Red Wine and Sake Help Create Superconductor

Sake Barrel

Bit of a techie post today. In today’s newspaper there was an article about how a group of Japanese scientists have discovered that soaking a special type of iron in red wine, sake or beer makes it a superconductor (a superconductor conducts electricity without resistance, i.e very fast).

The cool sounding Nano Frontier Materials Group at the National Institute for Materials Science in Ibaraki, Japan created an “iron telluride compound”, whatever that is, which was similar to a superconductor on a molecular level but didn’t show any of the special properties.

Leaving it on a desk for a week they came back to find it started showing superconductive properties. Probably due to moisture in the air they thought. So they experimented with water, ethanol and other stuff but got nowhere.

Now, this is the bit I like, after going to a party and presumably having a few sakes
Yoshihiko Takano, the groups leader, came up with the idea of trying booze on it!

I can just imagine all these pissed scientists at the end of the night caressing a nearly empty bottle of sake slurring

“It doesssn work.”
“What’r we gonna do?”
“I know! Les give it shome booze!”

And they all stagger down to the lab singing scientist drinking songs and pour sake on the iron to wake it up. As makes perfect sense when you’re three sheets to the wind.

Amazingly it worked!

Soak an iron telluride compound for 24 hours in red wine, white wine, beer or sake at 70deg C and you get a superconductor.
(Red wine works best).

Who’d have thunk it.