Some science leading into the APS Global Physics Summit

Next week is the annual APS conference that was once the March Meeting and is now the combined March/April "Global Physics Summit".  As I've done annually, I will try to give some impressions of interesting talks that I see, hopefully at an understandable level.  This year I'm only there from Monday through late Thursday morning, so I may miss exciting things - hopefully people will still discuss such things here as has happened in past years.

A few science tidbits in the meantime:

• People sometimes time arXiv submissions to coincide with the APS meeting, and sometimes it's just coincidence.  Two preprints (here and here) popped up very recently, both experiments on interferometry and braiding of anyons in bilayer graphene.  There are many subtleties in such experiments.  The colorized electron microscope images of the devices show how sophisticated fabrication has become in these systems, where very small amounts of disorder can disrupt the fragile many-body quantum states of interest.
• On a much more classical physics note, this preprint uses some sophisticated multiscale modeling to address the question, why is ice so slippery?  A super-thin layer of water on the surface of the ice under sliding conditions is crucial, and the roles of frictional heating and heat transfer have been tricky to quantify.
• Meanwhile, across town from me at the University of Houston, Paul Chu and company have published this paper in PNAS, where they have demonstrated ambient pressure superconductivity in a mercury-based cuprate at 151 K, breaking the old ambient pressure record by 18 K (!).  The trick here has been pressure annealing.  Many superconductors, particularly the cuprates, tend to have higher transition temperatures at elevated pressures.  One idea is that pressure distortion of certain bond angles favors superconductivity in this system, and Chu et al. have been exploring the idea of cycling pressure and temperature to "lock in" the altered crystal structure.
• Moving away from condensed matter and turning to science used in the aid of history:  When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the pyroclastic flow swept through Herculaneum and a nearby Roman villa, housing a library of more than 1800 now-carbonized scrolls.  Using 3D x-ray tomography, it is hoped that these scrolls may actually be read without trying to physically unroll them, prompting the Vesuvius Prize.  This effort, involving x-ray imaging and AI methods, seems to be bearing fruit.  There may be many more scrolls still buried as well.  It would be amazing if great lost works of ancient Greek and Roman literature could be recovered.
• Tangentially related to science, the arXiv is looking for a CEO - here is the position description.  It's hard to overstate the impact of the arXiv and its relations in terms of open science, and in the chaotic world of scientific publishing, it's more important than ever.
• If you need evidence of how screwed up scientific publishing is, apparently Springer-Nature has been surveying people to see how willing they would be to pay an up-front fee (e.g. $299) just for the privilege of submitting an article.