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Daily briefing: Should old, bad science be culled from the literature?
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Physicists used an algorithm to combine telescope measurements of a black hole in a different way from the original analysis.Credit: S. Lai, N. Thyagarajan, O. I. Wong and F. Diakogiannis/CSIRO
A re-evaluation of data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has corroborated the findings that yielded the first-ever photo of a black hole. After the blurry image was released in 2019, sceptics argued that the circular shape seen in the shot was an artefact of the team’s image-reconstruction techniques. Independent astrophysicist Samuel Lai and his team used different methods to reanalyse the original data and their results — including new images of the black hole — largely match those of the EHT team.
The funding that voters in California have approved to earmark for immunology research — the largest ever infusion of cash for science authorized by a public vote in US history. (Nature | 5 min read)
Researchers have catalogued almost 100 proteins that get a free pass through the blood–brain barrier to maintain the health of neurons. Most of these proteins were produced in distant organs, particularly the liver. The team found that the transport of some of these proteins is disrupted in mice with a brain disease that mimics early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. The work suggests that the brain actively imports the proteins it needs to stay healthy, and that the breakdown of that transport drives the dysfunction seen in neurodegenerative disease, says neuroscientist and study co-author Andrew Yang.
The launch of the Artemis II mission to orbit the Moon produced unprecedented large-scale atmospheric disturbances, say researchers. Data from GPS receivers found that the Space Launch System — the most powerful rocket that NASA has ever built — disrupted the atmospheric layer known as the ionosphere. The GPS disruption was potentially large enough to “have a strong impact not only on self-driving cars but also on drone positioning,” says space physicist and study co-author Charles Lin.
Reference: Geophysical Research Letters preprint (not peer reviewed)
The scientific literature contains decades-old papers that detail fraudulent, unethical or merely incorrect results, but aren’t marked as such. Many of these papers are long neglected, but their digitization enables artificial-intelligence tools that summarize scientific literature on a topic to feed misinformation to a new generation. This leaves publishers to wrangle with the question of whether these historical papers should be retracted or flagged as suspect — a task that can be tricky if authors are dead, original records can’t be consulted or journals are no longer in print.
“You need a container before you can get the chemistry” that enables cellular life, says astrobiologist Bruce Damer. He’s among those researchers who favour a ‘lipid-first’ hypothesis for the origin of complex life: that the lipid membrane that corrals the cell is key to its success. Or even that bubbles of lipids, plus the chemistry they enclosed, could have propagated and evolved in a Darwinian-like way, before RNA (or DNA) arrived on the scene.