Superconductor Breakthrough

Scientists have developed a superconducting material that could lead to better electric motors, medical diagnostic devices and bullet trains that hover above tracks in the grip of magnetic fields.

The material, a flexible tape less than an inch wide and resembling foil in a chewing gum wrapper, was described at the Materials Research Society meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Government researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico developed the metaland-ceramic tape, which can be fashioned into electrical cables carrying 100 times more current than existing superconducting materials.