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Superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with no resistance—continues to be one of the most challenging fields in materials science. On the one hand, the effect appears reliably in a number of materials, although only at very low temperatures. Those temperatures went up with the discovery of copper-based (cuprate) superconductors in 1986. In the last four years, iron-based superconductors have pushed the maximum temperature of the superconducting transition higher, although it's still cold compared to room temperature. But the exact way in which these superconductors perform their tricks is still unclear.

One form of iron-based superconductors, the chalcogenides, are very unusual, since they are strongly magnetic—in other superconductors strong magnetism destroys the effect. ("Chalcogenide" is pronounced with a hard "ch" as in "chemistry", and refers to the presence of the chalcogenide element selenium.) Now, a new report in Nature indicates that they have another unusual property: high pressures, which normally kill superconductivity, can cause them to undergo a phase transition that not only restores the behavior, but raises the critical temperature.

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With HP’s latest quarterly earnings looking so poor , you’d expect the traditional financial analyst’s call to be dominated by concerns on the minutiae of performance. But every question was on leadership.…

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This morning, Google announced some added features to its Google Docs app for Android that will surely make frequent users of the online office suite happy: most notably, the updated version will now allow collaboration on documents from Android phones or tablets. Previously, Google Docs opened in the app were restricted to a single user, but mobile users can now see real-time updates to shared text.

Other features now available to owners of Android devices include rich text editing, so you can bold and italicize text, highlight sections of your document, or indent paragraphs. The UI in the app has changed a bit, and the rich-text editing icons at the top are simple and scroll in a single bar across the top of the document.

Google also now permits “pinch to zoom” across all types of items in its app (like presentations, PDFs, and spreadsheets, as well as documents) so you can control how much larger or smaller the text appears, unlike the previous Google Docs interface which basically gave you two options: a double tap to zoom in, and a double tap to zoom out.

Google's app still doesn't allow you to collaborate on spreadsheets in real-time (although multiple people can open the spreadsheet, you still have to click "refresh" to see any changes made by others). The new mobile collaboration tool follows an update about a month ago that permitted users to view, but not edit, Google docs offline on mobile devices.

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Intel is opening up its manufacturing facilities to third parties, as it takes the further tentative steps toward building a chip-to-order foundry business. The microprocessor giant announced last year that it would build FPGAs for Achronix Semiconductor, and on Tuesday a second FPGA designer, Tabula, said that it would have its chips built by Intel.

In its announcement, Tabula emphasized that it would be using Intel's cutting-edge 22nm process with 3D trigate transistors . Intel's manufacturing capabilities are world-leading, with none of the established microprocessor foundries—including TSMC, UMC, and AMD spin-off GlobalFoundries—able to match the company's process.

Compared to the 28 and 32nm processes offered by the competition, Intel's 22nm process should offer higher speeds with lower power usage, at lower cost. The company will start shipping its first 22nm x86 processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, in the coming months.

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy says that the company has had other foundry customers in addition to the two that have gone public.

The foundry business is a double-edge sword for Intel. On the one hand, having additional customers gives the chip-maker the ability to keep the factories churning out processors even if demand for new PC chips is low. This makes it easier to recoup its substantial manufacturing investments.

On the other hand, Intel's process advantage is a key part of its competitive advantage: it can build complex chips on a process that's more refined and more advanced than anyone else in the industry. With the company unlikely to want to squander that advantage, it may find its customer base limited.

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Over the past week, Google has been called out for bypassing default privacy settings in both Safari and Internet Explorer in order to serve up advertising cookies. The two cases were quite different. With Safari, Google acknowledged the problem and said it was an accident. With Internet Explorer, Google said it was using the best available workaround for an outdated browser privacy technology that limits the capabilities of modern websites—and noted that thousands of other websites do much the same thing to get past IE's privacy policy.

Despite the differences, each case demonstrates one thing that may be troubling to Web users: privacy settings in browsers can be easily circumvented. There are few technological barriers preventing companies like Google and Facebook from tracking users to serve up personalized ads, and there are few legal barriers as well.

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One of the most popular adult sites on the Internet has made one of the most egregious user securities possible, leaving millions of users’ credentials exposed on a public-facing Web server.…