Amazon has filed a lawsuit against a group of online stores that sell pirated DVDs of key titles such as "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" and "The Peripheral." TorrentFreak reports: In a complaint filed at a California federal court, Amazon accuses seven websites of selling pirated discs. These sites, including dvdshelf.com.au, dvds.trade, and dvdwholesale.co.uk, are presumably operated by the same group, using a variety of companies. For the public at large, it may not be immediately obvious that these discs are pirated. However, since Amazon doesn't produce or sell DVDs for these Prime Video series, there is no doubt that they are created from illicit sources.

The piracy operation consists of at least seven websites and these all remain online today. According to Amazon, the sites ship to customers in the U.S. and abroad, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, resulting in mass copyright infringement. Before going to court, investigators conducted more than twenty test purchases of pirated DVDs. After these orders arrived, Amazon sent the discs to the Motion Picture Association which independently confirmed that they were all pirated.

The complaint lists Yangchun Zhang as a key suspect. This person presumably resides in China and obtained the 'DVD Shelf' trademark in Australia. In addition, Zhang is also listed as the registrant of several of the domain names involved. The complaint accuses Zhang and the others of both copyright and trademark infringement. Through the lawsuit (PDF), Amazon hopes to recoup damages, which can run in the millions of dollars. Another key priority is to shut the sites down and Amazon asks the court for an injunction to stop all infringing activity.

Huawei is accused by a semiconductor manufacturers association of setting up secret chip-making facilities in China to evade U.S. sanctions. The Guardian reports: The Chinese tech firm moved into chip production last year and was receiving an estimated $30 billion in state funding from the government, the Washington-based Semiconductor Industry Association was quoted as saying by Bloomberg, adding that Huawei had acquired at least two existing plants and was building three others. If Huawei is constructing facilities under names of other companies, as the Semiconductor Industry Association alleges, then it may be able to circumvent U.S. government restrictions to indirectly purchase American chip-making equipment, according to Bloomberg.

India has become the first country to land a spacecraft on the moon's south pole. It launched Chandrayaan-3 in mid-July, with the spacecraft entering the moon's orbit on Aug. 5. Earlier this week, Russia crashed its Luna-25 rocket in the same lunar region. From a report: It's notoriously difficult to land a rover on the moon. Russia's Luna-25 crashed while making an attempt just this week, while Japanese company ispace failed to land an unmanned lander in April.â 1 Since the moon has no atmosphere, landers can't just softly touch down on the lunar surface. And, without GPS capabilities, scientists rely on the lander's computers to accurately identify where the spacecraft will touch down. India is only the fourth country to pull off a moon landing, behind the U.S., China, and Russia. The nation's lunar aspirations are part of a push by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to garner investments for private space exploration and satellite launches. Speaking at the rocket's launch in July, Modi heralded a "new chapter" in India's space program.

A draft agreement between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to avoid a ban would have given U.S. agencies unprecedented access to TikTok's facilities and servers. "Many of the concessions the government asked of TikTok look eerily similar to the surveillance tactics critics have accused Chinese officials of abusing," reports Gizmodo. "To allay fears the short-form video app could be used as a Chinese surveillance tool, the federal government nearly transformed it into an American one instead." The draft of the deal was obtained by Forbes. From a report: Forbes reports that the draft agreement, dated Summer 2022, would have given the US government agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense far more access to TikTok's operations than that of any other social media company. The agreement would let agencies examine TikTok's US facilities, records, and servers with minimal prior notice and veto the hiring of any executive involved with leading TikTok US data security organization. It would also let US agencies block changes to the app's terms of service in the US and order the company to subject itself to various audits, all on TikTok's dime, per Forbes. In extreme cases, the agreement would allow government organizations to demand TikTok temporarily shut off functioning in the U.S..

The draft document, which Gizmodo could not independently verify, is reportedly around 100 pages long and contains comments sent between attorneys representing ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese-owned parent company, and CFIUS. The agreements, if accepted as written at the time, would open TikTok's U.S. operations up to supervision by a number of external third-party auditors and source code inspectors. ByteDance leaders, whom US lawmakers and whistleblowers have accused of maintaining close connections with The Chinese Communist Party, would be excluded from some security-related decisions involving the US version of the app.

Provisions described in the guidelines weren't always agreed on by both parties. In several instances, according to Forbes, TikTok's attorneys pushed back against terms that would let the government alter what types of user data ByteDance employees could view. Another point of disagreement emerged when the government reportedly asked for limitless veto power over TikTok's future contracts. At one point, TikTok reportedly altered language that would have allowed government officials to demand changes to the apps recommendations algorithm if it promoted content the agencies disagreed with. A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement: "As has been widely reported, we've been working with CFIUS for well over a year to implement a national security agreement and have invested significant resources in implementing a firewall to isolate U.S. user data. Today, all new protected U.S. user data is stored in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the U.S. with tightly controlled and monitored gateways. We are doing more than any peer company to safeguard U.S. national security interests."

Japan is to begin releasing wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from Thursday, in defiance of opposition from fishing communities, China and some scientists. From a report: The prime minister, Fumio Kishida, said on Tuesday he had asked the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), "to swiftly prepare for the water discharge" in accordance with plans approved by nuclear regulators, adding that the release would begin on Thursday, "weather and ocean conditions permitting." Kishida has said that disposing of more than 1m tonnes of water being stored at the site was an essential part of the long and complex process to decommission the plant.

The plan has caused controversy because the water contains tritium, a radioactive substance that can't be removed by the facility's water filtration technology. Hong Kong, an important market for Japanese seafood exports, has threatened restrictions. Leader John Lee said on Tuesday he strongly opposed the water plan, adding that he had instructed the city's government to "immediately activate" import controls on Japanese seafood. South Korea and China banned seafood imports from some areas of Japan after Fukushima Daiichi suffered a triple meltdown in the March 2011 triple disaster along the country's north-east coast. China remains strongly opposed, accusing Japan of treating the ocean like a "sewer." The South Korean government recently dropped its objections to the discharge, but opposition parties and many South Koreans are concerned about the impact the discharge will have on food safety.

Microsoft is discontinuing the Kinect, again. The Verge explains: The company officially stopped manufacturing the depth camera and microphone in 2017 and brought it back in a new form in 2019 as the Azure Kinect Developer Kit. Now, Microsoft is ending production of that, too, but it has partnered with some outside companies to provide options available for people who need similar types of devices.

If you want to get one of the remaining Azure Kinect Developer Kits, they'll be available to buy through the end of October or "until supplies last," Microsoft's Swati Mehta said in a post on the company's website. If you already have one, Mehta promises that you can keep using it "without disruption." "As the needs of our customers and partners evolve, we regularly update our products to best support them," Mehta wrote. "From time to time, this includes introducing new opportunities, as well as retiring products. We have made the decision to end production of Azure Kinect Developer Kit, but this is far from the end of this technology as it will continue to be available through our partner ecosystem." One alternate suggestion from Mehta is Orbbec's Femto Bolt, which uses the depth camera module found in the Azure Kinect Developer Kit.

The US acted aggressively last year to limit China's ability to develop artificial intelligence for military purposes, blocking the sale there of the most advanced US chips used to train AI systems. From a report: Big advances in the chips used to develop generative AI have meant that the latest US technology on sale in China is more powerful than anything available before. That is despite the fact that the chips have been deliberately hobbled for the Chinese market to limit their capabilities, making them less effective than products available elsewhere in the world. The result has been soaring Chinese orders for the latest advanced US processors. China's leading Internet companies have placed orders for $5 billion worth of chips from Nvidia, whose graphical processing units have become the workhorse for training large AI models.

The impact of soaring global demand for Nvidia's products is likely to underpin the chipmaker's second-quarter financial results due to be announced on Wednesday. Besides reflecting demand for improved chips to train the Internet companies' latest large language models, the rush has also been prompted by worries that the US might tighten its export controls further, making even these limited products unavailable in the future. However, Bill Dally, Nvidia's chief scientist, suggested that the US export controls would have greater impact in the future. "As training requirements [for the most advanced AI systems] continue to double every six to 12 months," the gap between chips sold in China and those available in the rest of the world "will grow quickly," he said.

A cargo ship fitted with giant, rigid British-designed sails has set out on its maiden voyage. Shipping firm Cargill, which has chartered the vessel, hopes the technology will help the industry chart a course towards a greener future. From a report: The WindWings sails are designed to cut fuel consumption and therefore shipping's carbon footprint. It is estimated the industry is responsible for about 2.1% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The Pyxis Ocean's maiden journey, from China to Brazil, will provide the first real-world test of the WindWings - and an opportunity to assess whether a return to the traditional way of propelling ships could be the way forward for moving cargo at sea. Folded down when the ship is in port, the wings are opened out when it is in open water. They stand 123ft (37.5m) tall and are built of the same material as wind turbines, to make them durable. Enabling a vessel to be blown along by the wind, rather than rely solely on its engine, could hopefully eventually reduce a cargo ship's lifetime emissions by 30%.

The UK government will spend $127m to try to win a toe-hold for the nation in the global race to produce computer chips used to power artificial intelligence. From a report: Taxpayer money will be used as part of a drive to build a national AI resource in Britain, similar to those under development in the US and elsewhere. It is understood that the funds will be used to order key components from major chipmakers Nvidia, AMD and Intel. But an official briefed on the plans told the Guardian that the $127m offered by the government is far too low relative to investment by peers in the EU, US and China. The official confirmed, in a move first reported by the Telegraph, which also revealed the investment, that the government is in advanced stages of an order of up to 5,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia. The company, which started out building processing capacity for computer games, has seen a sharp increase in its value as the AI race has heated up. Its chips can run language learning models such as ChatGPT.

LiveScience brings an update on China's Chang'e-4 — the first spacecraft to ever land on the far side of the moon.

Its Lunar Penetrating Radar has now mapped the lunar subsurface "in finer detail than ever before" by bouncing radio signals deep underground: Their results, which were published Aug. 7 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, reveal billions of years of previously hidden lunar history. These new data suggest the top 130 feet of the lunar surface are made up of multiple layers of dust, soil, and broken rocks, said lead study author Jianqing Feng, an astrogeological researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona... Farther down, the scientists discovered five distinct layers of lunar lava that seeped across the landscape billions of years ago.

Scientists think our moon formed 4.51 billion years ago, not long after the solar system itself, when a Mars-size object slammed into Earth and broke off a chunk of our planet The moon then continued to be bombarded by objects from space for roughly 200 million years. Some impacts cracked the moon's surface. Like Earth, the moon's mantle at that time contained pockets of molten material called magma, which seeped out through the newly formed cracks in a series of volcanic eruptions, Feng said.

The new data from Chang'e-4 shows that process slowing down over time: Feng and his colleagues found that the layers of volcanic rock grew thinner the closer they were to the moon's surface. This suggests that less lava flowed in later eruptions compared with earlier ones. "[The moon] was slowly cooling down and running out of steam in its later volcanic stage," Feng said. "Its energy became weak over time...."

However, there could still be magma deep underneath the lunar surface, Feng said.

According to the National Business Daily, China's fertility rate in 2022 dropped to a record low of 1.09 from 1.15 in 2021. Reuters reports: The state-backed Daily said the figure from China's Population and Development Research Center put it as having the lowest fertility level among countries with a population of more than 100 million. China's fertility rate is already one of the world's lowest alongside South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. China has said it will focus on education, science and technology to improve population quality and strive to maintain a "moderate fertility" level to support economic growth in future.

Hong Kong's Family Planning Association said in a separate release on Tuesday that the number of childless women in the special Chinese administrative region more than doubled from five years ago to 43.2% last year. The percentage of couples with one or two children also tumbled while the average number of children per woman dropped from 1.3 in 2017 to a record low of 0.9 last year, according to its survey.

According to a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, nearly half of American adults support a ban on TikTok. From the report: TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and used by tens of millions of Americans, has faced calls from U.S. lawmakers for a nationwide ban over concerns about possible Chinese government influence. Some 47% of respondents to the two-day poll, which concluded on Tuesday, said they at least somewhat supported "banning the social media application, TikTok, from use in the United States," while 36% opposed a ban and 17% said they didn't know.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans favored a ban, compared to 47% of Democrats, the poll showed. The online Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted nationwide, collecting responses from 1,005 adults, including 443 Democrats and 346 Republicans. It had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points in either direction. Last month, a Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Americans (59%) believe the social media app is a threat to the national security of the United States.

Facing a rapidly aging population and land scarcity, the Chinese capital is piloting burial spaces with electronic screens instead of headstones. From a report: When someone dies in Beijing, the body is typically cremated and the ashes are buried behind a gravestone in one of the city's public cemeteries. Family and friends gather at the site to light candles and burn incense to pay their respects. Zhang Yin, a local resident in her 40s, chose a very different burial rite when her grandmother died earlier this year: She had her ashes stored in a compartment of a large room at Beijing's Taiziyu Cemetery, almost like a safe deposit box at a bank. An electronic screen on the door of the compartment displaying pictures and videos of the deceased replaces the traditional headstone. It's a land-saving option that's also more affordable and dovetails with the growing trend of Chinese families wanting more personalized funerals for their loved ones.

"Traditional cemeteries are outdoors, exposed to the wind and sun," Zhang says. "If you bring your kids there, they will only see bare graves, which has no meaning to them. For digital cemeteries, families can watch the photo display of deceased relatives together in a hall." Zhang says her grandfather gave his approval for the digital funeral because he's very receptive to new things -- and, by coincidence, the niche storing her grandmother's ashes is the same as the number of her grandmother's old house. Both local governments and funeral companies in China are experimenting with new ways of conducting burial rites as the country confronts urban land scarcity and a rapidly aging population.

New York City is banning TikTok from city-owned devices and requiring agencies to remove the app within the next 30 days. From a report: The directive issued Wednesday comes after a review by the NYC Cyber Command, which a city official said found that TikTok "posed a security threat to the city's technical networks." Starting immediately, city employees are barred from downloading or using the app and accessing TikTok's website from any city-owned devices.

"While social media is great at connecting New Yorkers with one another and the city, we have to ensure we are always using these platforms in a secure manner," a New York City Hall spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge Wednesday. "NYC Cyber Command regularly explores and advances proactive measures to keep New Yorkers' data safe." The city cited US Office of Management and Budget guidelines discouraging TikTok's use on government devices as well as federal legislation banning the app that was passed earlier this year.

One of the most productive scientific collaborations of the 21st century is pulling apart, as deteriorating relations between the U.S. and China lead researchers to sever ties. From a report: The decoupling, which began in recent years with investigations into Chinese researchers in the U.S., has accelerated as tensions have risen between the superpowers. Now some U.S. lawmakers are pushing to let a landmark agreement to cooperate on science and technology, signed in 1979 and renewed routinely since, expire this month. China has built itself into a powerful engine of scientific discovery in recent decades, partly with American help, and many in Washington fear that China could gain a security and military advantage unless the U.S. takes decisive steps to cut off cooperation in scientific research.

Many scientists warn, however, that Washington would be severing ties as China is making its greatest contributions to scientific advancements, and cutting it off risks slowing American progress in critical areas such as biotechnology, clean energy and telecommunications. While the U.S. remains the world's pre-eminent science power, fundamental scientific research has grown borderless in the era of globalization, much as business has. More than 40% of America's scientific production -- measured by the number of high-quality papers that U.S.-based scientists produce -- involves cooperation with researchers abroad, according to Clarivate, a London-based data firm that tracks global scientific research. China and the U.S. are each other's No. 1 partner in producing scientific research, with collaborative research between the two consistently among the most-cited papers across fields, according to an analysis of Clarivate's data by Caroline Wagner, a professor of public policy at Ohio State University.

China launched what is thought to be the world's first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar satellite on Saturday. SpaceNews reports: A Long March 3B rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 1:36 p.m. Eastern (1736 UTC) Aug. 12. The Land Exploration-4 01 (Ludi Tance-4 (01)) satellite successfully entered geosynchronous transfer orbit, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC) announced within an hour of liftoff. Few details of the satellite were provided by CASC. However the group's "blue book" outlining plans for 2023 released in January noted the launch of a "high-orbit 20-meter [resolution] SAR satellite."

The L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite will provide all-day, all-weather observation of China and surrounding areas, boosting the country's disaster prevention, reduction, and relief capabilities. The land observation satellite series and "high-orbit SAR technology" are listed in the country's Medium and Long Term Development Plan for Civilian Space Infrastructure (2015-2025). The plan includes establishing high and medium resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar constellations for a range of land, marine and atmospheric monitoring. The series is separate from the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), which consists of Gaofen ("high resolution") satellites. China's Gaofen-4 satellite is a GEO optical satellite. SAR at GEO, while providing much lower resolution than satellites in low Earth orbit, can provide constant coverage and imagery despite cloud cover.

It is not yet known what orbital scheme the Land Exploration-4 (01) satellite will enter. An inclined GEO orbit would produce a "figure eight" ground track over the area of intended coverage. Chinese academics from the Beijing Institute of Technology have produced a study of various schemes, while others have published research into modified signal models for GEO SAR. The (01) designation suggests China could launch other SAR satellites into geosynchronous orbits. The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Spacecraft Technology (CAST.)

US Representative Don Bacon said he is among those whose emails were hacked in an espionage campaign that Microsoft has attributed to China. From a report:Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska and a strong advocate for US military support to Taiwan, posted on social media that the FBI had notified him that the Chinese Communist Party hacked into his personal and campaign emails over the course of a month, from May 15 to June 16. "The CCP hackers utilized a vulnerability in the Microsoft software, and this was not due to 'user error,'" he wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Bacon, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, received an email from Microsoft indicating he may have been hacked and advising him to change his password on June 16, according to Maggie Sayers, Bacon's press secretary. She said that following subsequent notification from the FBI that he had been hacked, Bacon determined emails relating to political strategy, fundraising and personal banking information may have been breached. As a former US Air Force intelligence officer, he is careful to avoid writing sensitive emails relating to China and Taiwan, she said.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The New York Times: More than $1.7 trillion worldwide is expected to be invested in technologies such as wind, solar power, electric vehicles and batteries globally this year, according to the International Energy Agency, compared with just over $1 trillion in fossil fuels. That is by far the most ever spent on clean energy in a year. Those investments are driving explosive growth. China, which already leads the world in the sheer amount of electricity produced by wind and solar power, is expected to double its capacity by 2025, five years ahead of schedule. In Britain, roughly one-third of electricity is generated by wind, solar and hydropower. And in the United States, 23 percent of electricity is expected to come from renewable sources this year, up 10 percentage points from a decade ago... [F]rom Beijing to London, Tokyo to Washington, Oslo to Dubai, the energy transition is undeniably racing ahead...

[C]lean energy became cheap far faster than anyone expected. Since 2009, the cost of solar power has plunged by 83 percent, while the cost of producing wind power has fallen by more than half. The price of lithium-ion battery cells fell 97 percent over the past three decades. Today, solar and wind power are the least expensive new sources of electricity in many markets, generating 12 percent of global electricity and rising... The rapid drop in costs for solar energy, wind power and batteries can be traced to early government investment and steady improvements over time by hundreds of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs around the world. "The world has produced nearly three billion solar panels at this point, and every one of those has been an opportunity for people to try to improve the process," said Gregory Nemet, a solar power expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "And all of those incremental improvements add up to something very dramatic." An equally potent force, along with the technological advances, has been an influx of money — in particular, a gusher since 2020 of government subsidies...

In the United States, President Biden signed a trio of laws during his first two years in office that allocated unprecedented funds for clean energy: A $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law provided money to enhance the power grid, buy electric buses for schools and build a national network of electric vehicle chargers... Combined, the three laws have prompted companies to announce at least $230 billion in manufacturing investments so far... The U.S. solar industry installed a record 6.1 gigawatts of capacity in the first quarter of 2023, a 47 percent increase over the same period last year. And those low costs have led many of the United States' biggest corporations, such as Alphabet, Amazon and General Motors, to purchase large amounts of wind and solar power...

Quantum computing could turbo-charge AI into something "massively, universally transformative," argues the South China Morning Post, citing a quote from theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. "AI has the ability to learn new, complex tasks, and quantum computers can provide the computational muscle it needs..."

"AI will give us the ability to create learning machines that can begin to mimic human abilities, while quantum computers may provide the calculational power to finally create an intelligent machine." Where AI brings an ability to self-improve and learn from its mistakes, quantum computers add speed and power. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said "AI can accelerate quantum computing, and quantum computing can accelerate AI...."

Complex calculations that would take classical supercomputers thousands of years to crunch could, in theory, be completed by quantum computers in minutes... In expectation of its advantages, the automotive industry is already collaborating with pioneers in the quantum-computing arena. Daimler has partnered with IBM, Volkswagen with D-Wave Systems (a Canadian quantum-computing firm) and Hyundai with IonQ. "If you can increase the energy density of your battery by another factor of two, three or four, then instead of 300 miles (480km), you can go 600 miles and 1,200 miles on [one] charge," says Kim. "That actually starts to cross the threshold where they become so much more attractive than fossil fuel. And then we can really make an impact on global warming and all these problems..."

Similarly, the mysteries of carbon sequestration could be unravelled by quantum computing, with clear benefits for the efforts to reverse global warming. Drug design at the molecular level could be revolutionised, opening up new avenues for vaccines and, for example, personalised cancer treatment. There's no doubt about it: with effective quantum computing our understanding of chemical processes could become godlike. Finance and investment, too, could be revolutionised by the qubit. The huge range of factors that produce market fluctuations allow for an almost infinite range of possible outcomes, and modelling these possibilities would be relatively simple for quantum computers. Forecasts of market movements would become far more accurate...

For many physicists and mathematicians, every step of the journey towards functional and world-changing quantum computers assumes acknowledgement of an even more profound goal: a greater understanding of the nature of reality. This could also mean that the very nature of understanding has to be reconsidered.
The article suggests we "occupy ourselves with the dawning realisation that something philosophically far-reaching has begun to percolate into our shared consciousness from the laboratories of the world's quantum pioneers."

The Verge writes that "LK-99 hasn't turned out to be the miraculous superconductor some people initially claimed it was..." [T]he results so far indicate that LK-99 is not a superconductor, at room temperature or otherwise. A slew of research groups have released studies that counter claims originally made about LK-99. "With a great deal of sadness, we now believe that the game is over. LK99 is NOT a superconductor, not even at room temperatures (or at very low temperatures). It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth," the University of Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) posted on August 7th... [The last words of their tweet? "Data have spoken."]

Labs hurriedly published their own results on ArXiv, the same server for preprints (papers that haven't undergone peer review) where the original papers on LK-99 first appeared. Now, a body of evidence has piled up that disproves claims about LK-99. "There is no sign of superconductivity in LK-99 at room temperature," says one preprint from the CSIR-National Physical Laboratory in India. (That was one of the papers cited by the University of Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center this week when it posted that "the game is over....") [H]opes that levitation meant that LK-99 is a superconductor were dashed this week after another preprint posed another explanation for why the material might float. The International Center for Quantum Materials in China found evidence that the material is ferromagnetic. That means it can be magnetized and then attracted or repelled by other magnetic materials (iron, for example, is ferromagnetic)...

[T]here are already well over a dozen papers on ArXiv casting doubt on LK-99. "There may be room temperature superconductors to find, but this does not seem to be one," Chris Grovenor, professor of materials at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Applied Superconductivity, tells The Verge in an email.
The Washington Post reports that one of physicists who co-authored the discovery paper "countered in an email that other research groups' failure to replicate their results are probably because they lack 'know how' in developing the sample the same way."