Lee and Kim have been working on this stuff for a long time. They published prematurely after major falling out within their institute.
This isn't 1 experiment as the Germans seem to think. There are multiple papers, patents, etc.
The main focus of these papers has been to make huge claims and make replication very easy. They are "all in" and they want others to call.
If they were bluffing they would be heavy on results and light/secretive on how to make the stuff (trade secret, etc).
That's why there are 2x papers published within 3 hours, both with different authors, and you have one author telling New Scientist he did not approve of a paper naming him as an author.
You realise two of the authors (Lee and Kim) discovered this in 1999 (hence LK-99), and only published this paper after a huge fall out within the research team?
This isn't 1 experiment. This is 20 years of research leaking because of a fight over credit.
Exactly, they have made a very big claim and made it very easy to replicate / falsify. It takes a few days to produce this stuff.
Their paper is weak on data / results.
This is exactly what you would do if your team genuinely believed you had discovered something monumental.
In poker terms they are "all in" and they want to get called.
That's why it is so interesting. If they had posted lots of extreme results but it needed $10m to replicate then I would be thinking "fraud". It would look like a bluff.
Lee and Kim first discovered the material in 1999 and have spent 20 years doing other things in between getting help to figure out how to isolate LK-99 and reproduce the correct grain structure.
They eventually got a world class physical chemist, Kwon.
There is now a huge bust up within the team, hence the muddled race to publish and claim credit.
75% of aluminium supply is from recycling aluminium products.
The economy sort of has a "working capital" quantum of aluminium which also grows steadily from aluminium mining.
Lots of metals have very different and complex supply structures and thus completely different $$$ / volume curves for their supply.
Understanding the $$$ / volume curve of commodities is not something that is commonly considered when people try and predict the future. Mining a billion tonnes of Aluminium from an asteroid for example and safely landing it on Earth can never be profitable because the $$$ / volume curve for Aluminium is $0.00 at billion tonne volume.