Revenge on referees
Our information colleagues Jacob Aron and Michael Le Web page have drawn Suggestions’s consideration to a put up on social media web site BlueSky, which highlighted a scientific paper in awed tones.
The research in query was just lately printed within the Worldwide Journal of Hydrogen Power. There are seven authors. It’s concerning the methods hydrogen atoms can infiltrate sure steel alloys and make them brittle. It focuses on calculating precisely the place the hydrogen atoms place themselves within the crystal construction of the steel, in an effort to perceive the mechanism of this embrittlement.
At this level, it’s possible you’ll be questioning what this piece of analysis is doing in Suggestions. Effectively, the introduction concludes with the next paragraph: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [[35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], [47]] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.”
For anybody who hasn’t labored in academia, one of the best ways we are able to clarify that is that the authors are being gloriously petty. Their article has been examined by nameless peer reviewers, who (amongst different strategies) have urged them to quote the 13 older research within the checklist. The authors, left with no selection however to insert the supposedly irrelevant research, have refused to include them into their precise textual content, however as a substitute included them whereas concurrently drawing consideration to their irrelevance.
Or, as BlueSky person @Dave nʎ=2dsinɵ :protein: put it: “Absolute shots fired”. By the best way, kudos to @Dave nʎ=2dsinɵ :protein: for having a username that pushed New Scientist‘s font to its limits and sent Feedback to a search engine. The little equation in the middle is, we discovered, Bragg’s legislation, which describes how crystal lattices scatter incoming waves.
Anyway, as soon as Suggestions had stopped having flashbacks to our transient time in academia, during which this type of factor occurred to us however we didn’t have the nerve to chill in print, we did our due diligence and seemed up all 13 references.
All are involved with alloys and different composite supplies, however none of them appears to be about hydrogen embrittlement. Most are so technical that Suggestions was somewhat defeated in our try to completely comprehend them: any readers extra accustomed to composite supplies are welcome to weigh in on the regular tackle. Nonetheless, even with our poor understanding, not one of the references appears immediately related.
Nonetheless, Suggestions did discover one thing curious. Repeatedly, the identical authors seem within the 13 research’ creator lists – and one creator was concerned in all of them.
Suggestions doesn’t wish to placed on a tinfoil hat, particularly if it has been embrittled by hydrogen. However we surprise if we’d have recognized the nameless peer reviewer. Our query now could be: how did this get into print? Did the editors not discover the prank – or did they permit it for causes of their very own? Enquiring minds wish to know.
A fishy story
Talking of taking concepts from colleagues, assistant information editor Sam Wong flagged an intriguing research in Water Assets Analysis. This journal will not be, we confess, one in all Suggestions’s every day reads, however we appear to have been lacking out.
The research is concerning the biblical miracle of loaves and fishes, during which Jesus apparently fed 5000 individuals utilizing 5 loaves and two fish. The authors suggest a naturalistic clarification: a seiche or standing wave. The concept is that waves blowing over a lake typically create a standing wave, inflicting deep water to rise to the floor. In Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee from the Bible, this deep water is low in oxygen – so if it rises to the floor, it may possibly trigger fish to asphyxiate en masse.
The authors doc two such occasions in Lake Kinneret in 2012. In addition they word that they appear to be fairly uncommon: there hasn’t been one since 2012. Meaning most individuals might not have been conscious of the chance, particularly if that they had travelled to hearken to a charismatic speaker and lacked native data.
Suggestions is including this to the lengthy checklist of scientific explanations for obvious supernatural occasions, just like the manna from heaven being crystallised honeydew from scale bugs and the tendency of infrasound to trigger spooky sensations that may be interpreted as hauntings. We have now additionally eliminated our tinfoil hat, as we fear it’d act as a conductor for a divine lightning bolt.
Moon of Uranus
Information reaches us from the entrance of this situation that Voyager 2’s go to to Uranus in 1986 got here when the planet wasn’t its regular self, due to a gust of photo voltaic wind. Consequently, a lot of our concepts about Uranus must be rethought – and a few consider it’s even potential there’s life on a number of of its moons.
Life on Uranus, you say? Really, life on Uranus’s moon? We hope it isn’t Klingons. Or as author Tess Stenson put it: NASA, “get your ass to Uranus”.
Suggestions spent extra time than we should always attempting to think about puns, however our slate has been cleaned. Some brilliant spark, acutely aware of jokes concerning the planet’s identify, determined to call all Uranus’s moons after Shakespeare characters, selecting respectable names like Rosalind and Oberon. This does imply we are able to rule out life on one of many moons: Juliet is certainly lifeless, there was a play about it. In the meantime, astronomers urgently want to search out some extra satellites so Uranus could be orbited by Backside.
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