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Comment by arcticfox | Hacker News Reader

I 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?!

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99% of science journalism is repeating a press release that came out of a university's press office.

It's very hard to become a science journalist where you can pursue your own stories, because the market for this is practically zero in comparison to other parts of the media.

I always try to pay for media that publishes stories from the likes of, say, Ed Yong, and leave messages that I'm doing it for the science journalism. But I doubt it has much substantial effect on how much real science journalism happens.

Almost all of the stories in major newspapers are commissioned ("pitched") by interest groups that want to see that article published. It's why a lot of articles contain quotes from weirdly specific people with middle-office titles in specific organizations. Journalists aren't cold calling random office workers to get these quotes. An outline of an article is provided, journalists do some minimal fact-checking and write it out into a proper article. Beat writers that cover a specific topic regularly and have made their own contacts in that field are an exception.

> 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.

The 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.

hmm, 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]

What should the headline be? "South Korean scientists claim room temperature superconductivity again! Are they lying like their last paper? Let's celebrate!"

"Potential superconductor breakthrough sends national labs scrambling"

Nature published their last big superconductor claim and then had to retract it. Publications getting burned by these folks makes them understandably reluctant to get worked up again.

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