Comments on “Hydroconductivity Under Extreme Pressure” by Physicists: An Investigation by the Journal and Post-Publication Review of the Paper by Dias and Salamat
Since then, researchers have made hydride superconductors that push closer and closer to operating at room temperature, but all of them work only under extreme pressures. The paper by Dias and Salamat was published in Nature in March, and it seemed to have made a step towards a material that could be used in practical applications.
There has been a series of high-profile and high-priced retractions by the authors of the paper, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada. Nature and Physical Review Letters withdrew papers in the same year. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year.
Lilia Boeri says that some specialists in the field have doubts since the paper was published. This, she says, is in part because of controversies swirling around the team and in part because the latest paper was not written to what she considers a high standard.
“Virtually every serious condensed-matter physicist I know saw right away that there were serious problems with the work,” says Peter Armitage, an experimental physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In particular, members of the community took issue with measurements of the material’s electrical resistance, saying it was not clear whether the property truly dropped to zero, or whether Dias and Salamat had subtracted a background signal from a key plot of resistance to create the appearance that it did. Critics say that it should not be necessary to remove background from this type of measurement. In today’s text, the journal stated, “An investigation by the journal and post-publication review have concluded that these concerns are credible, substantial and remain unresolved.”
It has been reported that the publication of the paper raises questions about the quality of the editorial review process at Nature.
“Decisions about what to accept for publication are not always easy to make,” Ziemelis continues. We try to take an unbiased position, so the interests of the community always drive our deliberations.
How does the Dias-Salamat Collaboration in Superconductivity Research have been investigated? The University of Rochester and UNLV are investigating the allegations of plagiarism
Many teams had already created and experimented with similar hydrogen-rich materials, called hydrides, after a milestone discovery in 2015. A group led by physicist Mikhail Eremets at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, reported6 superconductivity in a hydrogen–sulfur compound at −70 °C (203 kelvin); at the time, this was a record-high operating temperature for a superconductor. Eremets required a higher pressure of over one million times atmospheric pressure, which was comparable to the crushing conditions at the centre of Earth.
Armitage does not think that Dias and Salamat will be able to keep doing research, pointing to the investigation findings and allegations of plagiarism in Dias’s PhD thesis. The University of Rochester has started an investigation into the integrity of Dias’s work, and it is being conducted by external experts. The university’s spokesperson did not answer questions about whether the institution has yet disciplined Dias. UNLV did not answer Nature’s queries about whether Salamat is being investigated, saying that “UNLV does not publicly discuss personnel matters”, but that it “is committed to maintaining the highest standards for research integrity campus wide”.
Canfield says that the Dias–Salamat collaboration has spread a “foul vapour” over the field, which “is scaring young researchers and funding agencies away”.
According to Ho-Kwang Mao, the director of the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Beijing, there is nothing to worry about. The funding for superconductivity research is not likely to be affected except for more careful reviews.
But Boeri says she has heard researchers complain that the controversies — the allegations of PhD thesis plagiarism and the findings of apparent data fabrication — have made it harder to recruit students to work on superconductors. She says a serious problem is that people don’t know that the field is healthy because they don’t think it’s as bad as the community thinks.
The people are doing amazing and interesting work. “Sure, they can be disheartened by this nonsense, but it won’t stop the science.”
Using Twitter to unpick the ancient cat genomes of wild cats: insights from ancient genetics and machine-learning simulations of biological systems
Researchers trying to rebuild the Scottish wildcat population are getting insights from ancient genomics. At a remote wildlife park in the Scottish Highlands, a captive-breeding programme is considering an audacious breeding strategy to eliminate the house-cat DNA that has infiltrated the wildcat genome. To help them to unpick the problem, researchers analysed the genomes of dozens of ancient and modern cats, including the 2,000-year-old remains of a domestic cat found at a Roman palace in West Sussex and those of a wildcat that died 600 years ago, uncovered at a now-ruined castle in the north of England.
Over the past two decades, more than 400,000 research articles have been published that show strong textual similarities to known studies produced by paper mills — and around 70,000 of these were published last year alone. An unpublished analysis shared with Nature estimates that 1.5–2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 closely resemble paper-mill works. The rate increases to 3% among biology and medicine papers.
We have to learn machine-learning systems on what goes on inside our skulls before we can build simulations of our entire brains. But there is a hybrid approach that combines information from conventional brain-modelling techniques with machine learning, writes computational scientist Viren Jain, who works on such research at Google. Simulations that accurately capture what is occurring in real biological systems could be created with the help of artificial intelligence-driven models.
With the demise of free researcher access to Twitter’s application programming interface, analysing misinformation on the platform is much more difficult — but it must be done, argues digital-literacy researcher Mike Caulfield. A group of seven accounts with links to Musk are manipulating the debate about the Israel–Hamas war after being boosted by interactions with the platform’s controversial owner. Although Twitter (now called X, if you must) is used by only a small slice of the population, it is influential — and is now “a ‘natural experiment’ in what happens as a company reduces existing trust, moderation and safety teams”, writes Caulfield.
Source: Daily briefing: Blockbuster room-temperature superconductivity paper retracted
Why are there so many dead birds? A response to an ornithologist who collected birds from the Chicago park during the Audubon shooting
In October, Audubon published shocking images of almost 1,000 dead birds that had died after colliding with the windows of a building in Chicago. Dave Willard, an ornithologist who has collected birds from the park since 1978, is one of those who advocates for bird-safe measures. With so many specimens to draw from, Willard’s research has revealed much about migratory birds; for example, they are losing weight and their wings are growing longer as the climate warms. He would like to have less data. “We’d trade everything we’ve learned,” he says, “not to have them dead on the sidewalk.”
The Lucy mission spotted the small asteroid that was about 220 metres wide and 790 metres long. Lucy is trying to find out more about the Trojan asteroids, which are in the vicinity of the Sun. NASA planetary scientist, Thomas Statler, says that there is no such thing as just another asteroid. “Each one is carrying with it a memory of a different part of the history of our Solar System.” The New York Times has a 4 min read.