In Julian Krolik's News and Views article, “Dust-filled doughnuts in space” (Nature 429, 29–30; 2004), it was incorrectly stated that the observations described were the first to be made of an extragalactic source using infrared interferometry. In fact, the first such observations were published by M. Swain et al. (Astrophys. J. 596, L163–L166; 2003), using the Keck interferometer to resolve the core of NGC 4151 at 2.2 micrometres.