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Comment by ziofill | Hacker News Reader

250K is -23C, or -9F, I.e. like a cold winter day. That’s really almost room temperature!

Compared with the working temperature of NMR magnets (4K)[1], it _is_ room temperature! It's not STP (standard temperature and pressure, 0C/1atm), yet, but maybe soon!

[1] https://www.indstate.edu/cas/chem_phys/filling-nmr-magnet

> It's not STP (standard temperature and pressure, 0C/1atm

Nit: STP is 20C/1atm, not 0C/1atm.

Nit's nit: depends on the defining body, IUPAC is 0C, NIST is 20C (as per wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_temperature_and_press...

Now you're nistpicking.

Huh, today I learned. In chem in college I was just taught 20C.

Not 298K? (25C)

IUPAC is *S*TP, NIST is *N*TP

standard and normal

STP is 0C, NTP is 20

What's important is what you can use to cool it. Using helium to cool traditional superconductors is expensive and bulky. If we can cool superconductors with small Peltier coolers or your traditional fridge setup, that's a huge advantage.

If this was the issue, aren't Peletier coolers already able to reach -80 deg C already? I remember our research camera sensors being cooled to that temperature withoutbfuss and being there for months on end.. surely some other superconductors work at this range!

-80c is 193K. Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superconductors there are 3 superconductors that work at that temperature or higher. But they all need very high pressures (150 GPa or higher). Which is close to the pressure in the centre of the earth (380 GPa).

A more reasonable superconductor that's widely used is YBCO, which at 95K (-178c) is cooled using liquid nitrogen. And I believe that's at normal pressures.

Some Russian scientists from 1800s may argue that is room temperature

From Chicago here. Can confirm that is the setting on my thermostat.

On a planet undergoing global warming.

While it's a lot for the planet as a whole, 2 or so degrees is trivial in these contexts. This discovery would raise the available temperature range of high temperature superconductors by 157 degrees K.

It depends on where you live.

Texas disagrees that -9 F is almost room temperature, though my freezers get that cold sometimes.

The fact that you have a relatively cheap, small and efficient device in your home that reaches that temperature is what makes -9F significant.

Sure, but Texas rarely approaches anything you could consider 'room temperature' anyway, its more like 'sauna temperature'

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