This was first mentioned in December 2014 but the review has just been published.
From the MIT Technology Review:
The Superconductor That Works at Earth Temperature
The world of superconductivity is in uproar. Last year, Mikhail Eremets and a couple of pals from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, made the extraordinary claim that they had seen hydrogen sulphide superconducting at -70 °C. That’s some 20 degrees hotter than any other material—a huge increase over the current record.
Followers of this blog will have read about this work last December, when it was first posted to the arXiv. At the time, physicists were cautious about the work. The history of superconductivity is littered with dubious claims of high-temperature activity that later turn out to be impossible to reproduce.
But in the months since then, Eremets and co have worked hard to conjure up the final pieces of conclusive evidence. A few weeks ago, their paper was finally published in the peer reviewed journal Nature, giving it the rubber stamp of respectability that mainstream physics requires. Suddenly, superconductivity is back in the headlines.
Today, Antonio Bianconi and Thomas Jarlborg at the Rome International Center for Materials Science Superstripes in Italy provide a review of this exciting field. These guys give an overview of Eremet and co’s discovery and a treatment of the theoretical work that attempts to explain it.
The review can be found here: Superconductivity above the lowest Earth temperature in pressurized sulfur hydride
Very cool - there are some limits to these materials. If they carry a large current, there are physical magnetic forces that the material needs to withstand. This is why MRI machines still use liquid helium instead of nitrogen (2,000X cheaper) - the copper ceramic materials that are superconducting at LN2 temperatures are very brittle and would shatter.
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