On 22 June 1978, The Guardian ran an article with the headline "Foot hits back on Nazi comparison". Reader David C. Allan of Edinburgh responded with a letter to the editor, which the paper ran on 27 June. Decrying the headline's apparent pun, Allen suggested that, if Foot were in future to be appointed Secretary of State for Defence, The Guardian might cover it under the headline "Foot Heads Arms Body". The belief later gained currency that The Times actually had run the headline. Some decades later, Martyn Cornell recalled the story as true, saying he had written the headline himself as a Times subeditor around 1986. The headline does not, however, appear in The Times Digital Archive, which includes every day's newspaper from 1785 into the 21st century.

That's a lot of pressure. That's like 40x the pressure needed to make diamonds.

The whole point in finding a room temperature super conductor is that it's difficult to maintain those low temperatures in practice. So if we want to put super conductors in practice, we need to figure out how to do it a different, more practical way. 40x the pressure needed to make diamonds doesn't seem practical. Maybe there is some material property magic like thermal quenching or tempering that could allow for a final product that has those kind of internal pressures in a steady state object.

You see this everywhere in the engineering world. I'm not saying this particular work will not lead somewhere, just that it is an example of a broader challenge I've seen in engineering, bridging the gap between practical every day use and research.

Surely room temp at atmosphere is the ultimate prize? Room temp has already been achieved so I would have thought lowest pressure is now the metric that matters

First, the science and engineering is interesting regardless. Better understanding of superconductivity and how we can achieve it will be helpful in applying it anywhere. Second, while RT is clearly a huge deal hotter is always better if possible. It means it can be used with less cooling in more extreme environments which would further expand the possibilities in industry. Just as there has been effort to make (and you can buy) electronics that are functional in extreme environmental and high radiation conditions that would kill consumer kit.

Also, "achieved" is doing quite a bit of work in your second sentence. Other material properties, including as you say operating pressure but also more basic stuff like pure flexibility or strength are important in how it can be used in practice right? Research pushing other limits may pay off down the road in new ideas elsewhere. Obviously speculative, it may not, but it's well worth pursuing many avenues in such a potentially valuable area even if most are dead ends.

Liquid Nitrogen : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_nitrogen

Search: 'High Pressure Liquid Nitrogen Superconductors' @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q='High Pressure Liquid Nit...>

Railgun : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

>A railgun is a linear motor device,

  typically designed as a weapon, that uses electromagnetic force to launch high velocity projectiles.<*

Just a Thought.

Edit: Add; Russia-Ukraine Conflict Prompted US to Develop Autonomous Drone-Swarms And 1,000-Mile Cannon :

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/russia-ukraine-co...

- Edit:2 fixed @DDG search URL, truncated in first edit!

See first sentence of article we're commenting on

The temperature, current density and magnetic fields they can tolerate while remaining superconducting varies between the various kinds of superconductors.

Most interesting use-cases outside the lab would involve at least non-trivial current densities, so that's one metric where one might still want to search for a better material even though one already exists.

Additionally, quench propagation is much slower in HTS so safe current dumping has a lot more time between quench detection and thermal runaway.

https://youtu.be/xJ2h3vbOag4&t=21m58s

My point was that if the current material only supports very low current densities at this high temperature, then that restricts the use-cases for it. I feel much of the popular science press makes it sound like all superconductors are equal, apart from the critical temperature.