applications for PHPs include distributed cooling for optics/detectors for IR systems and distributed cooling for thermal shields on cryofluid tanks.

Ryan Oliver explores the evolution of the techniques used to measure and control temperature since this time, with a focus on cryogenic temperatures as a tool, rather than techniques used by those working on defining temperature scales.

For engineers developing and designing new aerospace vehicle concepts, the determination of the transition from laminar flow to turbulent flow on an aerodynamic surface is of vital importance. It can be critical for accurate drag estimation, for example, and there are efforts underway to design wing shapes and vehicle concepts that can delay this transition for drag reduction leading to decreased fuel usage.

A multidisciplinary research team has discovered a groundbreaking process to cool and rewarm large-scale animal heart valves and blood vessels preserved at very low temperatures. The discovery could result in a major step forward in saving millions of human lives by increasing the availability of organs and tissues for transplantation, according to John Bischof, professor of both mechanical and biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota, a past president of the Society for Cryobiology and senior author of the group’s study, published in Science Translational Medicine