Original paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
"Significance" statement from the paper:
"The extent and pace of the transition from our current fossil fuel-based economy to one based on renewable energy will strongly depend on the availability of bulk energy storage solutions. Herein, we investigate one such candidate technology, using chemical precursors which are inexpensive, abundant, and widely available, specifically cement, water, and carbon black. The energy storage capacity of these carbon-cement supercapacitors is shown to be an intensive quantity, and their high rate capability exhibits self-similarity. These properties point to the opportunity for employing these structural concrete-like supercapacitors for bulk energy storage in both residential and industrial applications ranging from energy autarkic shelters and self-charging roads for electric vehicles, to intermittent energy storage for wind turbines."
Press coverage:
Hackaday, "MIT cracks the concrete capacitor"
MIT News, "MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials"
DevX, "MIT Engineers and their Game-Changing Green Energy Storage Solution"
Resolution criteria:
This market resolves to "YES" if by 2024 August 07 (UTC) a peer-reviewed scientific journal publsihes at least one peer-reviewed paper that satisfies the following conditions:
1. List of paper's authors contains none of the authors of the original paper (Nicolas Chanut, Damian Stefaniuk, James C. Weaver, Franz-Josef Ulm).
2. It is published in a journal's whose latest impact factor (as measured by JCR) exceeds 1.
3. This hypothetical new paper claims that it has succeeded in experimentally reproducing all the performance characteristics reported in the original paper. Resolution does not depend on the details of theoretical interpretation of the underlying mechanism in this new hypothetical paper -- the theory may differ from the original paper's conjectured mechanism.
Otherwise the market resolves to "NO".
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The requisites of this question ask for a new publication that "claims that it has succeeded in experimentally reproducing all the performance characteristics reported in the original paper"
That has not happened, even though some papers cite the original one in agreement. The outcome to this question could be a different one if it had been enunciated like this other one: https://manifold.markets/embed/MattLashofSullivan/does-bpa-cause-autism?qr
honestly, betting NO here not because I don't believe the original paper but because (based on my experience in academia) this doesn't strike me as the kind of research that will warrant aggressive replication studies outside of the original research group, especially on such a short timescale. the work is interesting but largely speculative, it passed peer review, and it doesn't really violate or challenge any conventional scientific wisdom. if there are any followup studies I would bet they're from the same research group -- academic territorialism is a real phenomenon!!
a straight-up replication study of the kind this market describes is resource-intensive and connotes a specific political-academic environment. if I'm a competing PI in this field, I don't have a lot to gain by spending a bunch of time and resources attempting to reproduce someone else's work unless I literally think academic fraud was involved and I think I can benefit from debunking the original paper (and maybe starting a public blood feud). anything short of that and academia's broken incentive structure makes it a waste of time.
worth noting that I don't think this is a good thing, much like publishing negative results would also be good for science but is not incentivized by the current publish-or-perish system!