This article is part of a monthly series celebrating research breakthroughs and successes at Brock University over the past 60 years. To read other stories in the series, visit The Brock News.

While most staff and faculty were preparing for the 1986 Christmas break, three Brock researchers hunkered down in their lab to work on a challenge that was to revolutionize technology.

Physics Professors Fereidoon Razavi, Bozidar Mitrovic and the late Frans Koffyberg were attempting to prove the existence of a new type of superconductor.

A superconductor is material that, when cooled to extremely low temperatures, allows electricity to flow easily and indefinitely with no resistance or energy loss.

Weeks before, researchers from IBM’s laboratory in Switzerland had said a particular compound could raise the temperature at which electricity would flow easily, making this superconductor far cheaper and more versatile than what was available at the time.

By Dec. 22, the Brock team had the proof. They were the second team in the world, and the first in Canada, to replicate the IBM study.

“The alternative and complementary measurements by the Brock physics group provided much-needed credibility to the IBM results, ushering in the prospects of ‘High Temperature Superconductors’ with applications leading to major advancements in everyday life,” says Professor Emeritus of Physics Shyamal Bose.

High temperature superconductors are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) systems, power transmission cables and generators, among other applications.

The physics team’s work was one of many breakthroughs throughout Brock’s history that not only advanced theory in an academic discipline but transformed people’s lives in the process.

This was the case for those who once fit into “Category X,” a classification created by American sexologist and biologist Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940s in his research on human sexuality.

The 1948 Kinsey Scale characterizing human sexual behaviour had the Category X group report “no socio-sexual contacts or reactions.”

A half-century later, Professor of Health Sciences Anthony Bogaert came across a similar set in a British study.

Bogaert’s curiosity fuelled his seminal 2004 study, “Asexuality: prevalence and associated factors in a national probability sample.” This sparked a flurry of research in the field leading to the recognition of a distinct sexual orientation.

“I felt that studying asexual people was important because we would begin to learn more about this minority group and potentially give them more voice in society, as well as offering an opportunity to take a new view on sexuality” says Bogaert.

His subsequent book, Understanding Asexuality, made global headlines.

“Dr. Bogaert’s research helped set off an international wave of press that encouraged hundreds of thousands of asexual people to find community in ways that changed, and in many ways saved, our lives,” says David Jay, founder of the California-based Asexual Visibility and Education Network.

About a decade later, Brock was to experience another wave of headlines, this time concerning the planet’s future.

Momentum was building to propose that the Earth is entering a new epoch, the Anthropocene, because of the impact that human activity had on the planet and how it functions.

Playing a major leadership role in putting together the proposal was Professor of Earth Sciences Martin Head. He and his colleagues in the Anthropocene Working Group sought a location where the boundary between the current Holocene and the suggested Anthropocene could be most clearly seen in the geologic record.

Crawford Lake, a small lake on the Niagara Escarpment in Milton, Ont., was one of a dozen contenders and a location familiar to his colleague, Professor of Earth Sciences Francine McCarthy, who had been studying the lake for years.

She quickly pulled together a multi-institutional team who collected cores from the lake’s bottom and examined their sediment layers for materials generated by human activity.

Crawford Lake turned out to be the site with the strongest evidence to support the creation of a new epoch.

Although the International Commission on Stratigraphy rejected the proposal, McCarthy says the group intends to resubmit it in future.

“Whether or not the stratigraphic community accepts that humans have fundamentally changed our planet in the mid-20th century, it is crucial that decision-makers recognize that we are no longer inhabiting a stable Holocene world in order to make responsible decisions that impact humanity,” she says.