Diamond vise turns hydrogen into a metal, potentially ending 80-year quest (check out whose reading)

[Bill USA]

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/diamond-vise-turns-hydrogen-metal-potentially-ending-80-year-quest

Last October, Harvard University physicist Isaac Silvera invited a few colleagues to stop by his lab to glimpse something that may not exist anywhere else in the universe. Word got around, and the next morning there was a line. Throughout the day, hundreds filed in to peer through a benchtop microscope at a reddish silver dot trapped between two diamond tips. Silvera finally closed shop at 6 p.m. to go home. "It took weeks for the excitement to die down," Silvera says.

That excitement swirled because by squeezing hydrogen to pressures well beyond those in the center of Earth, Silvera and his postdoc Ranga Dias had seen a hint that it had morphed into a solid metal, capable of conducting electricity. "If it's true it would be fantastic," says Reinhard Boehler, a physicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. "This is something we as a community have been pushing to see for decades."

The feat, reported online this week in Science, is more than an oddity. Solid metallic hydrogen is thought to be a superconductor, able to conduct electricity without resistance. It may even be metastable, meaning that like diamond, also formed at high pressures, the metallic hydrogen would maintain its state—and even its superconductivity—once brought back to room temperatures and pressures.

Still, claims of solid metallic hydrogen have come and gone before, and some experts want more proof. "From our point of view it's not convincing," says Mikhail Eremets, who is pursuing solid metallic hydrogen at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Others in the contentious field are downright hostile to the result. "The word garbage cannot really describe it," says Eugene Gregoryanz, a high-pressure physicist at the University of Edinburgh, who objects to several of the experiment's procedures.
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Look whose reading Dr. Silvera's research:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Isaac_Silvera/stats

Institution ....................................No. of Reads

Center for High Pressure Science
and Technology Advanced Research............. 13
Pudong, China

Harvard University .....................................9
Cambridge, United States

Technische Universität Dortmund ................. 9
Dortmund, Germany

By country:

Germany .............................................1,128

United States ......................................... 351

India .................................................... 124

China ....................................................113

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I hope our scientific community isn't missing something here.....

[drm604]

1. 351 in the US, 9 in Harvard

It looks like we're second only to Germany.

[Bill USA]

2. our population is 4X that of Germany, while their Reads R 3.2x our Reads....