A Texas physicist found a hidden spiral inside a compound chemists ignored since the 1960s

Dr. Mengke Liu, a physicist at the University of Texas at Dallas, took a fresh look at uranium oxytelluride — a material chemists first described in the 1960s and then largely forgot — and found something nobody had seen: a twisted, spiral-like pattern in its atomic structure, revealed with powerful electron microscopes that can image individual atoms. Working with collaborators at Harvard, her team showed the material pairs two kinds of magnetism rarely found together, a combination that could one day make computer memory faster and more resistant to magnetic interference. The findings were published in the journal Nature.