[annogram]

You can have water under high pressure that does not freeze at 0 degrees, as it would at atmospheric pressure. It's because there are phases that water has behave differently under different pressure and temperature. Water behaves very differently at different temperatures and the same goes for Lanthanum (the metal used to create the superhydrate, or whatever its called). At room temperature the metal just does not bond to as many hydrogen atoms as needed to create the superconducting latice (the paper goes of the model that metals that can bond to >6 hyrogen atoms per host molecule are good candidates for room temperature superconductivity) so we have to do it under extreme pressure.

The traditional way that superconductors have been made has been to lower the temperature near absolute zero to get the metals into that a superconducting phase. What these researchers are trying to do is prove a model that suggests that there are metal compounds with superconductivity at near room temperature.