Scientists already have well-defined terminology for many of the crystal structures described, the LK-99 is just a shorthand for this synthesis product (and a convenient one at that, for anyone trying to keep up with the latest). I wouldn’t be too concerned!
Part of the reason we’re not using a full formula yet is that we don’t precisely know what it is (or, indeed, if it’s just one thing at all; the linked paper makes a good argument that this will necessarily be a mix of multiple phases if synthesized as-described). Once we know what it is, we can use one of several existing names.
There should be a middle ground somewhere between an unwieldy chemical formula and a catchy product-like name.
For example 3,4-MDMA is a useful shorthand for people who want to be precise as to which isomer they're talking about, but don't want to spell out 3,4-methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine every time.
> calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine"
Not far from the truth, talking as someone who is in the field. Unlike Science, which is published by AAAS, a non-profit, Nature is a for-profit publication. They have an incentive not to miss out on something huge so that they can retain their status as the place to go for big results, but this also means they have an incentive towards selecting more sensational research for publication. That doesn't mean that research published in Nature is bad--often it is excellent--and I'm sure their editorial staff sincerely try their best, but they often make quite bizarre editorial decisions (personal opinion).
That said, Nature attracts far more scrutiny than other journals because of their ability to make and break careers, so many people feel resentment towards them as a result. Not all criticism of Nature is entirely fair.
The important thing to understand is that only the scientific publications in Nature matter. These articles are written by world-class scientists and are taken very seriously. In contrast, the journalism section is akin to any random newspaper. It is generally written by standard journalists and is intended for a mass audience.
Even if the hype over LK-99 comes to nothing it became evident to me several days ago that this research has likely changed scientific publishing permanently—and I'd almost bet on the fact if the research is confirmed.
What made this a such a huge tech event with the world watching on was that the research was on a subject that has captured the imagination of both scientists and the lay public for many decades and that it was posted on arxiv.org website which is open and copyright-free, similarly, we witnessed peer review processes also occurring out in the open and in public for all to see—and essentially in real time! Contrast this with the traditional tech journal process, Nature, Science, IEEE Proceedings, The Lancet, etc. which takes months to publish, and is a closed process not to mention papers being the whim of editors who often reject them (and sometimes very significant ones at that).
Irrespective of whatever outcome eventuates, the contrast between traditional, slow and now-very-expensive scientific publishing with that of this speedy, exciting, open and participatory model that's copyright-free will be obvious to everyone.
Moreover, this is happening at a time when the traditional for-profit scientific publishing has come under enormous criticism with Elsevier and others milking the university and scientific establishments to breaking point and the rise of Sci-Hub as a countermeasure. Whilst academics have been aware of the problem for quite some time the general public has not. This research and how it played out on arxiv.org in just two weeks won't be forgotten easily.
If I were a director of Elsevier and after witnessing what's happened in less than two weeks I'd be damn worried.
This puts Nature's position here as on display in TFA (they don't have to publish everything that is sent in) in a different light. There might be an element of sour grapes here, and if the research is validated then it will have a huge impact on them.
This isn't "Nature's position". This is a freelance science writer's position, and they paid him for the article. Nature wouldn't even weigh in with a real editorial opinion at this point.
It is their name on the masthead. If they don't agree with it they shouldn't publish it. Doing this 'at arms length' allows them to have this under their banner while at the same time being able to say 'that wasn't us'.
There's nothing wrong with this article. I really don't see what you have to complain about. It's broadly factual, and roughly consistent with the mainstream opinion at this point: there is no smoking gun evidence of anything, and the noise being generated by social amateurs is making it hard to find the real signal from the small number of groups competent enough to make useful statements about this "discovery".
Yes, and it serves no purpose other than to get Nature in the position where they can hedge their bets based on rejecting the article earlier and publishing this now just in case it eventually does work out. It's content free from Nature's audience perspective, nobody reading it will think 'hey wow, this is news to me', if they've been at all interested. So it must serve some other purpose because Nature doesn't just publish anything. I was wondering earlier why they would publish it and I think it isn't too farfetched to see this as a deliberate strategy to protect their interests. It's going to be interesting what happens on both sides of the fork: what they will do if after say 3 months there still isn't any very clear replication and when there is. For both of those they have positioned themselves well.
What irks me about it is that it's been all of a week and yet Nature is already deprecating it because the replication efforts fall short. It would seem to me to be a little bit early for that, what did they expect? And sure, we can argue over whether it was nature or the writer that is the root cause here but someone with editorial control at Nature must have felt it was good enough to include, even though it is just premature meta commentary, not science news.
Nature doesn’t need to hedge because their reputation won’t really affected by publishing—-or not publishing—-something on LK-99.
Paul Laterbur, who won a Nobel Prize for MRI after Nature rejected his paper on it has quipped that
"You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature."
The “top journals miss good stuff all the time; they publish bad stuff pretty often too. Sorting them out is just really hard.
The article doesn't deprecate LK-99. The article is about the hype surrounding the announcement and its replication results, mainly, but not exclusively by, amateurs in other fields (who seem to have shown that they can make samples that have unconventional properties, but not necessarily superconducting).
It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis.
"After the initial report of apparent superluminal velocities of neutrinos, most physicists in the field were quietly skeptical of the results, but prepared to adopt a wait-and-see approach. Experimental experts were aware of the complexity and difficulty of the measurement, so an extra unrecognized measurement error was still a real possibility, despite the care taken by the OPERA team"
No, but they also don't need to try to catch some of the hype while pretending to be immune to that hype. Clearly they feel the need to put LK-99 in at least one article title even if there is no news. That's not their normal standard for articles, at least not as far as I'm aware.
I'm aware of quite a few other scientific debacles, some involving outright fraud, data fabrication and sometimes true believers that even convinced themselves. What is interesting about the Ranga Diaz episode is that it was Nature that published it (and it took two years to retract it):
> So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving.
If there is this hot topic about LK-99, is it not their job to report it to their readers? Not everybody follows social media or has come across this personally. From this point of view, the article seems fair enough roundup of whats been happening.
> It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis.
"Debacle?" Some scientists saw something funny, pointed out that it violated known laws of physics, and asked for help explaining the results. They got that help relatively quickly and it was found that, indeed, the neutrinos were not moving faster than light.
If I were looking for a debacle, I'd look for something where there was outright fraud.
Here we have lots of people levitating small black rocks. It's probable that the samples created are impure, but something interesting might well be going on and so it's getting attention. Making things levitate like that is pretty cool, though, even if yes, you can do it with pencil lead (and a different magnet setup, not just a single magnet).
So people are trying to understand it. It's messy, and the results are unclear, but... hey, that's how things go. Sure, I'll wait to call it confirmed until we have a number of labs with good quality samples and expert testing, but I'll also give them time to actually try a few things since there are good reasons to think the synthesis is less easy than is reported.
But I'm not going to hate on people who just wanna see the rocks float, either. And we have quite a few people now with floaty rocks, which is more than enough to keep the average person entertained while the science settles.
Sorry, debacle wasn't the right word. Situation? Event?
In this case it wasn't as simple as asking for help- the team that caused this situation really just wasn't up to the task, and that should have been detected far earlier than their press release announcing faster than light neutrinos.
From https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/science/24speed.html
"""Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said in an e-mail, “There was no need for a press release or indeed even for a scientific paper, till much more work was done. They claim that they wanted the community to scrutinize their result — well, they could have accomplished that by going around and giving talks about it.”"""
Sure, that's better. I dunno, feels like bikeshedding to worry about the best way of getting help. It's sad that it turned out to be relatively boring (equipment not set up right) instead of any actual scientific discovery, but I'd personally rather see more people having fun and learning to love the process of discovery even when it doesn't pan out. And most things don't pan out, I get that.
This may well not pan out either, but lots of people with little floaty rocks are going to capture people's imagination in a way that a bunch of graphs just don't.
That is completely different. The mini-Natures are still peer reviewed journals with a strict selection process. These journals are usually reasonably high impact, and I don’t think there is evidence pointing towards them having more or less fraud than other journals on that tier. It’s not an amateur slapping a Nature logo on a preprint, which is basically what TEDx is.
What are the flaws? Why is the lay public not allowed to be involved? That sounds like elitist gatekeeping. The truth will come out regardless. Why can't everyone share in the excitement?
Yeah. For everyone watching with excitement, keep in mind that the silicon semiconductor was for years worse in practice than germanium ones, even if it was theoretically better and cheaper. It took advancements in material sourcing, kilns, etc. etc.
Give this material 20 years, and we will see how it fared.
I think this might be a bit exceptional as far as public engagement goes. So I wouldn’t necessarily judge public engagement based on this case.
“Rocks float” vs “rocks not float” is a very easy success criteria for the average person to judge by, lowering the bar for the average person to feel like they can add something to the conversation… so when we add in the potential revolutionary aspects of a room temperature superconductor we have a recipe for significant engagement… it’s even engaging the gawker reflex and people are picking up on it be LK99 is a weird trending topic and people will check to see if it’s an airplane that crashed or something …
In essence it was, by sheer coincidence, bound to go viral… and only because of a number of properties that others won’t have…
While an undergraduate degree in physics puts them above the average person, it’s probably only slightly. The majority of undergraduate physics degrees do not touch on solid state physics or material sciences to this degree. It would be at best a single elective course. And even then in physics and the sciences the area of focus gets so specific I would be hesitant to trust even a graduate degree holder unless they went into that field.
Agreed. I have an undergrad in physics from a top uni, took solid state courses, and worked in a lab specifically studying superconductivity and I dont really feel qualified to comment on this, so a generic undergrad physics degree certainly means jack.
Expertise aside I would argue that an undergraduate degree from a prestigious institution that pivoted to journalism is worse in this era. They have been tokenized and given lots of unearned reputation from their credentials, which biases them to provide the rosiest narrative (which is what the science industrial complex wants), without the years of grinding work or cynicism from management of rocky rapids of fraud and overrepresenting work that at least a grad student had to deal with.
That said, I actually believe lk-99 (let's be clear this is a belief, if strongly held) based on my personal experiences with scientific shenanigans.
I will amend my adjective. "Only very slightly earned reputation". Getting an undergraduate degree and getting a PhD are nothing at all like each other. Yes, coming out of undergrad you might be book smart, but most phds learn at least some amount of street smarts.
That’s all ready much more credible than a lot of people I have seen on social media, for whom a CS degree and reading Wikipedia is enough to weigh in.
I hate to say it, but I agree. Nature has outlived its "legit" branding by leaning too hard into the "product" realm. Most scientists don't want their fundamental work to be sold as a product unless it is a precursor to commercialization of their work. At that point, it becomes advertising rather than science.
When I see Nature pubs, I tend to enjoy the aesthetics of the articles, but discount them a bit to account for the mainstream-ness.
Yeah, I was going to say. I've seen so many (usually legitimate) criticisms aimed at Nature dot com in the past year alone that I saw the domain immediately disregarded the possibility that this should affect my opinions one way or the other.
... I once had someone in publishing try to offer me nature acceptance in exchange for ... things. The outsized role of these journals in the scientific community when reviews could be done in the open is pretty messed up.
>> calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine"
> Not far from the truth
It's very far from the truth; nothing is perfect, but Nature isn't some SEO clickbait. This subthread shows that the reactionary takedowns of everything now even are taking down Nature, of course. They've already discredited much of science, and have a lot of blood on their hands (climate change and vaccines stand out).
I think it's important for discussions about this to distinguish between how things are and how things should be.
How things are is that grad student labor is critical to the running of the university: critical for teaching of undergraduates, critical for performing research to reach deliverables on grants. Indeed, very little research is performed directly by faculty. And grad students are hurting, often at or below the poverty line. Typically a grad school program in the UC takes 5+ years, during which time wages might stagnate around $30k, without raise or career movement that would be possible if they spent those years in industry, despite by all objective measures their day-to-day work being very similar to a research job. Sunk costs make it very difficult psychologically to leave early. Abuse is rampant.
How things should be is very much open to debate. Perhaps a grad program should be as some claim it currently is: a privileged learning role, where you can focus on learning from world-leading experts. Perhaps university institutions should not rely on grad labor as much as they do, and invest more in faculty. Perhaps individual grad students would be better off not in grad school. There are lots of good suggestions in this thread.
How we get from how things are to how things should be is also an open question, but I'd advocate we do it with the least amount of harm to the specific individuals already living within this system. This proposed contract is already weak. The grad students deserve and need a lot more. And increasing the stipend to, say, the $54k proposed would also place incentives on the institution for change.
Finally, without living wages and good contracts, there will always be diversity and inclusion issues in academia. Someone from a wealthy background may be able to slog through a few years with support from their parents, but people from a poorer background will not. It simply will not be an option for them. There is a deeper tragedy here, for everyone involved--the individual, and the institution--for what is lost when so many intelligent, driven souls are not able to participate.
What gargantuan investments, tbh? I've been mostly hearing of volunteer-run DEI committees and the occasional checkmark or platitude on a forum somewhere. [Not trying to be snarky, genuinely wanting to know. I haven't heard of e.g. a trans student being paid way more money for attending grad school than a non-trans one.]
If I do a DDG search for "dei chairman university", I get listings for :
U. of Denver
U. Michigan
U. Washington
James Madison U.
Texas Tech
Emory School of Medicine
U. Virginia School of Engineering
Miami University
Washington State U.
UCLA
Now, if your argument is "All this is just empty platitudes" you might be right, but it's your turn to do the research.
Well, it’s unfortunately true. White women have by far been the greatest beneficiaries of DEI efforts. Of the POC that have benefited from these programs, many come from wealthy families. Functionally, DEI programs mostly exist to launder the reputation of universities.
Early in my career I joined a large company right when they went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Worked there for a year, then moved on. They shut down the office where I had worked a year or two after that. I don't regret working there at all. And I doubt Microsoft is even close to the same situation. They employ a couple hundred thousand people, so laying off 1000 is nothing. It's like a 200-headcount company letting go of just one person.
Either way, I think it's fine to join a company that is downsizing, since presumably the area you got hired is a department that isn't part of the downsizing. Of course there are horror stories of people who got laid off immediately after getting hired, but that's just bad luck. Most of the time there is a budget for you, or the position wouldn't be advertized in the first place. If you end up doing valuable work on a valuable team, you should be safe from any cuts - and you can ask those questions during the interview process.
From my perspective, any job where you get paid to work on something interesting and learn new stuff is worth considering.
In todays market be leery of companies who aren’t showing fiscal restraint. Look more at the strength and market positioning of the company, and don’t join a company whose business you don’t understand.
My general observation is some companies use layoffs as a periodic way to get rid of folks without performance reviews. (“Position was eliminated” doesn’t lead to law suits) Also, when companies do multiple rounds, they get less generous on each subsequent round.
It depends on the reason. If it was an old pharma company with expiring patents and no pipeline of new products to immediately replace them then that's a bad place to be. It's not as big a problem when it's a company that's making money hand over fist. You need to understand whether you are sustaining existing products or building the next set of things.
When you are really early in your career then you are less likely to be affected by big company layoffs. You are a relatively small cost and viewed as someone who might hang around, so are worth investing in. At least, you'll get a shot at filling the boots of the people who left until the better times come around.
EDIT: One other thing to look at is how the company cuts. Cutting a little when deep cuts are needed has a big impact on the day-to-day experience. No one feels safe. If there is a CEO who makes big cuts that seem reasonable for the business (completely ignore the tech) then you are better off.
I wouldn't turn down the opportunity if fresh out of school or still very early in career. Worst case you get laid off and are back on the market and not really any worse off than when you were looking earlier.
Once you're mid and senior level it's a bit harder to hop out and into a new job on very short notice--you really need clout and the right place at right time, or connections/network of companies that are hiring.
Might not be ideal, but going to a company that hasn't done a layoff yet is likely to be even worse. If business stability is a concern (and sometimes it legitimately isn't) then evaluating the odds going forward should be the main focus.
If you can find a decently paying job there and you're able to pick up a lot of skills and knowledge while getting paid for it, that is probably more than worth it, particularly if you're early in your career. A resume with Microsoft or something like that on it can't hurt.
Check the financial health of the company you're looking at. Are they profitable with positive cash flow? Microsoft had mountains of money coming in the door. One of the downsides of the American system is that a successful company changing priorities can fuck up people's lives.
if it's a small, unstable company on the verge of death probably not. For tech giants with tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees it doesn't matter. Would be weird if they didn't have occasional rounds of layoffs.
Yes and no. Yes, because it could demonstrate how much you like the company to be willing to look beyond the immediate-term risk of becoming part of any near future layoffs. Also, it shows that you are brave and confident in your own ability to find another job if it does happen. This could lead to the employer giving you more compensation and benefits to counter the reduction in interest from other candidates.
No, it may not be wise because it may result in you actually getting laid off soon after joining or having your offer rescinded 1 hour before start. As a great man once said, it all depends on your risk tolerance.
Bystander impression from other comments I've read on DuckDuckGo posts recently: they have good intentions but behind-the-scenes are a bit less rigorous on privacy than would be ideal. Is this an accurate impression from anyone who knows more?
For example, see discussion in this thread[0]. Even though the article itself seemed misleading, many commenters raised some good points.
They have pushed that contract to the limit thankfully. You can load up Firefox with ad blockers and then compare and contrast with their browser. They do as well as allowed, and have extra value adds. More well intentioned than brave imo.
1. Your mind is also part of the world. Changing your perceptions is changing part of the world.
2. All human minds are only capable of perceiving a small fraction of the total information content of the world, and most of our perceptions are based on constructed social realities (e.g., as this is a tech forum, you could say we live in a virtual machine where small rectangles of woven fiber are given a meaning far beyond the mere fact of their existence, purely based upon our collective perceptions of what those rectangles represent). Changing our perceptions can therefore change this social reality and, as a result, change the context in which we live.
Regardless of exposure, you have to consider wavelength. There are some things JWST can see that are completely invisible to Hubble, or, similarly, there are objects that are opaque to Hubble that JWST can see right through. Just look at all the extra stars that appear in the image of the Carina Nebula for an example of that.
Of course, the JWST without its struts and its mirrors wouldn't be much of a telescope! So the diffraction spikes are a part of doing business and also have the helpful side effect of allowing us to quickly know which objects are stars vs galaxies, since only the former have the really prominent spikes.
Part of the reason we’re not using a full formula yet is that we don’t precisely know what it is (or, indeed, if it’s just one thing at all; the linked paper makes a good argument that this will necessarily be a mix of multiple phases if synthesized as-described). Once we know what it is, we can use one of several existing names.