Nice article from The Scientist about the antibody "problem". www.the-scientist.com/altered-anti... @reeserichardson.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social @jwoodgett.bsky.social @mbonini.bsky.social @bwjones.bsky.social

Can bees spontaneously solve problems - and what does "spontaneously" mean? An interesting @pubpeer.com discussion. pubpeer.com/publications...

AEC staining. Something looks off to me, any thoughts? 10.1152/ajplung.00362.2025

Is science self-correcting? Not in this Elsevier journal. Two 'five-second-retractions' were never retracted, even though I reported them to the journal in 2015. Eleven years later.... nothing. My latest blog post: scienceintegritydigest.com/2026/06/24/i...

Scale bar: 50 pixels - Not sure that's as helpful as the authors imagined it would be. 10.1016/j.jtumed.2025.12.008

Lab leaks are scientifically impossible. In all of history of pathogen research, there hasn't been even a single lab leak. Besides, several raccoon dogs and a pangolin already admitted, in writing, to have smuggled the virus to Wuhan.

706 days? In a freezer, perhaps 😋 I don't like to gang up on poor @weldeiry.bsky.social but this one does need a source. Grokipedia references this claim which circles back to this slide deck, so it's an urgent situation!

This is a ridiculous paper in the category of "computational bestiary" but Fig. 1 is wonderful: fcampelo.github.io/EC-Bestiary/

Recently published "Expert Review of Clinical Immunology": A so called "scattered plot", which plots something against nothing in particular. A diagram that looks convincing but is back to front; assigning low COVID-19 mortality to western countries. 10.1080/1744666X.2026.2664060

@smutclyde.bsky.social discusses the recycling of kaggle datasets into the scientific literature. A paper from Scientific Reports used the "eye disease data set" which includes only a few hundred images, including animals, diagrams, and people in sunglasses. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/09/b...

I am sending an open letter to Thermo Fisher. Their response to my response to their manipulated western blot is bullying and petty. Yes, this western blot really is manipulated, it is unfair on me to say otherwise. I don't make those accusations lightly, and I have a (minor) reputation to defend.

This is a very compelling animation and another good thread from @reeserichardson.bsky.social. I understand these are catalogue images... but size matters. A lot of energy is wasted on troubleshooting experiments. Thermo doing stuff like this will not help!

Today I'm posting a new blog about an astonishing scientific own goal. Hundreds of papers have reported using a totally wrong antibody to investigate the tumor suppressor p16. This mistake has happened because scientists have muddled the names of two proteins. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/02/m...

I GOT THE DOMAIN! I FINALLY GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!1 🥳🎉 Paint​.NET is now at paint.net! Well, it will be just as soon as I push all the buttons to migrate content and set up redirects from getpaint​.net etc. For now it's just a "hey go here" redirect page.

Unreliable and underperforming antibodies are a longstanding problem, so while the reveal of apparently manipulated antibody data in Thermo Fisher's catalog was a shock, the frustration it sparked among many researchers is perhaps no surprise. My reporting:

Reluctant to post too much about this but I did want to share my favourite finding from the dozens of manipulated or duplicated ThermoFisher verification blots. This one has a giant square. Enjoy!

TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...

By @arbitraryeffect.bsky.social

“At Thermo Fisher, consistency is more than a goal.”

Earlier this week I posted an example of a fake western blot provided by ThermoFisher to demonstrate the validity of a p53 antibody. I considered it an amusing curiosity. In fact Thermo Fisher Scientific has systematically manipulated antibody validation data!

@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

@sholtodavid.bsky.social Have you seen this WB from ThermoFisher? Still anti-p53 antibody, but another clone (MA-12648 instead MA5-12557). It also looks like that the band in lane 3 was rotated and reused in lane 4. Moreover, it seems that same band was used for the 2 different clones.

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

TREM2+ macrophages have rapidly emerged as key regulators in diseases. Studying them requires specific antibodies. Among 14 tested antibodies in KO cell lines by WB, 5 are specific. Pick up the right human TREM2 Antibody. Full report: tinyurl.com/TREM2Ab Or here: tinyurl.com/OGA-TREM2

A 2018 paper with an astonishing muddle of overlapping images has finally been retracted. The authors include the infamous (in some circles at least) Alexander Seifalian, a bunch of Iranians, and for some reason, a bloke from Lancaster. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

While the non-disclosure of the conflict of interest is a serious issue, it is also important to point out that @sholtodavid.bsky.social and others found several instances of image duplication in this paper. pubpeer.com/publications...

Mariano Barbacid retracts his fresh @pnas.org paper celebrated worldwide as a "miracle" cure for cancer. Official reason is his omitted business interests. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Read my past reporting: forbetterscience.com/2026/02/06/s...

Exciting new graphical abstract from Ivyspring's Journal of Cancer: 10.7150/jca.125659. AI will replace all scientists very soon by the way.

Former Rector Karin Dahlman-Wright, who was foind guilty of research fraud and sued to avoid sacking, triumphantly returns to @ki.se ! news.ki.se/karin-dahlma...

I will chat to Patrick from ImageTwin this week. If you have any questions about the case or analysing images in scientific papers feel free to join. luma.com/0c2016n8

Lorenzo Cohen at MD Anderson presented "Biofield Therapy" results at AACR last week. "Biofield Therapy" sounds scientific but is just a fancy name for telekinesis - AKA staring at mice. Actual photo from his lab below, now deceased psychic staring at mice. Not clear who does the staring these days.

Chris Gaffe: “Scientific Reports has an in-house team who are dedicated to ensuring that the journal operates with integrity. They are an excellent team who care enormously about the journal and the research it publishes." "oxygenaonol", "cen̈rifiugation", "Cos aspe-9" pubpeer.com/publications...

Now that I have finally been paid I made a video about the Dana-Farber legal case from my own perspective: youtu.be/ioRtnMEV46Y

Gorilla Troops Optimizer!

Obviously, this is not the only great use case of this tortured phrase. See here, in the context of embryo cryopreservation: doi.org/10.31674/boo...

Ahahahahaha. @bmj.com first issued a correction to remove the English guys, Anthony Mathur and Sheik Dowlut, as innocent victims of impersonation. Only then did BMJ retract that Iranian papermill fraud! forbetterscience.com/2025/11/05/b...

Oh nothing, just a peer reviewed paper my colleagues found... doi.org/10.1016/j.ma... "1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min." Even AI knows what's wrong here, but @elsevierconnect.bsky.social doesn't.

I have been blogging again at For Better Science, this time a case of an epic image fraud from a Japanese lab: forbetterscience.com/2026/03/24/p...

The same western blot image used 23 times in 14 different papers by one Japanese team. The image has been labelled as representing a range of experiments and proteins. This is the most I have ever seen. Perhaps it is a record?

In retrospect it was a bad idea to train the LLM on dialog from Tarzan movies.

Just read the abstract 🫠 via Alexander Magazinov. I don't believe he is on Bluesky.

Figure 1g from a 2018 paper in Nature (10.1038/nature25170). The red staining is supposed to show cleaved caspase-3 in MCF-7 cells... Except MCF-7 cells have a homozygous deletion in the gene. They are well known to be entirely caspase-3 deficient (10.1007/s10549-008-0217-9).

Cool, useful, project. www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

Schneider Shorts 6.03.2026 – Not identical and also not adjusted by sequencing forbetterscience.com/2026/03/06/s...

Genus: Man or Female? Alzheimer's improved in just four weeks with plant extract 🙄

Maybe investigate how the paper got published.

Another wonderful diagram of a bacterial cell with mitochondria, this one in Frontiers in Microbology (10.3389/fmicb.2023.1194292). Reminder: Bacteria are prokaryotes, they do not have mitochondria...

@pmurray65.bsky.social @forbetterscience.bsky.social Amazing Videregen, having pissed away €6.8m for 3 trials that never opened, pivoted to new rubbish - a dead thymus gland for anti-aging. From the look of it, the company has been nuked from orbit: www.videregen.com LMAO 🤡