It would have been more convincing if you had given real past examples rather than speculative future ones :) Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
Penicillin has gotta be on that list. Just randomly happened to culture on a Petri dish left out on vacation, happened to be the worlds first antibiotic
It wasn't. "Stuff that kills bacteria" has been known for a long time, including times when nobody knew what bacteria were. Not every dirty wound was fatal, there's mixes of plants, applied to wounds, that do a good job.
Penicillin was the first highly effective AND mass producible antibiotic, though.
One somewhat ironic fact of this story is that the rogue former employee perhaps deserves some credit for bringing this thing out into the world.
They had been working on this for quite a long time themselves, rightfully so. But now the whole world is working on it and exploring other methods and combinations of materials I would assume (to improve upon the original design and avoid any patents).
How long would they have kept this thing to themselves without the rogue employee bringing this thing to light?
Perhaps that was part of the rogue former employee's motivation in "going rogue": that this thing needs to see the light of day so it can start to benefit humanity.
Update from 2 hours ago https://twitter.com/floates0x/status/1687296154416066560 "LK-99 Updates around the Korean Verification Committee: - Sample will not be released today/tomorrow - Group waiting on peer review (implied to be APL materials) and could take 2-4 weeks - Sample possibly with APL Materials, which is why it cannot be provided to verification committee - Team is asking the Verification committee for a de…
iPhone translate reckons
> It is not advisable to borrow money and come to people who do business with difficulty and be organised and do tyranny," he said.
Maybe he is frustrated with the verification process?
The paper shows a clear phase transition to diamagnetism as the material is cooled. That would be seen in superconductors and not in regular diamagnetic materials. I'm not aware of any that have that kind of phase transition. Though since we're in weird territory here, it's important to note some weird non-superconductor behavior that's beyond regular diamagnetism might be going on as an alternative explanation. But…
> this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time. Time for you to make some money then? :D https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...
Can one know how many people are in that market? When prediction markets where mentioned early during the LK-99 story, I looked a bit around out of interest, which platforms exist, which topics they cover, how many people participate in that markets. Where I could find the number of predictors, it seemed pretty underwhelming - one, ten, fifty, a hundred, I think the highest I ever saw was a bit over a thousand, but even then less than a hundred or so where using real money, the majority was using play money. Did I miss the place where everyone is? Is this to expected because the are so many topics you can bet on? Are the resulting prices still meaningful even with a small number of predictors only?
You can't get CT scans very often, because they hit you with large doses of ionizing radiation. Ultrasounds are low-resolution spotlights; you shine them at a particular spot to diagnose something specific. With this you could get an MRI at your annual checkup. You could diagnose all number of diseases like that, not to mention 95% of cancers. Each year your scan is automatically compared to the previous year, and an…
we could do annual scans with current tech. the fundamental limitation of MRI is proton relaxation time, which limits the sampling rate. the path to reducing scan time and thus cost is to use a more sophisticated reconstruction method to reduce the number of required samples. this is being worked on. i don't have any data here, but I am dubious that a room temperature superconductor will bring down the price of MRI m…
There is a lot of infrastructure around the MRI in order to support liquid helium storage, cycling, and inter-device pathways. It isn't just what you see in the room.
It might still be a large machine, but a bunch of bottlenecks disappear. With that, it is only a matter of time until a startup develops a much cheaper, smaller, and more efficient device.
I get the idea of superconductivity at room temperature in theory. But I don't have enough knowledge to understand in real terms, how will the world change if this is true?
It means we won't lose MRIs when the earth finally runs out of helium as they require liquid helium to run the superconductors that generate the magnetic field. We're running out of helium with no way to replenish it. Helium is the only element on the periodic table which is a non-renewable resource on Earth. So MRIs will get much cheaper, and they could end up being as cheap as taking an x-ray today.
Channeling M. Kaku:
An Earth-sized MRI machine could image all of the remaining mineral deposits, and it coils could make for a hell of an autobahn.
One somewhat ironic fact of this story is that the rogue former employee perhaps deserves some credit for bringing this thing out into the world. They had been working on this for quite a long time themselves, rightfully so. But now the whole world is working on it and exploring other methods and combinations of materials I would assume (to improve upon the original design and avoid any patents). How long would they…
Have you got any back-story on that? I only saw that their team posted it to arxiv, hadn't heard the other drama
So far lab replication efforts are: Two from HUST: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/ https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/ One by USTC https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ex4y1X7ix/ this tiny sample can stand on its pointy side. One by Qufu Normal University https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720 One with THU background but claims a personal project https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14z4y1s7V…
> Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos? some possibilities: - they have not been able to conclusively replicate anything and don't want to publish a negative result for fear of someone else publishing a conclusive positive result later. - they are more careful to publish something that they are not (yet?) 100% sure about - they don't care so much about the whole 'science in the spotlight'…
> this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time. Time for you to make some money then? :D https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...
Can one know how many people are in that market? When prediction markets where mentioned early during the LK-99 story, I looked a bit around out of interest, which platforms exist, which topics they cover, how many people participate in that markets. Where I could find the number of predictors, it seemed pretty underwhelming - one, ten, fifty, a hundred, I think the highest I ever saw was a bit over a thousand, but e…
Manifolds main market on LK99 has 4.6k predictors now.
This is a pretty strict version, at 33% now by 2025