Twenty-five years ago this April, two researchers working for IBM in Zurich—Karl Miiller and Johannes Bednorz—discovered the first material that didn't have to be cooled to within a few degrees of absolute zero to be superconducting. The discovery, which would later win Miiller and Bednorz the Nobel Prize, sparked one of the great research stampedes of modern science. In the quarter-century since the discovery of what researchers took to calling high-temperature superconductors, some 100,000 papers have been published on the subject.
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