After searching through the Ashley Madison database and private email last week, I reported that there might be roughly 12,000 real women active on Ashley Madison. Now, after looking at the company’s source code, it’s clear that I arrived at that low number based in part on a misunderstanding of the evidence. Equally…
Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. lived for 60 years, and spent most of them pretending to be someone else. Or someones else, really; the man who came to be known as “the Great Imposter” adopted at least 10 identities, including a year-long stint as a (self-taught!) trauma surgeon during the Korean War.
How do you spot—and then stop—scientific fraud? Simple, you just follow the math. Nautilus has a piece on how the researcher with the most retractions ever (183!) was finally caught. The story not only includes plenty of sick science burns, it also details a statistics-based procedure to catch future frauds.
In past years, the peer-reviewed journal Nature has had to retract scientific papers at a rate of about one or two each year. But in the past two years it's had to retract over a dozen. So what's going on, science?
The publishers Springer and IEEE announced they would remove the papers from their subscription services after French researcher Cyril Labbé demonstrated the works were not original scientific work at all, but rather "computer-generated nonsense."
To boldly lie: Howard Leventhal pled guilty to fraud charges after he snookered people into investing into a nonexistent "McCoy Home Health Tablet," a version of Dr. McCoy's medical tricorder from Star Trek.
In a few short years, China has metamorphosed from a middling contributor to scientific knowledge into one of the most prolific research entities on the planet. But the country's meteoric ascent to scientific prominence – widely attributed to a flawed incentive system – has given unintentional rise to a lucrative…
Writing in Nature, science journalist Colin Macilwain exposes a little-known fact about articles published in reputable scientific journals. Every year, 20,000 of them are fraudulent. Scientists fudge their work in these papers about 1% of the time, and it adds up. But now, science institutions are starting to be…
Talk about making a statement: Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline was recently slapped with an unprecedented $3 billion fine for a series of questionable business practices dating back to 1998. The fine is the largest for healthcare fraud in US history — and a clear message from the US Department of Justice that…
Have you been faking ADHD to get Adderall? The charade is over! Here's how your intrepid physician sniffs out ADHD fakers who are just in it for the drugs.
A diploma doesn't necessarily indicate expertise. Zoe D Katze, Ph.D., C.Ht., DAPA, for example, has a wall of diplomas, despite being unable to sign her name. She doesn't have the opposable thumbs for it.
A new study shows which nations in the world have the highest rate of retracting scientific papers due to fraud. Which country has the dirtiest scientists? A statistician analyzes the numbers for you.
Pick any large set of random data you like. Look at the first digit of all the numbers. You're going to see a lot of ones. It's not just a coincidence. It's the law.
Former runway-model Laura Brown and her husband Stephen van Rooyen are still fighting extradition from South Africa, for an alleged scam to provide a stem cell "cure" for neurological diseases. But one doctor who worked with them wasn't so lucky.
In 1934, G. Warren Shufelt told the Los Angeles Times he had discovered the remnants of an ancient reptilian civilization under L.A. Even though Shufelt's story was a load of bullpucky, he left this nifty map as his legacy.