  We prove that there exists an exponent beyond which all continuous
conventional powers of n-by-n doubly nonnegative matrices are doubly
nonnegative. We show that this critical exponent cannot be less than $n-2$ and
we conjecture that it is always $n-2$ (as it is with Hadamard powering). We
prove this conjecture when $n<6$ and in certain other special cases. We
establish a quadratic bound for the critical exponent in general.
