These include plumbers, electricians, insulators and maintenance specialists to help make homes greener.

FORBES: Green Jobs Are a Cost, Not a Benefit

Understanding such social behaviour may hint at ways to design other sorts of superconducting material or even, paradoxically, better insulators.

ECONOMIST: Magnetism

The six cables that pass from one pylon to another are each borne by two insulators attached to the poles.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

It is among the world's top ten producers of cement and among the top five makers of acrylic, carbon black and insulators.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Using hafnium insulators, Intel has built prototype chips that are 45 nanometers wide and run Windows, Mac OS X and Linux software.

FORBES: Magazine Article

They often have interesting properties, such as poor heat conductivity (which makes them good insulators) and low friction (which makes them slippery).

ECONOMIST: The 2011 Nobel prizes

Yet a roadblock to discovering new and better superconductors is the near impossibility of chemical substitution to introduce charge carriers into other families of large gap insulators.

UNESCO: 2013 UK and Ireland Fellows

My proposal with this fellowship will use the novel method of applying an electric field gradient instead of chemical substitution to induce charge carriers in large gap insulators, and thereby create new superconductors.

UNESCO: 2013 UK and Ireland Fellows

In 1989, tinkering with materials he hoped would amplify electrical signals, Cambridge University physics professor Richard Friend and his graduate students were testing large organic molecules to see whether they were good insulators.

FORBES: Seeing the Light