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Comment by inasio | Hacker News Reader

One obvious application: your family doctor will have an MRI machine in her office, same for all physio clinics

Not so fast... These superconductors although revolutionary loose superconductivity in high magnetic fields (or with high currents).

If this proves true I'd see their use more in electronic circuits. Novel sensors etc rather than classic high power high field uses people dream about when the words "room temperature superconductivity" gets thrown about.

MRI will get much cheaper, but you still need a good upper critical field and a proper access control (Zone 2/3/4) protocol. So probably not in very small buildings.

From what I can tell this material can't provide higher than 0.3T. We've had permanent magnet MRI at 0.3T but the drawbacks vs superconducting magnets are weight and lack of active shielding.

With room temperature superconductivity doesn't it become possible to turn the magnet on and off far more easily? MRIs would be much safer if they were only energized during the actual imaging process.

To turn the magnet off you need to get the current out, I don't see why raising the temperature would make that easy.

Dump it in a bank of capacitors, send it back when you need it. Or in a superconducting loop...

How does the temperature come into play?

What are the failure modes for a superconductor MRI? Could it cause a resonance cascade?

Sign me up, I'd like to be one of the biped critters with giant mouths on their stomachs. Short pipeline, very efficient.

That description sounds like the F'lickta in Marathon 2, was it also something in Half Life?

At least now the silo doors will open by sliding on superconductors.

I think "superconductor MRI" is redundant.

The failure modes would mostly be the same as for the big ones: sucking in metal chairs if you're not careful.

I hope I never find out which is worse of chairs vs. piercings…

I hope I never witness a resonance cascade, let alone, create one.

They are already superconducting and using liquid helium to cool. They have failure modes of spilling gas out into the room (patient and operators have to evacuate.)

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