Blog Thing

Awesome by Andrés Nieto Porras

Journal Accepts Paper Reading “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List”

A paper that largely consists of the words “Get me off your fucking mailing list” repeated 863 times has been accepted by a journal that claims to be peer reviewed. The move might appear to offer hope to scientists struggling to get marginal work published, but really just exposes the extent of scam publications pretending to be contributing to science.

“Publish or Perish” is more than a catch-phrase for scientific researchers. With rare exceptions, such as those working for secret military projects, research scientists need to publish regularly if they hope to advance, or often just keep, their career. High impact journals such as Science and Nature help most, but getting into these is hard and even less prestigious journals can be a challenge.

This has created a market for bottom feeders with impressive sounding names and absolutely no standards. For a fee, they will publish anything. Unscrupulous, desperate or very naive scientists can pad out their CVs and hope no one notices the quality of some of the journals they list.

No one goes into science to do this kind of stuff though, so these “journals” spam email lists  in the hope the suggestion will arrive in a moment of weakness.

Dr Peter Vamplew, a computer scientist at Federation University Australia got one too many invites from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology and hit back with the seven words repeated over and over, along with headings, pseudo-citations, a flow chart and graph.

La Vía Láctea desde Oaxaca, México - Foto: Erik Gómez Tochimani

The Feather and the Bowling Ball in a Vacuum Chamber

This is what happens when a bowling ball and a feather are dropped together under the conditions of outer space.

Why does this phenomena happen ?, that’s crazy talk son!

In a vacuum chamber, like outer space, there’s no air friction as all the gases are sucked out. Air friction is what you observe when you see a fall leaf dance about the wind,..because the wind is molecules blasting against your face.

the translucent skin of the northern glassfrog (hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni) allows us to see its internal viscera, and, in the case of the fifth photo, a mother’s eggs.

and yet, it is the male glassfrogs who alone provide the parental care, as the females flee the scene once the eggs have been delivered. it for this reason that these protective male glassfrogs can be extremely aggressive.   

to date, there is no clear explanation for the evolution of this transparency. most frogs are not transparent, as this would expose organs to the deleterious effects of sunlight and heat.

but the transparent underbelly of the glassfrog is covered in light reflecting organelles called iridiphores which could give the glassfrogs the ability to optimize their internal homeostasis.

some suspect this abdoninal transparency helps the glassfrog to blend into its environment, though no evidence as yet supports this crypsis hypothesis.