ASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory, a facility for fundamental physics experiments on the International Space Station, underwent a major hardware upgrade with the help of astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir in January. By chilling atom clouds to just above absolute zero—the lowest temperature matter can reach—Cold Atom Lab enables scientists...

In February at CERN, a demonstrator magnet using superconducting niobium-tin, cooled to 1.9 kelvins achieved a peak magnetic field of 16.5 tesla on the conductor, exceeding the previous record of 16.2 tesla from 2015. The demonstrator, known as an enhanced Racetrack Model Coil (eRMC) magnet, consists of two superimposed flat...

On May 26, the soup-bowl-shaped base of the ITER cryostat was gradually lifted from its frame, carried across the Assembly Hall to the Tokamak Building and eventually lowered into the Tokamak assembly pit. In a delicate lifting operation, the cryostat base descended into the deep concrete cylinder of the tokamak...

Beginning last year, AFCryo (CSA CSM), a division of Fabrum Solutions, and Cryomech (CSA CSM) worked collaboratively to design and supply a helium recovery system and a liquid nitrogen generation system at the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) laboratory at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. While both companies produce cryocoolers...

Scientists from the international XENON collaboration announced on June 17 that data from their XENON1T detector, the world’s most sensitive dark matter experiment, shows a surprising excess of events. While the scientists do not claim to have found dark matter, the source of the observed unexpected rate of events is...

The US Department of Defense is getting interested in space-based propulsion. Through a May presolicitation, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced its intent to have a flyable nuclear thermal propulsion system ready for a demonstration in 2025.