Dear Readers,

I started Animated Science in 2003 as a small flash-based site for my own pupils. I am now serving Science, teacher training and food-based blog content around the world with an ever-increasing footprint.

It has been over 23 years now online and the changes have been massive, but I try to keep up and serving free content for all users. I serve over 200,000 pages a month from this site alone. The reach is global with many countries using the content but mainly the traffic is from the UK, US, Philippines, India, UAE, Australia, Sweden, Canada.

My site is a non-profit concern, and all resources are provided free of charge and should not be commercially exploited in any way. The ads on here pay for the hosting and features on the site, so it really is a super Physics resource for all to use for all.

I also run other content channels in addition to this WordPress based site, please feel free to subscribe and support me. 

If anyone wishes to contact me to send thanks, donate to the cause or support please do so on the contact form. Also if you have questions on the content please also ask. But, I am not teaching anymore, so I don’t have access to the latest exam questions or similar.

Thanks

Daniel Powell

Animated Science Director

https://www.youtube.com/@animatedsci & https://apocalypsezombie.co.uk/

It’s here: Scientists have reported the discovery of the first room-temperature superconductor, after more than a century of waiting. The compound conducts electricity without resistance up to 15° C, but only under high pressure.

The discovery evokes daydreams of futuristic technologies that could reshape electronics and transportation. Superconductors transmit electricity without resistance, allowing current to flow without any energy loss. But all superconductors previously discovered must be cooled, many of them to very low temperatures, making them impractical for most uses.

Now, scientists have found the first superconductor that operates at room temperature — at least given a fairly chilly room. The material is superconducting below temperatures of about 15° Celsius, physicist Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues report October 14 in Nature. However, the new material’s superconducting superpowers appear only at extremely high pressures, limiting its practical usefulness.

Dias and colleagues formed the superconductor by squeezing carbon, hydrogen and sulfur between the tips of two diamonds and hitting the material with laser light to induce chemical reactions. At a pressure about 2.6 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere, and temperatures below about 15° C, the electrical resistance vanished.

Superconductors and magnetic fields are known to clash — strong magnetic fields inhibit superconductivity. Sure enough, when the material was placed in a magnetic field, lower temperatures were needed to make it superconducting. The team also applied an oscillating magnetic field to the material, and showed that, when the material became a superconductor, it expelled that magnetic field from its interior, another sign of superconductivity.

The scientists were not able to determine the exact composition of the material or how its atoms are arranged, making it difficult to explain how it can be superconducting at such relatively high temperatures. Future work will focus on describing the material more completely, Dias says.

When superconductivity was discovered in 1911, it was found only at temperatures close to absolute zero (−273.15° C). But since then, researchers have steadily uncovered materials that super conduct at higher temperatures. In recent years, scientists have accelerated that progress by focusing on hydrogen-rich materials at high pressure.

Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/physics-first-room-temperature-superconductor-discovery

This post is to celebrate a moment in time from 1994 when Gloucester Youth Orchestra played at Cheltenham Town Hall. On this occasion a recording was taken on DAT tape and some copies made for the players to listen to their own music.

Having had this tape cassette in my car for the past 10 years or so I decided to digitise the whole concert so it was preserved for the rest of time on youtube.

I have not altered the recording or cleaned up any noise so please realise this is not a perfect recording but simply a memory to share with any of the other players at GLO at that time, and also for future musicians to be inspired.

I have included an image of the full orchestra compliment which also included some guest players on the day.

It is also interesting to see that many of the orchestra have carried on their musical careers after the orchestra. To name but a few…

Charles Peebles who has gone on to conduct many other orchestras in the past few years.

Matthew Elston who now plays as Principal 2nd violin of the BBC Concert Orchestra and teaches music

Diggory Seacome – musical director – went on to become a Conservative Councillor!

Large Hadron Collider discovers new pentaquark particle – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33517492