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Comment by okwhateverdude | Hacker News Reader

> the team worked with FePS3 — a material that transitions to an antiferromagnetic phase at a critical temperature of around 118 kelvins (-247 degrees Fahrenheit). > [...] > They placed the sample in a vacuum chamber and cooled it down to temperatures at and below 118 K.

I feel like this massive caveat was buried half way through the article. This is why I dislike university press. I mean, the wizardry is impressive, but it isn't gonna revolutionize anything anytime soon if it requires a vacuum and liquid Krypton-ish temperatures.

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>but it isn't gonna revolutionize anything anytime soon

Reminds me of CCD. Back in the day CCD only worked effectively at liquid nitrogen temperatures; a couple of decades of development and you could have one in a pocket camera.

Maybe that's what you meant.

We are on the other hand still waiting for the room temperature super conductor and the fusion reactors. I’d say that most interesting breakthroughs never reach the stage where they are useful.

Indeed, that is what I meant. This is a neat result, just not practical yet.

It's not that bad - 118K is slightly above the boiling point of LNG(~112K), so achievable at scale.

That’s good. Ideally we won’t have a scattering of profit seeking engineering firms casting magnetic fields everywhere when we have the most cursory scientific understanding of high spin metals in the brain.

If anything, we might reassess our current usage…

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8189590/

https://web.stanford.edu/group/solomon/research.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266652202...

Could be useful in space where those are the default conditions

Space is a fantastic insulator. Space suits for astronauts have to be cooled, not heated.

I think it’s more appropriate to say conduction and convection doesn’t work well. When you have a suit, it’s meant to block radiation and that’s the mode of heat transfer in space. If space was a fantastic insulator, the suit itself would eventually overheat since you have to remove the heat somehow (they boil off water in vacuum similar to sweat).

It’s basic research

So it works at room temperature in low earth orbit.

Because of solar radiation, you have to take special measures with heat shields, etc, to achieve low temperatures in low earth orbit.

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_...

Could it have a practical use in space? Which is both already a vacuum and close to absolute zero temperature wise?

A practical application of storing data in space that could just easily be beamed to earth to be stored?

From everything I’m seeing so far, all protocols for space are stateful to deal with the incredibly high latency.

I can see a future where the space between earth and mars is a constellation of massive caching servers.

you could have rotating disks that can encode data as they turn towards the sun.

Or the sun's light could drive the rotation using magnetic force.

Please, we can only get so excited.

Exactly. I can’t believe they published something if we can’t buy it and use it right now.

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