LK-99

Article

LK-99 is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 09, 2023 and February 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “supposed “room temperature superconductor” LK-99”; “LK-99 doesn’t work”; “There’s been more news and claims about the LK-99 alleged superconductor recently”. It most often appears alongside Manifold, Polymarket, Eliezer.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: August 09, 2023
  • Last seen: February 10, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

August 09, 2023 · Original source
33: Claim: phase transition in Cu2S impurity fully explains superconductor-like properties of supposed “room temperature superconductor” LK-99 (paper, Twitter discussion). Prediction markets on Manifold and Polymarket are down from high-30s% last week to ~10% now.
August 28, 2023 · Original source
Sorry guys, LK-99 doesn’t work. The prediction markets have dropped from highs in the 40s down to 5 - 10. It’s over.
March 12, 2024 · Original source
There’s been more news and claims about the LK-99 alleged superconductor recently, all of which have totally failed to move the market away from 4%:
February 10, 2025 · Original source
1: I’ve previously cited some pretty compelling research that Prospera-based weird biotech company MiniCircle can’t work, but Micah Zoltu reports doing a study and finding that minicircles increased VEGF expression in some mice. A commenter notes that results are 1000x weaker than clinically significant levels, but Micah says he wasn’t dosing carefully and was just trying to find an effect at all, so maybe this could be solved by better dosing. I look forward to hearing more about his research (ie please email me when you have more results). I notice I am pattern matching this to things like EmDrive and LK-99 (amazing breakthrough that could change everything, comes from source which charitably is not the sort of people you would expect to make amazing breakthroughs, some people report positive results but never in perfect definitive tests), so I’m still very skeptical.