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Comment by obblekk | Hacker News Reader

The method to produce this material as described in the related paper [1] is fairly simple and could be done at home with a $200 home metal melting furnace from amazon and the precursors (which also seem to be fairly standard easy to obtain metals).

If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days.

If this is real, it'll change society quickly and permanently for the better. There's obvious wins in energy transportation and even generation, but actually having a room temperature superconductor is likely to result in an explosion of engineering use cases. It will be like the discovery of lithium ion which slowly transformed the use of energy throughout society, but faster.

Hopefully it repros.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf page 3

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Ok, let me just add the obvious disclaimer: don't try this yourself unless you have a pretty good understanding of chemical lab safety.

Really.

It's more likely that you will contaminate your land, and possibly your neighbors land too than that you will manage to replicate it.

What do you suppose the odds are that there's a Tin-based compound instead of lead based?

(Which would effectively make a bizarre form of brass a superconductor)

I doubt this one chemistry will be all that useful on practice. But after people understand it, I expect them to recreate the effect with completely different components, not on just slightly different ones.

Not really, cuprates have been the standard for high Tc superconductors since 1986 and nobody could replace them with easier to work with materials.

Bronze, right?

Brass is copper and zink.

I swear I typed bronze…

Yes, but chernobyl produced a lot of useful electricity (at first)

For years, and then after the explosion too. The last reactors were decommissioned around 2015 (it takes years, so the dates are bit washy).

Chernobyl wasn't the accident people seem to think. It wasn't inevitable, it was the result of numerous self-serving decisions exacerbated and even required in the very messed up Soviet system of management that enforced following the party instructions over all other possible complications.

> numerous self-serving decisions

And much of the cost of nuclear is hedging against these decisions, whether by profit-seeking or the tyranny of a totalitarian state

No? Not really? International standards exist

Unfortunately they have a point, in that there is no ISO or DIN standard that covers a plant that has been rigged with explosives by invading barbarians.

The solution isn't to abandon nuclear power, but to make it very costly for aggressors to meddle with it. E.g., deploy UN forces to the plant at the first sign of trouble.

It's more likely that you are confusing lead and Sarin.

You are vastly overestimating the danger involved in this.

There's no safe dose of lead.

Yes, there obviously is. One attogram is obviously safe. From there, it's necessary to look at the numbers.

Given the materials and methods involved it really isn’t that dangerous. With basic precautions I’d say go for it, worst case is honestly just blowing a few hundred bucks. If this pans out, there will definitely be some do it yourself tutorials on YouTube in the coming weeks.

Looking forward to the inevitable Nile Red & Applied Science videos

Or Tech Ingredients.

Or NightHawkInLight.

Does anyone in the twin cities area want to pair up and try to make this? Might be a fun group project.

I’d be down. Shoot me an email: hn@valine.io

Also down. Will email you

Please don't blow the lead smoke over to your neighbors house though

Seriously, people should stop panicking about lead that much. You know there is this fairly common hobby people have, it's called casting bullets. With lead. I've done it, I know many people that do it regularly and they're all fine.

Furthermore, shooting ranges are full of lead in the ground. The laws around here(Poland) require a cleanup by specialised companies every few years and a concrete slab to separate the lead/soil mix from the groundwater near the targets, but still there are tons of the stuff just sitting there for years and no one gets hurt. Fun fact. These specialised cleanup companies don't cost anything for big ranges. They're either free, or they pay the shooting club that owns the range money, because the lead they recover is worth a lot.

Yes lead in the ground isn't all that scary. Lead in your body is a concern.

So don't blow lead smoke over your neighbors house.

This post is what happens when chemistry sets don't contain anything more hazardous or interesting than marshmallows.

I think it's more that a generation of people grew up with lead paint and that decreased the average IQ so much that you have people suggesting that lead smoke is harmless.

Since when lead emits smoke? You'd have to heat it beyond it's boiling point that is 1750C,while the typical lead casting is done at around 450C.even if you managed to vaporise minute amounts of lead it's going to condense and fall out long before it reaches "your neighbour's house".

I wonder, does everyone that scared of lead own smartphones? (with cadmium in their batteries). Cadmium is very toxic and it boils at under 800C so your average wood flame will vaporise it. But everyone talks about lead.

Why? IMO because lead used to be added to petrol/gas as an anti knock agent. So there was quite a bit of contamination present back in the day. This has been outlawed decades ago, but the collective memory remains.

Dust.

Actually, firing ranges almost certainly are bad for your health and you should wear a particulate filter when going into one. https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-... for instance. I'd wager there is no small link between heavy firearm hobbyist and a proclivity for paranoia, conspiratorial thinking and other Q-Anon adjacent traits.

"No one gets hurt" - perhaps no one dies, but there are no safe levels of lead exposure.

Does the thought that there might be some guy in a garage 5 miles from you replicating this baffle you?

You need a furnace that can hold a vacuum, though.

There's a surprising number of them around. I think the bottleneck for quick repro will be mat sci people, not equipment.

> need a furnace that can hold a vacuum

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icniCydn_kE

In the paper, they sealed the material in a quartz ampuole under vacuum.

I wouldn't call it an easy process, but it's achievable without highly specialized equipment. Just a torch and a vacuum pump.

Those are easy to make.

Is the superconductivity present in the powder? Or does it require vapor deposition?

If the latter, it implies a cloth versus fibre topology, which forces an interesting rethink of many paradigms forced by the ductility of our present conductors.

Nilered, your time has come

> it'll change society quickly

True.

> and permanently for the better.

You can't know that.

Are you saying superconducting railguns could possibly cause problems?!?

They could only cause problems solvable by more superconducting railguns, so they're a net zero at worst.

> could only cause problems solvable by more superconducting railguns

If the projectile is ferromagnetic, or potentially even just diamagnetic, a defense system involving shaped ultra-high intensity magnetic fields becomes conceivable.

Hopefully they don't cause solar system wide loss of consciousness events.

When you activate the city shield, all your buildings become projectiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight

I believe ultrafast capacitors for high-energy lasers would be possible. Most likely some type of laser gatling gun configuration.

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