• FaceDeer@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          If you do a Google search for LK-99 you’ll see a whole pile of news articles from the past two days. A preprint was posted on arXiv and everything exploded. There are labs all over the world working on reproducing the material and testing it right now, and it’s a pretty simple thing to make so we’ll have a solid answer likely within a week.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Everything I’ve seen says that the 2020 paper was rejected, not falsified. It had been submitted to Nature shortly after Diaz’s now-likely-fraudulent superconductor research had been accepted and turned out to be controversial, so it’s understandable that Nature was gun-shy of superconductor papers. Do you have any references to its falsification? A paper can be rejected for many reasons other than falsification, indeed I would think most rejections are not for that since peer review doesn’t include independently replicating the results.

              What it feels like to me is that the authors were panicking over the possibility of getting “scooped.” They’ve been working on this stuff for decades and had often gone without funding so that seems like less of an urgent concern to me.

                • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  An initial paper was submitted to Nature in 2020, but rejected.[10] Similarly-presented research on room-temperature superconductors by Ranga P. Dias had been published in Nature earlier that year, and received with skepticism—Dias’s paper would subsequently be retracted in 2022 after its data was found to have been falsified.

                  Emphasis added. The paper that had falsified paper was by a different researcher and was about a completely different putative superconductor. Only Dias’ paper appears to be based on falsified data. There’s no indication that the LK-99 paper is based on falsified data. Unfortunately LK-99 is suffering guilt by association simply because both of these things are about room-temperature superconductors, but they share nothing in common with each other beyond that broad topic.

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I mean, publishing on youtube gets more viewers than publishing in a scientific paper

      • kjack@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure that “number of eyeballs” is the metric by which a successful scientific discovery should be judged…

        • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          You’re right, of course, but more eyeballs can lead to more sponsorship and more money, which leads to a greater chance of succes. Downside is that you’ve picked the commercial road and you’ll probably end up in the pocket of some Nestle or Shell.