Magnesium Diboride

This substance is very much a material for the new millennium, since its new manifestation as a high-temperature superconductor can be dated precisely from the seminal 2001 Nature paper (1st March, p63), Superconductivity at 39K in Magnesium Diboride, by J.Nagamatsu, N.Nakagawa, T.Muranaka, Y.Zenitani and J.Akimitsu of the Physics Department of Aoyama-Gakuin University, Tokyo. Until then, it had been seen and used only as a rather nondescript ceramic/abrasive.