Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York State and the University of Nevada have created conditions in which a material has exhibited superconducting behaviour at a temperature of 15^oC, as the BBC reports. Room temperature superconducting is something of a holy grail for many applications, including electricity transmission grids, and so the discovery is seen as highly significant, even though extraordinarily high pressures (267 billion pascals) were required to achieve the behaviour. The team will now focus its efforts on creating room temperature superconductors at lower pressures, so that they may one day be commercialised. Other applications would include faster, more efficient electronics, and co-author of the study, Ashkan Salamat, has suggested that with “this kind of technology, you can take society into a superconducting society where you’ll never need things like batteries again”.