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3 articles from ScienceNOW
Warmer winters could wipe out Antarctica’s only native insect
The Antarctic midge might be smaller than a pea, but it’s the continent’s largest land animal–and only native insect. The midge has clearly evolved to survive in extreme conditions, yet a warming climate could threaten its existence, a new study finds.
Unlike temperate-zone midges that swarm around water, the Antarctic midge (
Belgica antarctica
) is...
NIH’s vaunted program for solving puzzling medical cases is running out of money
Ten years ago, an athletic 12-year-old from Affton, Missouri, named Mitchell Herndon began to experience muscle weakness that eventually led to him using a wheelchair. After years of visits to specialists failed to diagnose his neurological symptoms, he enrolled in a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded program that studies patients with debilitating mystery diseases. Researchers...
‘Zombie papers’ just won’t die. Retracted papers by notorious fraudster still cited years later
Alison Avenell spent years collecting evidence that Yoshihiro Sato, a now-deceased nutritional researcher in Japan, was among the most prolific fraudsters known to science. After journals investigated the findings by Avenell, a clinical nutritionist at the University of Aberdeen, and her colleagues,
they retracted more than two dozen papers Sato had co-authored
. Many had...