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Not too many decades ago, some scientists discovered that certain materials would conduct electricity perfectly if you got them cold enough. Not just conduct electricity well - those materials actually conduct with zero resistance. Appropriately, the phenomenon was named superconductivity.

The problem for making thus useful is that you have to make these materials really cold. Just about 4 degrees above absolute zero for mercury. And it’s both difficult and expensive to get things that cold. But as time went on, physicists were shocked to discover that some materials kept superconducting up to fairly high temperatures. Some are now known to be superconducting up to around 130K, which is still around -225 °F but well above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, which is quite cheap. These high-temperature superconductors are pretty exotic materials; typically ceramic compounds involving copper.

While low-temperature superconductors are well understood, no one really knows why these exotic materials can become superconducting at such high temperatures. There’s no good theory explaining it. Whoever develops an accurate theory of high-temperature superconductivity will almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.

Small progress is being made all the time. Just recently, researchers in Japan and China have announced new records for high-temperature superconductivity in materials which don’t contain copper. In this case the materials are iron compounds under high pressure which become superconducting in the 40-50K range. While superconductors have already found their way into every day technology (cell towers use superconducting equipment to improve sensitivity of their reception, for instance), a room-temperature superconductor would absolutely revolutionize the world. These records bring us closer to understanding of this effect, and maybe even someday having superconductors which don’t have to be cold at all.