seewhydee

They have quantitative magnetization-versus-temperature data taken using a PPMS (an automated physical property measurement system). It shows strong evidence of some kind of diamagnetic transition at ~ 320K. It seems very likely now that this material has some kind of interesting magnetic property, whether or not it's due to superconductivity.

Yeah it looks to me like either a replication failure or even evidence AGAINST a superconducting phase. A superconductor's resistance curve is supposed to show a sharp drop to zero at the transition temperature. If it's a dirty inhomogenous sample (e.g. specks of superconductor embedded in non-superconducting material), you get a kink where the curve descends to a non-zero background resistance. In the Southeast University data, there's a smooth curve that goes down until they get to the noise floor. There's no transition.

They theoretically agree that the material's properties could be nice for making some kind of superconductor, but present no clear indication that it would/should be a room temperature superconductor. The critical temperature depends on stuff that can't be probed via such simulations (i.e., electron-electron interactions).

From my understanding (I am not a superconductor person, but in an adjacent field), having flat bands at the Fermi level is not that rare. Such features appear in other materials that are evidently not superconductors, room temperature or otherwise. So the conclusions are more along the lines of "maybe it wouldn't be totally crazy", rather than "omg, we predict this material has astounding properties".

Don't get too excited --- theorists have predicted nine of the last five physics breakthroughs (pace Paul Samuelson).

Looking through report issued by Stanford's scientific panel, it seems quite clear that (i) Tessier-Lavigne and/or people in his group have been very naughty indeed, and (ii) most of their image manipulations might have escaped notice if they'd only used fuzzy select.

There are tons of everyday use-cases where it's preferable to sacrifice fraud protection to achieve instantaneous money transfer. Credit card companies have normalized using credit cards (with their attendant fees) for all sorts of small-denomination transactions, like public transportation, where the fraud protection machinery of the credit card system is of negligible benefit; it's a rip-off.

In my country (Singapore), the instant payments system was rolled out in 2017 but took several years to get traction. The pandemic seems to have marked a turning point: it's now accepted pretty much everywhere, and it's great. You can use it to pay plumbers, small-scale food vendors who don't take credit cards, car workshops, people on Craigslist, friends you split a bill with, etc. Very convenient.

Reminder that Google killed Google Reader, which was a wonderful front-end to the web, to try to funnel users toward Google+.

As everyone knows, Google+ never gained the traction Google wanted, but it did have a decent commenting/discussion interface which a few specialised communities (e.g. academic maths) latched on to.

And Google killed that too.

Of course it doesn't contain the word TikTok. Legislation can't single out an individual company or person, it wouldn't pass legal muster. So you write it in general terms, and ta-da! The ban hammer that you wanted to apply to TikTok is now a general purpose tool for destroying civil liberties!

Scientists used to use anagrams to register scientific discoveries without revealing them. Hooke registered his law of elastic extension using the letters "ceiiinosssttuv”, which he later revealed to unscramble into "ut tensio, sic vis" ("as the tension, so the force").

People did try to brute-force the anagrams. On two occasions, Kepler unscrambled analgrams from Galileo into the statements that (i) Mars has two moons and (ii) Jupiter has red spots. Bizaarely, both turned out to be true facts, but not what Galileo's anagrams were about!