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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3665 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Room-temperature and pressure superconductor discovered. It's not peer-reviewed, published, or replicated yet--what do you guys think the odds are that this is legit?

Funnest update of the week so far: lesbian Russian catgirl replication in an apartment, with a pile of scraps. I've no idea how to guess whether this is real or not, but either way it is hilarious.

Yeah I saw that one hahaha. Such a tiny speck floating, it could easily have just been clinging to the needle or something, but I definitely want to believe. If it's a real superconductor, 1) stuff like that should be possible, but 2) why are they not just experimenting using the original materials? Replication (at least, validation of the claims) should be easy with the actual material on hand.

The original protocol is trivial by superconductor (or even semiconductor!) research standards, but it's still filled with a number of individual materials that are expensive, controlled, or absolutely aren't safe to run in an apartment, along with a couple steps that require a long time with uncommon tooling. Iris_IGB's proposed approach cuts out some nasty chemicals and nearly half of the synthesis time; she probably just wouldn't have tried the original protocol at all.

Of course, optimizations only help if it works...

Of course. What I meant was, why not test the original material which the original researchers have already created? I'm dying to get some external validation and true replication could take months/years.

Not sure what's going on at that level. Most people seem convinced that the South Korean lab must be sending out samples for testing, or at least talking in person with MIT-level experts, but outside of saying that it's planned I've not seen much. The sorta people who have big XRD toolkits don't tend to spend too much time speculating on twitter, though.

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