Legless on the shore
Extremities can convey confusion even to educated specialists. Joanna Glengarry and Melanie Archer on the Victorian Institute of Forensic Drugs in Australia warn that forensic pathologists and anthropologists “should be prepared to face a variety of presented remains and objects”.
Glengarry and Archer current their very own firsthand expertise – of their phrases, “a case of what appeared to be a severed foot located on a beach, which examination revealed was a marine animal known as a sea squirt (ascidian)”.
Writing within the journal Forensic Science, Drugs and Pathology, they offer step-by-step particulars of their journey. The title of their report? “Marine mimicry is afoot“.
Holy ghostwriters
Sure, some persons are dismayed when senior division members routinely get co-authorship credit score for analysis achieved by folks of decrease standing (Suggestions, 11 Might). However possibly extra credit score ought to go to stated senior members.
Reader Bob Masta writes in about two doctoral college students who requested for his recommendation after they “had developed a procedure that greatly improved success rates for ridiculously-difficult experiments attempting to record signals from auditory hair cells in the inner ear of guinea pigs… [B]ut the lab’s principal investigator and the department head insisted on inclusion as authors… even though they had no knowledge of the work ahead of time”.
“I was appalled,” writes Masta, “but eventually came around to seeing the wisdom of this. As unknowns in the field, the students might have had a hard time getting published. [Their] credibility in the field would be greatly enhanced by having respected names on the paper. And everyone in research already took it for granted that the lead authors on any paper did the actual work, while the trailing senior authors provided the facilities and usually some consultation.”
And, Masta explains, “research labs require grant money to be able to do research and train students. So publications that enhance the status of the senior authors, who have to get those grants, help everyone.”
Suggestions, unconvinced, feels that credit-grabbing injects rot-from-the-head-down-ness into the system. However when you’re going to do it, why not go the entire hog? Share credit score with everybody – everybody! – who stands to realize from it. Give co-authorship credit score to all higher-level officers (division chair, division head, vice chairman(s), president, chancellor, company board members, emperor, and so forth.) of the establishment that employs the precise researchers.
Suggestions means that these high-powers, the non-author authors, be recognized unofficially as “holy ghostwriters”.
Wholly ghosted writers
Reader Max Perkins proffers an alternate technique to take care of the who-gets-listed-as-an-author query. He writes: “As [a person from a] college division in New South Wales, Australia, I wish to inform Suggestions about two postgraduate college students at my alma mater who altered their names on the door of their workplace to learn merely ‘et al’.
“I think this spoke strongly about the Professor’s citation index, and perhaps also as a comment on the use of such as a measure of worth to the university.”
Infectious failure
“Everybody tries to not get Covid but, in this study, all 35 volunteers who tried their best to fall ill (with a lot of help from scientists) completely failed.” Reader Chittaranjan Andrade despatched Suggestions this cheerful lament after he learn a report in The Lancet Microbe.
The staff behind stated report – Susan Jackson on the College of Oxford and her quite a few collaborators – aimed to check the flexibility of recent vaccines to assist individuals who, lengthy after receiving early variations of a vaccine, obtained contaminated by new variants of the coronavirus.
The researchers had hassle finishing the challenge’s first large step: to contaminate these volunteers. Their write-up explains and complains that regardless of “escalating the inoculum dose to the maximum available… we were unable to induce sustained infection in seropositive individuals”.
Covid-19, having knocked the world off kilter for a number of years, now causes issues even when it fails to trigger issues.
Worms on the flip
Not all flatworms have a nice style.
Leigh Winsor stories that the invasive New Guinea flatworm (Platydemus manokwari) “has a most unpleasant astringent taste… just as has been noted for other species”.
Winsor, a researcher at James Prepare dinner College in Australia, printed this information as a part of his “continuing collaboration with Professor J-L Justine, Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France, and Prof Romain Gastineau, University of Szczecin, Poland, on invasive land planarians in France and in French Territories”.
Unhealthy style can linger. Winsor notes that he did the Platydemus manokwari tasting (or “pers. obs.”, as he places it) in 1994.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the journal Annals of Unbelievable Analysis. Earlier, he labored on uncommon methods to make use of computer systems. His web site is unbelievable.com.
Bought a narrative for Suggestions?
You may ship tales to Suggestions by electronic mail at suggestions@newscientist.com. Please embody your house handle. This week’s and previous Feedbacks will be seen on our web site.
