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The fight against fake-paper factories
Since last January, journals have retracted at least 370 papers that have been publicly linked to ‘paper mills’, an analysis by Nature has found, and many more retractions are expected. Physicians in China are a particular target customer for paper mills — companies that churn out fake scientific manuscripts to order — because of intense pressure to publish combined with long work hours. Much of this housecleaning has come about thanks to sleuths who have publicly flagged papers that share suspiciously similar features, such as western blots with identical-looking backgrounds. The effect of such trickery can be very serious, says molecular oncology researcher Jennifer Byrne, who points to suspected fake studies that link genes to particular cancers. “People die from cancer — it is not a game.”
Read more: Meet Elisabeth Bik, a super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers (Nature | 15 min read)
Oldest wooden relic reshapes history
The world’s oldest wooden sculpture is even older than previously thought. A new study suggests that the 2.7-metre-tall Shigir Idol was carved more than 12,000 years ago from a tree that was already more than 150 years old. The relic was preserved in a peat bog in the Ural Mountains and is the world’s only surviving Stone Age wood carving. Its complex iconography of geometric patterns and human faces suggests that the region’s ancient societies were more sophisticated than previously thought. “The new Shigir evidence makes archaeologists daydream of how the archaeological record may have looked if wooden remains had been preserved in greater abundance,” says archeologist Olaf Jöris.
Reference: Quaternary International paper
Beauty decays into hints of new physics
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have seen early hints of an undiscovered particle or interaction. More research is needed, but the results suggest an imbalance in how subatomic beauty quarks decay into two flavours of leptons: electrons and muons. If confirmed, that’s a violation of lepton flavour universality as described by the standard model of particle physics. “It's too early to say if this genuinely is a deviation from the standard model, but the potential implications are such that these results are the most exciting thing I've done in 20 years in the field,” says physicist Mitesh Patel. “We were actually shaking when we first looked at the results.”
Reference: LHC seminar
Features & opinion
Flexible circuits inspired by human skin
Wearable, skin-inspired electronics have already made it into volunteers and clinics globally. For example, when used for health monitoring, they can spot early signs of COVID-19 in front-line health workers in Chicago. Other ‘e-skins’ are giving robots a lighter, human-like touch. But whether they are for people or robots, such devices represent a significant chemical and engineering challenge: electronic components are typically brittle and inflexible, and human skin is a malleable but difficult canvas.
Responsible publishing about suicide
Researchers investigating the mental-health impacts of the pandemic should be aware of how to responsibly report research related to suicide, argue four authors writing on behalf of the International COVID-19 Suicide Prevention Research Collaboration. They outline six key points to consider and highlight useful resources.
Scholarly Kitchen blog | 7 min read