2,267 karma · joined November 19, 2007
It's just plain impressive, even if it's not practical.
The point is that these proofs are largely useless without the insights. The value of a proof is largely in the travel, not so much in the destination.
(I'm becoming allergic to how these things write).
Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of this stuff.
Helium has 150mW/mK vs Argon ~18mW/mK so you can't replace it.
The only alternatives to Helium are Neon, which is 3x worse and much more expensive, and hydrogen. However, hydrogen is flammable so it's a very bad idea to use it in a fab which has extremely poisonous gases and needs a cleanroom environment. A fire would ruin your whole factory and kill your engineers.
Edit: I think I get it now, it's a chemical reaction. By applying a voltage with some polarity to the 3rd electrode you can run the reaction in reverse. Still very hard to achieve because you have to make sure the reactions happen at the same rate with the same efficiency, which is far from trivial. This must be a very high end sensor for all this effort to make sense.