Also this week: Leibniz vs. public health, fake superconductivity, Jeremy’s favorite eclipse image, and more.
From Jeremy:
Primatologist Frans de Waal, who emphasized continuities in intelligence and behavior between human and non-human primates, has passed away. Link goes to an obituary in Nature.
Here’s Nature’s news article, summarizing the confidential University of Rochester report on how Ranga Dias faked a blockbuster result on room-temperature superconductivity. The report came out in the course of Dias’ lawsuit against the university in an attempt to get his job back. Getting to the bottom of this seems to have required extensive and sophisticated data forensics. This wasn’t just a matter of sorting a spreadsheet by one of the columns, immediately revealing that a bunch of the entries must have been copy-pasted. Dias seems to have been a more careful fraudster than, say, Danielle Dixson or Jonathan Pruitt, or the many other scientific fraudsters whose frauds are surprisingly obvious. But that’s just my impression of Dias’ fraud from reading news reports, I could be wrong.
Speaking of high-profile serial fraudsters: Francesca Gino is also a plagiarist. (So is Ranga Dias.)
The difficulty of replicating hot dogs.
Leibniz on public health. Interesting historical tidbits.
This is old, but it’s new to me: a humorous illustration of how particle physics and astrophysics have too many acronyms.
I really like this animation of the recent eclipse, stitched together from satellite photos.
Terrible eclipse map. 😛
p.s. I’m traveling next week, so comment moderation might be slow.