Science Resizes Megalodon

They made it bigger! At Palaeontologia electronica: Otodus megalodon vertebrae from Denmark, "Rediscovery of the associated gigantic vertebrae of the extinct megatooth shark, Otodus megalodon, from the Upper Miocene Gram Formation in Denmark, and comments on its paleobiological significance and the maximum possible size of the species."

Abstract:

The extinct megatooth shark, Otodus megalodon, is an iconic Neogene shark that may have reached as much as 24.3 m in total length (TL). The 24.3 m TL estimate was partly based on published photographs of an associated set of vertebrae from the Upper Miocene Gram Formation in Gram, Denmark, some of which allegedly had a diameter of 23 cm. Here, we report on the rediscovery of the specimen, which was thought to be lost, confirming the reported maximum diameter of 23 cm.

 

Those vertebrae co-occurred with remains of a cetorhinid (basking shark), but the morphology and size assessments of the vertebrae suggest that they belong to O. megalodon, with the possibility that the cetorhinid remains represent stomach content of the megatooth shark. The vertebral specimen of O. megalodon was also used to decipher its ontogenetic growth patterns, and this study suggests that this specific individual had the potential to grow even slightly larger than 24.3 m. However, the growth model presented in this work must be viewed as highly tentative. Nevertheless, the O. megalodon specimen described herein is significant because it represents the largest shark vertebral specimen known to date, and quite possibly even the largest non-tetrapod vertebrae ever recorded. Ultimately, a more complete skeletal specimen of O. megalodon, ideally with associated teeth, is required for any further discussion on the maximum possible size of the fossil species.

For those reluctant to use Euroweenie units 24.3 m equals 79.7 ft, and 23 cm equals about 9 inches. That's a big fish. Our biggest Meg tooth is just about 4.5 inches, although the world record is about 7 inches. We have a vertebra that might be a Meg, (it's hard to be sure, but at least it was a large lamnid shark), that's about 3 inches.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Getting Strapped up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

The Monday Morning Stimulus

 With the help of the triple threat Sarah Harris:

Kazinform, Scientists convert coffee waste into premium fuel in under two minutes

Researchers from the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources and partner organizations reported that wet spent coffee grounds can be transformed directly into high-quality biochar using a flame plasma process, eliminating the need for the energy-intensive drying steps typically required in biomass recycling. 

Coffee consumption generates more than 10 million tons of spent coffee grounds worldwide each year. Most of this waste ends up in landfills or is incinerated, contributing to environmental problems and greenhouse gas emissions.

The new technique uses a high-temperature flame plasma jet fueled by liquefied petroleum gas. The process heats coffee grounds containing about 55% moisture to temperatures of roughly 800°C to 900°C, rapidly evaporating water and converting the material into biochar. Unlike conventional methods, which often require lengthy drying and processing times, the conversion is completed in just 90 seconds.

According to the study, the resulting biochar reached a heating value of 29 megajoules per kilogram, about 33% higher than untreated coffee grounds and comparable to, or even exceeding, the energy content of standard anthracite coal. Researchers said the process reduced the original mass of the coffee grounds by more than 83% while producing a sulfur-free fuel that could generate fewer harmful emissions when burned.

One of the key discoveries was that the moisture naturally present in the coffee grounds actually helped improve the process. As water rapidly turned to steam under the intense heat, it created what researchers described as a "popcorn effect," forming a highly porous structure inside the biochar and increasing its quality as a fuel.

Very interesting, but I wonder why they aren't telling us the net heat value after subtracting the energy input from the "flame plasma process." Plasmas take power.

Science is Dead, Long Live Science

 Leslie Eastman at LI, Proposed OMB Rules Could Reshape How US Science Is Funded and Published, "Laughably, unhappy scientists complain proposed grant system overhaul could politicize research funding — as if that weren’t already happening."

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is proposing major changes to the rules that govern how federal grants, cooperative agreements, and other financial assistance are managed across the government. The goals are to increase oversight of how taxpayer money is used, align awards with current law and administration policy, and reduce what OMB views as unnecessary burdens on recipients.

These changes apply to all federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The 412-page behemoth certainly has the potential to shake up the science-industrial complex that has gutted American trust in science to a meager 36%.

Among the action items embedded in this OMB plan, the new rules would allow agencies to terminate awards if they conclude that a grant “does not effectuate program goals, federal agency priorities, or the national interest as they exist at the time of the termination,” and also under any additional termination provisions written into award terms. This substantially widens discretion beyond classic noncompliance or performance failures.

Given the grants that continued to fund Wuhan bat virus research, the ability to slash funds for dangerous research should be viewed as a positive.

The proposed rules would also forbid spending federal funds on publication costs (e.g., journal publication fees), which is a significant departure from longstanding practice and directly affects the dissemination of research funded by federal grants.

I was utterly unaware of any policy mandating that agencies would be force to continue  funding work that they no longer believed was important to their mission. In fact, once, a grant on which I was a PI was delayed for over a year because the agency (guess who) decided they would rather have a satellite than our project. To be fair, we eventually did get the money, or at least most of it.

I'm sure the fear here is that the Trump administration will cancel a bunch of grants issued during the Biden administration that do not conform to their vision. There are lots of examples, but prominent among them would be climate science. For many years, one the magic phrases that helped get funding was "global warming" (or "climate change"). A lot of investigators who promiscuously promised to link their work to "climate change" may be regretting that choice.

The Monday Morning Stimulus

Med XPress, Coffee's sweet spot may help mental health in the long run

After analyzing coffee habits and the mental health status of over 400,000 men and women, they found that drinking two to three cups of coffee a day, which is considered a moderate intake, has been associated with the lowest risk of anxiety and depression.

The protective effect of coffee intake against mood disorders was stronger in men compared to women. The findings are published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

Hat tip to Insty. On the other hand, maybe they're confusing cause and effect. Maybe depressed people are more like to either drink less or more less than the optimum.

Linked as Blog of the Day at Pirate's Cove in If All You See… The Wombat has Rule Five Sunday: More Hot Girls & Hot Cars up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

Can Oysters Save the Crabs?

Probably not, but they might help a little on the margin. A study via the Bay Journal, Oysters reduce spread of disease among blue crabs, study shows.

With no wind to speak of, the water was calm along a pier on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. And with no clouds to speak of, the sun beat down on Xuqing Chen as she filled a mesh cage with oysters on a hot summer day in 2021. It was one of many days in the field for Chen, then a graduate student at the Virginia Institute for Marine Sciences (VIMS), as she took part in a study that concluded oysters likely do more than improve water quality. They can also save the lives of blue crabs — by feeding on a waterborne parasite that is often deadly to crabs in the saltier parts of the Chesapeake Bay and coastal Eastern Shore. “Our study shows that [oysters] actually have a hidden ecosystem service that hasn’t really been well studied,” said Jeff Shields, a VIMS professor and principal investigator for the study.

The researchers examined how oysters could filter out the parasite, Hematodinium perezi, which kills countless blue crabs every spring through fall. According to other VIMS research, the loss to the Virginia fishery may exceed $500,000 per year.

The H. perezi is most lethal to blue crabs during the summer and is found mostly in salty coastal bays, but the parasite is also present at the mouth of the Chesapeake. Crabs infect each other as they congregate in their underwater grass habitats.

 

The study, published in January in Ecology, a journal of the Ecological Society of America, was designed to test the hypothesis that oysters are reducing the parasites by feeding on them.

Researchers put parasite-free juvenile crabs in the middle compartment of a rectangular mesh cage, sandwiched between live oysters in the outer compartments. The bag was then lowered into the water in a modified crab pot for a prescribed period. Another bag, with no oysters in it, was simultaneously deployed. A third bag was deployed with the crabs sandwiched between oyster shells only — to rule out the possibility that shells alone might benefit the crabs.

The team placed the bags in Cobb Bay, South Bay and in Oyster, VA, for one to two weeks at a time. After nine trials between 2017 and 2023, the researchers tested almost 2,500 crabs.

The research team also replicated the experiment in a lab where they could control more variables and determine if the oysters were eating the parasites as they left the infected crabs.

The 10 trials in the lab showed that the oysters removed 60% of the parasites from the water per hour on average. In the field, where there are more variables, the crabs sandwiched between oysters were almost one-third less likely to become infected.

So, oysters can filter out and eat the Hematodinium parasite that causes disease in Blue Crabs. That is entirely reasonable since Hematodinium is actually an algae, and that's most of what oysters eat in the normal course of business. It is then, not surprising that in lab conditions, and field conditions manipulated to maximize the amount of oyster filtering around captive crabs, that oysters may decrease the infection rate. Unlike, many experiments where artificial conditions may not be fairly replicated in the field, this one may be in part because crabs tend to prefer oyster beds, because there are lots of things there for crabs to eat, including oysters, which they will crack open and eat. And unlike people, crabs don't respect the 3 inch size limit, preferring the smaller spat as easier to open.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Out Like A Lamb ready on time and under budget at The Other McCain.

Winter Weather Delays Chesapeake Crab Survey

Chesapeake Bay Mag, Winter Crab Surveys Delayed Due to Freezes

Finally, daytime temperatures are moderating after longer than usual sub-freezing snaps this winter and the ice floes are disappearing. That means the crews from Maryland’s and Virginia’s natural resources departments who conduct the annual winter crab dredge surveys have some catching up to do.

“We had a couple of weeks where we just couldn’t get out because of the weather and that put a damper on our survey,” says Mandy Bromilow, the Maryland Department of Natural Resource’s blue crab program manager. “There were days when the ice was in the slip and we couldn’t even get the boat out.”

There were other days when high winds made it too difficult to handle the boats and the dredging equipment. And crews in Virginia had the same problems, she added.

“After that nine, 10 days of cold, the weather did a complete180 on us and we had temperatures in the 50s, but that brought that wind out of the south and we couldn’t go out and work in that,” says Chris Walstrum, a fisheries biologist with Maryland’s DNR. He estimates they’re about three weeks behind where they should be because of the weather. “So, we’re kind of behind the eight ball now.”

 

Those cold snaps may have had some effects on the crabs as well, DNR’s Bromilow says. “It’s too soon to say how the storms have affected the crabs, but in past years these kinds of cold snaps tend to increase morbidity.”

Walstrum says they haven’t seen anything “out of the ordinary” yet. “But there’s still a lot of winter to go.”

According to Bromilow, the crews from both states are a little more than halfway through sampling now and Maryland crews are aiming for sites in the Patuxent River and some open bay sites as well. But the weather delays don’t mean they won’t finish by the end of March, she added.

“We have built into the survey some buffer time. We just won’t be able to finish as early as we would.”

Some results from the MD crab survey: 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Because I Can up and at 'em at The Other McCain.

It's the Sun, Stupid!

IT'S THE SUN, STUPID!
Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon's new brilliant (and funny) film, exposing the CO2 climate scam.@WillieSoon8 @TomANelson @Martin_Durkin pic.twitter.com/8gHTpoRwr5

— GorillaScience (@WatchGorillaSci) January 21, 2026

I Suspected As Much

 The Guardian, ‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body

High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell”.

Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years.

 

However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked.

The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics.

There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies.

 

“Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024.

However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.”

One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.

What we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. My own field of science (trace element biogeochemistry) was plagued with problems of false positives. It turned out that to get accurate trace element measurement require fanatical attention to anti-contamination  efforts.

A particularly telling example is the saga of Fritz Haber his attempt to pay off Germany's WWI debt by extracting gold from seawater. Now, Fritz Haber is a giant among chemists. His development of the  Haber process for making ammonia from nitrogen gas and methane allows mankind to sustain it's current population. Of course, for him it was a method to make nitric acid for gun powder and explosives, but it did earn him a Nobel Prize.

His preliminary attempts to extract gold from seawater suggest that it might be a viable method to get gold and pay off post-Versailles war debt. Via Google AI, "The German Atlantic Expedition (1925–1927) on the research vessel Meteor aimed to study the South Atlantic, famously utilizing sonar to map the seabed and revealing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Chemist Fritz Haber initiated this effort, hoping to extract gold from seawater to pay off Germany's post-WWI war debts." Of course, it turned out that the initial attempts were false positives, and that it didn't work on a large scale. Seawater contains so little dissolved gold it is almost impossible to measure, even today. 

We relearned those lessons in the 1980s when reliable measurement of some elements in seawater began to be made. I assume the people who measure low levels of organic contaminants went through the same learning curve. 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Extra Value Meal ready for your clicks at The Other McCain.

The Monday Morning Stimulus

With a little help from Julia Lescova:

Science daily, Newly discovered coffee compounds beat diabetes drug in lab tests

Roasted coffee may do more than wake you up—it could help control blood sugar. Researchers discovered several new coffee compounds that inhibit α-glucosidase, a key enzyme linked to type 2 diabetes. Some of these molecules were even more potent than a common anti-diabetic drug. The study also introduced a faster, greener way to uncover health-boosting compounds in complex foods.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: But First, Coffee awaiting your digital amusement at The Other McCain.

Science Unsettled

 From Leslie Eastman at LI, Nature Journal Retracts Climate Alarm Study After Data Errors Surface

2025 has been a very bad year for climate cultists, but a great year for those who value personal freedom and efficient, affordable energy.

First, President Donald Trump declared victory over the climate hoax industry. The New York Times declared defeat in what it termed the “Information War”, but which I term “victory of real science over political narrative”.

Now, one of the papers used by climate cultists in academia has been retracted after serious data flaws were exposed.

In April 2024, the prestigious journal Nature released a study finding that climate change would cause far more economic damage by the end of the century than previous estimates had suggested. The conclusion grabbed headlines and citations around the world, and was incorporated in risk management scenarios used by central banks.

On Wednesday, Nature retracted it, adding to the debate on the extent of climate change’s toll on society.

The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results. If Uzbekistan were excluded, they found, the damages would look similar to earlier research. Instead of a 62 percent decline in economic output by 2100 in a world where carbon emissions continue unabated, global output would be reduced by 23 percent.

I question the whole idea of predicting the impacts of "climate change" on the economy many years in the future. As Yogi Berra said "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future".

Tattoo Tuesday - Christmas Time is Here By Golly

Disapproval would be folly:

RV Travel, Study suggests having multiple tattoos lowers melanoma risk

People with more than one tattoo session may have a decreased risk of the skin cancer melanoma—with one key caveat, according to research from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah.

Although RVtravel.com readers, who are generally 55 years and older, have fewer tattoos than younger people, the results are worth noting. RVers, being out and about more than the general public, likely sustain more sun damage than their stay-at-home peers, which increases skin cancer risks.

A team led by Jennifer Doherty, Huntsman Cancer Institute investigator, co-leader of the Cancer Control and Population Sciences Program, and professor of population health sciences at the University of Utah, evaluated 7,000 Utahns and found that having two or more tattoo sessions decreased the risk of both invasive and in situ melanoma. In situ melanoma means the cancer cells remain on the skin’s surface and are more easily removed.

But the researchers also found that participants with only one tattoo session were more likely to have melanoma, especially in situ. The reasons why that may be the case are speculative, and more research is needed to understand this disparate pattern.

Remember, more than half of medical research can't be replicated. 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Old Trucks & Young Babes (Part 2 of n) up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

New Study Says Sea Level Not Rising Faster

I prefer OTP's headline, Study Finds Rise Of Global Sea Levels Wildly Overstated, to the headline at NYPo, Blockbuster sea level study may turn climate change orthodoxy on its head

Global sea levels have not continued to rise at the rates predicted by many scientists — and there is no evidence that climate change has contributed to any such acceleration, a new first-of-its-kind study has claimed.

The research found that the average sea level rise in 2020 was only around 1.5mm per year, or 6 inches per century, according to the paper’s authors, Dutch engineering consultant Hessel Voortman and independent researcher Rob de Vos.

“This is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media,” Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

 

Voortman was shocked that no researcher before had performed an analysis of real-world local data.

The study was also unlike any of its kind in that it was carried out with no external funding, said Voortman, who has spent the last 30 years as a hydraulic engineer working with flood protection and coastal-infrastructure adaptation projects around the world.

In 2023, Voortman published a bombshell paper claiming that sea level rise across the low-lying Dutch coast hadn’t accelerated. 

It's getting deeper!

No researcher before had done the analysis and published it for several reasons. First, most research is done at the behest of the government, with the unwritten goal of finding something that needs regulating, so the government can accumulate more power. Second, most scientists have internalized that, and believe, against available evidences, that sea level rise is accelerating. Third, there is a bias in scientific literature against papers that prove the null hypothesis. How boring is that? 

“From practice, I had already encountered the situation that sea level projections were exceeding sea level observations,” he said.

He decided to put his theory to the test worldwide, looking at 200 different tide-gauge stations with at least 60 years of data to study.

“For the vast majority of the stations, the differences between the two curves were not significant,” Voortman said, adding that this indicated no detectable acceleration in sea level rises.

The data is widely available, and though I haven't searched for it, I think I recall a post by Willis Eisenbach at WUWT that did just that, and came up with the same answer. I like to pull out the long tidal gauge record from Baltimore:

I know, 3.2mm is more than the world average of 1.5 mm, but subsidence in the mid Atlantic region is well established. 

Science is Dead, Long Live Science

AI view of a scientist
if only

Leslie Eastman at LI, Paper Mills, Sham Journals, and Stolen Reputation: Fraud and Greed are Poisoning Science

A major study published by Northwestern University this August, entitled “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly,” revealed that organized science fraud networks are extensive, resilient, and growing rapidly. The investigation analyzed retracted publications, image manipulation, and metadata across databases such as PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, revealing coordinated global efforts to flood the literature with fake research.

The scale of the problem is staggering and is perhaps the biggest crisis facing real science today.

By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, the researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities, which systematically work together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing.

The problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications. The authors argue these findings should serve as a wake-up call to the scientific community, which needs to act before the public loses confidence in the scientific process.

 

The authors investigated how systematic publication manipulation (especially involving organized entities like paper mills and brokers) represents a mounting threat to scientific integrity.

The findings were astonishing. The analysis demonstrated that there are large, interconnected networks of authors and editors collaborating across multiple journals to facilitate falsified activity, often evading detection and interventions such as retractions or journal de-indexing (in which an academic journal is removed from a bibliographic database). Fraudsters strategically target specific journals and subfields that are vulnerable to exploitation. Their operations rapidly adapt by “journal hopping,” whereby they switch to new journals when the old ones are deindexed or scrutinized.

The authors go into detail about the disturbing developments surrounding “paper mills”, designed to give paying contributors scientific prestige that is not earned through actual research and original analysis.

Cheating is inevitable when the rewards for cheating are high, the probability of being caught and and the potential penalty is small. There's not too much you can do about the rewards, nor would you want to, but it would be possible to dramatically increase the possibility of being detected (AI might prove useful), and work making the consequences of being caught more severe. 

The Wombat has posted Rule 5 Sunday: Karin Hart at the usual time and place.

The Monday Morning Stimulus

Daily Coffee News cites a Study: Moderate Coffee Drinking May Slow Cognitive Decline in Older Adults

A new long-term study found that drinking one to three cups of coffee per day may be the sweet spot for older adults seeking to prevent cognitive decline.

Published July 21 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, the longitudinal prospective cohort study followed more than 8,700 dementia-free adults aged 60 to 85.2 over a period of just over nine years, using data from the UK Biobank cohort.

After placing study participants into three groups based on daily coffee and tea consumption habits — never, moderate (1-3 cups) or high (4 or more cups) — researchers tracked cognitive performance using several tests of memory, reasoning and reaction time.

The most consistent finding was that people who drank a moderate amount of coffee, or a moderate or high amount of tea, experienced a slower decline in a specific type of reasoning ability known as fluid intelligence, which tends to diminish with age.

People who drank 4 or more cups of coffee experienced the greatest decline in fluid intelligence, according to the Australia-based research team.

Interestingly, tea drinkers started off with slightly lower fluid intelligence scores at baseline, but their decline over time was slower — suggesting a potential protective effect.

I drink 2-3 cups, the term cup being loosely defined.

The Wombat has Rule Five Sunday: The End of Summer up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

The Monday Morning Stimulus

UC Davis College of Engineering reports New Research Shows Roasted Coffee Beans Follow a ‘Universal Color Curve’

New research from the Coffee Center in the University of California, Davis, College of Engineering is featured in the publications, Daily Coffee News, Global Coffee Report, Phys.org and Sprudge. The articles point to the potentially game-changing nature of the research for establishing industry standards for defining light, medium and dark roasts based on color.

Most coffee drinkers consider labels of “light,” “medium” and “dark” to determine whether they would like to purchase it. These labels are typically perceived by the color of the roasted beans. Even though color is a key indicator of consumer preference, surprisingly, little research has investigated how the temperature and time of roasting coffee affect the color development. Additionally, definitions of “light,” “medium” and “dark” roast levels vary widely from roaster to roaster, often leading to confusion among consumers.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, reveals that regardless of origin and roast profile, coffee bean color always maps onto a “universal color curve” when plotted in the L*a*b* color space. Additionally, the coffee beans consistently exhibited the same color values at significant roast milestones, including color change, first crack and second crack.

I have no idea what this means. Anyway, we mostly drink medium roast. 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Doughnut Dolly up on time and under budget.

Science is Dead, Long Live Science

At Retraction Watch Frontiers to retract 122 articles, links thousands in other publishers’ journals to “unethical” network

The publisher Frontiers has begun retracting a batch of 122 articles across five journals after an investigation found a network of authors and editors engaged in “unethical actions” such as manipulating citations and reviewing papers without disclosing conflicts of interest.

The publisher’s research integrity team has identified more than 4,000 articles linked to the network in journals owned by seven other companies, according to a company statement. The team said it is willing to share details and the methodology of their investigation with other publishers upon request. The company is a member of the STM Hub, a platform publishers use to share such information.

As the publishing industry comes to grips with its paper mill problem, many firms have issued retractions in bulk. Frontiers retracted a batch of 40 in 2023, and a dozen the year before.

The latest tranche of retractions began to appear July 28. By our count, at least 25 were posted that day. According to one of the notices, which are identical for each paper, the publisher’s investigation “identified this article as one for which the integrity of the peer review process has been undermined, resulting in the loss of confidence in the article’s findings.”

The investigation “was not able to determine whether all authors, editors, or reviewers were aware of or involved in the misconduct, but this misconduct was significant enough to determine that the scientific integrity of the article cannot be guaranteed,” the notices state.

A list of the forthcoming retractions Frontiers provided us names one paper from Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, six from Frontiers in Public Health, 29 from Frontiers in Energy Research, 33 from Frontiers in Environmental Science, and 53 from Frontiers in Psychology. Most were published in 2022.

The investigation began after a reader noted undisclosed conflicts of interest in the peer review of a single paper, according to the statement. PubPeer user “Desmococcus antarctica” has posted comments on some of the papers to be retracted, identifying instances in which an author and reviewer had previously coauthored a paper together.

After the first tip, the research integrity team began investigating all the authors’ previous submissions, publications, and coauthor networks, the publisher’s statement said.

“As the investigation proceeded, it became clear that a broad and sophisticated network of about 35 authors were potentially colluding over a very large number of journals and published papers, a fraction of which were published by Frontiers,” according to the statement.

Frontiers has an artificial intelligence review system for submitted manuscripts, which now includes verification of the reviewers’ and handling editors’ conflict of interest statements, the company said.

Somebody once said “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

Science is Dead, Long Live Science

AI Scientist

From Dave Strom at Hat Hair, Medical Journals Flooded With AI Generated 'Research' wen Gregorian@OwenGregorian

Low-quality papers based on public health data are flooding the scientific literature | Miryam Naddaf, Nature

The appearance of thousands of formulaic biomedical studies has been linked to the rise of text-generating AI tools.

Data from five large open-access health databases are being used to generate thousands of poor-quality, formulaic papers, an analysis has found. Its authors say that the surge in publications could indicate the exploitation of these databases by people using large language models (LLMs) to mass-produce scholarly articles, or even by paper mills — companies that churn out papers to order.

The findings, posted as a preprint on medRxiv on 9 July1, follow an earlier study2 that highlighted an explosion of such papers that used data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The latest analysis flags a rising number of studies featuring data from other large health databases, including the UK Biobank and the US Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), which documents the side effects of drugs.

 

Between 2021 and 2024, the number of papers using data from these databases rose from around 4,000 to 11,500 — around 5,000 more papers than expected on the basis of previous publication trends.

The study’s authors warn that a large number of these papers — many of which have repetitive, template-like titles — are likely to be of low quality and could flood the scientific literature. Their analysis is intended as “an early warning system … so that peer reviewers, editors and researchers can understand where the vulnerabilities in the system lie”, says co-author Matt Spick, a biomedical scientist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.

Unexpected growth

Spick and his colleagues analysed changes in publication counts, title wording and author affiliations for papers that were based on data from 34 open-access health databases. The team used an algorithm to predict the growth in the numbers of papers expected for each data set from 2014 to 2024 — a period during which text-generating LLM tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini became mainstream.

When they compared their predictions with actual publication rates, the researchers identified six data sets that had significantly exceeded the growth rates predicted by the algorithm. All but one also showed a rise in the number of papers with ‘template-like’ titles. These data sets were NHANES, UK Biobank, FAERS, the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study and the Finnish genetic database FinnGen. By 2024, the number of papers using FinnGen data grew by nearly 15 times from 2021, for example, while those using FAERS increased by nearly 4 times and UK Biobank by 2.4 times over the same period.

The researchers also uncovered some dubious papers, which often linked complex health conditions to a single variable. One paper used Mendelian randomization — a technique that helps to determine whether a particular health risk factor causes a disease — to study whether drinking semi-skimmed milk could protect against depression, whereas another looked into how education levels affect someone’s chances of developing a hernia after surgery.

“A lot of those findings might be unsafe, and yet they’re also accessible to the public, and that really worries me,” says Spick.

“This whole thing undermines the trust in open science, which used to be a really non-controversial thing,” adds Csaba Szabó, a pharmacologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

 

Broad perspective

Igor Rudan, a global-health researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Global Health, praises the study for having “systematically addressed this problem in the entirety of the scientific literature”. “We need to understand this issue better. From the perspective of a single journal, you cannot do that,” he adds.

Rudan says that, in 2022, Journal of Global Health editors noticed an unusual rise in submissions for papers that used open-access data sets, including the UK Biobank, GBD and NHANES. In 2023 and 2024, these manuscripts constituted 10% and 15% respectively of all submissions to the journal. That has now risen to nearly 20%, and the journal is receiving manuscripts on these databases almost daily, he adds.

In response, the journal introduced guidelines earlier this month for researchers submitting research on open-access data sets. These require authors to declare how many papers they published in the last three years that analysed such data sets, disclose the use of artificial intelligence in preparing manuscripts and explain how they rule out false positives in their results.

Read more: https://archive.is/1qURI

The scientific literature system relies heavily on trust. Editors and peer reviewers are by and large, scientists in their real life, and article editing and checking is an unpaid add on to their day job, and they don't have the time or motivation to look deeply for signs of fabrication. 

The motivation from fabrication is obvious, in a "publish or perish" culture there is ample reason to skip the hard parts of actually doing the work and going straight to the write up. Now that we have LLM to do the writing, too, it was only a matter of time until those scientists willing to cheat adopted them. Using them has become a chronic problem in college; well, these scientists were all students once. 

The Wombat has Rule Five Sunday: The Ghost of Safeguard-chan Watches Over Us up and at 'em at The Other McCain.

A Chesapeake Bay Prehistory Lesson

The rock formation at the North Carolina site showing impacts

 from the ancient tsunami, with lines superimposed to distinguish

 layers. The reddish layer includes plinthite, followed below by

 ash and crushed rock material.

 A couple of articles I've had sitting in tabs for a while: WHRO, Geologists uncover new evidence from ancient asteroid that hit the Chesapeake Bay

Almost a decade ago, retired consulting geologist Bob Ganis was investigating some fossils in Moore County, N.C. when he got a call from a local property owner nearby. 

A pipeline was set to be constructed through the edge of her property called Paint Hill Farm, and she wondered if Ganis might like to come investigate the temporary trench as part of his research. Ganis accepted the offer and it became “one of the most strange days of my life,” he said.

He took a look at the rock layers exposed about 10 feet deep and was “totally baffled.” What he saw didn’t align with his geological understanding of the region. “I had no idea what it was, and no reports of this kind of geology were available to understand what it was,” he said.

Thus began a yearslong quest to get to the bottom of the mystery trapped in sediment. The first piece of the puzzle was determining the age of the rock layers in question.

Ganis said he found fossilized shark teeth nearby and worked with peers who helped date them to the late Eocene era, which lasted from about 56 to 34 million years ago. Next Ganis connected with Ralph Willoughby with the South Carolina Geological Survey, and described the mysterious sediment layers. They methodically went through the rock beds to try and explain each within the geological context of the region. “When we get to the top, this explanation of all this rubble at the top, we're still scratching our heads,” Ganis said. “‘What is this stuff?’”

One day, looking at photos from the trench site, “a light bulb goes off,” he said. “It struck us (that) this is a tsunami deposit.” There was no geological history to explain why such a deposit would be there, except for one: the meteoroid strike up in Virginia on that fateful day 35 million years ago.

The asteroid, moving at about 44,000 miles per hour, was about 2 to 3 miles wide and blasted an enormous crater into the continental shelf of modern day Virginia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Much of the crater is still underwater in the bay, which is why it took until recent decades for scientists to discover. The circular outline of the impact in Hampton Roads includes the bottom half of the Eastern Shore, northern edge of Norfolk and eastern outskirts of the Peninsula and Middle Peninsula.

Like any object that lands in water, the asteroid caused a big splash – a giant tsunami likely thousands of feet high, “the kind of tsunami that the world rarely sees,” Ganis said.It likely washed over the Blue Ridge Mountains and swept across the Southeast – maybe even over the Atlantic Ocean to lap at the shores of Africa and Europe, he said.

Scientists described such a wide-reaching tsunami when they first investigated the Chesapeake Bay impact crater but no one had found actual remains of it. Ganis’ team homed in on the tsunami as a likely explanation for the Paint Hill rock formation, but needed more evidence to prove it. The bottom layer featured charcoal, natural glass and other rock fragments; materials you would expect to fly out of the impact, Ganis said. It also had the hallmarks of a “tremendously hot blast.” Another layer contained ash from the explosion.

A modern Great White Shark tooth

Moving forward a few million years, to the Southern Maryland Chronic,  Calvert Fossils Reveal Shark Evolution

Fossil discoveries along Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs reveal that ancestors of the great white shark, dating back 15 million years, consumed marine mammals like dolphins and whales despite lacking the serrated teeth of modern great whites (Carcharodon carcharias), according to a study published on June 27, 2025. The findings, led by Dr. Stephen J. Godfrey, curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum, challenge previous assumptions about the diet of the Miocene Epoch shark Carcharodon hastalis.

A C. hastalis tooth I found recently

 

Modern great white sharks use boldly serrated, triangular teeth to slice energy-rich marine mammals, such as seals and dolphins, into bite-sized pieces. In contrast, Carcharodon hastalis, an ancestor from 15 million years ago, had comparably sized but unserrated teeth. Scientists long assumed this species primarily ate smaller prey, like fish, due to the lack of serrations. However, two fossilized vertebrae—one from a small dolphin and another likely from a small baleen whale—found along the fossil-rich Calvert Cliffs, contain embedded, unserrated teeth from Carcharodon hastalis. These fossils confirm that the sharks fed on marine mammals before serrated teeth evolved. The discoveries suggest that feeding on large prey with unserrated teeth may have driven the evolution of serrated cutting edges in later species. An intermediate species, Carcharodon hubbelli, now extinct, developed lightly serrated teeth, bridging the gap to the modern great white’s steak-knife-like dentition. The study, published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, involved researchers from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Materials Science and Engineering, and syGlass, which used virtual reality to visualize a 3D scan of one embedded tooth.

One fossilized vertebra was CT-scanned at Johns Hopkins University, revealing the precise positioning of the shark tooth within the bone. The 3D visualization, processed using syGlass’s virtual reality engine, provided detailed insights into the predation event. These analyses confirmed the teeth’s pointed crowns penetrated the vertebrae, indicating active predation or scavenging by Carcharodon hastalis on marine mammals.

C. hastalis teeth are among the best treasures from the beach, not as rare as Megalodon, for sure, but rare enough that finding one makes it a pretty good day on the beach. The Miocene seas would have have been pretty terrifying, between Megalodon, the more common hastalis,and the ancestor of todays Tiger Shark, not to mention some seriously toothed whales, including  Squalodon and Livyatan.

Pennsylvania Lad Tackles Major Bay Problem

Lancaster Online reports Lancaster County science fair champ's biodegradable fishing lure earns international award

A Lancaster County science fair champion has earned international honors for developing a fishing lure that won’t contribute to the problem of plastic pollution in waterways.

Hempfield High School junior Ethan Albright won third place last month in the materials science category at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Columbus, Ohio, for his project “Reel Problems. Reel Solutions: Combating Microplastics in Aquatic Ecosystems with Biodegradable Fishing Lures.” The same project took first in the earth and environmental science category at the North Museum Science & Engineering Fair in March.

 

During the awards presentation in Columbus, Albright said he had an inkling that maybe he’d secure fourth place, so when a competitor was named the fourth-place winner, he lost hope of receiving an award at all. “I heard my name, and I just threw my hands on my head,” Albright said. “I was superduper surprised.” He was joined by Warwick High School senior Ansh Dwivedi, North Museum’s 2025 grand champion, in competing among 1,657 students from 63 countries from May 10-12.

For his project, Albright developed an entirely biodegradable and edible fishing lure that is similar to a traditional lure. Albright said the total cost to manufacture and package the biodegradable lure in biodegradable packaging comes to $1.70 per pack of 10.

Which is about a quarter of what similar commercial baits would cost. 

The worm-shaped biodegradable lure could substitute for traditional soft plastic fishing lures that tend to break off the hooks of anglers and sink to the bottom of waterways, degrading into microplastics over time, according to a description of Albright’s project on the International Science Fair website.

The lure is made from a “biopolymer hydrogel recipe” using sodium alginate, calcium lactate, gelatin, vegetable glycerin, cornstarch, distilled water and natural coloring (for cosmetics), according to Albright’s project description.

Soft plastic lures get a lot of use in Chesapeake Bay. Trollers often use big paddle tail shad baits in their umbrella rigs. Individual plastic baits range in size from about 1 to 0  inches or more. They come in a wide variety of shapes and colors, and even plastic mixes, ranging from softish Bass Assassins to the much firmer Bass Kandy Delights, and even the soft and stretchy Z-Man baits, which will stand up to even the dreaded teeth of Bluefish.

As for them being a major environmental concern? I don't see it. I occasionally find one or two on the beach, but much less that tampon inserters. When I use them on a boat, the used, torn plastics get saved for trash, although, to be fair, Bluefish chop off and consume (maybe) a fair number. 

I'd be willing to try them, for the right price.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: The Almost Perfect Picture ready and willing to collect clicks.

What Did Megalodon Eat?

Georgia in the Jaws of Death 
at the Smithsonian

Pretty much whatever it wanted. Science Alert, Giant Megalodon's Prey Finally Revealed, And It's Not What We Thought

Megalodon, the terror of the Neogene, dominated its giant shark niche for just 20 million years before it disappeared from the world's oceans. And, during that time, it hunted anything and everything that crossed its path. It didn't distinguish: if it was large enough to be a snack, megalodon (Odotus megalodon) partook. Scientists have reached that conclusion after studying the teeth of modern sharks, and comparing them to the fossilized teeth of megalodon, almost all we have left of the extinct fish today. This contradicts the theory that the main prey of megalodon was whales. Certainly megalodon could and did eat whales – but its diet as a whole was far more opportunistic.

"Our study tends rather to draw a picture of megalodon as an ecologically versatile generalist," says geoscientist Jeremy McCormack of Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. "Megalodon was by all means flexible enough to feed on marine mammals and large fish, from the top of the food pyramid as well as lower levels – depending on availability."

Georgia with her very real 4 1/2 inch Meg

Megalodon is an extinct species of shark that lived from around 23 million to around 3.6 million years ago, during which time it occupied a prime position at the top of the food web, before being driven to extinction. We will never know for certain what it looked like; like all sharks, its skeleton was mostly cartilage, and all it left behind was a lot of teeth and a few vertebrae.

We know from these remains, however, that megalodon was enormous, with size estimates ranging from around 11 meters to over 40 meters (36 to 131 feet) in length (although the latter is an outlier, and most estimates hover around 13 to 20 meters). That's huge – so huge that scientists think that megalodon may have specialized in large prey.

One way to determine the diet of someone who has been dead a long time is to look at isotopes in their teeth. An isotope of an element is an atom that deviates from the norm in the number of neutrons it has in its nucleus, and the ratios of these isotopes vary according to several factors, one of which is diet.

This is because when we eat, some of the metals in our food replace some of the calcium in our teeth and bones – not so you notice, obviously, but enough to leave a tracer. McCormack and his colleagues looked specifically at the ratios of two isotopes of zinc – the lighter zinc-64 and the heavier zinc-66.

When fish at the bottom of the food web eat, they store less zinc-66 than zinc-64. The fish that eat those fish have even less zinc-66. So when you get to the fish at the very top of the chain, you see the very least zinc-66 compared to zinc-64. This is what the researchers observed in the teeth of megalodon and its cousin, the extinct Odotus chubutensis.

The researchers don't really know what was at the bottom of the food chain 18 million years ago, the time from which the megalodon teeth they studied hailed. So, they compared the megalodon teeth with the teeth of sharks that swim the oceans today to work out what the giant predators ate.
. . .
There were also intriguing differences in megalodon diet depending on where the animals lived. Megalodon teeth found in Passau, Germany, dined more heavily on the lower levels of the food web, the researchers found.

This is not dissimilar to the opportunistic hunting approach demonstrated by white sharks (Carcharias carcharodon), which stands to reason: previous work led by McCormack showed that the rise of the white shark was likely one of the drivers that led megalodon to extinction. With competition in its ecological niche, megalodon became more vulnerable.

So, yeah, it ate whatever it wanted. Don't we all?