Columbia investigators have invented of a novel "home-built" cryogenic near-field optical microscope that has enabled them to directly image, for the first time, the propagation and dynamics of graphene plasmons at variable temperatures down to -250°C.

In a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the OPERA collaboration reports the observation of a total of 10 muon to tau-neutrino conversion events, demonstrating unambiguously that muon neutrinos oscillate into tau neutrinos on their way from CERN, where muon neutrinos were produced, to OPERA at the Gran Sasso Laboratory some 730 km away.

NASA's Cold Atom Lab (CAL) facility was included in the cargo that launched to the International Space Station on the Orbital ATK CRS-9 mission. CAL produces clouds of atoms that are ten billion times colder than deep space, using lasers and magnetic forces to freeze the atoms until they are almost motionless. In the microgravity environment on the space station, it’s possible to observe these ultracold atoms for much longer than what’s possible on the ground.

The Canadian Space Agency has awarded a research team at the University of Saskatchewan a contract to design and engineer an ankle-sized MRI device for the International Space Station. The device, according to the team, will ultimately monitor the bone health of astronauts during prolonged space trips, where weightless conditions lead to the loss of bone mass.

The UK’s National History Museum announced a new initiative to collect and preserve the DNA of thousands of animals at a biobank called CryoArks. The collection of zoological tissue will provide a central hub for researchers across the UK, according to the museum, providing access to cells and DNA from endangered species and other wildlife that can be used in both research and conservation planning.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has reported a performance issue with the cooling system aboard GOES-17, a multibillion-dollar weather satellite launched in March. NOAA engineers encountered the issue during commissioning of the satellite’s Advanced Baseline Imager instrument.

The US Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation have approved funding and the start of construction for the SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, that will begin in the early 2020s to hunt for light dark matter particles. DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (CSA CSM) will play a major role in building this new experiment, hosted at SNOLAB in Canada and managed by DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Lake Shore Cryotronics (CSA CSM) is celebrating 50 years in business this year, and in May it recognized the people who helped it become a worldwide leader in precision measurement over a wide range of temperature and magnetic field conditions.

Young Professionals introduces outstanding young professionals (under 40 years of age) who are doing interesting things in cryogenics and superconductivity and who show promise of making a difference in their fields. Debuted in the Summer 2006 issue, the feature has presented many young persons whom we are proud to see have indeed lived up to that promise. Enjoy Part 2 of the sixth installment of this series.

Over the last 10 years, a multidisciplinary team from institutes around the world has worked to design, fabricate and assemble SPIRAL2, a new generation heavy ion superconducting linear accelerator (LINAC) at the Grand Accélérateur National d’Ions Lourds (GANIL) facility in Caen, France.

More than 1,600 scientists from all over the world use the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsourse (SSRL) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory each year for research that spurs advances in medicine, energy production, environmental cleanup, nanotechnology and new materials. And now, a multidisciplinary team has used the machine’s acceleratordriven X-rays to reveal the hidden text of a medical manuscript written on parchment in the sixth century and then overwritten with religious text some 500 years later.

Young Professionals introduces outstanding young professionals (under 40 years of age) who are doing interesting things in cryogenics and superconductivity and who show promise of making a difference in their fields. Debuted in the Summer 2006 issue, the feature has presented many young persons whom we are proud to see have indeed lived up to that promise. Enjoy Part 1 of the sixth installment of this series.

Collaborators of the Majorana Demonstrator, an experiment led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have shown they can shield a sensitive, scalable 44-kilogram germanium detector array from background radioactivity.

The recent back-to-back failures at two US fertility clinics are beyond stunning and have resulted in the loss of thousands of frozen human embryos. The breakdowns, which occurred in separate clinics in Cleveland and San Francisco, were apparently unrelated but nevertheless expose both the wonder and the fragility of this technology.