The Record For High-Temperature Superconductivity Has Been Smashed Again (technologyreview.com) 145
Chemists have found a material that can display superconducting behavior at a temperature warmer than it currently is at the North Pole. The work brings room-temperature superconductivity tantalizingly close.
From a report: The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole.
"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
From a report: The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole.
"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
Well that solved the problem (Score:3, Funny)
After all, generating that kind of pressure in your computer should be easy.
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Well, I can totally see Google, Amazon or Facebook creating a new data center in the center of the earth and drilling a hole down from the North Pole for a cooling line.
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But it is interesting how high pressure changes the dynamic, and so as basic science goes this is interesting and worthy of more research and learning. Just not breathless /. headlines.
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If he had met her, you would not see it ...
Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly. (Score:2, Interesting)
The pressure might be high, but it doesn't require constantly putting energy into it. So I wouldn't call it much of a caveat. It still nearly solves exactly what we needed.
-23C can be done with a better freezer. Make it really bulky, preferably out of an isolating material, and your energy usage will be small enough to run it on a local wind turbine or solar panel.
It's enough, IMHO, to make consumer superconducting electronics a thing. Certainly, a superconducting CPU for the average user is now thinkable.
W
Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly. (Score:4, Informative)
While I agree that this is a big step forward, 25,000 psi is more than "not much of a caveat". Your PC is going to gain a lot of weight when you add a pressure vessel capable of containing that safely. Then there's the additional challenge of getting wires from inside to outside without compromising the vessel. I'd like to see the hermetic connectors they use for that.
Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly. (Score:5, Informative)
I think you missed a few zeroes there, 170 gigapascals is around 25 million psi.
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I think you missed a few zeroes there, 170 gigapascals is around 25 million psi.
Oops. That''s what I get for using a calculator instead of asking Google. Guess I need new reading glasses too, so I can distinguish between a comma and a decimal point. Anyway, this just makes the pressure vessel more challenging. Also, what kind of compressor do you need to get that kind of pressure? Something tells me it's not something you can get at Harbor Freight.
The device is... (Score:4, Informative)
The device used to get to this type of pressure is called a diamond anvil press/cell (see wikipedia) And no, there is no way to use such a device outside a very specialized lab.
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I'm sure harbor freight has it. I'm also sure that it will explode five minutes after you start using it. However, they will refund the $4.00 you spent on it.
additional challenge of getting wires from inside (Score:2)
Blue Tooth?
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Blue Tooth?
Great idea. RF should easily penetrate a thick metal pressure vessel, and power over Bluetooth is proven technology.
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You left out the invariably occurring ruptures of such a vessel, and the issues that result from turning your computer into shrapnel.
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Why would I want a superconducting CPU?
Give me my hoverboard!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Okay, but you get to pay for building, cleaning, and maintaining the required powerfully magnetic roads.
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Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is 170 gigapascals. That is 1.7 million atmospheres! The most powerful high explosives known only produce pressures up to about 300,000 atmospheres. This can only done in a diamond anvil which have working sizes one the order of 100 microns (barely visible speck, without magnification).
No, this is not thinkable. There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge that allows to design some other material that can do the same trick without 6 times the detonation pressure of HMX.
Re:Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge
This, in general, is how scientific progress works. This is a proof of concept. Now that one person has done this others will be inspired in ways not previously anticipated to look at other avenues.
Re: Pressure can be held. Heat not exactly. (Score:3)
Maybe, maybe not. Yeah sometimes discovering completely impractical things opens up new lines of research which do turn out to be groundbreaking. Other times it goes nowhere.
We already knew that pressure could change the conductivity of various materials, and we already knew it was possible to superconducting at relatively high temperatures. Ergo this discovery seems more likely to fall into the "goes nowhere" camp.
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And we're okay with just anyone being able to buy something with that much stored energy.
Oh no, he has a detenator on his computer. RUN!
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"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)"
ROFL, oh yeah.
"The pressure might be high, but it doesn't require constantly putting energy into it."
Right because things... besides the core of the earth, maintain that kind of pressure without losses which require energy to offset.
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A sufficiently resilient material to hold that kind of pressure on a macro-sized object would probably end up looking a lot like a planet. Perhaps we can enhance some of Jupiter's surplus moons to achieve the requirements and bring those into earth orbit to play around with.
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If by indefinite you mean indeterminate, perhaps, if by indefinite you mean forever then no. Not even the core of the Earth will accomplish that.
In the real world, we do not have such chambers and compartments lying around in any practical form and aren't likely to anytime within our lifetimes. Just the energy to reach the desired pressure make this a useless discovery. Of course, until it is replicated outside China I'd look on the "discovery" with a heavy grain of salt in any case.
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Thanks for the clarification but it seems odd to invoke the practicality of the leak rate of a vessel which does not exist and won't be possible to construct on any forseeably practical timescale.
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You underestimate just how much pressure that is. Air does not merely liquify at room temperature: It solidifies.
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That makes no sense. Materials do not 'withstand' pressure. They have specified strengths - tensile strength being the important one in a pressure vessel. This material is simply not remotely practical for use in any type of engineering. Its real value comes from research - a better understanding of the mechanisms of superconductivity may lead to discovery of other materials, ones which are directly useful. Perhaps even the holy grail, a material that is superconductive at room temperature and standard pres
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Exactly
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Certainly, a superconducting CPU for the average user is now thinkable.
Seems to be a lot of effort just to read a facebook feed and watch porn though.
The long-term implications (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't need literally room temperature superconductors in order to have a lot of the benefits that people associate with room temperature superconductors. -23 C is within essentially close to the range of conventional refrigeration equipment. Once one doesn't need to rely on liquid nitrogen cooling for superconductors, the general use goes way up. The pressure is of course a pretty big issue, but if for example one had something that was a superconductor at -30 C and 2 gigapascals that would be incredibly practically useful.
And it is worth keeping in mind that even superconductors which require very cold temperatures are now being produced and used in large enough quantities that we can use them as part of the regular electric grid. The US Eastern electric grid already has a superconducting cable in Long Island https://www.energy.gov/oe/downloads/long-island-hts-power-cable [energy.gov] and the Tres Amigas Superstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation [wikipedia.org] is going to have superconducting lines to allow efficient transfer between the three major US grids (East, West and Texas). This sort of thing will also help renewable energy a lot; since right now, there's often more wind or solar power somewhere than one directly needs but hard to get it elsewhere, and then not enough wind or solar at some other time. More efficient grids mean that excess can be much more easily transferred to where it can be used.
Re:The long-term implications (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, a liquid nitrogen cooled superconductor has been used in a German city as a part of the local power grid for several years now.
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That cable is half a mile long. The costs to make it superconduct are so much higher than electricity losses in comparable HVDC line of that length, it's not even funny. The sheer amount of zeroes involved in that multiplier after the meaningful number is hilarious.
Also this doesn't interact with renewable energy in any way. You need actually functional superconductivity at near environmental temperature (and pressure) to get anything like what you suggest. As far as we know, that doesn't exist. At all. Wha
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Do you have any idea how expensive it is to maintain thousands of kilometers of liquid nitrogen cooled system?
There's a reason why these "deployments" being cited rarely reach even a kilometre. It's incredibly expensive.
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Why would I justify an absurd claim I didn't make, just because you are claiming otherwise?
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Re:The long-term implications (Score:4, Informative)
You wrote "The costs to make it superconduct are so much higher than electricity losses in comparable HVDC line of that length, it's not even funny. " I apparently misread that as being a claim about energy use. My apologies.
You have nothing to apologize for. Luckyo was drooling his ignorance all over you while making an ass of himself. The Long Island superconducting cable operates at 130 kV AC and has 150 times the power capacity of the same size conventional copper conductor, which means the right of way required to run it safely is much much narrower. They're moving 574 MW through a right of way just 4 feet wide. In New York City, that's incredibly valuable because the real estate required to operate a conventional line would be dramatically more expensive. Prohibitively more expensive, in fact. To operate a conventional cable, the voltage required to carry the same amount of power is much higher, which requires a correspondingly wider right of way for safety.
The Department of Energy helped pay for it. It went live in 2008 and the Long Island Power Authority has decided to keep it permanently, even though it was intended as a demonstrator. It's still in operation today. That tells you that it's cost effective to operate. LIPA will eventually install more such lines on the island in other locations that physically can't be replaced with a conventional HVDC line of the same capacity. There isn't room for one.
Ultimately, superconducting power cables will be HVDC installations themselves. Experiments out of Japan in 2010 demonstrated that HVDC over superconductors is 10 times more efficient than HVAC over the same size lines. There are still losses in superconductors. They're very very small compared to conventional lines, but they're non-zero.
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I like how you claim I'm ignorant while espousing utter BS. The reason this thing is still operating is because it's largely paid by federal government rather than utility itself. It's near free from utility's point of view, while running inconsequential distance of about a kilometre. So free vs massive investment that is laying HVDC transformers. Yeah, free is better, since someone else is paying for deployment.
This cable installation was built in 2008. This is 2018. There are grand total of zero plans to
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Awesome post. Best drool-slap ever.
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Which claims specifically? Massive deployment costs? That can be directly derived from the fact that utility paid zero for this ~1km of a line. It was fully funded by federal government as an experiment. The fact that utility itself paid for zero metres of the line since tells you everything you need to know about economics side.
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The two are not mutually exclusive.
HVDC has several advantages over HVAC transmission lines - namely in synchronization, lower impedance losses (basically just resistive losses) and the like. However, IIR losses are still present with HVDC installations and superconducting cables can still be used to reduce IIR losses. It's just they're lower than the IIZ losses incurred by HVAC.
The difficulty in transforming HVDC
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(basically just resistive losses)
Wrong (HVDC has several advantages over HVAC transmission lines - namely in synchronization, lower impedance losses )
AC has lower resistance losses, that is the fucking reason why every majour grid is AC.
However with the high amount of current we transport in our days, impedance and furthermore: radiation, is now the prime reason for loss.
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Long Island HTS Power Cable: [energy.gov]
Siting new transmission lines has become a formidable challenge to utilities in congested areas such as Long Island. HTS cable can carry several times more current than a conventional copper cable with the same diameter. HTS cables can be installed in existing rightsof-way, helping to reduce the cost and environmental impact of grid upgrades.
So the electricity losses are of less concern.
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That's literally what I said. Electricity losses are loss of a concern on supraconductive cable. The problem is that the assembly itself is far more expensive for any kind of long range deployment than HVDC line.
Which is why they haven't installed any more in ten years since, while HVDC rollout is happening as we speak on thousands of kilometres.
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An electrical grid encompasses more than just long distance transmission. There are more considerations than just transmission losses.
HTS was selected for Long Island because it was best suited for high capacity within the limitations of installation. HVDC wouldn't even be applicable in that case.
HVDC has advantages and disadvantages that would limit its suitability within all applications. Likewise with HTS. Having additional medium options can be a benefit for planners in making design choices for an
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They were built by a company called American Superconductor, who got money from the Obama administration's Department of Energy to build both mentioned superconducting transmission lines as part of the 2009 "shovel ready" stimulus package.
So no, a utility company didn't spend money on this.
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We don't need superconductors. Period. The whole idea of moving energy long distances comes from the big utility model of business. Solar and wind can be generated locally, nearer the loads. What we need is storage. As this problem is solved more economically, the need to shift from generation to use sites goes down. And as this need goes down, the cost of losses to support temporary energy shifts becomes less of an issue.
A side effect of the AC/DC conversion technology needed to support battery interfaces
Re:The long-term implications (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The long-term implications (Score:5, Interesting)
We *do* need superconductors. MRIs are an essential part of modern medicine.
What we don't need is long distance power transmission by superconductor.
This thread has been taken over by the unrealistic, unnecessary dream of superconducting power transmission. But there are a large number of other applications that superconductors enable. And doubtless even more that haven't been invented yet.
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What we don't need is long distance power transmission by superconductor.
Define "need." We don't strictly "need" a lot of things. That doesn't mean that long-distance, near-lossless power transmission wouldn't be a transformative technology.
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That doesn't mean that long-distance, near-lossless power transmission wouldn't be a transformative technology. .... oh, here it gets complicated.
Transmission losses are in the range of 7% in your grid. So your $1 bill would be
How much do you pay for power? Lets say 100 cents? 20 cents are for infrastructure and staff, like the guy reading your meter, the guy writing the bill etc. (simplified, obviously) 40 cents are for the grid, 40 cents are for the power.
So, you switch from "some losses" to zero losses,
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That is not about just transmission losses, but also the size of the cable. Replacing old cables in a densely populated city that became quite power hungry during the past 50 years might be problematic. Superconducting cables are somewhat thinner than normal cables with the same capacity. Alternatively they can be operated with far lower voltages, eliminating the need for substations. That was the reasoning behind the ampacity project in Essen.
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Long distance power transmission by superconductor would making going 100% solar a very realistic choice. It may not be needed, but it's exciting.
You are right there are numerous other uses, but, frankly, while I can appreciate and respond to them, I cannot think of them. Hence, the low hanging fruit I (and others) focus on. That's why that's what the thread is talking about.
Please correct this by going on about cool new stuff, instead of saying what we know about is boring!!
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Long distance power transmission by superconductor would making going 100% solar a very realistic choice.
Power to gas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) and power to liquid seem like much more viable technologies to that end. I was surprised at the achievable efficiencies as well as how much energy the existing gas networks in Europe could 'store' ("The storage capacity of the German natural gas network is more than 200,000 GWh which is enough for several months of energy requirement.").
Apart from further developing battery technology, this seems to me like something that should be heavily invested in to in
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Schsch ....!
("The storage capacity of the German natural gas network is more than 200,000 GWh which is enough for several months of energy requirement.")
That was a well kept secret!!! Now the Americans know we are not at the mercy of the Russians! You spoiled it, traitor!
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YBaCuO high-temperature superconductors have been known for 20 years now. But MRIs still use low-temperature superconductors that require liquid helium instead.
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In principle, this is true, but the average power density of solar on the surface of the earth over a single solar day is about 1kw/square meter... there are many places that fall below that, and conversely there are many that are above. It would be extraordinarily wasteful IMO to not be maximizing power utilization in places with excess and sending it to places with less if it were feasible to do so with high temperature superconductive cables..
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If you live in a suburb, then yes.
If you live in Manhattan, or you are running a power-intensive factory, then the amount of solar and wind that can be generated locally do not come close to the demand.
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we'd all be using them instead of copper and aluminum
Probably not. Lanthanum isn't particularly rare. But good luck rounding enough of it up to make a small dent in the copper/aluminum transmission conductor market. Maybe for niche applications like MRI and other instruments.
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I would think the smart move would be how to get a current to move across the surface of a material rather than through it, static flow. So very thin molecular conduits.
That's a pretty big caveat (Score:4, Interesting)
170 gPascals ~= 1.68 Million atmospheres.
I just did a quick Google search on "High Pressure Operations" and couldn't find anything that was within two or three orders of magnitude of this level of pressure. To make artificial diamonds, you need around 8.4gPascals. Maybe somebody with experience with high pressure operations can provide references to other operations at this pressure level.
TFA references "USOs" (Unidentified Superconducting Objects" and I would argue that this is one of them.
Re:That's a pretty big caveat (Score:5, Interesting)
Defining progress. (Score:2)
This kind of reminds me of when I hear about new and exciting discoveries regarding habitable planets that are "only" a few light-years away. (The caveat being we have no way of traveling at 186,000 miles per second or faster to get there.)
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Yes but for the purpose of spreading the human race to another planet and helping ensure our survival it could be worth sending a population on a trip to get to one if we have confidence they could live there.
This on the other hand is useless.
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86,000 years would be useless but that isn't what we are discussing. There are potential candidates being found that we could reach in 100-200 years. What you have to remember about these very far locations is that they are very very far and we DO have technology that can theoretically accelerate to the kind of speed we'd need turtle style given enough time and space.
Even 86,000 years might not be useless in the long run but we'd have enough trouble successfully building a self contained environment that wi
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Right now, making something that lasts 86 millennia is out of our capabilities, but it would be foolish to assume it always will be. I'd argue that (assuming we survive long enough) any spacefaring civilization is going to set up shop on places (like inside asteroids) that would be just as well served with their own power source to replace the sun. Those asteroids have been there billions of years, so they're "proven space-worthy".
Say we have a self-sufficient colony on a 100 meter asteroid that decides the
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"that decides they want to just wander the system and possibly beyond by strapping motors to their rock, collecting smaller objects as they go for raw materials and fuel."
Perhaps but we are long way from being able to establish a fully self sufficient colony that could produce things like replacement motors, integrated circuits, etc from raw materials with only a small population and less than 100 meters of space. If anything, we are moving further and further AWAY from this target.
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You're assuming that just because they don't have the latest fab tech (because it will be expensive and large), that they can't do reasonably well with older, larger-process tech for which the machines are smaller and likely being dumped by commercial entities.
And when you say "a long time", who cares? If you're positing an 86,000 year journey, what's another few hundred or even few thousand before leaving?
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"And when you say "a long time", who cares? If you're positing an 86,000 year journey, what's another few hundred or even few thousand before leaving?"
Sure but an exercise like this becomes silly if you detach entirely from what is feasible on our current theoretical roadmap. We are a long way from just being able to project our consciousness through the gaps in the weave of time and space to any place and time we want with the sniff a smelling salt tin which would eliminate the need any of this stuff. But
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Simply put: there are almost certainly people who aren't going to like living in the Matrix. Perhaps they'll be allowed to leave peacefully.
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Maybe they WILL live in the Matrix while their bodies are in some kind of stasis during the 86,000 year journey.
Re:Defining progress. (Score:4)
Yeah, its pretty useless outside of the lab. That seems to be the state of a lot of new advances today. "Hey we got a battery that will keep your phone running for 3 years on one charge. It only has to be made of a combination gold and element-295. Also to work it must be used while its stored up a rabid gorillas ass."
North Pole? (Score:2)
Can we count on using the current temperature of the North Pole as the temperature we can conduct superconductivity? If so, climate change will be a huge help for progress in this field. /s
Usefulness (Score:3)
So in terms of usefulness, this is the least useful semiconductor yet, since it is far easier to super cool a semiconductor than apply ludicrous amounts of pressure.
Had to read the title again (Score:2)
I thought this was going to be another story about climate change.
Yeah, I'm kind of cynical.
About that high pressure thing. (Score:2)
So far as I can tell from the source, this material is not in a stable state, meaning release the pressure and the structure falls apart. However, that is not the case with all solid structures. For example, it takes a lot of pressure to form a diamond crystal out of carbon, but once you have this "seed" crystal, there are chemical techniques for growing the crystal under much less demandin thermodynamics.
(also true for Ice-9, but only in fiction, sadly).
Thus -- one of these days maybe this kind of rese
Caveat? That's putting it mildly (Score:2)
. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole. "Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
That's not a caveat. That's a show stopping problem. In what circumstances would this finding be useful given the ridiculous pressure involved? I get that it's probably a new line of discovery and that eventually it could result in something practical but as it stands this definitely isn't practical.
What we want is superconductivity at temperatures and pressures that require minimal to (preferably) no refrigeration at temperature ranges habitable to humans and no special pressure vessels under routine ci
For future generations... (Score:2)
For future generations, this was posed in 2018. At that point, the North Pole was still considered really cold.
Fun race, which progresses faster, room-temp. superconductors or temp. at the North Pole. Looking forward to the new headline in 3 years - "North Pole warms up, no longer able to cool superconductors anymore."
Which North Pole? (Score:2)
1 - Terrestrial North Pole
2 - Magnetic North Pole
3 - Geomagnetic North Pole
4 - North Pole, Alaska
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2. and 3. are both subject to drift, which is exactly what we're trying to solve, so they're right out. 4. probably fails for political reasons, although I'm sure the National Weather Service would love it.
Yet more bad science reporting (Score:2)
Came here excited by the headline, then read the comments and saw the real story. So let's play the headline game! That's where you make up an impressive headline, then try to find a mundane way that the headline could be true without anything special happening.
Headline: "Scientist creates smallest bacteria ever"
Reality: Someone CG rendered a bacteria that is smaller than any known bacteria.
Headline: "Russia creates most powerful atomic bomb ever."
Reality: Strapped 2 atomic bombs together with duct tape.
H
Not a record; not even close. (Score:2)
Santa (Score:2)
"That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole." Just in time for Santa Claus's workshop. Apart from the pressure...
Re:Where's the source link? (Score:5, Informative)
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I think I found a way to get the required pressure easily. The density displayed in some postings here should be sufficient to create the pressure by mere gravitational force.
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Did they try using 1.7 gigaasm instead?
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There isn't enough RAM in the universe for even 1 megapython.
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It's easy, you just need 1.21 jiggawatts!