The initial claim was speculated to be room temp and ambient pressure superconduction. 110K is a far cry from that.
1) A bunch of clowns.
2) Interesting
3) Next Nobel prize winners
I think they had a good reputation in the community, so the opinion of the hivemind was to discard 1. But there was still the possibility of a honest mistake or something weird.
If this post is correct, other team confirmed that they discovered a new family of "high temperature" superconductor. The old families have been tweaked and explored to death. A new family gives a lot of room to optimize the composition and building process. So perhaps they found it.
If this is confirmed they are definitively in the "interesting" category, at least.
Secondly, there is no middle ground here. If it’s a room temperature superconductor like some of their data showed, then it’s Nobel Prize.
There is middle ground. They may have discovered a new kind of (not room temperature) superconductor that is an achievement. It's good to publish a few papers, but we would not be discussing it all week.
Another middle ground is it is a superconductor at -15°C (5°F). That's not room temperature unless you live in Antarctica and forgot to close the window. But it's freezer temperature that is much cheaper than liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.
I suspect this will make MRI machines much cheaper than they are currently and will radically improve the healthcare for many.
You got me thinking about the viability of superconductor-based EV motors that are cooled by compressed gas refrigeration; drink chillers might come standard on EVs since you'll be having beefier compressors than for just climate-control
-EDIT- Like if the first paper was not released as is let's say after their testing it turns out to not be room temperature and ambient pressure. They could have easily revised their paper to be about new class of super conducting material ect.... or just not published the paper if it was dud.
So even if that's all it sounds like an important discovery.