Paul Ohodnicki leads team developing transformers for high-voltage DC power grid
Grant and Award Announcement
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 21-Jun-2026 10:16 ET (21-Jun-2026 14:16 GMT/UTC)
For decades, that thermal ceiling has been one of the hardest walls in engineering.A team at the University of Southern California may have just found a way around it. In a study in Science, researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC School of Advanced Computing report a new type of electronic memory device that kept working reliably at 700 degrees Celsius, hotter than molten lava and far beyond anything previously achieved in its class. The device showed no signs of reaching its limit. Seven hundred degrees was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go.
A new study conducted by Department of Physics researchers using the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory at Florida State University examined titanium-50 nuclei and showed that a long‑standing explanation for where magnetism in atomic nuclei comes from does not fully work for titanium‑50. The research, which was published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that scientists may need to rethink how they explain nuclear magnetism.
Scientists have uncovered an unexpected microbial relationship that could help explain differences in the severity of a major disease affecting common beans. The discovery sheds light on how the pathogen evolves and may point to new strategies for breeding disease-resistant crops and reducing reliance on chemical pesticides.
A unique experiment led by a UC Berkeley biologist enlisted researchers from Europe, the Middle East and U.S. to plant 12 plots of Arabidopsis at 30 sites representing different climates and leave them for five years to adapt or die. A genome analysis of yearly flower clippings from the 360 plots showed how allele frequency changed as the plant populations evolved. Populations at the warmest sites were least likely to find a genetic path to survival.