There’s been some hype over the past week or so around a supposed room-temperature, ambient-temperature superconductor. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of it, but if it’s real it’ll be a very big deal. So far though, there have been some independent replications that have shown that it may at least be an exceptionally strongly diamagnetic material, so at the very least the material has some interesting and potentially useful properties even if it isn’t a full superconductor.

One interesting property of the claimed material however is that it’s actually fairly simple – just lead, phosphate, and doped with a bit of copper. Compare that to the common approach to superconducting materials, which often are full of exotic and expensive elements. We will very likely know whether or not it’s actually legit within a week or two. There’s already a decent number of people trying to replicate it independently, including a few of private individuals.