Alcohol has long been seen as a social lubricant for thousands of years in Japan, where business deals and difficult issues are discussed over bottles of beer and sake.
It is believed that drinking alcohol creates a more relaxed environment for such discussions.
This is such an odd bit of “cultural context” to include in the article. Alcohol is a social lubricant in basically every culture that doesn’t outright forbid it.
With no beards! That parts important - Hegseth likes his manly men to be smooth.
This is likely bunk.
There was a nice comment when this was posted on one of the science communities digging into the history and affiliations of the authors of this preprint: https://kbin.social/m/science@lemmy.world/t/249222/-/comment/1110464
Just by looking at the authors, this is not real:
Of the three, the first author (and corresponding author) and second author claim Q-centre as affiliation. If you check the webpage, it is not a research lab but just a commercial company selling this as a product. The third author claims KU-KIST as affiliation, but the only one I can find in google scholar has no background on superconductivity at all, and actually I can’t even find them as a current faculty member of KU-KIST.
If you look at the other paper they have in arxiv about the same, list of authors from the same Q-Centre, plus a last author from Hanyang university, but researchgate shows him as last publishing in 2006, so I assume long time retired by now. Not in the field of superconductors either.
I am looking for other work from any of the authors, and I can find none. Science is an incremental process, with some breakthroughs, sure, but incremental. Cancer won’t be cured in a day, and room temperature ambient pressure superconductors won’t just happen out of nowhere. Even room temperature superconductors at very high pressures aren’t really a thing, as the recent retractions of Ranga Dias’ papers shows.
As an aside, here is an interesting talk about the work that went into showing that the data was manipulated in those high-pressure room-temperature superconductor papers - as much as papers with manipulated data are a terrible thing for science, the fact that people will go to these lengths to prove them wrong is very reassuring. A paper that is wrong only misleads for a while, actual science pushes through and buries it eventually.
There have been A LOT of room temperature superconductor claims, thus far all have been irreproducible, either due to measurement error or likely fraud. I wouldn’t take this one seriously, especially since non of the coauthors have any previous publications in this field. That’s a big red flag.
I’m guessing because it was a quote from the NSW Premier who praised the guy. Putting it in quotes makes it clear the news outlet isn’t labeling him a hero (which would be editorializing) and is instead quoting someone else (news reporting).
It feels a little silly in this situation where any reasonable person would label the guy a hero, but it is standard journalistic practice.