Lee and Kim have been working on this stuff for a long time. They published prematurely after major falling out within their institute.
This isn't 1 experiment as the Germans seem to think. There are multiple papers, patents, etc.
The main focus of these papers has been to make huge claims and make replication very easy. They are "all in" and they want others to call.
If they were bluffing they would be heavy on results and light/secretive on how to make the stuff (trade secret, etc).
That's why there are 2x papers published within 3 hours, both with different authors, and you have one author telling New Scientist he did not approve of a paper naming him as an author.
You realise two of the authors (Lee and Kim) discovered this in 1999 (hence LK-99), and only published this paper after a huge fall out within the research team?
This isn't 1 experiment. This is 20 years of research leaking because of a fight over credit.
Exactly, they have made a very big claim and made it very easy to replicate / falsify. It takes a few days to produce this stuff.
Their paper is weak on data / results.
This is exactly what you would do if your team genuinely believed you had discovered something monumental.
In poker terms they are "all in" and they want to get called.
That's why it is so interesting. If they had posted lots of extreme results but it needed $10m to replicate then I would be thinking "fraud". It would look like a bluff.
As I mentioned in my above post, they have really dodgy data. Ideally, with something like this, you would have collaborators to verify alongside you as joint co-authors. I think something people underestimate if how easy to replicate samples are - crystal growth is difficult, and impurities are important. It is unlikely anyone will produce exactly the same sample only something close based on the process they've given.
In realistic terms it seems they're grabbing for the prestige without the foundation of crossing their ts. Bad science like this shouldn't be encouraged. It's likely there's not very many groups growing the same material system so they have the time to spare. A paper like this wouldn't be on the arxiv at all if they were 100% sure because they would go straight for the nature publication and take the time to do more follow-up papers while they can.
Edit: to be clear as well, a lot of people are underestimating the time it takes to reproduce a growth even with a manuscript telling you how to do it. People always leave out steps and oversimplify. There is a lot of extra characterization that takes time to double check you have the right material that lines up with what they have here. Only the direct competitors actually already growing this material can do it in a few days.
Lee and Kim first discovered the material in 1999 and have spent 20 years doing other things in between getting help to figure out how to isolate LK-99 and reproduce the correct grain structure.
They eventually got a world class physical chemist, Kwon.
There is now a huge bust up within the team, hence the muddled race to publish and claim credit.
Ahh that makes sense. I was wondering what was going on with the two papers and thought it might be something like that too. Thanks for the extra details.
75% of aluminium supply is from recycling aluminium products.
The economy sort of has a "working capital" quantum of aluminium which also grows steadily from aluminium mining.
Lots of metals have very different and complex supply structures and thus completely different $$$ / volume curves for their supply.
Understanding the $$$ / volume curve of commodities is not something that is commonly considered when people try and predict the future. Mining a billion tonnes of Aluminium from an asteroid for example and safely landing it on Earth can never be profitable because the $$$ / volume curve for Aluminium is $0.00 at billion tonne volume.
Engine blocks too. If you go to a scrap yard though you’ll be pretty amazed at all of the stuff they’ve got collected and sorted. Metal recycling (compared to, say, electronics recycling or plastic recycling) has a very clear economic model and financial incentives. If you’re demolishing a building or scrapping old machinery it will cost significantly less to recycle the metal (because you get paid decently by the pound) than to take it to a landfill (where you pay by the pound instead).
I would guess that it'll take a month or two to repro the procedure. The paper was uploaded in the last week, so we're still probably a few weeks out on peer review.
