In a historic achievement, Rochester researchers have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications.

“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of physics. In a paper in Nature, the researchers describe a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH) that exhibits superconductivity at 69 degrees Fahrenheit and 10 kilobars (145,000 pounds per square inch, or psi) of pressure.

Although 145,000 psi might still seem extraordinarily high (pressure at sea level is about 15 psi), strain engineering techniques routinely used in chip manufacturing, for example, incorporate materials held together by internal chemical pressures that are even higher.

Scientists have been pursuing this breakthrough in condensed matter physics for more than a century. Superconducting materials have two key properties: electrical resistance vanishes, and the magnetic fields that are expelled pass around the superconducting material.

“A pathway to superconducting consumer electronics, energy transfer lines, transportation, and significant improvements of magnetic confinement for fusion are now a reality,” Dias says.

Discover the future of superconductivity—and why a compound that starts as a lustrous bluish color was given the code name “reddmatter.”

A close-up is any camera shot in which a character’s face, an object, or scene detail takes up most or all of the frame. Through a $100,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge Program, the close-up is the subject of a 15-month collaborative study between the University and Bowdoin College. The project, “A Digital History of the Close-Up in Narrative Film and Television,” is being led at Rochester by Joel Burges, an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies.

Burges is the principal investigator on Mediate, a digital annotation tool for audiovisual and time-based media, while Allison Cooper, one of his Mellon grant partners at Bowdoin, is the director of Kinolab, a public-facing, searchable, open-access database of annotated film and television clips.

Using Mediate, the researchers—including undergraduate student curators and professionals at the River Campus Libraries—will annotate existing and newly collected film and television clips with metadata, enabling them to be discoverable in Kinolab. In essence, they will be marking every close-up and creating tags critical to making clips findable.

Zoom in on one of film and television’s most powerful techniques.

The “heads or vase” visual illusion. “When we view an object or picture, our brains use processes that consider our experience and contextual information to help anticipate sensory inputs, address ambiguity, and fill in the missing information,” says Emily Knight.

Along with their fellow researchers, Emily Knight and John Foxe at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience have found that the brain process that allows us to see visual distinctions may not happen the same way in the brains of children with autism spectrum disorder. Their study, which appears in The Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that something goes awry in the feedback processing pathways in the brains of children with autism.

Knight’s past research has found that children with autism may not be able to see or process body language like their peers, especially when distracted by something else.

“Continuing to use these neuroscientific tools, we hope to understand better how people with autism see the world so that we can find new ways to support children and adults on the autism spectrum,” says Knight.

Read more about the study.

Celebrate the research and accomplishments of Rochester’s graduate students at the second annual AS&E Graduate Research Symposium on Thursday, March 23, from 3 to 5:30 p.m. in Feldman Ballroom, Douglass Commons. More than 70 graduate students, both master’s and PhD, from a variety of disciplines, will showcase posters of their research and will be available to discuss their work. The event will include the Graduate Research Poster Session from 3 to 4:30 p.m. and a networking reception and awards ceremony from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. The reception will include remarks by Nick Vamivakas, AS&E dean of graduate education and postdoctoral affairs.

On March 24 and 25, the Department of English will host a symposium, “Margins, Borders, and Outlaws in Medieval Literature,” in honor of Professor Tom Hahn’s 50th year at the University. A pioneering scholar of historically marginalized literature and peoples of the Middle Ages, Hahn has had a major impact on the field. This public conference features distinguished medievalists from across the country who will speak on panels devoted to Chaucer, Robin Hood, popular medieval romance, and related areas of study to which Hahn has contributed. Panels are designed to be accessible and of interest to all, and will not presume prior knowledge of the texts under discussion. Advanced registration is requested.

The Translational Immunology and Infectious Diseases Institute program funds innovative ideas and team-driven, multidisciplinary translational research projects related to infectious disease and immunology with three awards of up to $33,000. Learn more.

This free course, sponsored by UR Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the Center for Community Health & Prevention, explores how the history of racism has shaped the relationship between doctors/researchers and patients/research participants who are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color). Rochester faculty, staff, trainees, and students as well as community members (typically from community-based organizations) are invited to sign up for the course by Monday, March 20.

Full-time faculty at the University can apply for this one-year award of up to $25,000 from the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute to support research that advances the development, approval, adoption, and use of innovative digital health tools, methods, and approaches, such as utilizing sensors and mobile technologies, electronic medical records, data from registries and other real-world data, and approaches to advance clinical research and address regulatory science needs. Apply by Monday, March 27.