For the slow folks....what does all this semi-conductor talk mean...and if VALID, what types of potential innovations, or inventions happen in the future?
How would life change, with this discovery?
You know how you have an aerosol can and everything is bottled up? The compounds/chemicals in that can before they're dispersed have the potential to be put to use. However, once you spray that can you can't really take it back and put those compounds back into the can once again. Once it's out in the air and you didn't put the contents to use, that's basically potential put to waste.
That's kind of like the same principle with friction. The heat generated by the force of friction is basically waste.
You know how wires get hot? You can think of that as potential electric current traveling through those wires "dragging" through the material being lost to friction.
That is basically energy lost and not doing anything, meaning the energy generated by your batteries or power plants isn't
fully making it to your homes/devices because it's getting lost in the wires as heat/friction. There is a large component of energy wasted due to internal resistance of the wires.
Now imagine all the source/transmission lines and all the devices around the world don't lose that kind of energy and it all makes it to devices 1:1 (and all the components that are inside these devices will not waste energy due to heat either). That's basically what a superconductor does: pure energy transfer, with, for the most part, no energy loss. Pure efficiency.
One of the downsides with superconductors and the practicality of it is they must be kept very cool (nearly 300 degrees below zero) in order to get this no loss of energy. It'd be a little difficult to have a transmission line be a superconductor because you'd have to find someway to keep it 300 degrees below zero for example. So the goal is to try and get these things to behave this way in room temperature or at a high enough temperature where it won't take much to cool it to get the superconductor effect.
That's basically what these people are getting close to here (hopefully): pure 1:1 energy transfer outside of the laboratory. That's just one thing. There's also implication when it comes to levitation and the like.
Further, given how common and potentially easy this synthesis is, it'll mean poor countries have all the resources to make this stuff. That's why this compound goes even above and beyond superconductors - it'd be highly inexpensive require materials we have in abundance (basically the ground).