KentuckyFC writes Physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany have measured sulfur hydride superconducting at 190 Kelvin or -83 degrees Centigrade, albeit at a pressure of 150 gigapascals, about the half that at the Earth’s core. If confirmed, that’s a significant improvement over the existing high pressure record of 164 kelvin. But that’s not why this breakthrough is so important. Until now, all known high temperature superconductors have been ceramic mixes of materials such as copper, oxygen lithium, and so on, in which physicists do not yet understand how superconductivity works. By contrast, sulfur hydride is a conventional superconductor that is described by the BCS theory of superconductivity first proposed in 1957 and now well understood. Most physicists had thought that BCS theory somehow forbids high temperature superconductivity–the current BCS record-holder is magnesium diboride, which superconducts at just 39 Kelvin. Sulfur hydride smashes this record and will focus attention on other hydrogen-bearing materials that might superconduct at even higher temperatures. The team behind this work point to fullerenes, aromatic hydrocarbons and graphane as potential targets. And they suggest that instead of using high pressures to initiate superconductivity, other techniques such as doping, might work instead. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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High Temperature Superconductivity Record Smashed By Sulfur Hydride
jfruh writes:Computing devices have been gobbling up more and more memory, but storage tech has been hitting its limits, creating a bottleneck. Now researchers in Spain and Scotland have reported a breakthrough in working with metal-oxide clusters that can retain their charge. These molecules could serve as the basis for RAM and flash memory that will be leagues smaller than existing components (abstract). Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
In the middle of the 19th century, Chicago embarked on a quest to literally lift itself out of the mud. Water couldn’t drain from the low-lying city, so its streets became impassable swamps. The most reasonable solution, Chicago decided, was just to raise the whole goddamn city by 4 to 14 feet. Read more… 
dstates writes “A team of researchers at the University of Michigan has released Zmap, a tool that allows an ordinary server to scan every address on the Internet in just 45 minutes. This is a task that used to take months, but now is accessible to anyone with a fast internet connection. In their announcement Friday , at the Usenix security conference in Washington they provide interesting examples tracking HTTPS deployment over time, the effects of Hurricane Sandy on Internet infrastructure, but also rapid identification of vulnerable hosts for security exploits. A Washington Post Blog discussing the work shows examples of the rate with which of computers on the Internet have been patched to fix Universal Plug and Play, ‘Debian weak key’ and ‘factorable RSA keys’ vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, in each case it takes years to deploy patches and in the case of UPnP devices, they found 2.56 million (16.7 percent) devices on the Internet had not yet upgraded years after the vulnerability had been described.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Australia is on the cusp of a solar energy revolution. First, a recent study suggests that the country could power its entire national domestic infrastructure using only solar (while slashing the price of home electricity by 70 percent). Now, the University of Melbourne has introduced a new organic PV cell printer that rolls out a functional binder page-sized sheet of solar panel every two seconds, making the production of all those cells cheaper and a whole lot faster . Read more… 