Sapphires which can be found in nature in several colours like red, pink, blue, purple, yellow, orange, or greenish are commonly worn as jewelry.
Tel Aviv University researchers thought of another use of Sapphire, as an electricity conductor. All the wires now is made from copper which is a cheap metal, but copper loses a lot of energy in the form of heat during its trip through the cables that are all over the cities.
The Tel Aviv University borrowed a fiber of sapphire from the Oakridge National Lab in Tennessee, it developed a superconducting wire barely thicker than a human hair that conducts 40 times the electricity of its copper brethren. Cooled with liquid nitrogen, the sapphire superconductors carry current without heating up, which is key to their efficiency. The team is now working on practical applications of the technology — because it’s so small and pliable (unlike previous superconductors) it could replace copper in domestic settings and its cold efficiency makes it perfect to transmit power long distances from green energy stations.