Leopoldina and Tiwari’s scamferences, or what’s the point of Academies
The German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, advertises for Ashutosh Tiwari’s predatory conferences. Occasion: Academician Herbert Gleiter won an IAAM Award.
Category: Blog
Undress, the doctors will see you now
Two old gynaecology professors in Milan decided to racially profile, then rate their misinformed young patients for sexual attractiveness. Their even published this as an evo-psych study in a respected society journal.
Yin and Yang nanoquackery at Royal Society of Chemistry
Royal Society of Chemistry published a research paper which unashamedly peddled TCM, under the title: “Probing the Qi of traditional Chinese herbal medicines by the biological synthesis of nano-Au”. Both Editor-in-Chief and publisher executive saw no problem there because the paper passed peer review.
How Andrea Cerutti molested and defiled Journal of Immunology
Spain is where dishonest research gets rewarded, with awards, grants and media fame. No wonder the New York-based immunologist Andrea Cerutti opened a second lab in Barcelona.
Preprinters of the World Unite
The following is a rant in praise of preprints. I blog of usefulness of preprints, open science and open access, how BioRxiv works and their Plan U.
Western blot loading control libraries and beyond
Too many scientists defend the practice of not probing for loading controls for each protein gel. They say a “library” method perfectly suffices, when one separate loading control gel is run once for reference. Such sloppiness can sometimes be a hint of even worse practices taking place.
Eric Lam: shady research at Imperial to cure breast cancer
Eric Lam is yet another of the many “Curing Cancer with Photoshop” researchers which PubPeer is full of. This professor of molecular Oncology at Imperial College in London is responsible for several papers with duplicated gel bands, but does it matter? He has 250 more.
Olivier Voinnet, the new Dreyfus?
Much of French media and academia, and certainly also the international plant science community now debates a hot conspiracy theory: what if Olivier Voinnet is actually innocent, a visionary genius who fell prey to a conspiracy of fraudulent colleagues and scheming bureaucrats? I discuss here the widespread dishonesty and data manipulation among Voinnet’s co-authors and peers. Is French research culture to blame?
The alpha males of physics
Two sets of events for Women in STEM: the theoretical physicist Alessandro Strumia, soon likely ex-CERN affiliated, decried feminist conspiracies and the discrimination against males like himself, in a workshop talk on gender. Right after, the Nobel Prize for physics was finally after 55 years given to a woman. Thing is: one of the other recipients, Gerard Mourou, made it clear in a 2013 video what the roles of males and females in physics are.
The anti-social mini-brains of Neanderthals
Neanderthals colonised Europe and Middle East long before modern humans and went extinct less than 30,000 years ago, when our species has spread there. Their story inspired the fantasies of generation of scientists, some of whom still cannot accept the idea that Neanderthals were just another kind of humans very similar or maybe simply just like us. Even new age phrenology is paraded as scientific explanation to why Neanderthal died out.
