Certain Aluminum clusters appear to superconduct at 200K

Martin Jarrold,Indiana University in Bloomington, is claiming to have found evidence of superconductivity in aluminium nanoclusters at 200 K. Two years ago Yuri Ovchinnikov at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow and Vladimir Kresin at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California predicted that metal nanoclusters with exactly the right number of delocalised electrons …

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Overrated nuclear weapons and underrated conventional weapons

In response to the 2008 Edge question “when did facts change your mind”, Freeman Dyson describes the facts that changed his mind about the role of nuclear weapons in ending world war 2 I agree with the assessment that nuclear weapons are overrated and excessively feared. Nuclear weapons are devastating but conventional weapons and all …

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photonic crystal can increase the efficiency of solar cells by up to 37 percent

In conventional solar cells (a), light (dashed line) enters an antireflective layer (yellow) and then a layer of silicon (green) in which much of the light is converted into electricity. But some of the light (solid arrows) reflects off an aluminum backing, returns through the silicon, and exits without generating electricity. A new material (represented …

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