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Last week, a team of South Korean physicists claimed they created a new material that could change the world: a room temperature superconductor called LK-99. Such a development would mean potentially unlocking fusion energy, next generation batteries, and quantum computing.
“We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind,” the authors wrote in one of two preprint papers of their findings uploaded to the internet. (Neither paper has been peer-reviewed and published by a journal yet.).
Since the announcement, there’s been a level of hype and hope for the new technology not seen since the release of ChatGPT. Experts of varying degrees have echoed the South Korean team’s claim saying that it’s a “watershed moment for humanity easily on-par with invention of the transistor” and akin to “walking through a keyhole for humanity.”