I lost my leg on the beach
Extreme cases can confuse even trained professionals: Joanna Glengarry and Melanie Archer of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Science in Australia warn that forensic pathologists and anthropologists “need to be prepared to face a wide range of remains and objects presented to them.”
Glengarry and Archer shared their first-hand experience, in their words, of “discovering what appeared to be a severed leg on a beach and, upon examination, determining it to be a marine animal called a sea squirt.”
Write a diary Forensic Medicine, Medicine, Pathologythey give step by step details of the adventure. What is the title of the report?Marine mimicry in progress.
Holy Ghostwriter
Certainly, some are dismayed that senior department members are automatically credited as co-authors on research done by lower-ranking people (Feedback, May 11), but perhaps senior department members should be given more credit.
Reader Bob Masta writes about two doctoral students who sought his advice after he developed a procedure that greatly improved the success rate of an incredibly difficult experiment: recording signals from auditory hair cells in the inner ears of guinea pigs. [B]However, the lab's principal investigator and department head insisted on participating as authors, even though they knew nothing about the study beforehand.
“I was appalled,” Masta wrote, “but eventually came to realize that this was wise: students who were unknown in the field might have had a harder time getting published. [Their] Having a respected name on a paper gives you a lot of credibility in the field, and everyone in research expects the first author on a paper to do the actual research, with subsequent senior authors providing facilities and consultation.”
And, Masta explains, “Laboratories need grant funding to conduct research and train students, so publications that elevate the status of senior authors, who have to get grant funding, help everyone.”
The feedback we've received is that some feel that credit-grabbing corrupts the system from below. But if we're going to do it, why not do it all the way? Give credit to everyone and everyone who stands to benefit from it. Give co-author credit to all senior officials at the institutions who employ the actual researchers (deans, department chairs, vice-presidents, presidents, provosts, corporate executives, emperors, etc.).
The feedback is that these high-powered people, non-authors, should be informally known as “holy ghostwriters.”
Totally ghostwritten
Reader Max Perkins suggests another way to deal with the issue of who gets listed as an author. He writes: [a person from a] I work in a faculty position at a university in New South Wales, Australia, and I wanted to provide feedback on a case in which two graduate students from my alma mater had written their names, simply “et al,” on their office door.
“I think this speaks strongly about professors' citation metrics and perhaps also a comment on the use of citation metrics as a measure of a university's value.”
Infection failure
“Everyone is trying hard to avoid catching coronavirus, but in this study, all 35 volunteers who tried their best to get infected (with a lot of help from scientists) failed miserably,” reader Chittaranjan Andrade wrote. Lancet Microorganism.
The team that produced the report – Susan Jackson of the University of Oxford and a number of collaborators – aimed to test the efficacy of new vaccines to help people who become infected with new variants of the coronavirus long after they had been vaccinated with an earlier version of the vaccine.
The researchers struggled to complete the first major step of the project: infecting volunteers. In their paper, they wrote:Maximize the inoculum size… We were unable to induce persistent infection in seropositive individuals.”
COVID-19 has been disrupting the world for years, but now it is causing problems when it shouldn't.
Worm on turn
Not all flatworms have a tasty taste.
Lee Windsor is investigating the invasive New Guinea flatworm (Manokwari) “Has a very unpleasant astringent taste… as has been noted in other species.”
Windsor, a researcher at Australia's James Cook University, called the news “Ongoing collaboration In collaboration with Professor JL Justin of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, and Professor Roman Gastynow of the University of Szczecin in Poland, we studied invasive terrestrial planarians in France and French territories.
The bad taste lasts a long time. Windsor Manokwari He tasted it (or, as he calls it, “personal observation”) in 1994.
Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.
Do you have a story for feedback?
You can submit articles for Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week's and past Feedback can be found on our website.
Source: www.newscientist.com
