Superconducting

Room temperature superconductivity sounded great. I read the paper, and decided I couldn't comment. Some of their measurements sounded interesting, but the critical bit was a plot of voltage and current--and it didn't look flat in the central region. Almost. Was that because bits of the sample had gone superconductive and other bits in between hadn't? That demanded some experimental work, and I have neither the domain knowledge nor the facilities.

As you all probably know by now, the answer is that nobody's been able to verify it. Too bad.

The high pressure superconductivity looks interesting, though not yet very useful. The pressures required are comparable to those at the Earth's core. I wonder, might the core of some cold moon superconduct as it cooled down? If it had a magnetic field, and if the outer part of the core cooled below the critical temperature while the inner core retained its magnetic field, the Meissner effect would try to expel the field from the outer shell (probably in patches at first)--what would that do to the currents in the inner non-superconducting part of the core?