Valentin Rodionov

(1/3) An interesting case of proactive coverup by a papermill: The authors of AlSalem et al. 2024 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jwpe.2024.105928) where they replaced all of the SEM images & stating that images got mixed up in prep.. That is a false & misleading statement. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Rogue Scholar citation tracking launches to production The Rogue Scholar science blog archive uses DOIs to uniquely identify blog posts with meaningful metadata. This enables tracking citations of scholar blog posts in the scholarly literature using tradi...

Nice development at (non-profit) Rogue Scholar, which helps scholarly blogs to become part of the scholarly literature. It applies persistent identifiers (DOI, ORCID, ROR), standardized metadata (Crossref, DataCite), etc. And it now adds citation tracking
blog.front-matter.io/posts/citati...

A memo from Michelle Bulls to NIH Extramural Staff indicating that Notices of Special Interest will no longer be issues except in emergencies.

This delightful news is slowly filtering down to program staff inside NIH.

Notices of Special Interest are going to be a thing of the past...

Scaling down your chemistry to the tiny wells of a 1536 plate can certainly work, and you can get a lot done when it does. But put some time into the setup, or you can get unreliable noise for results:

Shocked, angered and appalled “I have been following the comments on PubPeer, and have been shocked, angered and appalled by the issues […] there can be no explanation for this other than systemic fraud “- Pro…

Shocked, angered and appalled
forbetterscience.com/2025/08/05/s...

First porn, now YouTube, ID checks to access the internet are creeping in.

China & Russia started this way. Now their internet is locked down: no anonymity, no dissent, total surveillance.

We are sleepwalking into total fascism. Don’t buy the “protect the kids” excuse. They want total control.

@nature.com brought an Exclusive!

White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite The White House has instructed NASA employees to destroy two major, climate change-focused satellite missions.

The White House has instructed NASA to terminate two major, climate change-focused satellite missions. They've been collecting widely-used data, providing both oil and gas companies and farmers with detailed information about the distribution of carbon dioxide and how it can affect crop health.

It never occurred to me that papermillers would *illuminate the circuit diagrams* in their garbage papers, but of course they do. Life continues to imitate 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'.

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

Way to go @reeserichardson.bsky.social

Good to see For Better Science data being heavily used by celebrated research integrity experts.
Of course, it would be better to be referenced or at least mentioned.
www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10...
Is it a special message to me when this gets cited instead?

A screenshot of a google search result for "2*pi*(8 kpc)/(220 km/s)" which is roughly the time it takes the Sun to go around the Galaxy. In the screenshot, google's calculator has popped up and parsed the expression correctly, but then returns the result 3 899 243.9 years, and answer which is off by 2 orders of magnitude.

PSA to scientists: Google calculator appears to no longer do basic unit conversion correctly!

n.b. the correct answer here is 223.4 Myr, a factor of about 60 larger than Google's answer.

🔭 🧪

Ugh, I just saw the clip of Tristan Harris telling Bill Maher that only in the last two years has AI started to demonstrate self-awareness because it blackmails people, and I just want to rip all of my hair out followed by his. None of that is true, in any sense of how we understand those words!

And we are about to do even worse with so-called "AI".

Frontiers' Research Integrity team uncovers peer review manipulation network Frontiers Research Integrity Auditing team has uncovered a network of authors and editors who conducted peer review with undisclosed conflicts of interest and w

Fox finds raccoons in henhouse.

www.frontiersin.org/news/2025/07...

You are so naive about ACS. forbetterscience.com/tag/acs/

Not hand-drawn! It is pretty clear they used a ruler.

UV-Vis Absorption up to a wavelength of 0 nm = infinite energy!!
👉 Nobel Prize or Retraction due to an 'experiment' hand-drawn by 'scientists' working in theoretical chemistry? Elsevier: please decide!

doi.org/10.1016/j.jm...

#researchintegrity #ChemSky #PiSky #CompChemSky

Royal Society right to keep Elon Musk as member, says new astronomer royal Prof Michele Dougherty, first woman to hold position, is upbeat about role of private sector in space exploration

Academics' moral compass is only money and ego. That's why they see Musk as their own.
This one would've installed Wernher von Braun as FRS. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

I am baffled by the Washington Post's sanitized framing of this story. The Supreme Court is clearly going to "rule on the law" -- that is what courts do! The news is that SCOTUS signaled that it might gut the VRA entirely.

Compare WaPo and Democracy Docket's headlines. Which source do you trust?

Not even a Lada. That looks like the venerable VAZ 2101 "Zhiguli", sometimes referred to as the "kopeyka". Lada was a later brand name for mostly the same car, especially its export variant. Fun fact: in most cases you could not buy one even if you could afford it.

Image posted by the GOP to support ‘making America’s auto industry great again’. The image is of Trump, wearing a MAGA hat, with both fists upraised, and resembling nothing so much as a constipated Mole Rat. The car behind him in the image is an actual Lada.

There has to be a progressive mole in the GOP’s press dept. This is the image they posted on X to support ‘making the US auto industry great again’. Yes, that IS a Lada behind the Dayglo Fuckwit 🤣🤣🤣💦. That model was based on the Fiat that my mum was driving in around 1970. It wasn’t great then…

“It’s just a tool! People used to hate on photoshop too.”

Take away my photoshop, take away my tablets, I can still draw. Take away your plagiarism machine and what are you gonna do? Shout prompts at me?

I think we may already have a candidate. If you’re willing to add good glothing to your list of things that make for high quality of life

bsky.app/profile/diew...

Masked ICE agents hauled workers out of a pizza place in my Massachusetts town today.

Do I feel safer? No, the opposite. Do I feel wealthier? Not a bit. Do I feel that justice is being served? No, not that, either.

I’m mostly infuriated by armed, masked men roaming around and grabbing people.

Stalin ass shit

In preparation of today's mark-up of the NIH appropriations bill in the Senate and other activities, I sent this note to Senator Susan Collins' office.

1/2

My prediction: per-publication cost ceilings will finally incentivize journals to make individual publications shorter!

Why would a journal accept $3,000 for a publication with a 90-page supplement when they could split it into four different publications published back-to-back and get $12k?