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A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

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Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#261

Post by tills13 »

martinald wrote: post #54
digdugdirk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a conductor of electricity. But super good at it. i.e. - It has zero resistance to electricity. Currently, the best superconducting materials we can create have to be chilled to near absolute zero, which means designing them to work in liquid helium baths. This is expensive, and difficult. If a material can superconduct at room temperature, now we're talking usage in general purpose consumer goods. As for why we…

Hmm. Losses from HVDC transmission are on the order of 3% per 1000km, so I'm not sure how much of a big deal it'd be for that kind of use case. Your example would only save ~6% transmission losses. An improvement yes but not really a big deal, unless the cables were far cheaper to make than current HVDC cables (which I'm doubtful about). I think there are other use cases within devices themselves that are far more in…

ok but 3% when you're talking about MWs or GWs of power is still a lot of wasted energy.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#262

Post by spotplay »

roywiggins wrote: post #79
TheJoeMan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever seen one of these high school science demos?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWojYBhvfjM Now imagine one where you don't have to chill it with liquid nitrogen.

A huge renaissance in desk toys, at the very least!

You're joking but to be honest the reason I'm most excited at the moment about this discovery is because of desk toys. The way I would calculate excitement is usefulness / time to market and the respective graph of a superconductor application (at least in my monkey brain) peaks at desk toys since they would come first.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#263

Post by 0xDEF »

deeg wrote: post #165

I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974.

Danish and German media has covered it by interviewing local scientists who are all calling it bullshit.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#264

Post by greggsy »

badRNG wrote: post #244
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for having RTRPS tech flying around for decades RTRPS = Real Time Role Playing Strategy?

I'm sorry, but you are correct. I made a mistake earlier when I referred to RTRPS as being a flying technology the government has been using for decades. No such technology goes by that name. I apologize for the error.

This still doesn’t make sense

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#265

Post by Bjorkbat »

deeg wrote: post #165

I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974.

Because until more scientists can replicate this the news is little more substantial than the typical post on /r/futurology on any given day.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#266

Post by _yb2s »

orangepurple wrote: post #249
_yb2s wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the "disappointment" with USA scientists in this thread not having yet published a replication. There has only been one weekday since the LK-99 revelation came to light. Have some patience. The analysis from this article is a publication from Berkeley National Lab that has already come out, and Argonne National Lab has announced they have synthesized the material as of yesterday and will release results f…

China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more access to raw materials and chemicals, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more everything, and all of that by huge margins. USA scientists will eventually put something out, but 10x more slowly than China.

I'm not looking at official numbers here, but in my field (academic biotech research) I still don't see much innovation coming out of China.

All of what you say is true, yet in academic research China is still far behind the USA in nearly every field. They haven't yet been able to build institutions with the staff, structure, and culture needed. That will likely change in time, but at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work, and staying here. Despite the USA having a lot more research output, a substantial fraction of the top scientists in the USA are from China.

My Chinese colleagues tell me that the bureaucracy and authoritarianism in Chinese institutions puts a lot of hurdles in place when trying to do research. Simply buying equipment, hiring staff, etc. is a nightmare, and results in "evaporative cooling" where the top researchers with the option to work anywhere don't tolerate this and leave.

Edit: I will also add that in some sense US academia is supported by overcharging Chinese students for tuition. If and when Chinese institutions get to the point where the best students want to stay there, there will be a huge crisis in US universities, possibly being unable to support tenured staff.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#267

Post by joefigura »

jvm___ wrote: post #102
anyoneamous wrote: post #30

Mostly, I am just glad that all the LK-99 posts are drowning out the "AI" news for a few days.

AI has already taken over the internet and is just feeding us news stories based on what it already knows. Super conductor discovered by a team who's been searching for 20 years. Internal conflict 'proves' there's something to argue over. Low quality, confusing information that's hard to decipher, but kind of makes sense. Asian language information streams and videos. Musk buys twitter. A submarine visited the titani…

Dude sometimes scientific progress really does happen, and it's messy when it's happening live, and people get excited about it because they really do find science inherently exciting.

I've got no clue what you're trying to imply. Most things aren't an internet conspiracy. Skepticism is warranted, and the claims about LK-99 are far from proven. But there's 100s of thousands of researchers out there in the real world, doing research and publishing papers, and that really is what's happening here.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#268

Post by refulgentis »

ygjb wrote: post #236
declan_roberts wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think them waiting until there’s more research is preferable to them coming out and making random claims which pan out not to be true.

I think it's more likely that the bulk of folks don't fully comprehend why this would be so important. I would imagine alot of reporters look at the things they could write about and the choices are politics, war, polarizing news, or nerds nerding hard trying to prove other nerds right or wrong, and it just doesn't make the cut.

No...that's not the case here, to wit, we can observe writers from these publications discussing it casually.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#269

Post by fluidcruft »

fallingknife wrote: post #49
7moritz7 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen three now from China alone. Plus a calculation from some respected institute from today that confirms the theory

Why are they all from China? Why are they able to replicate so much faster than US labs?

With China's research environment things happen really fast--you just never know what you're going to get. Sometimes you get superconductors and sometimes you get COVID.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#270

Post by 0xDEF »

orangepurple wrote: post #249
_yb2s wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the "disappointment" with USA scientists in this thread not having yet published a replication. There has only been one weekday since the LK-99 revelation came to light. Have some patience. The analysis from this article is a publication from Berkeley National Lab that has already come out, and Argonne National Lab has announced they have synthesized the material as of yesterday and will release results f…

China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more access to raw materials and chemicals, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more everything, and all of that by huge margins. USA scientists will eventually put something out, but 10x more slowly than China.

The above can be condensed to "China has more STEM graduates".

It was China's STEM graduates and not just the stereotypical "cheap labor" who built up the Chinese manufacturing base.

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