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World's Only Sample of Metallic Hydrogen Has Been Lost (ibtimes.co.uk)
New submitter drunkdrone quotes a report from International Business Times: A piece of rare meta poised to revolutionize modern technology and take humans into deep space has been lost in a laboratory mishap. The first and only sample of metallic hydrogen ever created on earth was the rarest material on the planet when it was developed by Harvard scientists in January this year, and had been dubbed "the holy grail of high pressure physics." The metal was created by subjecting liquid hydrogen to pressures greater that those at the center of the Earth. At this point, the molecular hydrogen breaks down and becomes an atomic solid. Scientists theorized that metallic hydrogen -- when used as a superconductor -- could have a transformative effect on modern electronics and revolutionize medicine, energy and transportation, as well as herald in a new age of consumer gadgets. Sadly, an attempt to study the properties of metallic hydrogen appears to have ended in catastrophe after one of the two diamonds being used like a vice to hold the tiny sample was obliterated. The metal was being held between two diamonds at a pressure of around 71.7 million pounds per square inch -- more than a third greater than at the Earth's core. According to The Independent, one of these diamonds shattered while the sample was being measured with a laser, and the metal was lost in the process.
As I recall the biggest problem they had in making the stuff in the first place was constantly shattering the diamonds when they tried to shine light through them. Also, the breathless talk of this revolutionizing every industry under the sun is tremendously overblown. Right now these are laboratory curiosities, they may very well amount to nothing.
I read the internet for the articles.
People tried for years and years to make diamonds in the lab with little to no success. As they continued they were able to make small ones, now days they can make a diamond in the lab that is of comparable quality to mined diamonds at a lower cost.
Once the process has been figured out and the end result examined it is possible that things can be adjusted to increase efficiency and decrease difficulty improving yields, this is how most manufacturing processes work. All sorts of things started off hard to make, but over time we learned and improved things.
They were studying the sample, it is possible that the sample didn't need the force to stay stable anymore, that is part of the studying part. Since the sample was lost in the debris and is so small it is unlikely they will be able to find it. Yes it is possible it did revert back to a gaseous state, but it might still be in a metallic state. Maybe this research does end-up in a dead end, but maybe it will be a catalyst for significant technological advances over the next 30 years.
and aerodynamics sez bumblebees can't fly.
That old meme. "Scientists said bumblebees can't fly, yet they go right on flying. Dumb ol' scientists!"
It came from applying rigid-wing models to bumblebees, which doesn't work; a bumblebee is a much more dynamic system that needs more complex math to describe. Aviation engineers never claimed that bumblebees can't fly just because a simple mathematical model computes a self-evidently incorrect result.
http://www.snopes.com/science/bumblebees.asp
Books were written about it instead. When a subject is important, why settle for a journal? Le Vol des Insectes.
Go ahead and google it yourself. Oh, and the original claim was that bumblebees cant fly according to fixed wing aerodynamics, which is true.
The paper said that aerodynamics are unable to explain how bumblebees fly. There were no equations at the time (may still not be) that would allow wings that small to generate enough lift to hold the bee in the air - they're using properties of turbulence and other less well understood fluid dynamics to get their lift.
Only problem is that there are no such people, or any such place. Then of course you run into the problem of stories that falsely report that a story is fake. It's a real hall of mirrors
I see what you're trying to do. You claim there's no way to trust any source of any information, so we are ripe for influence by whoever connects with our base instincts of fear, anger, and survival.
Journalism isn't perfect, but nevertheless it's essential to the proper functioning of a democracy.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Here, Here...
Scientist, lawyer, rock star (just neurosurgeon and rocket car pilot away from being B. Banzai), but, I digress.
Been in science, a long time, over 25 years. Started out washing glassware, stuffing cotton into serological pipets. All you kids today with your fancy disposable glassware, tubes and pipets, in my day we had to pay some poor kid 4 dollars an hour to stuff and autoclave everything. Don't get me started on nuclease or RNA'se free water.
But back to the matter at hand... I have seen some academic scientists coast through multiple grant cycles on one years worth of work. Re-tool the data, maybe add some supplementary data, collaborate to get more data (without doing anything yourself), then tweak the underlying hypothesis and/or title of the grant, resubmit, and then the NIH and their study sessions (made up of your scientific peers / friends / sometimes competitors) will score, and you get money. Of course, if you don't publish during the interim, then your basis for the grant is less firm, so go back to the well, and submit to as many journals as you can afford (it does cost money to get published in a real journal). This does happen, particularly when the professor has tenure, or something that is difficult to reproduce due to cost constraints. Even if they get a grant, the university will take at least half for "overhead" and "indirect costs". Hiring help in the lab, that will cost you. I want to pay a research assistant, fresh out of college with a B.S., if they will take the 25 - 35K a year I can afford, I have to tack another 25% on to that for fringe benefits. Multiply that by 3 Assistants, and one associate or post doc, and well over 150,000 dollars is gone in salary. With chemical costs, and anything science costing so much more than it used to, due to mergers... in the old days there was competition, you could buy one enzyme from, for arguments sake, 10 suppliers, same with chemicals, and anything else you need for research. Now there are much fewer, Thermo Fisher bought Lifetechnologies (who had previously bought about 5 large companies, and untold small ones), they bought Pierce, and of course Thermo had bought Fisher Sci, years before. GE bought everyone else. EMD bought Millipore, and then EMD Millipore bought Sigma-Aldrich. The point is, sometimes the reason why some work on the same thing over and over, and don't deviate, is because they know the area, the thing, the theories and hypothesis better than anyone. Some back data mining, collaborations that make sense, and expansion on the theme is needed in this day and age, to fully flush out the underlying scope of the original idea. New research can not happen every four years, once you start. New researchers can get all types of deals from suppliers and from NIH and other sources for new and novel ideas, while the old timers, get to spend their twilight, polishing either diamonds or turds, depending on what they started with. This plus the fact that tenure, and lack of benefits for professor level researchers, means they have no impetus, other than the love of science, to keep going with new ideas. The hallways of any academic institution that still has tenure track, is filled with old men and women, showing up, collecting their guaranteed non grant subsidized money, often not having to, or able to teach, but still a great source of knowledge, and generally fun to talk to. You will often find them by the coffee maker or water cooler. One old timer, used to hide in his office and smoke... what were they going to do, fire him, no chance, and with an ash tray in the fume hood, and a little beta mercap, or DTT in the air, who could tell anyway. So, needlessly long post short, sometimes, the research is rehashed because the research is not fully completed, and there is still valid analysis to be done, and sometimes, it is added to by other researchers that are in fields that can assist, or add to the picture, and lastly, there are just a few, bad eggs, that just milk the system to do as little as