Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer. I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute.

Here’s a funny thing I hadn’t given much thought to until recently: virtually all journals, even the born-digital variety, have pages in portrait mode for easy printing on 8.5×11 or A4 paper. And many offer a column-width option for figures.

Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total. When I wrote to thank him his reply included “I have thousands of questions about apatosaurus that I would like to ask you some day.” It seemed only fair to invite him to ask some of those questions, so we asked him to give us five and said we’d try to answer them.

The SVP 2024 abstract book dropped earlier this week. You can download it here.

I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: A man needs to cross a river. He has a goat with him, which he needs to take across. The boat is big enough to carry the man and only one other object.

This one hardly needs making. I found it by accident when we roasted a chicken this Sunday. As we were tearing the carcass apart like a pack of hyaenas, I noticed that one of the wings had a nice, distinct thumb claw. Here it is in a big plastic bowl in the kitchen — shown this way to emphasize its mundanity.

The University of Bath Research Data Archive has added ORCIDs and RORs to their metadata. They were already a brightSpot among Universities at DataCite. Now they are even brighter!

Comparison of content from the global research infrastructure retrieved from CHORUS and the NSF Public Access Repository indicates that using current infrastructure effectively could significantly increase PAR content and, subsequently, our understanding of the impact of NSF funding across many domains.

Version 4.5 of the DataCite Metadata Schema\ includes several changes supporting the identification and description of instruments. Several DataCite members were describing instruments in DataCite metadata before this capability was introduced and others are beginning to do it now. These existing efforts can inform the development of community conventions and help the broader community understand how to use instrument metadata effectively.

Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’ve gone almost 17 years without posting about a hypothetical sauropod dissection is quite beyond my capacity.