Sciences (les meilleures news) - Page 138

Simple mix of soap and solvent could help destroy ‘forever chemicals’
Science.org

Approach doesn’t work on all PFAS compounds, but could help decontaminate thousands of sites worldwide

Iceman RGC (./4121) :
Article lisible entièrement ce week-end seulement :

Rencontre. Ces “hipsters de l’eugénisme” qui veulent changer l’avenir de l’humanitéCourrier internationalSimone et Malcolm Collins sont persuadés de la supériorité de leurs gènes. Ils veulent avoir un maximum d’enfants pour peser sur l’évolution humaine. Leurs idée...

‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction imminent for controversial physicist
Nature

A prominent journal has decided to retract a paper by Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York who has made controversial claims about discovering room-temperature superconductors — materials that would not require any cooling to conduct electricity with zero resistance. The forthcoming retraction, of a paper published by Physical Review Letters (PRL) in 20211, is significant because the Nature news team has learnt that it is the result of an investigation that found apparent data fabrication.

PRL’s decision follows allegations that Dias plagiarized substantial portions of his PhD thesis and a separate retraction of one of Dias’s papers on room-temperature superconductivity by Nature last September. (Nature’s news team is independent of its journals team.)

After receiving an e-mail last year expressing concern about possible data fabrication in Dias’s PRL paper — a study, not about room-temperature superconductivity, but about the electrical properties of manganese disulfide (MnS2) — the journal commissioned an investigation by four independent referees. Nature’s news team has obtained documents about the investigation, including e-mails and three reports of its outcome, from sources who have asked to remain anonymous. “The findings back up the allegations of data fabrication/falsification convincingly,” PRL’s editors wrote in an e-mail obtained by Nature. Jessica Thomas, an executive editor at the American Physical Society, which publishes PRL, declined to comment.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
Researchers seem to have solved the puzzle of LK-99. Scientific detective work has unearthed evidence that the material is not a superconductor, and clarified its actual properties.

The conclusion dashes hopes that LK-99 — a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen — marked the discovery of the first superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure. Instead, studies have shown that impurities in the material — in particular, copper sulfide — were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors.

“I think things are pretty decisively settled at this point,” says Inna Vishik, a condensed-matter experimentalist at the University of California, Davis.

vince (./1638) :
Maintenant imaginez le programme de recherche martien de l'inde : en fait s'ils n'ont pas encore lancé leur rover, c'est parce qu'il doit d'abord apprendre à danser

Co-developer of Cassava’s potential Alzheimer’s drug cited for ‘egregious misconduct’
Science.org

City University of New York’s Hoau-Yan Wang couldn’t provide original data to refute allegations of image manipulation, university says

Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets
Nature.com

Wide distribution of findings shows how analytical choices drive conclusions.

ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis
Nature

Researchers say that the model behind the chatbot fabricated a convincing bogus database, but a forensic examination shows it doesn’t pass for authentic.

World’s oldest forts upend idea that farming alone led to complex societies
Science.org

In remote Siberia, hunter-gatherers built complex defenses 8000 years ago