I'm in math and there's been a noticeable growth in this sort of thing, either very low quality papers or papers which are just wrong. But almost universally these are in terrible journals that one isn't going to spend any time looking at. Within any given field, recognizing which journals are of reasonable quality should not be that tough. On the other hand, for at least some fields which have just massive numbers of journals, it may require more work. But by and large most of these papers and entire journals are just going to get ignored by the people doing serious research.

I'm struggling to see how there's a violation of the anti-trust laws. Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but states are allowed pretty large leeway in how they regular businesses, and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act doesn't really interact with states doing something like this in any obvious way.

A law can be "outdated and anti-competitive"- but a court is not in general going to strike it down for that. They do claim that the law is irrational which does matter more; courts can and have struck down laws as having no rational basis. But that's an extremely tough burden, and the state just has to come up with some reasonably plausible rational reasons for the law. Reasons used to justify such laws include that they helped alleviate an imbalance in power between car manufacturers, dealers and customers, and that they made sure that there was an easy and natural way for warranties to handle cars. They were also seen as a way to promote local business. Now, in the modern age, all of those seem like pretty poor reasons that don't remotely justify the negatives. But that's exactly the sort of balancing that is the job of the legislator to decide, not the courts.

TNT pretty stable. C-4 burns hot but doesn't go boom when set on fire. Ideally explosives are stable except under the exact right circumstances. In fact, one of the major difficulties is balancing these issues. There are a lot of chemicals which are more explosive than the explosives we use but are too unstable to be used in weapons. As for the molecular formula, it is 6 nitrogens in a ring which is depicted in the last article. It is also the form you should guess since nitrogen normally forms two bonds.

Yeah that's all very valid and good expansions of the complexities of this and does a good job also of articulating a lot of problems with my analysis. My comment is currently at +5 informative, but your comment is a lot better than mine.

Yeah, but that by itself doesn't tell as that much. A lot of high temp superconductors were first synthesized in very tiny quantities and people later figured out how to synthesize them more efficiently, to the point where a lot them now can even be made in a decent quantity in a high school chem lab. And if this does turn out to be useful as an explosive (which requires it to not just be able to make a big boom but also to not want to go boom too easily) then my naive guess is that a fair bit of research into efficient synthesis will happen. It probably is going to turn out to be too unstable for military use though.

Sigh. You brought up SpaceX in a thread about the Australian company and said:

The point that you appear whether or not Musk or SpaceX existed, it is highly reasonable to for a first rocket launch attempt to be considered pretty successful if all engines ignite and you get off the pad. That was true before Musk and SpaceX even existed, and is still the case independent of whatever SpaceX is doing.

People have been trying to synthesize N6 for about a hundred years. In that regard it is similar to trying to synthesize tetrahedrane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahedrane. But people also synthesized cubane a while ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubane and attempts to make it large enough quantities for rockets were not successful. In the 1960s through the 1980s there was a general tendency to want to have really extreme substances and use them either as rocket fuels or rocket oxidizers. FOOF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride and ClF3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride are the two most infamous ones, and both of those are really easy to synthesize, but just insanely dangerous.

However, one of the major insights in rocket development in the last 25 years has been that even if you can get a few percentage points more of energy out of a rocket fuel, if the fuel or oxidizer is really hard to make or really hard to safely use, then the difficulties involved just aren't worth it. Thus, the cheaper, more reusable rockets were now seeing like SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab's Electron use fuels like kerosene and methane. N6 seems like it would not fit in this paradigm unless someone comes up with a really efficient synthesis method.

That's all the more the case because twice as energetic as TNT isn't that energetic. Methane has a specific energy about 10 times that as TNT. TNT is really good as an explosive not as much because of its high energy but because it easily releases it all at once. So if N6 does get a use, it might be for making missiles and bombs.

Huh? The topic of this is about Gilmour Space Technologies's rocket, not SpaceX. Experimental rockets going boom is standard. In the particular case of SpaceX, multiple Starship launches resulted in debris outside the declared range. That was in fact bad, and for good reason resulted in FAA investigations and pauses on their launches. I'm not sure why you think this is a relevant topic when the entire discussion was about a separate Australian rocket. It seems like you are being a little bit obsessive about SpaceX.

This is pretty standard for rockets. That's why they have range restrictions and also have range-safety officers who send a self-destruct if the rocket fails to launch. Most rockets have failed to successfully launch on their first attempt, and that's been true for 80 years. One serious worry with the Space Shuttle initially was that there was no way to do any test launch without a crew.

Separate groups working on the same tech.

There were a bunch of people at NIH and NCI working on this also who were subject to the DOGE cuts.

The point that the internet changed the nature of this sort of belief structure is a neat one and one I'll need to think about more. Note that my observation wasn't really that sharp though; a very similar point is made explicitly in TFA.

The FDA's new AI tool is repeatedly hallucinating non-existent studies and making incorrect claims about actual studies. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/politics/fda-ai-elsa-drug-regulation-makary . Hooray for government use of AI.

I would have thought that too but that this study shows that conspiracy theorists think everyone agrees with them, suggests that it isn't as much about being the special, unique person.