While the article itself is a great intro into the engineering history of conductors, this is what the title refers too and is sensationalist at the least. IMO scientists are searching for a bunch of things and don’t necessary think of it as a holy grail.

…

This non-peer-reviewed preprint, boldly titled “The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor,” ignited a firestorm last month—both online and in physics departments around the world—as experts and laboratories rushed to recreate the material and reproduce these amazing results. But even from the very beginning, most condensed-matter physicists, including Mason and Greene, were skeptical.

“Even though they’ve shown levitation and resistance versus temperature curves in their paper … none of those measurements seem to have the reliability that a typical paper reporting superconductivity would have,” Greene says. “For example, one of the papers shows electrical resistance versus temperature, and when it comes to superconductivity there’s a very sharp drop in the resistance … the drop is much too sharp. It wouldn’t happen that quickly.”

Greene and Mason also mention some graph inconsistencies that make it hard to discern if this material is even a superconductor at all.

“I think one thing that’s exciting about this paper is that they were very clear about how they made the material. It’s a material that many people can make and reproduce,” Mason says, but he also points out a few red flags. “The resistivity plot is troublesome to me … if you took their plot of a superconductor, and just put gold on the same plot, gold would look like there was also zero resistance.”

At first, for every validation study that showed promising results, another study took the wind out of Ahab’s metaphorical sails. Finally, two weeks after its arrival, the International Center for Quantum Materials—an influential Chinese superconductor lab—confirmed that LK-99 wasn’t a superconductor at all, but instead displayed a kind of ferromagnetism.

So for now, the dream of room-temperature superconductors is on pause. But despite LK-99’s unfortunate fate, the dream has never been so tantalizing.

Ah yes, American exceptionalism. Silly me. Have to win as an underdog. If only we had education and learning history as part of our American ethos.

I always wonder why people venerate Edison so much. He did innovate, but man was he a shifty barron.

Each myth is contiguous in each episode rather than being interweaved. Much more satisfying.

Just give up and get streamlined mythbusters. Easier to watch anyway.

The video: https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ

[Jordan] was able to develop a transparent sticker that renders a license plate unreadable to the ALPR but still plainly visible to a human observer. https://github.com/bennjordan

Other links: IR LEDs to confuse security cameras

what about yarn

camera that only takes nudes

generates a picture based on geographic data

I think this is what you are talking about. Not sure about the brave inventors website validity in passing along the donations, but it has a picture or two.