New York: ‘I Almost Sound Like a Crazy Person, But I Think It Is a Superconductor’

In theory, science is an entirely rational and transparent undertaking. Scientists gather data, form hypotheses, and then collect more data to find out which hypothesis is correct. That’s the idea, anyway. In practice, real-life science is messy and often opaque. Data can be ambiguous. Scientists can be bull-headed. The process of shifting consensus has always been as much about politics and intellectual fashion as about theory and data. Now throw in social media, fanboy culture, preprint archives, and virality — you have a world that breeds all kinds of oddities that can pop up, disappear, and reemerge like quantum virtual particles. All sorts of wild discoveries are bouncing around the information ecosystem before any peer-reviewed journals are able to sort out whether they’re real. And scientists aren’t even all on the same page as to whether this is a good thing or not.

An iteration of flash-mob science erupted last summer, when Twitter users began hyping the work of a South Korean team that said it had discovered a material that was superconductive at room temperature and pressure. Bolstering the claim was a video showing a chunk of material partially levitating. As we reported at the time, if the findings were replicated, it would have massive practical implications for things like levitating trains and quantum computing.

Then the story collapsed.

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New York: Air Travel Is Not Ready for Electronic Warfare

Airway UM688 cuts an invisible path through the air from Samsun, Turkey, on the Black Sea coast down through Basra, Iraq, on the Persian Gulf and is used heavily by airliners traveling from Europe to the Gulf States. One stretch in particular, a 280-mile-long section in northeastern Iraq, has become a hot topic in pilot forums online. Planes passing through experience all kinds of strange system malfunctions.

“What’s happening is that the plane is flying along normally, everything is very chill, very relaxed, you probably have a foot up on the pedestal and you’re doing your crossword. And then, suddenly, either the plane will start to turn or you’ll get a whole bunch of warnings: terrain failure, navigation error, position error,” says Mark Zee, the founder of OpsGroup, an online forum that collects pilots’ reports. “For the crews, the initial reaction is What the hell is going on?” In at least 15 cases, pilots became so confused that they had to ask air-traffic control to tell them which direction to take. In one incident, a business jet nearly passed into Iranian airspace.

Someone, it seems, has been confusing the planes’ navigation systems by transmitting false GPS signals, a technique called “spoofing.” “Commercial aircraft are having their GPS units captured and taken fully under the control of the spoofer,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s eye-opening and unprecedented.”

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New York: The Tunnel War

After her release from two weeks of Hamas captivity, 85-year-old Yochaved Lifshitz described being marched for several kilometers underground by her captors through “a giant system of tunnels, like spiderwebs.” Few other Israelis had seen the Gaza Strip’s storied tunnel complex, but many are now going to get the chance.

Israeli Defense Forces that pressed several miles into Gaza beginning last Friday are forced to contend with a sophisticated labyrinth of underground tunnels and bunkers constructed over several decades by Hamas, hiding fighters, weapons, and more than 200 Israeli hostages. The elaborate system is believed to extend for hundreds of miles and, in some locations, lies several hundred feet below ground. Military experts who have studied Hamas call the tunnels a formidable defensive system that would be incredibly costly for Israeli troops to neutralize, even after several weeks of heavy bombardment targeting the network.

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New York: Why NASA Wants Your UFO Videos

Last year, as the topic of UFOs was exploding back into the mainstream, NASA convened a panel of outside experts, the UAP Independent Study Team, to assess the unclassified evidence the government had collected. (UAP, for “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” is the government-approved euphemism for UFO.) The group was a science-nerd murderers’ row whose purpose was to help the space agency handle a subject that had long attracted conspiracy theories — but which was also grounds for legitimate questions, considering the unexplained objects people had been observing and recording with increasing frequency. Heading the 17-member panel was Dr. David Spergel, a longtime Princeton professor of astrophysics who in 2021 took over as president of the Simons Foundation, a $5 billion nonprofit that supports basic science research. The group held a public meeting to discuss its work in May and released its final report last month. Among its top-line findings was that it had found no evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs, but that more data would be needed to settle the matter conclusively — including data from civilians who capture unidentified phenomena. It was a circumspect conclusion that, predictably, did little to satisfy true believers on either side of the UAP divide.

Intelligencer spoke with Spergel at his office at the Simons Foundation’s building near Madison Square, where he discussed why NASA got involved in the hunt for UFOs, what the odds of finding aliens are, and whether David Duchovny really believes that the truth is out there.

Why did NASA want to get involved in UFOs?
This starts with the Navy starting to declassify a bunch of images. The most famous one is the “Tic Tac” [filmed by a U.S. Navy fighter off the coast of San Diego], which is about 20 years old now. You look at those incidents and you say, “There’s something weird going on we don’t understand.” Then, having delved into the incident a bit, you realize that you wish they collected better data. What we’re left with is hard to interpret. NASA is a scientific agency. It’s charged with investigating the unknown. And the head of NASA announced, “We’re going to weigh in on this.”

After looking at evidence declassified by the Pentagon’s UAP organization, AARO (“All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office”), the panel concluded that most reported UAPs were either balloons, drones, or airplanes. What does that tell you?
The number of drones that are up at any given moment is enormous — they’re just monitoring fires and gas pipelines and helping farmers monitor crops. There’s also a ton of balloons. It turns out that small amateur balloons below a certain size didn’t have to be reported to the FAA. There’s probably some regulatory cleanup needed to make sure that balloons at low altitudes are not a threat to pilots.

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New York: The Floating Speck That Promised to Change the World

The video is subtle. A small, regular chip of stonelike material as wide as the end of a ballpoint pen rests on a flat metal surface. But it’s not resting, exactly: While one end touches the metal, the other end floats above the surface, and when pushed it bobs like a cork. It’s levitating.

If the physical scale of the phenomenon was small, the response by science enthusiasts was anything but. “Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime. I don’t think people fully grasp the implications,” a former Princeton physics undergraduate named Alex Kaplan tweeted. The tweet has since been viewed 30 million times.

The video was attached to one of a pair of papers published by a team of researchers from South Korea on July 22 on the Arxiv preprint server, a site where scientists can post papers that haven’t yet been through the peer-review vetting process. They described the results of experiments conducted with LK-99, a lab-made substance containing lead, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. (The name derives from the initials of its inventors and the year they created it.) The levitation could be explained by the Meissner effect, a characteristic of materials that are superconducting, meaning they carry electrical current without any resistance. The authors made no bones about what they thought they’d found, titling one of their reports “The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor.” This was no modest claim; scientists have spent decades searching for a substance that is superconducting under normal, day-to-day conditions, and finding one would have a revolutionary impact on a wide range of industries. “Our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind,” the authors concluded.

The story spread far and wide, from TwitterTik Tok, and Twitch to everymainstream publication. One of the science influencers touting LK-99’s incredible potential was San Francisco–based applied physicist Andrew Cote, who tweeted, “if successful LK-99 would be a watershed moment for humanity easily on-par with invention of the transistor.” His tweets, too, received millions of views.

As the news spread, so did optimism. For a time, one online betting market was posting better-than-even odds that the superconductor claims would pan out.

But would the findings prove replicable?

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New York: Deep-Sea Search Expert Is Aboard Missing Titanic Submersible

Rescuers are racing against the clock to find a submersible that has gone missing near the Titanic wreckage with one of the world’s most knowledgeable deep-ocean search experts currently onboard. Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, was piloting the minivan-size submersible Titan on Sunday with four passengers aboard. It lost contact with the surface an hour and 45 minutes after its descent and has not been heard from since. At a press conference on Tuesday, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman said the Titan had about 40 or 41 hours of oxygen left.

Dubbed “Mr. Titanic” by the media for his frequent dives to the wreck of the doomed liner, Nargeolet is a world-renowned underwater-search authority who helped locate a French aircraft that went missing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

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New York: When Flying Private Kills

As it took off from Dillant-Hopkins Airport in Keene, New Hampshire, on the afternoon of March 3, the Bombardier Challenger 300 business jet provided an apt illustration of why private flying is so popular among those who can afford it. Dana Hyde, a 55-year-old Beltway lawyer who had served in the Obama White House, had flown up from Virginia the day before with her husband, Jonathan Chambers, and their son Elijah to visit colleges in New England.

The three passengers were able to spread out in a cabin that accommodates up to 16. The trip, which would have taken more than eight hours by car, would be less than an hour, with no hassles at airport security, waiting in line to board, or juggling their schedules to match the airline’s — they just told the pilots when they wanted to go, where they wanted to go, hopped on, and left. After a brief delay due to an aborted takeoff attempt, the plane lifted off from Keene at 3:36 p.m., according to publicly available location data. It was a good day for flying: Winds were calm, the temperature a seasonally mild 44 degrees. Given the jet’s cruising speed, the family could expect to be on the ground at Leesburg Executive Airport by 4:30 p.m. From there, it would be a 30-minute drive to their home just across the state line in the affluent riverside village of Cabin John, Maryland.

A two-day private jet trip like this costs about $25,000 to book from a charter company, but the family had the plane at its disposal because Chambers is a partner in Conexon, the consulting company that owns the plane. A onetime Republican staffer for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Chambers had joined the Federal Communications Commission in 2012 and assisted in rewriting the rules for how the government helps subsidize telephone and cable services in rural communities. In 2016, he left government service and co-founded Conexon to help cable companies take advantage of the rules he had written.

Hyde had an even more impressive résumé. Born to a single teenage mother, she grew up in rural eastern Oregon, then attended UCLA and got her law degree at Georgetown. From there, her star rose quickly. She worked as a White House special assistant during the Clinton administration, then served on the 9/11 Commission. After a spell at the State Department, she was picked by the Obama administration to head the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent agency set up during the Bush years to fight global poverty by funding projects in countries that follow free-market economic policies. Having come from modest means herself, “working to fight global poverty” was important to her, Hyde said at her Senate confirmation hearing, but so was efficiency. “I believe in data-driven, cost-effective policies. I want the American people to always get their money’s worth from anything their government does on their behalf,” she testified. Confirmed unanimously, she steered the agency and its billion-dollar budget from 2013 until 2017. She thereafter worked as a partner at a Jerusalem-based venture-capital firm and was co-chair of the Aspen Partnership for an Inclusive Economy.

A gentle breeze was blowing from the south as the plane rose from the 6,000-foot runway. It banked to the left as it climbed over the foothills of the White Mountains, then leveled its wings to follow the course of the Connecticut River southward. What happened next can be pieced together from a report released a month later by the National Transportation Safety Board.

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New York: Why Elon Musk’s SpaceX Doesn’t Mind Its Rocket Blew Up

It was not, as they say in the space-launch business, nominal. Four minutes into Thursday’s launch of the giant SpaceX Starship, the unmanned rocket blew up at an altitude of 18 miles. The 390-foot-high launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful anyone has ever attempted to launch into space, has long been a lynchpin of Elon Musk’s ambitions to someday colonize Mars, and its failure interrupted what had been a remarkable string of successes for SpaceX. Yet, as the fireball ballooned across the sky the mood on the ground was anything but somber, as the crowd that had gathered to watch erupted in whoops and cheers. “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk tweeted in the aftermath. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”

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Businessweek: The Golden Era of AI Chess Makes Things Tricky for Players

The chess world was reeling when 13 of America’s best players convened in early October for the US Chess Championship in St. Louis. The previous month, top-ranked Magnus Carlsen, 33, suffered a surprising defeat in the same city at the hands of 19-year-old upstart Hans Niemann. Carlsen accused his opponent of cheating—without providing evidence—while Niemann proclaimed his innocence.

There was little prospect of closure as Niemann, broad-shouldered with a mop of curly hair, settled into the match room in St. Louis. (Carlsen wasn’t competing.) Chess seemed to return to its usual form: a game of profound intensity played in churchlike quiet. Niemann started the two-week-long event strong, stumbled through a string of losses, then pulled it together to finish in the middle of the pack, about what you’d expect from a player at his level. Nothing about his tournament play raised any eyebrows. “Even people who were extremely critical of him are saying that his performance is not really noteworthy,” says chess journalist Greg Keener.

Hours after the last game was played on Oct. 20, and shortly before the first drinks were poured at the awards ceremony, the next bombshell dropped. Niemann had filed a $100 million defamation suit against Carlsen and a number of co-defendants. The game had never seen anything like it. As chess YouTuber Levy Rozman put it, “This is probably the most shocking development in the world of chess ever.”  (Carlsen’s manager didn’t respond to an interview request; Niemann declined to comment.) Continue reading Businessweek: The Golden Era of AI Chess Makes Things Tricky for Players

New York: The Hunt for the Butchers of Bucha

Lena, a corporate executive living in Germany, left her native Ukraine in the 1990s but stays in regular contact with her extended family there. When Russia struck the family’s town soon after the invasion started, they sent Lena photos of bomb damage. Around the same time, she was searching for news about the war on social media when she came across an appeal by Ben Strick, an open-source investigator, for images to geolocate. She sent him one picture, and then more. “After three or four images, he offered me to join the team on a voluntary basis,” she says. “So I did.”

Today, Lena spends three hours a day of her spare time working with Strick’s team at the Center for Information Resilience, a U.K.-based nonprofit dedicated to countering misinformation, part of a worldwide community of open-source intelligence (OSINT) researchers studying the war in Ukraine. Like the rest of the world, the team has been shaken by the images from Bucha, where Russian forces are accused of executing civilians and torturing Ukrainian soldiers. For the past week, Lena and her colleagues have contributed to a collective effort to identify and locate the perpetrators — a task that’s especially relevant to Lena because her family members are currently living under Russian occupation as Bucha’s residents were. “Right now, it’s pretty peaceful where they live, but I don’t think it will stay that way. The fights will come,” she says. (Out of concern for their safety, she asked me to change her name.) Continue reading New York: The Hunt for the Butchers of Bucha