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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.

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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 It's not peer-reviewed, published, or replicated yet--what do you guys think the odds are that this is legit?

New paper from the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposes that the high-temperature steep change in resistance may have been due to Cu2S contamination. That's nice in the sense that it's a fully honest explanation -- Lee et all's original paper could be entirely measuring real things, no fraud or even measurement goofup! -- but would leave their samples as just weird rather than superconducting. There's still some space for exploration, since the XRDs from other labs pointed more to CuS2 and this doesn't explain the 110K behavior supposedly observed by the Southeast University of China, but it drastically raises likelihood of a prosaic explanation.

Thanks for keeping up with this story!