Almost everyone I know in chemistry. Almost no one I know in physics. Things are weird that way.

Say that to Styrian arsenic eaters. Cyanide and uranium though are fair. Though there was an “energy drink” with thorium once.

And there’s also the practice of mithridatism, but at least there is some evidence to support some of its instances.

I’d say (a couple years ago) the service is also supposed to be access via DOI in perpetuity and presence in all the relevant databases, so that’s gotta cost some money for the reassurance as opposed to a pdf file “hosted” on Google Drive. But after Heterocycles fiasco I am not sure about that anymore.

Well, and some mark that this is likely a valid piece of research if it’s at www.reputablejournal.com as opposed to this likely being half-baked something at www.somerxiv.com or this likely being absolute lunacy at www.anyothersite.com.

Still, yes, billions in revenue vs millions spent essentially on essentially simple tasks like hosting and cataloguing (plus matching authors to reviewers I guess, though with how often I am asked to find them myself it’s doubtful) does not compute indeed.

By the way, in almost 100% of cases (the rest being just OA where the published version could be sent by anyone to anyone or something legally really dubious), the authors have a right to send their paper, even if it is published in a paywalled journal. Basically, the only thing the journal has a right to for subscription-based (aka those that cost $35) articles is content plus page layout. If the authors have the exact same text but formatted differently, they are free to distribute it wherever and however they want.

Preprint servers or lab/personal websites are best first choices for that.

edit: a small disclaimer on the exact same text meaning exact same text the authors provided; if the editor in the journal has corrected some typos and inserted a/the here or there (a common thing for non-natives to miss), then this becomes more of a grey area, because technically at this point it’s not a 100% authors’ text).

I’d say yeah, I agree with you, at least in some cases that must be true. It’s so hard to imagine what must go through their heads.

I can’t even say they aren’t doing it for science, because at times there’s such insistence that you can’t help but feel they are sincere in their beliefs (well, same applies to ‘psychics’ or ‘telepaths’, so ehh).

Fair. But this is an example of something egregious by all standards. Sure, we can also remember Jacques Benveniste. Or recent ivermectin fiasco. And are we considering that superconductor story from last year fraud or just negligence?

Maybe a handful others can be found active today, but the number of those that attempted such a risk would be very small — probably several hundred bold enough to disrupt their area, virtually unnoticeable from outside perspective, and a couple dozens willing to try to act at a scale visible by popular media (well, like example you provided).

That’s what I mean by rare. I would call these outliers in terms of scale/frequency because incidents like these were allowed to happen and did not pop out of thin air. They are not a root of the problem, but rather a byproduct of how academic publishing, financing, and recognition work as a system. The random article you would try to replicate would with a certain far-from-zero probability fail not because the authors had a grandiose idea of how to fool the academic community and gain fame, but likely tried to fit in their poor results in the publishing process that requires novelty and constant publishing regardless of the quality of research, or else they lose their position/group/lab/not gain tenure/not gain next grant/not close the report etc. And that is more problematic and brings far more distrust in science, even among academics themselves, than any vaccine- or water memory-related nonsense.

Well, this is extreme.

But in all seriousness, it’s rare for someone to commit fraud on this scale, and even rarer for someone to expect fame from it.

It’s much more common to be in a position where your grant obligations require you to publish 4 articles in a year, and the topic didn’t turn out to be as good as you initially expected, so what do you do? Just take the samples that actually worked at least barely, at least once, apply the logic of “well, it did work once, it doesn’t matter that two other replication attempts brought the catalysis efficiency twice as low, one sample is enough for a proof of concept, let’s write a whole paper based on that”, and here we have a manuscript that contains inflated data, maybe because the conditions were successful this time, or maybe because someone had previously polished platinum on the same surface that the electrode for the catalysis was polished on. Who knows? Who cares? At least you won’t starve for a year until you have to do it again.

Not trying to justify such behaviour, just providing some sort of explanation of why this happens at least in some cases.

See, I am of position that in developing countries British colonialism (or whatever you prefer to call it it) right now seems to push pro-queer rhetoric, at least that was my experience. And I can’t accept opposing statements “Britain pushes homophobia” and “Britain pushes LGBTQ+ people acceptance”; at least if there is something of the former, the latter has larger effect it seems.

Thank you for a well-written response. I think I am just starting from the different position, having experienced more positive effects from English influence than negative ones, in my country at least.

My experience on social media mostly skewed my view towards “anyone can say anything, and it looks like there’s a lot of hateful things people want to say” for Britain or any other democratic country. As a result, I see the anti-queer sentiment, but know from what I see daily in real life it could be much worse.

In my experience, the Christian (well, orthodox for that matter) church is right now very reluctant to accept LGBTQ+ people, with state-wide position being non-tolerant, and individual priests being accepting, if you are lucky. This is wrong. This must be better. The same, I think, can be said about Catholic Church, yet I didn’t have direct experience with that. Still, it’s better (again, for my region) than Muslim-majority regions being in a murderous position about the same group of people. It’s a lousy choice, but still, in a choice between “you are a disgusting sinner” and “you don’t deserve to exist, and your own family will murder you” the latter looks much worse.

Maybe I am not opposing Islam per se, maybe I just think that Islam is inextricably linked with “non-secular form of governance”, and that alone is enough for me to condemn such states more than any form of British influence.

In Russia. I think it’s the perspective that matters but I’d take British colonialism any day over the genocidal shitshow we have here, even putting Ukraine aside and focusing on LGBTQ+ for the sake of the argument. In comparison, the homophobia in the UK/US, while problematic, is relatively tame, e.g., it does not call all the LGBTQ+ people terrorists and extremists as official government rhetoric. And as for pre-2022, number 1 rule for an LGBTQ+ person living in an Islamic regionin Russia would be “don’t you even try to suggest that you are queer if you want to live”.

I kind of get the grievances towards the British colonialism and homophobia of the past (which incidentally gets a lot of whataboutism from some Russians I know: “What about Alan Turing! What about India!”), but for the present the British/American media is THE BEST thing that has happened in Russia to stop vilifying and demonizing LGBTQ+, and I just can’t wrap my head around the reverse situation.

I thought the topic was the hate of LGBTQ+, and right now it’s Islam that’s acting with said hate most of all. British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago, and you can’t actively blame dead people for it (well, you can, but they aren’t going to fix anything, and you won’t solve anything by blaming them), while Islam is remaining anti-LGBTQ+ right in this very moment. Isn’t it more productive to oppose whatever’s present right now?

Why isn’t Brazil on the list of countries that have their fees waived? Are they on the “rich” side of the spectrum for that to be considered or is there simply no agreement between Brazilian government/publishers?

Yes, I know this is treating a symptom rather than illness itself, but for the sake of today’s science and not the science of tomorrow, at least such an option should be available.

“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.

Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.

And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.

Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).

A bilingual person would to a certain extent. I’ve noticed a tendency of English-speaking societies to gradually eliminate the gender from professions, while the languages with grammatical gender, like Russian or German, tend to incorporate previously missing feminine suffixes to the words that previously were male-gendered only.

Though your question (a rhetorical one I guess) regards English only, I suppose, and then yes, the combination is weird.

edit: from what I gather, German is already content with the use of “-in” suffix, so not much change needed, except the push for the use of a “gender gap” or “gender asterisk” (Genderstern) for language to be more inclusive when using plurals [looks extremely clunky to me, but I get the spirit]. In Russian, however, even the suffixes meet significant resistance, both from society and, especially, government, to the point that feminitives are considered “LGBT propaganda”, and since “LGBT is an extremist organisation”, that is extremism apparently. Anyway, “gender gaps” (usually as underscores) are also used in more “left” (for lack of a better label) communities, but are absolutely not accepted and misunderstood be the wider audience.

It’s a brief five-minute Google search for me, but it seems that everyone has problems with both reading comprehension and/or causality evaluation.

I think it’s great that such a patent exists and that the technology was invented by her. Yet, even checking the frequency-hopping spread spectrum page on Wikipedia shows that it was only one invention in the long series of discoveries and technologies, which was neither the first, nor the most crucial of them, and this particular option seems to be one of the sources of inspiration for later technologies (along with a bunch of predecessors).

The rest of the criticisms regarding the choice of Wi-Fi over Bluetooth is already mentioned in the comments of others.

I really don’t want to minimise the contribution of an individual towards the development of sophisticated technologies, and I have zero qualms about this individual being a woman, I just think that the presentation oversells the achievement which might cause additional mockery from those who do think that women (and actresses at that!) have no business in anything serious.

What I actually find impressive, however, is that a woman, at the time where women’s rights were far from what they are today (just read about her first marriage, that must have been hard), could be both an actress, an inventor, a producer, all while leading quite a bitter life it seems. Not many can boast that.

I guess where I’m going with that is that she, as many others, may be best praised as an example of a complex person that had many achievements as well as many hardships. Using her as a basis of “Didn’t think an actress could do something worthwhile? Gotcha!” statement seems a bit shallow.

edit: However, since this post showed me that a person like Hedy Lamarr has existed in the first place (yeah, I’m not well-versed in mid-20 century American culture, sorry), and interested me (and likely a bunch of others) enough to Google her biography, I’d say it’s a net positive regardless.

First time I see the name, had to search it. To me, it is just a “change my mind” meme with no relevance as to which person is in it.

Both on Android, and iOS, opting out of notifications solves most of the problems. You can do all on your own time without constant nagging, and leave notifications on for the communication channels you really need.

However, what I hate with passion are shopping and delivery apps that suffer with disabled notifications (I don’t know when things arrive, and that would ideally be good to know within seconds), but enabled notifications mean that there would be a lot of spam notifications about ordering and buying more.

It’s also a laxative.

I don’t think my statement above is relevant, just throwing it out there.

This serves well as a statement.

It is, however, delusional to think that at this point anything can become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, unless Wikimedia collapses because of reasons from within.

Metallic elemental mercury (what you see in the picture) is relatively harmless to touch. Arguably, it’s more dangerous to rub a lead ingot, for example. However, mercury vapours (and mercury does evaporate slowly but consistently) absorb quite easily when you breath them with a ton of undesirable effects, often related to central nervous system, which is never a nice thing. Broken mercury thermometer won’t kill you. Playing with the puddle inside a non-ventilated room might kill you in several decades. Working in the non-open-air environment where mercury is always present will slowly worsen your health as mercury accumulates.

Organic compounds of mercury are what actually is nasty. A short contact with a few millilitres of that — and you will have to recover for a long-long time, if ever. However, the scary stories about methylmercury rarely mention that there are other organic compounds that are just as toxic or worse. I wouldn’t get close to any organic cadmium compound, for example, and would be extremely wary of its inorganic salts too. The thing is it’s extremely unlikely that you encounter any of these chemicals ever in your life, and if you do encounter them, then you are likely a professional who knows exactly how and why you are to deal with them.