Planet Neuroscientists

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Nanographenes prolong super-resolution microscopy from minutes to hours

in OIST Japan on 2025-03-12 12:00:00 UTC.

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Alison Preston explains how our brains form mental frameworks for interpreting the world

in The Transmitter on 2025-03-12 04:00:59 UTC.

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Calculating neuroscience’s carbon cost: Q&A with Stefan Pulver and William Smith

in The Transmitter on 2025-03-12 04:00:09 UTC.

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U.S. BRAIN Initiative set to lose $81 million this year

in The Transmitter on 2025-03-12 01:47:13 UTC.

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Which States Have the Most Climate-Friendly Transportation

A report from the Natural Resources Defense Council looked at how states balanced transportation needs with climate and equity efforts

in Scientific American on 2025-03-11 17:30:00 UTC.

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NASA Begins Mass Firings ahead of Trump Team’s Deadline

Top advisers in NASA’s Office of the Chief Scientist are among the first to go amid a government-wide downsizing effort

in Scientific American on 2025-03-11 17:15:00 UTC.

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6 things to know about antidepressants

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-03-11 17:00:00 UTC.

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How to Help Butterflies That Are Disappearing

A new report finds that butterfly populations in the continental U.S. declined by one fifth between 2000 and 2020—but it’s not too late

in Scientific American on 2025-03-11 16:00:00 UTC.

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Strong Scientific Leaders Must Speak Out against the Trump Administration’s Science Denial

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences should denounce the antiscientific policies of the Trump administration

in Scientific American on 2025-03-11 15:30:00 UTC.

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How COVID Shaped Education and Mental Health Outcomes for Kids

COVID’s emotional and educational strain on children still lingers, but educators and mental health specialists say they are far from a “lost generation”

in Scientific American on 2025-03-11 14:05:00 UTC.

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As AI advances, the meaning of artificial general intelligence remains murky

in Science News: AI on 2025-03-11 13:00:00 UTC.

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Foraging footballers suggest how we come together to act as one

in OIST Japan on 2025-03-11 12:00:00 UTC.

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The Secret to Understanding Animal Consciousness May Be Joy

Animal emotions—including joy—may be key markers of conscious beings

in Scientific American on 2025-03-11 12:00:00 UTC.

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Food Recalls Are Down, but Food Poisoning Deaths Are Up

Despite headlines, there were fewer food recalls in 2024 than in 2023, but more people died from food poisoning linked to outbreaks

in Scientific American on 2025-03-11 11:00:00 UTC.

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The Night’s Work: How sleep impacts your brain function

in Women in Neuroscience UK on 2025-03-11 09:45:04 UTC.

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Concerns for whites, retractions for the rest?

in For Better Science on 2025-03-11 06:00:00 UTC.

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How tiny tardigrades could help tackle systems neuroscience questions

in The Transmitter on 2025-03-11 04:00:51 UTC.

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Analyzing automation: Two studies test methods that track rodents’ social interactions, children’s speech characteristics

in The Transmitter on 2025-03-11 04:00:11 UTC.

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Microplastic Pollution Is Messing with Photosynthesis in Plants

Microplastics can cut a plant’s ability to photosynthesize by up to 12 percent, new research shows

in Scientific American on 2025-03-10 20:40:00 UTC.

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Athena Lunar Lander Declared Dead on the Moon

For the second time in two years, a commercial lunar lander built and operated by Intuitive Machines has fallen over on the moon

in Scientific American on 2025-03-10 16:30:00 UTC.

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Guest post: Should Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment be retracted?

Philip G. Zimbardo passed away in October 2024 at age 91. He enjoyed an illustrious career at Stanford University, where he taught for 50 years. He accrued a long list of accolades, but his singular and enduring contribution to scholarship was the Stanford Prison Experiment, a simulation carried out in the university’s psychology department in August 1971. The research project became the best-known psychological analysis of institutionalization at the time. 

The study has always been treated with skepticism by penologists and psychologists, and recent scholarship by social scientist Thibault Le Texier has raised fundamental questions about the scientific validity of the investigation, the originality of the research design, the unethical treatment of the subjects, and the credibility of the reported results. 

Many consider Zimbardo’s SPE to be one of the classic studies of experimental psychology in the post-war period. It continues to be reported as a landmark achievement in many psychological textbooks today, despite drawing decades of criticism both in and out of the scientific literature. But considering Le Texier’s findings, should Zimbardo’s work be retracted?

For the prison simulation, Zimbardo recruited 24 college-aged men and randomly assigned half to the role of guards and half to the role of inmates. “Inmates” were housed in mock “cells” in the basement of the psychology department, and “guards” worked three at a time over three eight-hour shifts. Everyone was paid $15 per day. A camera was installed surreptitiously in the main hallway of the “prison” to film the interactions. 

The inmates were picked up at their homes by a member of the Palo Alto Police, “charged” with a serious felony and driven blindfolded to the mock prison, where they traded their clothing for a prison gown that included an identification number on the chest and back. The inmates wore nylon stockings on their heads to symbolize being shaved. Zimbardo played the role of prison director, a senior undergraduate student played the role of warden, and two doctoral students were cast as psychological counselors. 

Participants began to exhibit pathological behaviors almost immediately. According to the videotapes, the guards showed signs of dominance and brutality, and the inmates exhibited signs of depression and defiance. 

This interpretation was based on the proposition that the primary determinants of social behavior are situational: Personal autonomy was assumed to be overshadowed by situational roles. What started as mocking antagonism — play-acting — degenerated into degradation and abuse on the one side, and depression and rebellion on the other. According to the conventional interpretation, an experimental simulation increasingly came to approximate the real thing. 

In 2014 Le Texier started researching the SPE, initially planning to make a documentary film for French media. He delved into the archives of the experiment, including the documents, videos, and interviews Zimbardo had cataloged and archived in the Stanford Library.  Le Texier later interviewed about half of the original participants by phone to reconstruct what happened. 

He realized how flawed the conventional interpretation was, and ended up writing a book on it, originally published in French in 2018 and translated into English in 2024. “My enthusiasm gave way to skepticism, then my skepticism to indignation, as I discovered the underside of the experiment and the evidence of its manipulation,” Le Texier wrote in the introduction of Investigating the Stanford Prison Experiment: History of a Lie.

 Four main themes come to light in Le Texier’s book that undermine the credibility of the SPE.

1. The scientific credentials of the study

As Le Texier points out, Zimbardo had no expertise in criminology. His doctoral training was behavioristic and his subjects were lab rats. His interests at Stanford changed to questions of deindividuation of people in mass society. Consequently, the SPE began as a kind of observational study, not of a real prison but a drama enacted by subjects pretending to be guards and inmates. 

On the Saturday before the experiment started, the guards were briefed about how they were expected to behave. The message: essentially to make the lives of the inmates miserable. Zimbardo equipped them with riot batons borrowed from the Palo Alto police department, without training the recruits to use the weapons. 

In the following days, several guards were reprimanded by the experimenter’s assistant for not displaying sufficient dominance to make the situation realistic. The apparent spontaneity of the pathological behavior captured on film was due in part to coaching. On Monday, their first full day together, the inmates planned a prison break to defy authority. This action suggests the subjects also drew from their own background knowledge of prison experience portrayed in popular media. 

Le Texier argues the SPE was not a scientific experiment at all, but a demonstration created to depict the evils of incarceration based on the supposition that institutions can make normal people act in pathological ways. Although Zimbardo’s results were not reported in peer-reviewed journals until 1973, he communicated his “findings” by press release at the end of Monday, the first full day of the experiment. The experiment started to attract press coverage by the following Thursday. 

A bloody attempted prison break at San Quentin State Prison the day after the experiment ended was followed within weeks by a major prison riot at Attica Correctional Facility. In the shadow of these events, Zimbardo’s findings skyrocketed to national prominence as the SPE was invoked as context to this violence. Within a month, Zimbardo found himself speaking as an expert to a congressional subcommittee on criminal justice policies. 

The SPE became a cause célèbre before it underwent peer review. Interest in the findings revived in 2004 following reports of inmate abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to Le Texier, despite the publicity it attracted, the SPE was never a credible scientific experiment. The research lacked a defined theory and a priori hypotheses, did not use any validated sociometric instruments to measure behavioral differences, had no tests of significance, and did not include a control group.

2. The originality of the SPE design 

The official history of the SPE is recorded in a large slideshow, which Le Texier employed as one of the main sources for his research. Zimbardo also produced a 19-minute video for circulation.

One of the items Le Texier discovered in the archive was a term paper by David Jaffe, a senior undergraduate in a seminar Zimbardo offered in the spring of 1971 – several months before the launch of the SPE. Jaffe and two classmates had created a prison simulation in their dormitory at Toyon Hall as a course assignment. They scripted a typical daily schedule for the inmates as well as a list of prison rules. The objective of the simulation was to mimic the effects of real prison by trying to create feelings in the “prisoners” of the loss of freedom, total dependency on the guards and feelings of worthlessness. 

In his various reports Zimbardo insists the routines and rules in the SPE were improvised spontaneously by the guards. However, when Le Texier compared the rules and schedules in Jaffe’s term paper with those allegedly concocted by the SPE guards, he found them to be  virtually identical. Jaffe was also employed in the SPE as the “head guard.” However, his role in designing Zimbardo’s experiment is rarely credited. 

“Instead of acknowledging the foundational importance of the Toyon Hall experiment, Zimbardo completely obscured it for 40 years,” Le Texier wrote. “He does not mention it in the slideshow he used for 20 years to present the experiment, nor in the documentary Quiet Rage that succeeded it in 1992.” 

3. Ethical Issues in the treatment of subjects 

In the protocol submitted to the Stanford Human Subjects Research Review Committee, Zimbardo indicated subjects would only be released prematurely for “emergency reasons” and would be “discouraged from quitting.” However, the committee appears to have mandated that if anyone wanted to quit, “they would be released; no explanation needed.” In fact, the experimenters did not release inmates when several individuals expressed a desire to quit. They were told voluntary departure was not an option and they would have to apply to the parole board. Consequently, the loss of freedom was not simulated. 

The loss of privacy was not simulated either. The prison gown was worn without underwear, so when the guards forced inmates to play “leapfrog” their genitals were exposed. The inmates were denied access to showers and deprived of access to the toilets at night and had to use a bucket as a commode in their cells.  

Questionable treatment raises ethical issues as well. Guards interrupted inmates’ sleep with blasting whistles, and called the inmates out of their rooms for meaningless head counts in the middle of the night. They handcuffed and blindfolded inmates to march them to the toilets. When a guard assaulted rebellious inmates by spraying them with a fire extinguisher, or struck them with a riot baton, neither act was simulated. 

In the search for verisimilitude in a role-playing environment, Zimbardo exposed his subjects to a series of ethically dubious conditions and was reckless in his gamble that no one would get seriously offended, injured or sick.  

4. The credibility of the results 

The six days of interaction between the inmates, the guards and the experimenters created emotionally provocative moments even if the participants knew, at least initially, the “prison” was a pretense, everyone was more or less acting, and they were being paid as subjects in an experiment. As Le Texier reported: “His experiment had effects on all of its participants, inducing stress, tension, aggression, indifference, resignation, or even apathy.” By analogy, audiences sometimes weep at the theater even when they know the play is fiction. But to what extent were the significant changes observed by Zimbardo cases of deliberate play acting? 

Zimbardo reported five inmates experienced “nervous breakdowns” over six days and were released. However, post hoc debriefings suggest at least one of these subjects said he faked emotional trauma by screaming, crying, threatening suicide and acting out physically to trigger a “medical emergency” — after being told he could not leave. According to Le Texier, what that suggests is that “Zimbardo strongly encouraged the prisoners who wanted to leave the experiment to simulate a nervous breakdown.” 

On the guards’ side, one of the subjects who adopted a tough guard persona and was most aggressive toward the inmates adopted a fake Texas accent and admitted his facade was an act played for the camera. In fact, he was a drama major. 

Should the SPE be retracted?

At some point, when the credibility of a classic study has received so much critique, official retraction, while desirable, becomes redundant. What Le Texier added to the record is not only the dubious value of Zimbardo’s findings but his virtually unacknowledged appropriation of the ideas of his students and his exploitation of mass media to promote his ideas in advance of peer review. If we were seriously talking about retracting the SPE, what exactly would be retracted? 

The first refereed paper, “Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison,” appeared in the International Journal of Criminology and Penology in 1973. By that time, the popular press had papered the walls with the news of the study. Le Texier identified a dozen newspaper reports in the weeks following its termination including Life, The Daily Mail and The Washington Post. 

The SPE provided context in news reports of the lethal breakout at San Quentin the day after the experiment ended and the bloodbath following the riot at Attica three weeks later. Another wave of newspaper stories in October and November covered Zimbardo’s congressional testimony. In 1972 Zimbardo submitted a short report to Society, a popular sociology magazine, called “Pathology of imprisonment.” And recounted the experiment in The New York Times Magazine in April 1973 in “The mind is a formidable jailer: a Pirandellian prison.”

By the time the study was reported in the International Journal of Criminology and Penology, it was common knowledge. The IJCP ended publication in 1978. It was superseded by the International Journal of the Sociology of Law (1979-2007) which was itself superseded by the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice. Consequently, a retraction in the IJCP is not even possible. If Le Texier’s findings are credible, arguably the best outcome we can expect is more responsible reporting in contemporary textbooks. 

Augustine Brannigan is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Calgary.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-03-10 16:00:00 UTC.

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Brain implants don’t change a person’s sense of self. Hear why

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-03-10 15:00:00 UTC.

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9 Unsolved Mysteries in Mathematics

Mathematicians discuss some of the most compelling unsolved problems in the field

in Scientific American on 2025-03-10 15:00:00 UTC.

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5 years after COVID-19 became a pandemic, are we ready for what’s next?

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-03-10 13:00:00 UTC.

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Our Narrow View of Masculinity Is Hurting Boys

Masculinity isn’t “toxic” by itself, but the strain boys feel from society and parents to meet unrealistic expectations is

in Scientific American on 2025-03-10 12:00:00 UTC.

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Earth May Soon Get Early Solar Flare Warnings

Flickering loops in the sun’s corona may appear before dangerous solar activity

in Scientific American on 2025-03-10 11:45:00 UTC.

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Measles Misinformation Sparks Concern, Supreme Court Limits EPA Power, and Scientists Create Woolly Mice

In this week's news roundup, we dig into measles misinformation, ozone recovery and new findings on using nasal cartilage to treat knee injuries.

in Scientific American on 2025-03-10 11:00:00 UTC.

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Next Open NeuroFedora meeting: 10 March 2025 1300 UTC

Photo by William White on Unsplash.

Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 10 March 2025 at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us in the Fedora meeting channel on chat.fedoraproject.org (our Matrix instance). Note that you can also access this channel from other Matrix home severs, so you do not have to create a Fedora account just to attend the meeting.

You can use this link to convert the meeting time to your local time. Or, you can also use this command in the terminal:

$ date -d 'Monday, March 10, 2025 13:00 UTC'

The meeting will be chaired by @ankursinha. The agenda for the meeting is:

• New introductions and roll call.
• Tasks from last meeting.
• Open Pagure tickets.
• Package health check.
• Open package reviews check.
• CompNeuro lab compose status check for Fedora 41/rawhide.
• Neuroscience query of the week
• Next meeting day, and chair.
• Open floor.

We hope to see you there!

in NeuroFedora blog on 2025-03-10 09:24:05 UTC.

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The limits of neuroscience

in The Transmitter on 2025-03-10 04:00:52 UTC.

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DEI-stroying Research: How Science Loses When Inclusivity is Undermined

in Women in Neuroscience UK on 2025-03-08 19:01:11 UTC.

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Earth’s Oldest Impact Crater Discovered in Australia

Scientists with a new theory about how Earth’s early continents formed predicted where a superold impact crater should be—then found it

in Scientific American on 2025-03-08 13:00:00 UTC.

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Weekend reads: Former NIH director suddenly retires; more on patent mills; journal editors talk damage control

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Five studies from ‘Bust Size and Hitchhiking’ author retracted
• ICYMI: Dean under investigation for plagiarism following Retraction Watch story: report
• Was nonsense ‘vegetative electron microscopy’ phrase a Farsi typo?
• Seven years after ‘noncompliance’ finding, whistleblowers push for retractions
• His manuscript was rejected. Then he saw it published by other authors
• Don’t tread on me: Snake paper retracted for ‘soft-stepping’ technique

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 57,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• “Former NIH Director Francis Collins retires suddenly, makes plea to protect agency staff.”
• “Patently fraudulent”: more on Science’s ‘patent mill’ story from an author of the preprint.
• “Damage Control in the Wake of Political Action That Threatens the Integrity of Medical Research,” from the editors of Annals of Internal Medicine.
• Our Ivan Oransky on funding for scientific research and censorship across the political spectrum.
• “‘Omg, did PubMed go dark?’ Blackout stokes fears about database’s future.”
• “One would-be Romanian president is a plagiarist. But will voters care?”
• “Bankruptcy gives no relief to professor who defamed student.”
• “The Problems with Peer Review”: A podcast with our Ivan Oransky.
• “Social Science Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It: We need a post-publication, citation-triggered review process,” says Andrew Gelman.
• Researchers ask: “Do competitive forces tend to correct choice errors in journal selection due to imperfect attention on the part of researchers?”
• Universities are “encouraging non-traditional outputs” to improve research culture.
• “CDC Staff Prohibited From Co-Authoring Papers With World Health Organization Personnel.”
• “The Sun also revises: A scandal in Australia’s space science community.” A link to our 2023 coverage of the story.
• Study looks at “substantial research integrity challenges within stem cell research.”
• “Why is it that nobody can reproduce anybody else’s findings?”: A pharmacologist discusses his upcoming book.
• “GenAI synthetic data create ethical challenges for scientists. Here’s how to address them.”
• “Self-retraction as redemption: Forgiveness for repentant authors.”
• “China’s supreme court calls for crack down on paper mills.”
• “Self-plagiarism: A retrospective study of its prevalence and patterns across scientific disciplines.”
• “NSF brings back 84 fired workers after judge blocks White House–ordered dismissals.”
• “Former School of Medicine researcher sues Yale for alleged damaged research.”
• Do citations drop more after sexual misconduct allegations than research misconduct allegations? Coverage of a new study in Science and Nature.
• “Academic publishers warn against AI copyright plans.”
• “Open repositories cannot ignore retractions and corrections.”
• “Ph.D. student sues UMN, files human rights complaint after AI plagiarism expulsion.”
• “The NIH Is Canceling Grants for Research About Trans People.”
• “Dishonesty now poses a real threat to the credibility of scientific research.”
• “FDA scolds drugmaker over promotion that touts ‘misleading’ comparison with generics.”
• “Psychedelic drug studies face a potent source of bias: the ‘trip.’”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-03-08 11:00:00 UTC.

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Stand Up for Science Rallies Draw Crowds Protesting Trump Cuts

Scientists and supporters rallied in cities across the U.S. and Europe to protest dramatic funding cuts and other attacks from the Trump administration

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 22:45:00 UTC.

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It’s ‘personal.’ What the Stand Up for Science rally meant for attendees

in Science News: Science & Society on 2025-03-07 22:44:45 UTC.

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Daylight Saving Time and Early School Start Times Cost The Economy Billions

The current system of daylight saving time and early school start times wastes billions while causing more car accidents, workplace injuries and health issues

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 20:40:00 UTC.

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Trump Administration Likely to Drop Chloroprene Lawsuit. Here’s What That Means

Trump could drop a federal lawsuit against a petrochemical plant that emits chloroprene. Here’s a look at the cancer-causing chemical

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 20:15:00 UTC.

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Don’t tread on me: Snake paper retracted for ‘soft-stepping’ technique

Agitating snakes isn’t something most of us would do on purpose, but for a group of researchers, it was central to their research. The authors of a May 2024 paper in Scientific Reports achieved that by “softly” stepping on the head, tail and mid-body of newborn, juvenile and adult pit vipers to see how often they would bite. 

But the technique wasn’t quite what the authors’ ethics committee had in mind when approving the study. The journal retracted the paper last month, noting the ethics approval the authors received “did not include newborn snakes or the use of the ‘soft stepping’ method.” 

Lead author João Miguel Alves-Nunes blamed the retraction on a “communication error” by the ethics committee. The researchers believed they had approval both to step on snakes and to include newborn snakes, Alves-Nunes, a former researcher at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, said in an email to Retraction Watch. 

Two methods were initially approved by the ethics committee, Alves-Nunes said. One “involved touching and pressing the snake’s body against the ground using a metal herpetological hook.” The second consisted of researchers approaching the snakes with a booted foot. 

The researchers “noticed that the metal hook could injure the snakes’ mouths,” so rather than using the hook to press down on the snake, they lightly stepped on the animals instead, Alves-Nunes said. The boot had a foam reinforcement to protect the snakes, he told us. 

Alves-Nunes said the researchers “did not even consider that this modification required an additional approval request, as this method was essentially a combination of the two already approved methods.” 

As reported in a Q&A with Alves-Nunes in Science, he stepped on 116 snakes 30 times each, totaling over 40,000 steps. In tests with a different type of snake, the bite pierced his boot. That’s when he learned he is allergic to snake venom and antivenom.

Mid-study, the researchers began questioning how hatchlings would react to this method. They submitted a second request to the ethics committee asking permission to include these newborn snakes in the study. 

The committee first rejected this proposal because of Alves-Nunes’ allergy to the snake venom caused by “a history of ophidic accidents,” or snake bites, according to the authors’ rebuttal of the retraction, provided to Retraction Watch.

Once researchers replaced Alves-Nunes with coauthor Adriano Fellone as the “executor” of the experiment, the “Ethics Committee of the Butantan Institute responded with a single word: ‘APPROVED,’” Alves-Nunes said. 

After the retraction, the researchers realized the approval response applied only to Alves-Nunes’ removal from the study, not the use of hatchlings, he told us. 

The Butantan Institute told us the animal ethics committee was unavailable for comment because of a national holiday. 

Readers raised ethical concerns about the study shortly after its publication, Rafal Marszalek, the journal’s chief editor, told us. The paper has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

All authors disagreed with the retraction, the notice states. Alves-Nunes called the decision to retract “disproportionate. The mistake made was bureaucratic, not scientific fraud, plagiarism, or experimental error.”  

The authors’ response to the retraction, signed by senior author Otavio Marques of the Ecology and Evolution Laboratory at the Butantan Institute, noted the researchers “emphasize that ethical conduct regarding live animal experimentation—avoiding excessive suffering and minimizing discomfort and the number of specimens used—was upheld.”

After our story published, we heard from the communications office at the Butantan Institute, who told us by email:

The Institute does not believe that the violation of the methods approved by CEUAIB [the Butantan Institute Animal Use Ethics Committee] was intentional and clarifies that, at this time, there is no ongoing institutional process aimed at penalizing those involved.

This story was updated March 10, 2025, to include a statement from the Butantan Institute.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-03-07 19:30:39 UTC.

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Medical AI tools are growing, but are they being tested properly?

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-03-07 18:59:44 UTC.

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Trump's FEMA Disaster Aid Freeze Threatens 'Acute Harm,' Judge Rules

The Federal Emergency Management Agency must show in one week whether it is complying with a judge’s ruling that blocks the Trump administration disaster aid freeze

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 17:30:00 UTC.

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Exclusive: Acting NIH director extends appointments for senior neuroscientists on administrative leave

in The Transmitter on 2025-03-07 16:44:45 UTC.

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Why Is the Trump Administration Politicizing Weather?

Climate change is real. Dismantling our federal weather agency won’t change that

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 13:00:00 UTC.

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Leading a Meaningful Life through Storytelling Skills

People who are rated as good storytellers exhibit a purpose-oriented mindset and big-picture thinking more often than others

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 13:00:00 UTC.

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Five Years after the COVID Pandemic Began, Fatigue and Frustration Remain

The “quarantine fatigue” of 2020 became an ongoing “pandemic fatigue,” a complex set of emotions that continues to affect the nation

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 12:30:00 UTC.

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Developing a Spin-Based Ultra-Low-Noise Amplifier for Microwave Quantum Technologies

in OIST Japan on 2025-03-07 12:00:00 UTC.

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How to Watch the Total Lunar Eclipse on March 13

The March 13–14 lunar eclipse will be an all-night affair you won’t want to miss

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 11:45:00 UTC.

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John Green on His New Nonfiction Book Everything Is Tuberculosis

Novelist John Green talks about his new nonfiction book, Everything is Tuberculosis, and the inequities in treatment for the highly infectious disease.

in Scientific American on 2025-03-07 11:00:00 UTC.

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Schneider Short 7.03.2025 – Unfortunately, the past cannot be restored

in For Better Science on 2025-03-07 06:00:00 UTC.

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His manuscript was rejected. Then he saw it published by other authors

A chemist at a university in Pakistan found a surprise when he opened an alert from ResearchGate on a newly published paper on a topic related to his own work. 

When Muhammad Kashif, a chemist at Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, looked at the paper, he noticed “substantial overlap” with an unpublished review article he had submitted to other journals. On closer inspection, he found it was indeed his paper — published by other authors. 

“I was shocked and deeply concerned,” Kashif told Retraction Watch. “My unpublished work was replicated without attribution, undermining months of effort.” 

The paper, “Bismuth-based nanoparticles and nanocomposites: synthesis and applications,” appeared in RSC Advances last December. One of the authors said he uploaded the wrong file by “mistake” when submitting to the journal, and a retraction is in progress. 

Kashif submitted his manuscript to the Archives of Advanced Engineering Science, a title of Singapore-based Bon View Publishing, in March 2024, according to emails we reviewed. He withdrew it after the first round of review, then submitted it in April to Elsevier’s Materials Today Communications, which rejected the article.  

The paper in RSC Advances was submitted in August 2024, according to the journal. The first author, Sujit Kumar, is an assistant professor in the department of electrical and electronics engineering at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering in Bengaluru, India. Kumar had reviewed Kashif’s manuscript for AAES, said managing editor Fay Ge. 

The file names of Kashif’s manuscript and one of his own were similar, Kumar told us, and he submitted the wrong paper to RSC Advances. 

“It happened because of my negligence,” Kumar said. “I assure you that this type of mistake will not be on my end in the future.” 

Russell Cox, an editor-in-chief of RSC Advances, confirmed the journal’s ethics team is investigating the paper. 

“We follow the COPE guidelines in these matters, so I am unable to share confidential information with you regarding the outcome at this stage,” Cox told us. “However, the investigation is certainly ‘active’ and I would expect a clear outcome in due course.” 

Kashif said he had hoped to publish his own manuscript in RSC Advances after the copied version was retracted, “as my work had already cleared peer review.” But he thinks the journal is taking too long to act. “Given their lack of urgency, I am now pursuing publication in a different journal that prioritizes ethical standards and timely resolutions,” he said.

“Beyond personal frustration, this raises serious ethical questions about peer review integrity and the exploitation of confidential submissions,” Kashif said. He is a “young researcher who is committed to do best for Science,” he said. “This thing really shattered my heart.” 

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in Retraction watch on 2025-03-06 20:59:04 UTC.

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NASA’s Voyager Probes Lose One Instrument Each as Power Wanes

NASA’s twin Voyager probes, which launched in 1977, are the longest-running missions to send data home. But as their power supplies wane, scientists are saying goodbye to one instrument on each spacecraft

in Scientific American on 2025-03-06 19:00:00 UTC.

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Intuitive Machines’ Athena Lander Reaches the Moon Lopsided—Just Like Its Predecessor

Despite some connection delays postlanding, the lunar lander Athena is officially set to study what lies beneath the moon’s surface over the next 10 days

in Scientific American on 2025-03-06 18:30:00 UTC.