
Superconductivity Near 20 Celsius - ph0rque
http://www.superconductors.org/20C.htm
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ylem
I'll believe it when I see it in a peer reviewed journal--published by more
than one group. Until then, it's a USO (unidentified superconducting object).
If it were real, then reports would be all over the March Meeting of the
American Physical Society which is celebrating 100 years of superconductivity
this year.

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ecuzzillo
I don't know about physics, but in robotics and computer vision and CS, there
is no correlation between credible research and journal publication. I suppose
physics attracts more quacks, though, and it's not quite as easy to verify
because you need expensive equipment generally owned only by people who
publish in journals all the time anyway.

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icegreentea
If you look into the history of high temperature superconductors (or any realm
of physics where 'world changing' is in play... like fusion), it's full of
quacks, frauds, overeager scientists publishing before checking properly,
unrepeatable experiments, or just plain honest errors.

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turnersauce
This has been posted before, and there was much interesting discussion:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2041675>

~~~
MrDunham
That article claims 3 deg C. The article just posted claims to have furthered
that research to 20 deg C.

Amazing how 3 months of research produced such a significant jump.

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gimpf
Until further replication I think it is more probable that three months of
waiting resulted in somebody using a text editor.

~~~
MrDunham
Haha very true.

They have both posted on their news, however, under the root. However I'd like
to see the claim backed up.

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phreeza
If this is for real, the implications are huge. Seems odd that news like this
would be broken on a weird page like this, and not on arxiv, for example.

Not holding my breath.

~~~
sage_joch
What would some of the implications be?

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wisty
Big magnets, for MRI, and for trains. Maybe flying cars :)

Run a big, refrigerated line (or just dig underground where it's cooler), and
you can transmit unlimited power coast-to-coast, or even around the world. You
could put some big nuclear power plants in the middle of a desert (or several
deserts, to reduce the risk of a failure taking out the world's power supply),
and a wind/solar grid around the world, and send that power anywhere. They are
already building this kind of thing (Tres Amigas SuperStation), but it's
expensive and small-scale.

~~~
ramchip
Wouldn't you still hit a wall due to the maximum field in the superconductor?
I'd expect the wires needed to transport gigawatts of power to be pretty large
and require exotic metals to build, so much that it may not make economic
sense compared to a regular, slightly lossy wire.

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asdkl234890
I don't see that website linking to any kind of a scientific or academic
publication about this. If this was real, I don't think it would be only on
the web.

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nickpinkston
Wow - I liked this part:

"This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent
protection in order to encourage additional research."

Let's hope this works!

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I'm not even sure what it means. Not patenting the invention makes sense, but
exactly what is being released into the public domain? I don't see any benefit
to not retaining the copyright on your writeup. (Provided you make it publicly
accessible - but that's clearly the case here.)

~~~
mayank
You can patent the process for creating superconducting materials:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=superconducting+patents&...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=superconducting+patents&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1,14&as_sdtp=on)

Presumably, that's what is being release into the public domain.

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mangirdas
Just half year ago I thought that it can't happen any time soon. Now I think
some day we will have a new kind of transport and many other technologies
based on superconductivity.

~~~
kjhghnjmk
Don't hold your breath.

It's not the temperature that makes HTSC a problem, it would still be
fantastic if they were usable at liquid nitrogen temperatures. The difficulty
is that most of these materials have a very low maximum field, in anything
approaching the sort of fields you need for an MRI or even a motor the
material stops superconducting. They are also difficult to form into wires.

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kordless
That's the temperature of a nice day in San Jose.

~~~
dhughes
That's a typical summer day here in eastern Canada. Seriously.

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kirubakaran
But the question is, how many summer days do you get in a year?

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gloob
I'm not really certain about eastern Canada, but in Calgary the seasons are
something like:

    
    
      Spring: Mid-March til Mid-May.  Snow goes away.  Then it
              comes back.  Then it goes away.  Then it comes
              back.  Then it goes away.
      Summer: Mid-May til early September (with luck) or late-
              August (without it).  Mostly warm, usually dry.
              Punctuated by hailstorms.  Once every few years
              punctuated with a smallish snow storm.
      Fall: Early September til late October.  Stuff cools down.
            Frost is common.  Occasional hail or freezing rain.
      Winter: Late October til mid-March.  October-til-Christmas
              swings back and forth between (very) cold streaks
              and stereotypically fall-ish weather.  January to
              March is mostly just cold and snowy and icy.
    

Bear in mind that the climate really only gets worse the further east you go,
culminating in the maritimes - where winters of five-foot snow alternate with
summers of hurricanes. :P

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koenigdavidmj
No, the one between `Spring' and `Fall' is called `Construction'.

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nkassis
I'm from Montreal and currently that's now year long.

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goalieca
It's pothole season here.. That's how we know it's spring!

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eyeforgotmyname
Can someone explain this?

