On July 23, Dev Kumar Thapa and Anshu Pandey made an extraordinary claim online. It wasn’t your garden variety fake news: By cramming microscopic particles of gold and silver together into pellets, they said, they’d constructed the first ever room-temperature superconductor. In a 13-page PDF, the two chemists at the Indian Institute of Science laid out measurements that indicated the pellets could conduct electricity perfectly at temperatures as warm as 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

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