Having successfully field-stripped and reassembled a Dyson vacuum cleaner, my pride is immeasurable.

Papermillers: Whoops, we forgot to copy-paste into all the columns of the spreadsheet when inserting the paid-for, irrelevant citations into the manuscript. Scientific Reports editors: Do we look like we care? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The original was great (in a dystopian way). We don't need a remake.

Crivens! Deepak Chopra was involved in the rise of this bumptious shitweasel!

The good news: this was just retracted. The bad news: it was published in the first place. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Please admire these remarkably bimodal distributions of hemocrit, red-corpuscle count, & hemoglobin level. It appears that half of the 5066 subjects were already dead from anemia and half had such extreme polycytemia that blood couldn't flow in their veins. pubpeer.com/publications...

Nice incompetence. Abject?

'Scientific Reports' is inordinately fond of papermill products in a 'retinopathy diagnosis through AI' style - I guess the mill installed editors in the system, to ensure that they're reviewed by other mill sockpuppets. Even so, this was more annoying than most. pubpeer.com/publications...

So we stole someone's identity to be Corresponding Author, and plagiarised the figures and images, but "the conclusions of the article are otherwise unaffected." doi.org/10.1002/prp2... Publisher: We see you're reading this Retraction Note. Allow us to recommend the paper that it retracted.

Nice nonsense. Arrant?

My "Euthanasia doesn't count as Murder" t-shirt is raising many questions that my t-shirt refuses to answer, instead choosing to plead the 5th Amendment.

"mRNA" in the NBC headline is unnecessary. They could just have written "Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration has taken an aggressive stance against technology".

I was inspired to check Google Street Maps for Down House (Darwin's old abode) and yes, these sinister red blobs continue to hover above the kitchen garden. www.google.com/maps/@51.330...

Crunchy Frog and Cockroach Cluster forbetterscience.com/2026/02/10/c...

Heat transmission in hamburgers. From "Cattaneo-Christov heat transfer method on free convective three-dimensional flow with periodic permeability" (Arshad &c 2025). pubpeer.com/publications... Now retracted: not because it was garbage, but the papermill stole someone's identity to use as coauthor.

I want to be author of a paper about cancer biomarkers. You're in luck! We're running a 1/2-price special on processed-alloy papers! What good is that! I'm an oncologist, not a metallurgist. We'll tie a sign to it that says 'cancer'. Do you want the text or not? OK then. pubpeer.com/publications...

JanciToxDoc seems very well-informed.

One seldom sees such commitment to holothurian cosplay.

Please admire what 'Viola sheltonii' found in Discover Oncology, in "Engineering CAR T NK and NKT cell therapies to target cancer stem cells and overcome stem like resistance". pubpeer.com/publications...

I reckon it would be a good move for cinemas in the US to be showing the original Downfall film now. Magnificent film with huge relevance for today

At the sauna this morning, recovering from the plunge pool.

The publishers of Frontiers are very proud of their fraud-detection software and have appointed themselves as "Guardians of Research Integrity". Also, they publish stuff like this.

1. Aotearoa New Zealand friends and colleagues 🇳🇿, Logistics for my February trip are coming together. I'd love to meet more of you and/or talk with groups of interested colleagues about AI course and teaching in a ChatGPT world (thebullshitmachines.com). Right now, my schedule is as follows:

Pompous idiots are *always* a joking matter!

And here are both David (Smut Clyde on X/Hoya campingear on PubPeer) and Kevin (Cheshire on X/Actinosome thing-or-other on PubPeer) sharing a 🍻; we will again. Together we’ve posted comments on ~40,000 papers, including retraction notices to make the database more useful. Re: x.com/SciGuardians...

Imagine my delight to discover that one of the artists who designs cans for Garage Project beers is a fan of Musrum (Earnshaw & Thacker 1968).

The References had a seizure and started speaking Qwghlmian.

@spottingthespot.bsky.social Merry $mas! pubpeer.com/publications...

I am brimming with holiday spirit

One more bookish set for good measure. These biscuits are inspired by the weird and wonderful world of medieval illustration.

I have much better than yours

We see a new phenomenon. Fake authors in papers with hundreds of citations. Papers are easy to produce by ChatGPT. Even if a paper is retracted, no punishment to the real authors, but citations still count. Today's puzzle is about a similar case papermills.tilda.ws/2025advent4

These are not references. These are what happens when the cat hoiks up a hairball while you are dictating into voice-recognition software.

PRO-TIP: When you ask Chat-GPT to write your paper, *read* the responses before copy-pasting them into the document. pubpeer.com/publications...

Ah, passive voice... is there anything that can't be done by it? link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Rate your score on Factor Fexcectorn. Well done, Scientific Reports. pubpeer.com/publications...

@deevybee.bsky.social @rosewind.bsky.social I finally finished writing a thing. forbetterscience.com/2025/11/25/a...

So red wine does *not* cure erectile dysfunction after all. I am disappoint. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The authors failed to cite Judge Dredd. Unacceptable. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The Fribourg Declaration forbetterscience.com/2025/11/17/t...

@retractionwatch.com One for your Confabulated References archives.

I did enjoy @scalzi.com's cheerful disinclination to identify his narrator / protagonist as male or female. "Does it matter? You choose! Which do you prefer?" To the annoyance, I am sure, of readers who think that clearly gendering the characters is part of an author's job description.

This is *not* how to plagiarise text by asking Chat-GPT to paraphrase it.

One of the first papermills was 'MedChina' - a Dr Jia-Li Liu - following a template to churn out fake meta-analysis papers. forbetterscience.com/2022/06/07/t... 12 years too late, the editors of Gene finally got around to checking the .doc metadata of the manuscript. pubpeer.com/publications...

So I thought that Elsevier was already as enshittified as possible. I was wrong.

Starting a petition to replace the word 'palindrome' with 'palinilap'.

"Additionally, the author stated that they have used AI tools for generating some images, including Fig. 1." Reviewers and editors could not work that out for themselves. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Happy Birthday!

Today I realised that the 'Madonna in the Dry Tree' was a stock image, and the original owner of the version in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum didn't want to pay Petrus Christus to paint a legitimate copy, which is why it's adorned with the little 'A's of the Alamy watermark.

The editors of ACS Omega cheerfully accepted the authors' excuses and replacement image for this weird shit. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/... H/t Leonid @forbetterscience.bsky.social