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Carbon Magnets At Room Temperature
Bolie writes: "Trying to make high temperature super conductors yielded an unexpected result. The pure carbon bucky ball material was put under pressure to make sheets. That worked. Picture microscopic bubble pack. But the result was a sheet that was magnetic at room temperature. It has not escaped the attention of the discoverer, Tatiana Makarova, that this might be useful for a non-metallic computer memory. The material is also lighter than metals, flexible and transparent. Lasers anyone?"
Actually, no. What the article was saying was that the material is the first non-metallic material that was magnetic at room temperature (meaning that other non-magnetic materials weren't, at least not at room temperature). The point about the material being magnetic even above 200C was about the material's Curie point (above which the material stops being magnetic) being much higher than any other material, the previous record being 255C which was held by a different form of buckyballs. So this material is interesting because it's the first non-metallic material to be magnetic at room temperature and has a higher Curie point than any other non-metallic material to date.
Apparently, the material's magnetism could be linked to unpaired electrons, which can sustain a magnetic field when their spins are aligned (in this case there are unpaired electrons). One possibility is that they bond in triangular groups of three, which would provide for unpaired spins.
Although, to be used as computer memory it would have to have uniform magnetism, not just in pockets. But either way it's a significant step forward.
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When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
It's a mistake in the HTML, the 250 should be -250, but they put a soft hyphen in instead of a minus sign or a dash.
Absolute zero is -273.15C (or is it .16)
or 0K There is no such thing as 'degrees kelvin'; the proper way to say it is 'zero kelvins'.
And this discovery has absolutely nothing to do with superconductivity; only that they were trying to produce a superconductor when they discovered it was magnetic. This is not an advancement in superconductivity. They didn't produce a superconductor. That's obvious even without reading the article...
Also, you are correct about superconductors.. but... the reason microprocessors work is because they are full of SEMIconductors... transistors... you HAVE to have resistance.. you can't build logic with pure superconductors.
There is a bug in some browsers that fail to display the - sign. The articl may appear to say the previous temp was 255c when it actually says(look in the source) -255c.
I don't know how to post a story update, so I'll do this here.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on