That's extremely interesting, though the "article" doesn't do a great job of presenting it to people who don't already know it.
The reason high-temperature superconductors are important is because they allow very strong magnetic fields, such as the kind used in MRI scanners in hospitals. Currently those need to be cooled with liquid nitrogen, which is obviously very expensive. At the temperatures described in this article, you could have a a superconductor cooled by a simple freezer unit. This is a lot cheaper and would make MRI much more accessible.
And then, of course, there's a dozen other applications of strong magnetic fields that we don't know about because it's too expensive.
And then, to add onto that, if we can manufacture circuits out of superconductors, we may well find increased efficiencies in running a computer. Superconductors have zero resistance and so they don't heat up when current goes through them. They require less current and less cooling than normal systems. I'm sure Google is looking into ways to use this sort of thing for their data centres.
As I understand it, for MRI (and other devices which need high fields, such as magnetic confinement fusion), the biggest limiting factor is not cooling, which is not terribly expensive relative to the cost of all the other equipment (liquid nitrogen is actually cheaper than milk), but the so called critical magnetic field strength, at which the material no longer can maintain its superconductivity. There's been similar progress along these lines as well, but it is not as glamorous -- as the critical field increases, so too may your magnetic fields.
By contrast, room temperature superconductors, if they're cheap enough, are way better than even slightly lower Tc superconductors, because they can be used in situations where cooling would induce a prohibitive efficiency loss and expense. Hence the glamor. :-) It could revolutionize instrumentation, power transmission, generator, transformers, power quality, signal transmission, on and on and on... :-)
We had a similar incident with the kids who had a hair solar panel. Not knowing much about superconductors, I had no idea what to look for. This being HN, I somehow expected the submitter to be knowledgeable enough.
Can we have some submitter guidelines for preventing people from posting such stuff. Digg and reddit fail pretty regularly at preventing this and it would be great if HN could dodge this bullet.
I felt that the veracity of the claim itself would be an interesting discussion on HN. It's been talked about on other sites but we tend to have more informative and knowledgeable discussion here than happens elsewhere so I felt that it was worth posting if only to be able to discuss the deeper implications and the nuances of why, specifically something like this may in fact be impossible as claimed.
As the guidelines say: "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
There are also some guidelines about the appropriate way to handle submissions that are off-topic which might be helpful to you.
The reason high-temperature superconductors are important is because they allow very strong magnetic fields, such as the kind used in MRI scanners in hospitals. Currently those need to be cooled with liquid nitrogen, which is obviously very expensive. At the temperatures described in this article, you could have a a superconductor cooled by a simple freezer unit. This is a lot cheaper and would make MRI much more accessible.
And then, of course, there's a dozen other applications of strong magnetic fields that we don't know about because it's too expensive.
And then, to add onto that, if we can manufacture circuits out of superconductors, we may well find increased efficiencies in running a computer. Superconductors have zero resistance and so they don't heat up when current goes through them. They require less current and less cooling than normal systems. I'm sure Google is looking into ways to use this sort of thing for their data centres.