A little disorder, a lot of magnetism: a ceramic film that could cool the data-centre age

At Penn State, materials scientists coaxed a thin ceramic film into behaving magnetically by deliberately scrambling its chemistry — disorder, carefully arranged, turned out to be a feature rather than a flaw. The work, published in Advanced Materials, points toward electronics that move information with magnetism instead of electric current, which the team estimates could make large data centres 10 to 100 times more efficient. It is early, basic research, but it grew from a decade of patient groundwork on advanced materials.