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<\/div>Legless on the shore<\/h2>\n
Extremities can bring confusion even to trained experts. Joanna Glengarry and Melanie Archer at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia warn that forensic pathologists and anthropologists \u201cshould be prepared to face a variety of presented remains and objects\u201d.<\/p>\n
Glengarry and Archer present their own firsthand experience \u2013 in their words, \u201ca case of what appeared to be a severed foot located on a beach, which examination revealed was a marine animal known as a sea squirt (ascidian)\u201d.<\/p>\n
Writing in the journal Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology<\/i>, they give step-by-step details of their adventure. The title of their report? \u201cMarine mimicry is afoot\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yes, some people are dismayed when senior department members automatically get co-authorship credit for research done by people of lower status (Feedback<\/a>, 11 May). But maybe more credit should go to said senior members.<\/p>\n Reader Bob Masta writes in about two doctoral students who asked for his advice after they \u201chad developed a procedure that greatly improved success rates for ridiculously-difficult experiments attempting to record signals from auditory hair cells in the inner ear of guinea pigs\u2026 [B]ut the lab\u2019s principal investigator and the department head insisted on inclusion as authors\u2026 even though they had no knowledge of the work ahead of time\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI was appalled,\u201d writes Masta, \u201cbut eventually came around to seeing the wisdom of this. As unknowns in the field, the students might have had a hard time getting published. [Their] credibility in the field would be greatly enhanced by having respected names on the paper. And everyone in research already took it for granted that the lead authors on any paper did the actual work, while the trailing senior authors provided the facilities and usually some consultation.\u201d<\/p>\n And, Masta explains, \u201cresearch labs require grant money to be able to do research and train students. So publications that enhance the status of the senior authors, who have to get those grants, help everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Feedback, unconvinced, feels that credit-grabbing injects rot-from-the-head-down-ness into the system. But if you\u2019re going to do it, why not go the whole hog? Share credit with everyone \u2013 everyone! \u2013 who stands to gain from it. Give co-authorship credit to all higher-level officials (department chair, division head, vice president(s), president, chancellor, corporate board members, emperor, etc.) of the institution that employs the actual researchers.<\/p>\n Feedback suggests that these high-powers, the non-author authors, be known unofficially as \u201choly ghostwriters\u201d.<\/p>\n Reader Max Perkins proffers an alternate way to deal with the who-gets-listed-as-an-author question. He writes: \u201cAs [a person from a] university department in New South Wales, Australia, I would like to tell Feedback about two postgraduate students at my alma mater who altered their names on the door of their office to read simply \u2018et al\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cI think this spoke strongly about the Professor\u2019s citation index, and perhaps also as a comment on the use of such as a measure of worth to the university.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody tries to not get Covid but, in this study, all 35 volunteers who tried their best to fall ill (with a lot of help from scientists) completely failed.\u201d Reader Chittaranjan Andrade sent Feedback this cheerful lament after he read a report in The Lancet Microbe<\/i>.<\/p>\n The team behind said report \u2013 Susan Jackson at the University of Oxford and her numerous collaborators \u2013 aimed to test the ability of new vaccines to help people who, long after receiving early versions of a vaccine, got infected by new variants of the coronavirus.<\/p>\n The researchers had trouble completing the project\u2019s first big step: to infect those volunteers. Their write-up explains and complains that despite \u201cescalating the inoculum dose to the maximum available<\/a>\u2026 we were unable to induce sustained infection in seropositive individuals\u201d.<\/p>\n Covid-19, having knocked the world off kilter for several years, now causes problems even when it fails to cause problems.<\/p>\n Not all flatworms have a pleasant taste.<\/p>\n Leigh Winsor reports that the invasive New Guinea flatworm (Platydemus manokwari<\/i>) \u201chas a most unpleasant astringent taste<\/a>\u2026 just as has been noted for other species\u201d.<\/p>\n Winsor, a researcher at James Cook University in Australia, published this news as part of his \u201ccontinuing collaboration<\/a> with Professor J-L Justine, Museum National d\u2019Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France, and Prof Romain Gastineau, University of Szczecin, Poland, on invasive land planarians in France and in French Territories\u201d.<\/p>\n Bad taste can linger. Winsor notes that he did the Platydemus manokwari<\/i> tasting (or \u201cpers. obs.\u201d, as he puts it) in 1994.<\/p>\n Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and\u00a0co-founded\u00a0the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is\u00a0<\/em>improbable.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Got a story for Feedback?<\/b><\/p>\n You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com<\/a>. Please include your home address. This week\u2019s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nHoly ghostwriters<\/h2>\n
Wholly ghosted writers<\/h2>\n
Infectious failure<\/h2>\n
Worms on the turn<\/h2>\n