A Russian university is planning to create a databank of the DNA of all living species. Moscow State University will collect and store the DNA in a facility on campus. There are more than 1.5 million species known at this time, with more undiscovered.
Monthly Archives: December 2014
Keeping plants safe for future generations
Norway has been doing something unprecedented for about 7 years. They’ve been building the largest vault of seeds. The idea is to store seeds in case crops become extinct; as protection for the future. The vault is located in Svalbard, an archipelago north of Norway. It’s kind of like a Noah’s Ark for seeds.
Evidence of new phase of matter competing with superconductivity
So, the 3 phases of matter are Solid, Liquid, and Gas. Oh, and Plasma. And if you get it really cold, Bose-Einstein Condensate. And then there’s Pseudogap.
It turns out that pseudogap is one thing that stops things from being superconductive at high temperatures.
In this latest study, Hashimoto was able to find out exactly what was happening at the moment the material transitioned into a superconducting state. He did this by measuring not only the energies and momenta of the electrons, but the number of electrons coming out of the material with particular energies over a wide range of temperatures, and after the electronic properties of the material had been altered in various ways.
He discovered clear, strong evidence that at this crucial transition temperature, the pseudogap and superconductivity are competing for electrons. Theoretical calculations by members of the team were able to reproduce this complex relationship.