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I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes
by deeg 3y ago
I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974.
- declan_roberts 3y agoI think them waiting until there’s more research is preferable to them coming out and making random claims which pan out not to be true.
- adamsb6 3y agoWait wait wait... Are eggs healthy again?
- tills13 3y agoThat hasn't stopped them in the past...
- ygjb 3y agoI think it's more likely that the bulk of folks don't fully comprehend why this would be so important. I would imagine alot of reporters look at the things they could write about and the choices are politics, war, polarizing news, or nerds nerding hard trying to prove other nerds right or wrong, and it just doesn't make the cut.
- refulgentis 3y agoNo...that's not the case here, to wit, we can observe writers from these publications discussing it casually.
- zgluck 3y agoThis plus vacation time in the Northern hemisphere - that one science reporter per large news org who actually understands the importance is AFK.
- lolinder 3y agoNewspapers don't work like that. The same reporter isn't responsible for politics, war, and science—they specialize, and a dedicated science reporter is going to be at least as savvy as a random commenter on HN. They may want to cover it and just have a hard time explaining it to their editor, but I think "we can afford to wait until a peer reviewed paper comes out" is more likely.
- fragmede 3y agoRight. There's nothing to write about (yet!), but their science reporter is scrolling science twitter harder than we are. The movie can come later.
- byw 3y agoThough that's like the opposite of how most media operate.
- algoatecorn 3y agoTrue, but that hasn't stopped MSM in the past
- moffkalast 3y agoBecause the media is of course known for studying topics in high detail to make sure they don't report the wrong thing and not for rushing half written hearsay out the door before the competitors do.
- wilg 3y agoGenuinely a laugh-out-loud take on mainstream science reporting.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoWhy aim to improve when we can just keep making the same old mistakes?
- wilg 3y agoI misread it as saying the news always does it this way, which was clearly not what they meant.
- lolinder 3y agoI took it as saying "they usually jump in too early, so this is a refreshing change of pace."
- wilg 3y agoOh yes, you’re right, I think I read it too quickly.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 3y agoThere isn’t much to report.
- t3rabytes 3y agoI haven't seen a particularly great explanation that explains why this is such a positive discovery that is copy/paste/digestable. No MSM outlet is going to run this story unless they can say an impact.
- arcticfox 3y agoThere are a ton of them on Twitter.
- cududa 3y agoYes and many of them are completely wrong. I keep seeing people saying "CPU's that don't generate heat". How exactly would that work? When a transistor turns off/ switches to 0, where does it dump the electrons? Hint: into heat
- dlivingston 3y agoSorry, can you explain? My understanding is that transistors don't "dump" electrons anywhere. The gate controls the voltage, which in the `0` state forces resistance to be high enough s.t. current flow through that transistor stops. As the Veritasium video explains [0], current flow is not a literal flow of electrons, but a state of the electromagnetic field (or something to that effect... it's been many years since my electromagnetism university courses). [0]: https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY
- kragen 3y agocurrent flow isn't always a literal flow of electrons, but in a wire or transistor it is you probably should trust your electromagnetism textbook more than a youtube video
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lucubratory 3y ago
- AlanSE 3y agoIt's still not believed. It's just Twitter that I've seen the juicy stuff, like a (very sketchy) claimed replication from a Russian, and now another claim from a Chinese group. I could still see this being something "new" but not a true superconductor. If you read the link, there seems to be some kind of discovery brewing, but the original discovers may not have understood what they found.
- throwaway23354 3y agoWhile you're correct about the scarce and sketchy evidence currently it is in the process of narrowing down. Or to put it better the evidence is mounting that it might be a breakthrough. It likely hard to manufacture correctly, but simulations done at Berkeley Labs seem to support the claims of the original paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 And aside from that to be honest I hope that we have time to prove or disprove those claims, before any major news outlet jumps onto the hype train and ruins it.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 3y agoThe paper you referenced doesn’t say anything about the room-temperature superconductivity claims.
- lolinder 3y agoWhy a throwaway account for this? It honestly makes me immediately question your take.
- arcticfox 3y agoI am also completely baffled by this! So many stupid mouse-model medical discovery stories over the years and actually zero LK-99 coverage. It doesn't even matter if it works or not as for whether it's newsworthy; the mystery, human backstory, and Argonne/China/independent scientists jumping to replicate alone is a whole swathe of viable and fascinating topics ready to be published. The crazy thing is NYT just bothered to publish a story about the Dias superconductor paper retraction; a paper that had never even crossed my radar in the first place because TBH I don't care about superconductors unless they're going to be a huge step change in practical applications, which the Dias "finding" wasn't. What are they doing?!
- nomel 3y ago> What are they doing?! Trying to make ad money with views, which is their profit incentive. Mouse models are nearly always spun as applicable to humans, which an average, aging, viewer would be interested, usually relating to "Cure <ailment>", "regrow limbs", "stop aging", etc. The average viewer isn't interested in superconductors, and the 10 seconds the news orgs have for each bit of news isn't enough to explain them.
- arcticfox 3y agoThe NYT has published 3 articles about room-temperature superconductors since March; all about the insanely high-pressure one that is INFINITELY less exciting than the new claim and turned out to be bunk anyways.
- kragen 3y agohmm, the high-pressure room-temperature superconductor turned out not to actually be real? wp says In 2020, a room-temperature superconductor (critical temperature 288 K) made from hydrogen, carbon and sulfur under pressures of around 270 gigapascals was described in a paper in Nature.[71][72] However in 2022 the article was retracted by the editors because the validity of background subtraction procedures had been called into question. All nine authors maintain that the raw data strongly support the main claims of the paper.[73]
- 0xDEF 3y agoDanish and German media has covered it by interviewing local scientists who are all calling it bullshit.
- moooo99 3y agothat does indeed sound like a very German reaction
- Bjorkbat 3y agoBecause until more scientists can replicate this the news is little more substantial than the typical post on /r/futurology on any given day.
- stusmall 3y agoI actually appreciate that caution. Things have been extremely up in the air and it would be very hard to properly explain what is happening, how it matters and if it matters. The last part I think is why it's a good thing that they held back. There was enough unknown that it wasn't clear if this would ever amount to anymore than "some scientists may or may not have made a big mistake." I think we are hitting the point, with multiple teams saying this is either possible or has happened, that we will start seeing MSM stories. They aren't ignoring it, they are being cautious. I promise you their science beat reporters are watching this like a hawk. I appreciate reputable news organizations as a reliable filter against noise out there on the internet. If I want early rumors I have sites like this. If I want something filtered, curated and focused, I go to them.
- wallaBBB 3y agoAfter racing with each other to fuel political extremism or push the corporate narratives like how working from home is terrible for the worker or how good it is for us that the rich don’t pay the taxes, how unaffordable housing is good for the economy… this is what they choose to be careful about? Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.
- fragmede 3y agoThe EmDrive was first publicized in 2001, but wasn't picked up by the mainstream media until 2013, and then again in 2016 after NASA picked it up. That Korean scientists have this discovery on their hands and the materials world is racing to keep up, and isn't frontpage of the New York Times, is editor's choice. Currently, that's Joseph Kahn, but (unfortunately) science ranks below politics and sports and business.
- stusmall 3y agoIt's hard to not let cynicism like this get to me especially when the argument makes so little sense. This doesn't sell? Isn't sensationalist enough? A possible end result of this is magic flying space trains. This isn't exactly some boring in the weeds things. This is extremely easy to hype if you just want to draw eye balls. But sure, yeah, MSM corporate plutocracy or whatever.
- joefigura 3y agoWell, half the comments are making fun of the spotty quality of the evidence and it's been barely a week since the paper was published. I think it's reasonable to wait for at least a pre-print of a successful replication. I don't think it's fair to say the MSM is ignoring it, the possible discovery literally just happened and some combination of low awareness and caution with the evidence means they haven't covered it yet.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoMost people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity. A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at people like a rocket or a big fusion reactor. The application is similarly unintuitive. Many here on HN ask why such a thing would be important, and they are probably the 99th (or 99.9th?) percentile in materials science and EE literacy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoEven if it is true, we are a long ways off from Star Trek utopia. No idea if macroscopic quantities can be robustly produced, what their limitations will be, cost per gram, etc. If the material is confirmed, there will be oodles of money pumped into the space, but it could still be years before commercial applications begin to appear.
- boppo1 3y ago>Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity. I don't. I read someone saying it would be the biggest breakthrough since fire. Is that true or hyperbole?
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThats kinda hyperbolic. Its more like the transistor.
- xereeto 3y agoThe transistor was unequivocally the biggest technological breakthrough since fire
- kragen 3y agobreakthroughs since fire more important than the transistor probably include cooking, agriculture, the wheel, metallurgy, glass, ceramics, the heat engine, mechanisms in general (with things like pulleys, hydraulics, screws, and gears), construction cement (originally lime), math, writing, optics, electricity, chemistry (including things like distillation, the atomic theory, and recrystallization), plumbing, carpentry, weaving, sewing, automatic digital computation, and possibly language, depending on when that happened it seems like maybe you haven't thought much about the history of technology
- jcranmer 3y agoTo be frank, the available evidence at the moment is pretty shaky. Derek Lowe here is pretty optimistic, but most of the comments I've seen from the superconductor folks are pretty pessimistic [1]--and given that Derek Lowe isn't in the field, I'm inclined to favor their views over his at this point. The original articles are a pair of papers posted to arxiv in a field which I believe isn't well-known for arxiv publications, and most science journalism tends to wait for a peer-reviewed paper to come out in a notable journal before reporting on it. Although it has been reported by some specialized outlets already (a category which I'd include Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline). [1] See, e.g., https://nitter.net/i/status/1686373516286005248 https://nitter.net/i/status/1686373516286005248, which goes into why even the recent theoretical-confirmation papers are unpersuasive to them.
- lolinder 3y agoThanks for that link! My feeling watching all this has been that it's weird people are getting so excited about the replication when the actually interesting question (is it truly a superconductor) hasn't even been answered yet. Glad to see that isn't just my ignorance.
- failuser 3y agoThere have been several false reports of high-temperature superconductors during previous months. There seems to be backlash to the high-temperature superconductors claims now.
- raziel2701 3y agoIt's because it's a piece of news that doesn't cause outrage and polarization so they don't know how to profit off it.
- mrWiz 3y agoNYT did mention it the other day, as a side note to this story about allegations of misconduct by a physicist who has studied superconductors. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/science/ranga-dias-retraction-physics.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/science/ranga-dias-retrac...
- exoque 3y agoReally? Here’s an article from one of switzerland’s biggest newspapers: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/ein-supraleiter-fuer-den-alltag-483599515972 https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/ein-supraleiter-fuer-den-alltag...
- fouc 3y agoit's showing up on science news sites though, even major ones.
- anshumankmr 3y agoI think if it got true mainstream acceptance, it might. Or if it is some spectacular bust (praying this is not the case), they may cover it.