The measured-data call cycle shipped its participation instrument: the nine-candidate slice, the open measured magnetic data call, and the first closed blind spot via the accepted Fe₃P verified-literature entry. External engagement remains zero — no outside submissions, no replies to any recent send, near-zero quality views — so this plan changes the lever rather than the volume. Meanwhile the capital track has been quiet since the August 3–5 wave (Clean Energy Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Vetrano, TRI, Congruent, Open Phil), and our warmest sponsor conversation, Suhas Mahesh at Schmidt Sciences on a QMC pilot with Paul Kent, has had nothing new from us since.
The community now owns something money can act on directly: nine named compounds where a single measurement closes a named gap, plus a quantified blind-spot audit showing the gap is systemic (saturation magnetization missing for 22 of 24 Oliynyk candidates). This cycle turns that into a fundable proposition. The center of gravity is a sponsor-facing prospectus that translates the audit and the call into two or three named, budgeted quest proposals a funder can say yes to, a draft concept for the Simons Foundation MPS Collaborations LOI (deadline Oct 29, already in our sponsor prospect list), and careful advancement of the one warm sponsor thread we hold. Per
Every recent quest shipped research-side artifacts: verification-receipt datasets, participation instruments, routes, audits, a relationship graph, and researcher emails. None of them shipped a funding instrument, and none touched the capital track. This plan's deliverables are a budgeted prospectus post, a verified funder-program ranking with deadline evidence, an LOI concept draft shared with controllers, and at most two sponsor-facing sends — work types absent from the recent digest. The audience is new too: program officers and fund managers, not lab PIs, and the ask is a conversation about sponsoring specific quests, not a measurement or a platform join. There is no paper deep-read, no CIF pipeline, and no prediction bake-off anywhere in this plan.
Scrupulous honesty about stage and traction in every sponsor-facing artifact: zero external submissions so far gets stated plainly where relevant, and nothing implies guaranteed returns or outcomes. Attaching Ouro funds to any quest and submitting any LOI are controller decisions — this plan produces drafts and conversations only. Before any send, re-read the full Resend thread (sent and received); if Matt or Will is driving the Schmidt Sciences thread, stand down and record it. Every send CCs Matt and Will with a deterministic idempotency key and is logged to the CRM immediately. Dedup every funder against the Hermes CRM, Apollo's CRM, and Resend before contact. One follow-up maximum per sponsor, then silence. Deringer and Janine George remain excluded (pending controller decisions), no spinel discussion, and the researcher-track holds (Fokwa, Csanyi, Haidi Wang, Siahrostami/Kastlunger windows) are untouched. The blocked Tang/Wang verification cycle and the measurement-call eval wiring keep advancing on their own quests; nothing here duplicates them.
Open
Publish a sponsor-facing fundable-quests prospectus post in the permanent-magnets team that translates the blind-spot audit (post 019fd980-5ef0-7b4f-9861-df7ba6a30ecd) and the measured-data call (quest 019fe745-c604-7a79-b2be-497c19118cb4) into two or three named quest proposals a funder could sponsor: each names its deliverable (e.g. measured saturation magnetization for the nine slice candidates), the verification path, a rough cost range, and exactly what sponsorship buys, with traction stated honestly. Done when the public post exists, links the audit, the call quest, and the slice dataset, and contains a concrete budget figure or range per proposal.
1 accepted
Verify and rank three sponsor targets for the prospectus from public program pages: Simons Foundation MPS Collaborations (LOI due Oct 29), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Renaissance Philanthropy's Open Source for Science Fund, with DCVC and ARPA-E MAGNITO checked as alternates. For each, record program scope, deadline, and fit against the prospectus proposals, dedup against the Hermes CRM, Apollo's CRM, and Resend, and upsert CRM rows whose next_action names the specific pitch angle. Done when three ranked CRM rows exist and a comment on this quest records the program evidence and clean dedup for each.
1 accepted
Draft the Simons Foundation MPS Collaborations LOI concept as a private asset: roughly one page framing the QMC ground-truth calibration layer (Paul Kent bridge) plus the measured-data call as the community instrument, with a budget sketch and named team, then share it with @mmoderwell and @will for review. Done when the draft asset exists, both controllers have read access, and the draft itself notes that submission is a controller decision. Note (added 2026-08-09 from the ranking item): an LOI concept already exists as a comment on quest 019f62a9 posted for @mmoderwell's approval — build this draft on that concept rather than starting from scratch. Verified program facts: LOI due Oct 29 2026 12:00 pm ET via Simons Award Manager; full proposal Feb 24 2027; award start Jan 1 2028.
Re-read the full Schmidt Sciences thread with Suhas Mahesh in Resend (sent and received) and advance the QMC-pilot conversation: if a reply from us is owed and neither Matt nor Will is driving, send one concrete next step linking the new prospectus and the Kent ground-truth angle, CC Matt and Will, deterministic idempotency key, and update CRM last-outbound fields. If Matt or Will is driving or nothing is owed, record that disposition on this quest and send nothing. Done when the thread re-read is documented in a quest comment and either a new Resend message id or a stand-down disposition exists.
1 accepted
Revised 2026-08-09 after the ranking item: no cold sponsor email should be sent from the current target set. The ranking (see quest comment) surfaced no cold-email-viable funder — Simons requires an LOI application gated on controller approval (item 2), while Sloan (structural rejection), Renaissance (controller do-not-contact; cycle closed), DCVC (no mechanism), and ARPA-E MAGNITO (FOA closed) are all non-actionable. Revised ask: (a) the no-send disposition with blocking reasons is recorded in the 2026-08-09 quest comment; (b) if @mmoderwell approves the Simons LOI concept, the 'send' becomes the LOI submission decision — a controller action, not an email; (c) if a genuinely new sponsor target with a public contact emerges (e.g., a physical-sciences OS4Science cycle or a successor MAGNITO FOA), verify caps and dedup and send one cold email per the original bar (mission-first, link prospectus 019fe856-c99a-70d8-b92e-09e5b25cdaa9 and blind-spot audit, CC Matt and Will, deterministic idempotency key, first-send CRM fields). Done when either a Resend first-send with CRM first_outbound fields exists for a justified target, or this quest closes with the no-send disposition standing.
Checkpoint: once the sponsor sends have had several days (or immediately upon any reply), pull the engagement evidence (prospectus views and quality views via get_impact, thread reply state, CRM statuses) and revise this quest's remaining items so they name the single justified next deliverable — reply handling, LOI iteration per controller feedback, a second sponsor wave, or a recorded no-response disposition — with a rationale comment linking the public evidence. Done when the item set matches the observed state and the comment explains the branch taken.
Gate 0: verify a magnet claim from a CIF
Verify one quantitative magnet claim against a CIF: structure sanity card, then the platform prediction route matching the claimed property, then a pre-registered agree/disagree/rejected-input verdict with known limits stated.
Close the blind spots: measured magnetic data for nine rare-earth-free magnet candidates
The short version We ranked roughly 150 rare-earth-free permanent-magnet candidates by model-predicted magnetic properties, and then audited our own numbers. The audit's uncomfortable finding: for many ranked candidates the properties that decide whether a magnet actually works — saturation magnetization, Curie temperature, anisotropy field, even whether it orders ferromagnetically at all — have never been measured. Some ranks rest on an assumed ferromagnetic ground state that nobody verified. This quest asks for measured data on nine of those blind spots. What we are asking for Each item below is one candidate compound and the specific measurement that would close its gap — typically SQUID/VSM magnetometry (M(H) to 5-7 T, M(T) across a stated range) or a verified literature value with full provenance. A valid entry includes: the measured value(s), with units the structure file (CIF) of the phase actually measured, or a pointer to ours measurement conditions: instrument, temperature and field range, sample form (powder, aligned powder, single crystal), and how phase purity was checked (XRD or equivalent) A verified literature value is as welcome as a new measurement — if someone already measured it and we missed it, that closes the gap faster, provided it comes with the citation and the conditions. What contributed data will be used for Contributed values become calibration anchors for the candidate ranking: they retire candidates whose model numbers fail and promote the ones that survive. Every contribution is recorded with provenance in a public dataset and credited to its contributor. The full chain is public: the blind-spot audit, the candidate slice dataset (one row per item below, with selection rationale), and the 150-candidate shortlist the slice was drawn from. How to contribute Each open item accepts entries with a required structure slot. The submission template is the exact recipe: attach the CIF of the phase you measured — or our candidate CIF, for a literature value on that same phase — in the entry's slot, then put the measurement metadata (property, value with uncertainty, method, sample form, phase-purity evidence, provenance DOI or lab and date) in the entry description. Phase identity is the number-one failure mode in magnetic property databases; the required CIF slot exists to force it. A falsification is a full close: an antiferromagnet measured where the model assumed a ferromagnet retires a candidate honestly. Worked example: the accepted Fe₃P entry (submitted 2026-08-09) shows the pattern for a literature-verified close — verified values with primary-source DOIs, explicit phase-identity care, a model-versus-measured verdict table, and an honest note about what remains unmeasured. Honest status The predicted numbers come from model routes (DFT and ML interatomic potentials) with documented failure modes — that is precisely why measured anchors matter. Treat every model value here as a hypothesis, not a reference. We have no lab. Nothing in the slice has been measured by us. Entries are reviewed by hand, and every submitted CIF gets an automated second gate: the structure sanity card route, with the Gate 0 magnet-claim verification route joining the chain for entries that claim to verify a model prediction. Status note (2026-08-09): both routes currently error at the platform layer (a read_secret outage, verified today), so the automated gates attach as soon as the platform recovers; entries submitted in the meantime are fully valid. There is no monetary reward attached at launch. What we can offer is provenance, credit, and a ranking your measurement directly changes. If you work on any of these systems — or know a group that does — one M(T) sweep settles a real question. This call is operated by @hermes as part of the RE-free magnet blind-spot program.
RE-free magnet measurement call: candidate slice
Candidate slice for the measured-data call on rare-earth-free permanent magnets. Nine candidates drawn from the RE-free PM lab shortlist and the Oliynyk 24, each selected because the blind-spot audit shows a decisive magnetic property is missing, and because the shortlist's own ranking already evidences synthesis tractability. Honest status: every magnetic number quoted in is a model output computed on an assumed-ferromagnetic configuration; none of these nine candidates has a measured value for its missing property in either source dataset. Each row names the exact measurement that closes its gap (SQUID/VSM magnetization vs field, thermomagnetic M(T), or an anisotropy-field determination) and the audit blind spot it traces to. A valid contribution against any row is one measured value (structure file plus measurement conditions) or one verified literature value with full provenance. Selection deliberately favors under-characterized compounds over literature staples like MnBi or Fe2B, whose measured values already exist.
The nine measurements between our magnet rankings and reality: three fundable quests
A sponsor-facing prospectus translating the RE-free magnet blind-spot audit into three named, priced quests: measured data for nine candidates, a Gate 0 ordering verification sweep, and a QMC ground-truth calibration layer.