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TSMC inaugurates its Global Research and Development Center, a building it proclaimed as the ‘Bell Labs in Taiwan’ in Hsinchu on July 28. The building will house more than 7,000 R&D talents of the company to develop cutting-edge 2 nm, 1.4 nm, and even more advanced semiconductor technologies in new materials and transister architectures.

Scientists have claimed to make a breakthrough that would be “one of the holy grails of modern physics” – but experts have urged caution about the results.

In recent days, many commentators have become excited by two papers that claim to document the production of a new superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure. Scientists in Korea said they had synthesised a new material called LK-99 that would represent one of the biggest physics breakthroughs of recent decades.

Superconductors are a special kind of material where electrical resistance vanishes, and which throw out magnetic fields. They are widely useful, including in the production of powerful magnets and in reducing the amount of energy lost as it moves through circuits.

This is according to a report by the institution published on Tuesday.

The strongest material ever known

“For the given density, our material is the strongest known,” said Seok-Woo Lee, a materials scientist at UConn.

YouTube.

But in a development that is creating a lot of buzz, and at the same time a bit of suspicion from the scientific community, a team of Korean researchers have claimed that they have created a superconductor capable of conducting electricity perfectly at room temperature and ambient pressure.

The world’s largest community of 3D-printed homes is being built in Texas — and the neighborhood just unveiled its first completed house.

With walls “printed” using a concrete-based material, the single-story structure is the first of 100 such homes set to welcome residents starting September.

The community is part of a wider development in Georgetown, Texas called Wolf Ranch. It’s located about 30 miles north of Austin, the state capital, and is a collaboration between Texas construction firm ICON, homebuilding company Lennar and Danish architecture practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe, with features that sound like they come straight from a sci-fi movie.

Stellar-mass black holes with masses of roughly 10 suns, for example, reveal their existence by eating materials from their companion stars. And in some instances, supermassive black holes accumulate at the center of some galaxies to form bright compact regions known as quasars with masses equal to millions to billions of our sun. A subset of accreting stellar-mass black holes that can launch jets of highly magnetized plasma are called microquasars.

An international team of scientists, including UNLV astrophysicist Bing Zhang, reports in Nature on a dedicated observational campaign on the galactic microquasar dubbed GRS 1915+105. The team revealed features of a microquasar system that have never before been seen.

In today’s world of digital information, an enormous amount of data is exchanged and stored on a daily basis.

In the 1980s, IBM unveiled the first hard drive—which was the size of a refrigerator—that could store 1 GB of data, but now we have memory devices that have a thousand-fold greater data-storage capacity and can easily fit in the palm of our hand. If the current pace of increase in digital information is any indication, we require yet newer data recording systems that are lighter, have low environmental impact, and, most importantly, have higher data storage density.

Recently, a new class of materials called axially polar-ferroelectric columnar liquid crystals (AP-FCLCs) has emerged as a candidate for future high-density memory storage materials. An AP-FCLC is a liquid crystal with a structure of parallel columns generated by molecular self-assembly, which have polarization along the column axis.

Mysterious radio wave pulses from deep in space have been hitting Earth for decades, but the scientists who recently discovered them have no concrete explanation for the origin of the signals.

For 35 years, the strange blasts of energy in varying levels of brightness have occurred like clockwork approximately every 20 minutes, sometimes lasting for five minute intervals. That’s what Curtin University astronomers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) concluded in research published last week in the journal Nature.

The discovery of the signal, which researchers named GPMJ1839-10, has the scientists baffled. Believed to be coming from around 15,000 light years away from Earth, the signal has been occurring at intervals and for a period of time previously thought to be impossible.