news from nerdland

We're now a step closer to room-temperature superconductors, which I know has you foaming and frothing.

Over the last decade, physicists working with extremely cold gases have created nine different frictionless "superfluids" with bosons, elementary particles with integer spins (1, 2, etc.). In a superfluid, particles do not lose energy when they flow, for example, by heat due to friction.

But creating a superfluid made of subatomic particles called fermions, which include protons, neutrons and electrons and have half-integer spins (1/2, 3/2, etc.), initially seemed impossible. That is because a quantum mechanical law prevents identical fermions from sharing the same state of being. For example, having the same location or momentum - conditions required for superfluidity.

But recently physicists have discovered that fermions can be coaxed to pair up, so that their spins add together for a split second, so the pair behaves like a boson.

Up next: researchers will find a fashionable way to combine polka dots and plaid.