The organizers of the 2020 Applied Superconductivity Conference are presenting a completely virtual conference through November 7, 2020. The two-week format aims to accommodate international attendance and make viewing presentations convenient and easy to experience. https://ascinc.org/registration/

Given the continuing COVID-19 pandemic with restrictions on travel and group meetings, the organizers of the International Cryocooler Conference (ICC) have moved the meeting date to December 7-10, 2020, as a totally virtual conference with no on-site attendance using Zoom® as the primary media. https://cryocooler.org

In ITER's French Assembly Hall environment, a strange component shines like a freshly polished mirror. Lying horizontal, it looks like a giant's tiara; when upended to the vertical position and paired to its missing half, it will fit between the vacuum vessel and magnetic system of the machine and act as a barrier against the transfer of heat to the ultracold superconducting coils.

Walking to his lab one afternoon last year, physicist Charles Brown found his way blocked by a white student who refused to let him into the physics building and demanded to see his ID. A postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, studying ultracold atoms, Brown says the incident reflects the barriers—both visible and invisible—faced by Black physicists like himself around the world. #BlackInPhysics week, a Twitter®-based series began Sunday, October 25, and is now running through Saturday, October 31.

RIX Industries (CSA CSM) announced in August that it had supplied mission-critical cryocooler technology for shipboard pilot and medical applications onboard the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78). The company designs and manufactured a state-of-the-art liquid and gaseous oxygen generating plant that is now used onboard the ship.

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 based on data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, scientists have been gathering new data on the Higgs particle and its associated Higgs field to understand how—and whether—it interacts with specific types of other particles. Released in early October, a new analysis, featuring contributions by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and its Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, supports the hypothesis that the Higgs boson interacts with muons.

Announced on October 26, NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.

The search is on to discover new states of matter, and possibly new ways of encoding, manipulating and transporting information. One goal is to harness materials’ quantum properties for communications that go beyond what’s possible with conventional electronics. Topological insulators—materials that act mostly as insulators but carry electric current across their surface—provide some tantalizing possibilities. In late September, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory discovered a "quirky" response during the search.

Elizabeth Beck of Instant Systems (CSA CSM), a leading supplier of cryogenics packaging solutions, outlines the three key attributes to keep in mind when selecting the most suitable flexible packaging for a particular cryogenic application.