“This is the promise of superconductors,” Nadya Mason, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, tells Popular Mechanics. “Superconductors are the materials where electrons can move through the material without losing energy as heat … but the problem with superconductors so far is that they only work at extremely low temperatures.”
Because of these bone-shattering temperatures, superconductors are mostly relegated to advanced technologies. But what if science could somehow find a material that performed this atomic superconducting dance at room temperature?