- Number 305 |
- February 15, 2010
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New details of hot quark-gluon soup
(NOTE: EMBARGOED FOR FEB. 15, 2010, 9:30 A.M.)Recent analyses from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven Lab establish that collisions of near-light-speed gold ions create matter at a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius — the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory and 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. That’s hot enough to melt protons and neutrons into a plasma of quarks and gluons — a substance that last existed some 13 billion years ago, a mere microsecond after the Big Bang.
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Helping industrial factories go wireless
Wireless technology inside factories is cheaper than cable connections, but the flow of information is not as reliable. That’s why an engineer at DOE's Idaho National Laboratory is devising and testing wireless sensor networks to help ensure the transition to wireless is safer for facilities with automated control systems.
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Neutron studies support superconductor theory
Neutron scattering experiments performed at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory give strong evidence that, if superconductivity is related to a material's magnetic properties, the same mechanisms are behind both copper-based high-temperature superconductors and the newly discovered iron-based superconductors.
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Discovery shows how antiviral drugs bind to and block flu virus
Antiviral drugs block influenza A viruses from reproducing and spreading by attaching to a site within a proton channel necessary for the virus to infect healthy cells, according to a research project led by Iowa State University and DOE Ames Laboratory researcher Mei Hong and published in the Feb. 4 issue of the journal Nature.
New results confirm standard neutrino theory
In its search for a better understanding of the mysterious neutrinos, a group of experimenters at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has announced results that confirm the theory of neutrino oscillations and help rule out two alternative scenarios: neutrino decay and the existence of sterile neutrinos.