via Gizmodo
Superconductors are materials that can transmit electrical charge without any resistance—unlike a copper wire, for example, which heats up from passing electric current, weakening the transmitted signal. Superconductors have found an important use generating the intense magnetic fields required by MRI machines and high-energy particle physics experiments, but they must be kept at temperatures far colder than those we naturally experience on Earth.
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Now feels like a turning point: lanthanum hydride is the closest a room-temperature superconductor has felt to reality. But visiting with Geballe at the Geophysical Laboratory, it was hard to imagine the slivers of the material—smaller than the width of a human hair—fashioned into a wire or used in any technology at all. Nor is that the point. Materials scientists are working at the boundary of the present and the future, performing grueling, hands-on research hoping to develop substances that might not even have any applications.
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