Navy files for patent on room-temperature superconductor

I'll believe it when I see the data.

Fascinating. I'd put a bit more faith in this one on the grounds that 1) the Navy probably wouldn't waste legal cycles on filling this one if it hadn't been reduced to practice, and 2) there looks like there's still energy lost to heat, if I'm reading correctly:

> An electromagnetic coil is circumferentially positioned around the coating such that when the coil is activated with a pulsed current, a non-linear vibration is induced, enabling room temperature superconductivity.

I'm presuming there's still energy loss taking place with the coil that wraps the wire. So it seems you enable superconductivity and some of its associated benefits but you're still going to have some energy loss since it's... for lack of a better term, an active superconductor rather than a passive one.

I wonder if the heat output of the coil is drastically reduced compared to the heat you'd get from electrifying e.g. the sort of cable this seeks to replace?

Well, you could make the coil out of this room-temperature superconductor that the Navy just developed; then it wouldn't have any heat loss...

Oops.

You could think about taking two of these and weaving them in a helix around each other so that they each are creating the magnetic field for the other, except that:

1. The coil needs a pulsed current. It's not just a simple current-carrier. Trying to use it to also carry current is... probably going to be problematic.

2. If "non-linear vibration" means a mechanical vibration, that's probably going to be lossy. Worse, the loss is going to appear as heating of the superconducting wire, which could also cause problems.

Still, even with such a Rube Goldberg approach, getting superconductivity up to room temperature is a really big deal... if it truly works. If nothing else, it's going to show the way for a bunch of future work, some of which will (hopefully) improve on this.

The real startling discovery here is that there is still value in reading Slashdot

No