Weird & Interesting science, take 2

[Labster]

If there really is a Turkey Star (presumably rolled by the Prince of All Cosmos), can we get Erdogan to move there?

Back on the big story, the superconductor candidate LK99: A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments. There is lots of drama because apparently on of the authors published too early because he was afraid of getting scooped, which led to him scooping some of his coauthors and them pushing out another paper to preprint that wasn’t ready either. All of that is not really relevant to if it works, though.

And does it? A few labs have tried and failed, which is apparently normal in materials science? One Chinese lab claims to have replicated it in a YouTube video of something floating. The original group said that it only superconducted on 10% of their samples… and they don’t know why. On the other hand, a couple of new preprints suggest that the physics makes sense in their computer models of LK99. And:

They also predict that substituting gold atoms into the Pb(1) site could lead to a material with very similar properties, which will be an extremely interesting idea to put to the test.

Oh good, something for audiophiles!