Yeah, condensed matter is full of fraud stories. And it's almost always interesting, if disheartening, to read about them.

It's a shame showing a lack of successful measurement isn't rewarded or even encouraged. I end up hearing stuff through the grapevine how the idea I thought worth revisiting was already tried by some small team back in the '90s, and it's only mentioned at the back of the supplemental materials. There's a binder (and database) on my desk (laptop) that catalogues excerpts and mentions of such misses that may end up being my biggest contribution to the field.

So many grad students will run the labs for like 80 hours a week, gather the data sets they were told to, and then have no idea what any of it means.

To be fair, grad students span gamut from 'wait, why isn't B a constant?' out-of-their-depth beginners to the likes of you, who probably shake their head at visiting professors' inexperience with methodology. Not really trying to defend how some people run labs, but I know in my heart there were times when prof wasted his breath on explaining my role in the grand scheme of things.