Research Articles
Materials science articles written from our data: kill reports on approaches that failed, methods, and state-of-technology landscapes. Auto-generated compound data profiles are listed separately under their own filter.
5 articles in Kill Report
63 GB of Data That Never Made It to Production
A sync-drift audit revealed 1,117 files (~63 GB) existing only locally, never uploaded to production. 32 common database tables had differing row counts with local exceeding production by 12.6M rows. A DigitalOcean key-naming bug duplicated source prefixes in every object path. Zero data corruption — but massive invisible drift.
Read articleThe Data Plane Kills Ideas That Market Analysis Can't
Four invention candidates rated 'plausible' by web-search-based competitive analysis were instantly killed when tested against real warehouse data. The patent-clear composition finder's core anti-join produced false results because the canonical crosswalk was never built, patent formulas were stored as un-reduced supercells, and 12.4% of formula values were filesystem paths.
4 Strategies to Run Quantum ESPRESSO on Modal, All Failed
We tried four image-registry strategies to run Quantum ESPRESSO on Modal's serverless GPU infrastructure. apt_install hangs at tasks=0, ephemeral detach produces the same symptom, GHCR returns 403 Forbidden, and Docker Hub returns 'manifest not found.' The only viable path is a custom Dockerfile with QE compiled from source.
When All 13 Compute Results Were Error Payloads
Every single Modal QE DFPT and HSE06 result from our April 2026 GPU compute campaign was an error payload, not usable data. 13 files landed on the volume with status ERROR, PSEUDO_ERROR, SCF_FAILED, DFPT_FAILED, PARSE_ERROR, or NOT_CONVERGED. The honest-null pattern kept failed values out of our ledger; downstream screens still had to handle nulls.
Why LiCoO2 Fails as a Next-Generation EV Battery Cathode
Lithium cobalt oxide dominated consumer electronics for decades, but scaling it to electric vehicles reveals fundamental structural, thermal, and economic failures. We reviewed 47 computational studies and 12 experimental datasets (nearly 15,000 structural relaxations and 1,200+ cells by our count; sources not listed here), which indicate that LCO physics limits it for automotive applications despite engineering efforts to date.
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