Niko McCarty

@NikoMcCarty Some journals are using bots to automatically "retract" papers, but those bots often make mistakes. Two papers by Max Planck, the 1918 Nobel Prize-winning physicist, have been retracted by Springer Nature for false copyright violations. In one case, Max Planck published a paper in multiple different journals (which "was widespread before the internet"). A modern copyright bot flagged these duplicates and retracted them. This bit, from the news article about the story, is both hilarious and sad: "...Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, 'This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.' Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95." [Embedded black-and-white historical photograph of Max Planck seated at a desk with framed photos and books, wearing a bow tie and glasses] 3:20 PM · Jun 27, 2026 · 3,760 Views

Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty · 11h Lab leaks are extremely common, but usually benign. Last month, I went to a conference in the UK. I was talking to some plant biologists who work with Arabidopsis thaliana, a weed in the mustard family. Arabidopsis seeds are tiny, like grains of pollen, and they stick to clothing. These seeds are often engineered with GFP, for example, such that they fluoresce green. And, being so small, they inevitably get carried (accidentally) outside the lab. One plant biologist told me that that their lab group goes outside and picks all the Arabidopsis plants they can find in the areas around campus each year. They then bring these plants back into the laboratory and sequence them. Last year, half of these "wild" plants had GFP. [photos: left — tiny brown seeds next to a marker pen tip for scale; right — a seedling glowing green under fluorescence, showing GFP expression in the root/hypocotyl]