...just a new form of matter, if you happen to be interested in that sort of thing.
Q: How many forms of matter are there?
A: A couple more than I realized:
The new matter form is called a fermionic condensate and it is the sixth known form of matter -- after gases, solids, liquids, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995.
Jin and her colleagues' cloud of supercooled potassium atoms is one step closer to an everyday, usable superconductor -- a material that conducts electricity without losing any of its energy.
"If you had a superconductor you could transmit electricity with no losses," Jin said. "Right now something like 10 percent of all electricity we produce in the United States is lost. It heats up wires. It doesn't do anybody any good."
Or superconductors could allow for the invention of magnetically levitated trains, she added. Free of friction they could glide along at high speeds using a fraction of the energy trains now use.
The first of my Seven Questions About the Future goes like this:
1. The present if the future relative to the past. What's the best thing about living here in the future?
And the answer is: stuff like this.
via KurzweilAI.net
So Earth, Air, Fire and Water doesn't cover it anymore? What equivalent label can we give this stuff?
Flubber?
Posted by: Phil at January 29, 2004 06:29 AM