News Currents: Superconductors Made with Scotch Tape and Other Noteworthy Stories
Levitation of a magnet on top of a superconductor.
Julien Bobroff, Frederic Bouquet, Jeffrey Quilliam, LPS, Orsay, France via Wikimedia Commons
(Inside Science) -- It’s possible to use Scotch Tape to transform ordinary semiconductors into superconductors, according to new research described in this NBCNews.com article.
Semiconductors are the ubiquitous slabs of silicon that manufacturers slap into all things digital, while superconductors conduct electricity without losing energy or heating up and have some other incredible properties. According to the article, this finding could potentially make it easier to create quantum computers with superconductors.
Here is a link to the research paper .
There are no official guidelines regarding how long doctors should try to resuscitate a patient in cardiac arrest, says this article from The Economist .
According to the article, some hospitals tend to try to resuscitate patients for a longer period of time, and those hospitals tend to have more success in reviving and eventually discharging patients than hospitals that stop trying after less time. But, as in many studies, the interpretation is difficult. One factor, mentioned in the story, is that the interpretation of this research is complicated by differences in the quality of care between hospitals.
When someone has a false, but preconceived notion of how the world works, why does it seem impossible to convince that person of the error in his scientific understanding? Air is not just empty space, even though many people might think of it that way. In many cases, that underlying assumption is difficult to replace, even with the confirmed and accepted truth. As this article from Scientific American puts it,
“Even long after we learn that these intuitions have no scientific support, they can still subtly persist and influence our thought process. Like old habits, old concepts seem to die hard.”
The article describes a truly interesting experiment and the considerable implications for education.
Finally, here’s something that also blew me away -- audio recordings of air, both pristine and polluted areas, posted and described in The Atlantic .
Researchers turned samples of gas collected at various locations, from tunnels to mountains, into audio signals. They’re a lot of fun to listen to.
