To look back in time at the cosmos’s infancy and witness the first stars flicker on, you must first grind a mirror as big as a house. Its surface must be so smooth that, if the mirror were the scale of a continent, it would feature no hill or valley...

Nestled 30 feet underground in Menlo Park, California, a half-mile-long stretch of tunnel is now colder than most of the universe. It houses a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National...

Superconductors are materials that conduct electrical current with almost no electrical resistance at all. This property makes them particularly appealing for a variety of applications, including loss-less power cables, electric motors and generators, and powerful electromagnets that can be utilized for MRI imaging and magnetic levitating trains. Nagoya University researchers...

Boeing’s groundbreaking cryogenic fuel tank and Airbus’s hydrogen-powered jet engine bring promise to the future of aviation. A new type of cryogenic tank, designed and manufactured by Boeing, completed a critical series of tests at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center at the end of 2021. The successful test campaign advances the...