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Physicist Ranga Dias was once a rising star in the field of superconductivity research.Credit: Lauren Petracca/New York Times/Redux/eyevine
Exclusive: How superconductivity was faked
Ranga Dias, the physicist at the centre of the room-temperature superconductivity scandal, committed data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, according to an investigation commissioned by his university. Nature’s news team discovered the bombshell 124-page report in court documents. The report methodically documents how Dias deliberately misled his co-authors, journal editors and the scientific community.
Read more: Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star’s physics lab (Nature | 18 min read, Nature paywall)
Reference: Nature paper 1 & Nature paper 2 (both retracted)
First widespread bird flu outbreak in cows
H5N1, a virus that has killed hundreds of millions of wild and domestic birds, is spreading in US dairy cows for the first time. Researchers are closely monitoring the situation to see how the virus is infecting the animals. The overall threat to people remains low, but the outbreak in cattle could allow the virus to spread to humans. “There’s always a worry that viruses will surprise us,” says evolutionary virologist Daniel Goldhill. One dairy worker has been infected and is recovering. The viral strain isolated from the infected person is closely related to strains targeted by a candidate vaccine.
Image of the day
Forensic-science pioneer Edmond Locard, second from right in the front row, and his team at the Lyon crime laboratory around 1930.Credit: Archives municipales de Lyon
A huge photographic archive, saved from mould and neglect, reveals the founding of the world’s first police crime laboratory in France in 1910. The archive of more than 20,000 glass photographic plates includes the personal correspondence of Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science and founder of the lab. Locard is famous for his maxim, “Every contact leaves a trace,” and trace selection remains the foremost challenge of modern forensic science. “There is a movement to look back to the past for guidance as to how to renew the science of policing,” says historian Amos Frappa. (Nature | 6 min read)
Features & opinion
Survival of the nicest
‘Survival of the fittest’ doesn’t require all species to be hardwired for competition, argues evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown in Selfish Genes to Social Beings. His examples, from lichen to pirates, show that cooperation is ubiquitous — although it ultimately evolved for the ‘selfish’ reason that mutual benefits are better than working alone. “If this seems heartless, it’s a reflection of the human tendency to apply human moral frameworks to biological phenomena,” writes reviewer and public health researcher Jonathan Goodman.
Make kidney disease a public-health priority
Despite kidney disease being very common, and kidney failure being deadly and expensive to treat, awareness of the disease is low. Leaders from the major professional organizations working in kidney health want the World Health Organization to include kidney disease in its list of priority non-communicable diseases that cause premature deaths. Adding it alongside other big killers such as heart disease and cancer will, the authors argue, bring attention to the growing threat, which is particularly dire for people in low- and lower-middle-income countries, who already bear two‑thirds of the world’s kidney-disease burden.
Nature Reviews Nephrology | 49 min read
Dark energy might not be a constant
The first year of data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggests that dark energy — the force that's pushing cosmic expansion to accelerate — might be weakening over time. “It’s exciting,” says cosmologist Sesh Nadathur, who worked on the DESI analysis. “If dark energy is not a cosmological constant, that’s going to be a huge discovery.” But this intriguing result could disappear as DESI continues to measure the expansion of the Universe with unprecedented precision.
Reference: DESI Year 1 Results papers
Infographic of the week
Although only 2% of respondents to Nature’s postdoc survey were based in Africa, their replies offer a tantalizing glimpse of an emerging part of the research workforce. Postdocs in Africa reported among the lowest pay and were three times more likely than respondents elsewhere to have a second job. At the same time, Africa-based postdocs were the most optimistic about their futures: 64% said that they felt positive about their future job prospects, compared with 41% globally. (Nature | 13 min read)
