Revenge on referees
Our news colleagues Jacob Aron and Michael Le Page have brought Feedback to the attention of a BlueSky social media post that highlighted a scientific publication in surprising tones.
The mentioned study was recently published in the year International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. There are seven authors. It is about the ways in which hydrogen atoms can infiltrate certain metal alloys and make them brittle. It focuses on calculating exactly where the hydrogen atoms are located in the crystal structure of the metal, in order to understand the mechanism of this brittleness.
At this point, you’re wondering what this research paper does in Feedback. Well, the introduction ends with the following paragraph: “As the audience strongly requested, here we mention some references ((35), (36), (37), (38), (39), (40), (41). ), (42), (43), (44), (45), (46), (47)) although they are completely irrelevant for the present work”.
For anyone who hasn’t worked in academia, the best way to explain this is that the authors are very small. Their paper has been reviewed by anonymous reviewers, who (among other suggestions) have asked them to cite the 13 older studies on the list. The authors, with no choice but to insert supposedly irrelevant studies, have refused to include them in the actual text, but have instead included them while noting their irrelevance.
Or, like BlueSky user @Dave nʎ=2dsinɵ :protein: put: “Absolute shots fired”. By the way, congratulations @Dave for being the username that drives nʎ=2dsinɵ :protein: New Scientist‘s font to its limit and submitted the Review to a search engine. The small middle equation is Bragg’s law, which describes how crystal lattices scatter incoming waves.
Anyway, once Feedback stopped having flashbacks to our brief time at the academy where we had this sort of thing happen to us but didn’t have the guts to put it back in print, we did our due diligence and looked up the 13 references.
All deal with alloys and other composite materials, but none of them seem to deal with hydrogen embrittlement. Most of them are so technical that Feedback was defeated in the attempt to fully understand them: readers familiar with composite materials can measure them at the usual address. However, even with our poor understanding, none of the references seem directly relevant.
However, Feedback noticed something odd. The same authors appear repeatedly in the author lists of 13 studies, and one author participated in all of them.
Feedback does not want to put on a paper cap, especially if the hydrogen has ruptured. But we wonder if we could identify the anonymous peer reviewer. Now our question is: How did this print get in? Did the editors not notice the joke, or did they allow it for their own reasons? Inquiring minds want to know.
The fish tale
Speaking about taking ideas from colleagues, assistant news editor Sam Wong pointed to an interesting study Water Resources Research. This journal is not, we admit, one of Feedback’s daily reads, but we seem to be missing out.
The to analyze it is about the biblical miracle of the loaves and fishes, in which Jesus apparently fed 5000 people using five loaves and two fishes. The authors propose a naturalistic explanation: a seiche or standing wave. The idea is that waves crashing over a lake sometimes create standing waves, and deeper water rises to the surface. In Lake Kinneret, the biblical Sea of Galilee, this deep water has little oxygen; therefore, if it rises to the surface, it can cause the fish to suffocate en masse.
The authors have documented two such incidents in Lake Kinneret in 2012. They have also noticed that they are quite rare: there have not been any of them since 2012. This means that most people were not aware of the option, especially if they had traveled. listening to the charismatic speaker and local knowledge was lacking.
The review is adding to the long list of scientific explanations for apparently supernatural occurrences, such as manna honey crystallized from scale insects and infrasound trend to induce frightening sensations that can be interpreted as haunting. We have also taken off our hats, as we worry about acting as a conductor of divine lightning.
moon of Uranus
Ahead of this issue comes news that Voyager 2’s 1986 visit to Uranus when it wasn’t a planet was its usual one, thanks to one. solar wind gust. As a result, many of our ideas about Uranus will have to be rethought, and some believe that it is possible for life to exist on one or more of its moons.
Life on Uranus, you say? Actually, life on Uranus’s moon? We hope it’s not Klingon. Or Tess Stenson as a writer put: NASA, “get your ass to Uranus”.
The review has spent more time than it should have trying to think of puns, but our slate is clean. A few bright sparks, aware of the joke about the planet’s name, decided to name all of Uranus’s moons after Shakespearean characters, choosing respectable names like Rosalind and Oberon. This means we can rule out life on the moons: Juliet is definitely lifeless, there was a play about it. Meanwhile, astronomers urgently need to find more satellites to orbit Uranus below.
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