Tao Wu

A ceramic plate as thin as a soap film, and through it flows current with zero resistance. That's the superconductivity achieved in nickelates, relatives of the famous cuprate superconductors. Previously, this required enormous pressure, comparable to that at the ocean floor.

The cosmic detective story began with a quiet flash in the optical band. AT2019wzc slowly brightened and faded like a smoldering ember. But hidden inside was something more energetic — repeating soft X-ray bursts that astronomers call quasi-periodic eruptions. These eruptions last minutes to hours and repeat every few hours or days.

A tiny sandwich of oxides, grown layer by layer, becomes perfectly conducting at about minus 200 degrees Celsius. This is not a magic trick but a new chapter in the search for high-temperature superconductors.

Two spinning tops whirl so close they nearly touch. One is scorching blue, the other dim white. Together they complete a full orbit in twenty hours. This is the pair Feige 64: a blue star with a mass of just a third of the Sun's, and a white dwarf, the cooled core of a former star, one and a half times heavier than our Sun. The blue star seems too hot for its mass.

Fatty liver disease often goes unnoticed, but over time it can lead to serious problems. To avoid taking a tissue sample, doctors use ultrasound: sound waves pass through the tissue and attenuate differently depending on fat content. This parameter, the attenuation coefficient, shows how "fat" the liver is. But the method has a flaw.

A hydrogen bubble on a platinum electrode behaves like a swimmer trying to surface, but every time it almost breaks free, something below grabs its legs. In the lab, high-speed cameras captured this behavior: a millimeter-sized bubble hangs near the surface, even though buoyancy pulls it upward with a force thousands of times stronger than surface tension can hold.