<story><title>Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16802</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djtango</author><text>We also don&amp;#x27;t have a culture of replication. Basically all of the post docs I worked with in the lab lamented how hard it can be to replicate reported syntheses in chemistry wet labs.&lt;p&gt;Everything from humidity and altitude to undocumented &amp;quot;magic tricks&amp;quot; (eg baking something in an oven under vaccuum for a week to get.rid.of.all.the.water.)&lt;p&gt;I heard anecdotes that experiments were sometimes literally only reproducible in one exact lab because reasons.&lt;p&gt;Turns out there&amp;#x27;s just as much art as there is science in experimentation...</text></item><item><author>dmvdoug</author><text>Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s &lt;i&gt;In the Pipeline&lt;/i&gt; blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little bit to get the feeling back may have somehow made your small molecule production have less binding affinity or something. And yes, eventually you figure that out and stop jiggling your foot but two years have passed.</text></item><item><author>lucubratory</author><text>Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can&amp;#x27;t even get production correct in more than 10% of runs! Combined with the slipshod methodology, doesn&amp;#x27;t this make you feel like it was silly to release the arXiv paper when they did? Well, the LK-99 team agree, according to them it was a rogue industrial scientist that they&amp;#x27;d apparently fired four months ago who published it to arXiv with himself listed as third author. They wanted more time to nail down sample production and otherwise make a paper to their standards before release, but it effectively leaked and to avoid having credit taken from them for potentially months (or like, forever - science can be brutal) some of them decided to publish what they had on hand within a few hours. This sucks for them, a lot. I don&amp;#x27;t believe that their intention was to put out work with errors in it or incomplete methodology.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, this all happened two days ago! If the methodology was perfect, I still wouldn&amp;#x27;t expect good replication results back within two (part non-business!) days.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if this material is legit. I really hope it is. But the process of figuring that out could potentially take months (or more), and a two-day-later failed to replicate is not a death sentence.&lt;p&gt;As much as it sucks, this is really just going to take time to prove it&amp;#x27;s not a superconductor. If it is a superconductor, we may not know for a while either, unless one of the influencers&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot;makers&amp;quot; attempting to reproduce the material succeeds and posts some good convincing video of flux pinning or other Meissner effect stuff (that person is going to go insanely viral, if it happens).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>techdragon</author><text>The simple truth is we don’t have a culture of replication because no one is paying and no one is paying because no one is demanding it as part of the incentive system that the money is part of…&lt;p&gt;If a prerequisite of publication in a top tier journal was someone having replicated the work… anyone at all… then the quality of write up would improve dramatically because all the stuff that never gets written up would be written up so that the second lab costs them less money to do the replication work, so the second lab doesn’t spent a month failing because they didn’t bake the powder in a vacuum for a week before performing the entire synthesis under dry nitrogen purge when the methodology just said the powder had been dried and the synthesis was performed at ambient pressure in a zero humidity atmosphere…</text></comment>
<story><title>Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16802</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djtango</author><text>We also don&amp;#x27;t have a culture of replication. Basically all of the post docs I worked with in the lab lamented how hard it can be to replicate reported syntheses in chemistry wet labs.&lt;p&gt;Everything from humidity and altitude to undocumented &amp;quot;magic tricks&amp;quot; (eg baking something in an oven under vaccuum for a week to get.rid.of.all.the.water.)&lt;p&gt;I heard anecdotes that experiments were sometimes literally only reproducible in one exact lab because reasons.&lt;p&gt;Turns out there&amp;#x27;s just as much art as there is science in experimentation...</text></item><item><author>dmvdoug</author><text>Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s &lt;i&gt;In the Pipeline&lt;/i&gt; blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little bit to get the feeling back may have somehow made your small molecule production have less binding affinity or something. And yes, eventually you figure that out and stop jiggling your foot but two years have passed.</text></item><item><author>lucubratory</author><text>Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can&amp;#x27;t even get production correct in more than 10% of runs! Combined with the slipshod methodology, doesn&amp;#x27;t this make you feel like it was silly to release the arXiv paper when they did? Well, the LK-99 team agree, according to them it was a rogue industrial scientist that they&amp;#x27;d apparently fired four months ago who published it to arXiv with himself listed as third author. They wanted more time to nail down sample production and otherwise make a paper to their standards before release, but it effectively leaked and to avoid having credit taken from them for potentially months (or like, forever - science can be brutal) some of them decided to publish what they had on hand within a few hours. This sucks for them, a lot. I don&amp;#x27;t believe that their intention was to put out work with errors in it or incomplete methodology.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, this all happened two days ago! If the methodology was perfect, I still wouldn&amp;#x27;t expect good replication results back within two (part non-business!) days.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if this material is legit. I really hope it is. But the process of figuring that out could potentially take months (or more), and a two-day-later failed to replicate is not a death sentence.&lt;p&gt;As much as it sucks, this is really just going to take time to prove it&amp;#x27;s not a superconductor. If it is a superconductor, we may not know for a while either, unless one of the influencers&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot;makers&amp;quot; attempting to reproduce the material succeeds and posts some good convincing video of flux pinning or other Meissner effect stuff (that person is going to go insanely viral, if it happens).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mschuster91</author><text>The problem IMHO is funding related. Often enough the original lab&amp;#x27;s grant is &lt;i&gt;barely&lt;/i&gt; enough to account for the research and a shoddily put together paper, the rest is filled with a crapload of un(der)paid&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot;voluntold&amp;quot; labour.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s rare for researchers to get the budget to replicate someone else&amp;#x27;s work - this case might be one of the few exceptions given that everyone and their dog want to be the first one to show the world a successful replication. Hell, there are Youtube and Tiktok streamers on the task as well, that way you know just how nuts everyone is going.</text></comment>