In case others are coming into this thinking about LK-99, the article isn't about that.
I had figured the LK-99 team might actually have something interesting considering that they were promising a proper presentation of their work at the American Physical Society. I had heard it had been withdrawn and wrote it off as another case of academic fraud, but looking it up right now, apparently it's weirder than that.
Someone pretended to be the corresponding author and submitted a withdrawal, but this was fixed and the conference the presentation is at should be happening around these days.
It already happened a few days ago (March 4th). They showed more results, but nothing ground-breaking. There is another group that is also replicating the results and publishing results (SCT Lab or something). Their paper is currently pending.
LK-99 is interesting because it really is like another example of cold fusion.
And I don't mean what you probably infer from that. If you look into the way that hydrogen adsorbs into a platinum lattice, and how phonon resonance modes can induce tremendous crushing forces on anything between two platinum atoms, cold fusion actually looks quite plausible. It's not like perpetual motion--there's a clear possible mechanism for it which is surprisingly fully compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. That said, Pons and Fleischmann rushed publication on shoddy data, making a mockery of themselves and causing cold fusion to become an untouchable subject no one would go near a generation later due to perceived guilt by association.
The theory behind LK-99 is pretty solid. The linear structure of these apatite compounds create chains of conductive electron bands that in theory might have sufficient band gaps to enable superconductivity. If you could get atomic precision in the copper/lead alternating pattern that creates those stresses. However I fear any research into room-temperature linear superconductors will now be as taboo as cold fusion.
> That said, Pons and Fleischmann rushed publication on shoddy data, making a mockery of themselves and causing cold fusion to become an untouchable subject no one would go near a generation later
Yes, they were shoddy
But no, the field was swamped within weeks with people trying to replicate it. It has lost its luster, and become a parody, but that is because it was wrong
Pons and Fleischmann's experimental setup did not produce cold fusion. But some other variation or different catalyst material might. Yet effectively no one has carried on this work.
LK-99, or at least the manufactured samples of it, is not a superconductor. But some other variation or different manufacturing technique might. Yet I predict no one is going to look very hard in the years to come.
> If you look into the way that hydrogen adsorbs into a platinum lattice, and how phonon resonance modes can induce tremendous crushing forces on anything between two platinum atoms, cold fusion actually looks quite plausible.
No, it is not. These things are well understood. The behaviour of hydrogen in crystals is studied a lot. In metals because of issues with hydrogen embrittlement and fusion stuff, in some oxides for the storage of hydrogen for energy applications, and in material in general because proton irradiation is a common tool when studying them. All of this to say that this is not something that was never investigated.
> It's not like perpetual motion--there's a clear possible mechanism for it which is surprisingly fully compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them.
The orders of magnitude just do not match. The pressures involved is typically 1 GPa (usually less in metals, more in ceramics). That is far from enough to bring nuclei sufficiently close for fusion. There is a reason why nobody claims this, and it is not because we don’t look at the behaviour of hydrogen (or other light nuclei like deuterium, tritium, helium, or lithium for that matter).
> The theory behind LK-99 is pretty solid. The linear structure of these apatite compounds create chains of conductive electron bands that in theory might have sufficient band gaps to enable superconductivity.
Again, it is not. Some preliminary electronic structure calculations showed interesting features, but these features were no indication of superconducting behaviour, and indeed LK-99 is not a superconductor. There were plenty of people who tried to reproduce the results and it clearly showed that the initial paper was wrong.
> If you could get atomic precision in the copper/lead alternating pattern that creates those stresses.
Our understanding of what causes superconductivity and the creation of Cooper pairs is not complete. Otherwise, we’d design materials with the right properties from the beginning, rather than testing a lot of stuff just to see what works.
> However I fear any research into room-temperature linear superconductors will now be as taboo as cold fusion.
Contrary to cold fusion, superconduction is actually a thing. Current high-temperature superconductors work at the temperature of liquid nitrogen; finding one that works 100K higher is not that much of a stretch. The gap is not 6 orders of magnitude like with cold fusion.
In fact, there is quite a lot of funding for research on high-temperature superconductors even this year so your fear is not really well founded.
Orders of magnitude variation in phonon energy is a thing though. You can do the basic statistics of waves in the open ocean and show that waves will never get high enough to crest an oil rig in the North Sea. Then go search for "rogue waves" on YouTube and watch it actually happen.
We're just starting to get a handle on the mathematics underlying this phenomenon, but it does exist. And the causes of the phenomenon transpose directly into crystal latices. So we absolutely should expect "rogue phonons" that have energies orders of magnitude above average phonon energy, enough to overcome Coulomb barriers and trigger D-D or D-T fusion reactions.
Of course thinking of using this to generate energy is something else entirely. It's a freak occurrence, and if there is a way of making it predictable or enhanced in some way, that solution is not obvious. But it should be detectable with very sensitive equipment, and would be a wonderful experimental physics result.
> Orders of magnitude variation in phonon energy is a thing though You can do the basic statistics of waves in the open ocean and show that waves will never get high enough to crest an oil rig in the North Sea. Then go search for "rogue waves" on YouTube and watch it actually happen.
Not at that scale. 10m waves are common. 5 orders of magnitudes from this is not a rogue wave, it’s a wave that goes higher than the moon. I understand you are convinced you had a bright new idea, but if you want others to be convinced as well you need more solid arguments than “it could happen”.
Again, the kind of stresses at the atomic scale in materials are a few GPa. You need much more than that, on top of a few million kelvins to have deuterium fusion (hydrogen is even harder).
> So we absolutely should expect "rogue phonons" that have energies orders of magnitude above average phonon energy, enough to overcome Coulomb barriers and trigger D-D or D-T fusion reactions.
We really should not, after just basic napkin maths. The energy given by 1 GPa is around 0.001 eV. The energy barrier for a deuterium-tritium reaction is 0.1 MeV. The difference is not an order of magnitude or two; it’s 8. It is just not going to happen in anything that looks like a solid, which is exactly why we do it in confined plasmas.
But even if we take this for granted and think a bit about the consequences it gets even more absurd. The same deuterium-tritium fusion reaction releases 17 MeV. This is going to first, melt the crystal close to where the reaction is taking place; and the shred the structure of the material over centimetres.
> It's a freak occurrence, and if there is a way of making it predictable or enhanced in some way, that solution is not obvious.
Or rather, it would be a freak occurrence if it were happening. The likelihood of this being in the same realm as a wave putting some water on the surface of the moon.
> But it should be detectable with very sensitive equipment, and would be a wonderful experimental physics result.
You don’t need very sensitive equipment to see the damage caused by 17 MeV neutrons in a crystalline material. Fairly standard electron microscopes are enough.
There's perhaps some misunderstanding about where "perpetual motion" comes from : it was about Aristotle's metaphysics, the best today's translation for at least some of these first devices would probably be "powered by changes in atmospheric pressure" :
So the term was used more as a synonym for "continuously working", like a water wheel, without presuming any violation of the laws of thermodynamics that had yet to be invented :
Not really. Publish or perish does not force academics to commit fraud or to abuse their subordinates. It does not force them to behave unethically. Professor Dias choose to lie, choose to abuse, and choose to submit papers with fake data.
I agree publish or perish may not be the best system but we should not excuse people for being corrupt. People can and do chose to behave ethically. Those who don't should be punished.
Fun fact: Nature used to publish papers without any peer review whatsoever right up to the mid-60s. The selection was based on what the editors thought was interesting or provocative.
Legend has it that the submissions tracking system consisted of a particularly wide windowsill, in which the submitted manuscripts were stacked up in piles for each month.
Nature and Science are kind like the tabloids of scientific publishing. Legitimate news mixed with unsubstantiated gossip; all with a high “sexiness” factor that draws attention and moves copy.
- Nature published a paper twice after the reviewers voted "no". Of course, it is not a voting process, the editor makes their decision. But evidently the editor didn't use the referee's input for that decision. That input, must I say, is free work that academics do for the journal. Click-baitiness simply weighted more to the editor and her supervisors. People should just stop paying attention to what Nature publishes.
- The students... I think this is the worst part of the story. Sometimes, students are on a student visa that depends on them holding for dear life to their university position. Been there, done that. I remember when I did my PhD: four to five international students--very well prepared I must say--to one from the host country. The ones from the host country were the ones with the best soft skills but they rarely put the long hours. I'll never forget that Iranian student who was a political refugee passing as a PhD student, because she couldn't bear the indignity of an asylum process. She couldn't return to her home country either.
- The replication...For the first retraction, I could find nowhere in the article that replication attempts were made. If those replication attempts were impossible to produce with the data published in the article itself, then its not a scientific paper, but a promotional brochure. In fact, some promotional materials are more extensive than Nature's articles; they really want to make the thing very short and academics are forced to jump through hoops to condense their publications, until they are practically impossible to understand, not to mention replicate. Again, the only solution to that problem is to ignore Nature.
The people writing the Nature article did not seem to notice the issue. The third part especially was what was occurring to me while reading.
The LK-99 paper, lots of attempts at replicating the results. Crazy quick. Like front-running the published results.
These results, like people never even had the thought to try, and it devolved into arguing sampling issues rather than just trying the material.
There is some certain sub-segment of humanity that often feels that way. Like 8B humans will all bend over backward to let them get away with almost anything. Totally abandon all normal procedures, safety checks, laws, replication, validation, ...
For all the problems that Nature (and science in general) has, and while I'm sure this incident will be used by some as "evidence" that we shouldn't trust in science, ultimately this incident was another win for science. It should have happened much much sooner, but in the end, the truth was found and the record corrected. That's exactly the result we want.
I appreciate that Nature's news team is willing to publish information about Nature's massively embarrassing failure to do their job reviewing the paper, and I hope they mean it when they say “We are looking at this case carefully to see what lessons can be learnt for the future.”
It's a "win" for science in the sense that the truth was finally revealed.
It's "loss" in the sense that our truth determining apparatus (e.g. peer review) appears to be highly unreliable, and a massive, unquantified amount of bullshit research has already passed it and is actively being used as a foundation for subsequent research.
Realistically, we can't reduce false positives to absolutely zero without giving up on some True Positives (sensitivity/specificity tradeoff).
Nature intentionally plays loose with potentially world-changing discoveries. It probably makes sense to have some journals that publish with fairly high rates of (post-hoc determined) false positives, simply to move the fields forward more quickly.
That although scientists are people and so there will always be some who try to cheat and lie, those lies will eventually be found out and when that happens the record will be put right. It shows that science is not only non-dogmatic in the sense that new information which challenges or improves on our previous best understanding of a given topic will be used to update or replace the old, but that even when there is no new evidence, new research is still being openly challenged and tested by other scientists.
Scientific journals have their problems, but finding and correcting mistakes, and being transparent about the correction and about how those mistakes were made, are all indications of credibility. Even better, in this case, the alarms were sounded very very early and yeah Nature really fucked up by ignoring them for as long as they did, but there were people who cared about the truth who were persistent and in the end Nature did the right thing. That's says something really good about science.
The replication crisis is still a big problem. Lots of less dramatic results are probably false and will likely go unchallenged for a longer time, but that's just something we have to consider when deciding how confident we are in those results. Results which have been independently verified multiple times are those we can be more confident in, results which haven't been verified should be taken with a much larger grain of salt. It'd be silly to take examples like this as a sign that science as a whole shouldn't be trusted.
> truth was found and the record corrected. That's exactly the result we want.
I hope science can one day overcome people like you and actually address the systemic issues it is facing. Denial that there is anything really wrong, that ultimately everything works fine so nothing has to fundamentally change, is exactly the problem that causes those systemic failures we are seeing in science and academia all the time.
This is exactly why Nature can write about their own failure, because there are no expectations beyond "hoping" and trusting they change. But of course nothing will ever actually change.
Peer review is not a magic thing which can detect all mistakes and prevent all fraud. The biggest problem with peer review is people assume it means published research is correct. I do not think that peer review can do that. I think peer review at best gives good feedback to honest researchers and catches some mistakes.
Here are my reasons why I think peer review will not reach a higher standard.
1) Peer review is hard work and probably tedious. In order to do a really good job, someone would have to spend tens or hundreds of hours reviewing a paper. The best reviewers would actually replicate the research. This probably will not happen often.
2) Peer review is not rewarded. No one is going to get tenure for being an excellent reviewer.
3) Good reviewers may even be punished. Unfortunately, many humans do not like critical feedback and hate having their work invalidated. Some of these people take revenge, and "shoot the messenger".
I think the solution is to stop thinking something is correct because it is published in a peer reviewed journal. Instead, people need to recognize that while the scientific process may eventually get the right result, it often makes mistakes, and is not perfect.
The linked article is on Nature news. It’s a different team from Nature scientific articles.
It’s mentioned in the linked article and they do some investigation in Nature’s own failures.
(looks like no, the linked article currently says "at 203 K (−70 °C) and at extremely high pressures" so it was more likely just a typo/transcription error)
>Students say that Dias gave them an ultimatum: remove their names, or let him send the draft. Despite their worries, the students say they had no choice but to acquiesce. “I just remember being very intimidated,” one student says. The student says they regret not speaking up more to Dias. “But it’s scary at the time. What if I do and he makes the rest of my life miserable?”
Indeed it is scary, because as a student your PI can in fact ruin your life and ruin your career, without much recourse in most cases. This behind-the-scenes is a good insight into the bad incentives and lack of accountability for PIs in academic research. I suspect this kind of thing happens all the time in smaller fields, and never gets discovered because it's not a headline-grabbing topic like room-temp superconductivity.
I had a bioengineering PhD friend who said she spotted obviously fraudulent papers all the time in her field--publications claiming they grew such-and-such bacteria in so-and-so medium, when she knew damn well that said bacteria cannot grow in said medium.
Yep, when I was reading this article, as I kept hearing about what Dias was doing to his students, I was getting ready to throttle him.
The students here didn't really do anything wrong, but Dias used his position of authority to essentially blackmail the students into becoming complicit in fraud, and attempted to justify it essentially with an "everybody does it" excuse. Kudos to them for taking the initiative to retract their paper over the head of their PI! That takes a lot of courage, given the immense powers an advisor holds over their students.
> Soon after the CSH paper was published, Jorge Hirsch, a condensed-matter theorist at the University of California, San Diego, began pressing Dias to release the raw magnetic-susceptibility data, which were not included in the paper. More than a year later, Dias and Salamat finally made the raw data public.
Explain to me why Nature would publish a paper without having access to/requiring the data. Could it be Nature wanted to be the first to publish such a ground breaking discovery? Dishonest people are simply a fact of life. The entire point - supposedly - of peer review is to insure that scientist do not make unsubstantiated claims. Job well done Nature. Job well done.
I would like it noted that I had Jorge Hirsch as a professor many years ago, and his grading was extremely harsh - you needed to be flawless at showing your work, not just getting the right answer. I remember getting a 14% on one of his tests, the worst score I ever got on any test in my life. It turned out to be a B+ after the curve was applied.
Hence, it doesn't surprise me at all to see that he was the one to call out Dias. Some things never change!
Peer review is not designed to detect fraud. It is meant to improve the quality of work, by giving a publication a fresh set of eyes who might identify gaps in the original research.
BTW: I am not criticizing the actual reviewer of the paper. Data availability should be a policy of the journal and required for publication. How can you improve quality without access to the data? In this instance requiring data would have likely prevented the paper from even reaching peer review and wasting a busy individuals time.
That was one particular dataset being requested. There are near infinite ways to characterize a material, and even the best lab is only going to have the time, resources, and expertise to collect and present some of them.
I am not in the field, so I cannot comment on the specific relevance of the request, but in my area, there are absolutely some mandatory data inclusions which should block a paper from being published. Presumably this was not on that list.
There are numerous ways to embargo data and make it available to reviewers before publication and to the public after publication. [1] This isn't a new idea. They simply did not do it.
Nature is a "premier journal" known for publishing cutting edge research. Any data - in this case a bunch of numbers - used to support the conclusion should be made available. I am sure there are disciplines where the evidence would be difficult to provide directly - fossils, physical items etc. Maybe this PI did the experiment himself - thought he won a Noble - only to find he could not in fact reproduce the results after publication - oops. IMO Nature did not do its job. Just pointing that out.
Requiring (raw) data is relatively new, and is only in a few fields. For most of the history of peer review data was not required. In fact, none of the PIs I worked in during grad school would ever agree to releasing the raw data. I'm pretty sure they're still not in most of physics.
IMO, it's reasonable to require it, but understand that this is a relatively new requirement and not part of peer review culture.
Science isn't a religion, nor is it a paper, thesis, or journal. It's a method for understanding the world around us through rigorous application of testing and retesting.
Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted.
We call people in the field of Science, Scientists. Perhaps we should stop labeling fallible and untrustworthy humans as such. Science is trustworthy. Humans are not.
> Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted.
This is an important point and I think people should make it more often.
A human scientist who is committing fraud is misrepresenting facts about the world. And the way you would accurately describe those facts is with science. It's not that science is in the wrong here, it's that the human is lying about what the science says.
You want to be able to say "objectively, this guy lied about his research." But if you want to say that, then you need to be able to accurately describe both the world and the research so you can compute the diff between them. So if you throw out the science with the human scientist, then you've thrown out any objective means by which you were going to say the human scientist did anything wrong in the first place.
I strongly agree that there is a difference between science and "science".
>Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted.
I still wouldn't go so far. Science doesn't provide a pure understanding of the world it produces at best a model based on observations and axioms. These both can be wrong without politics,money, or personal bias. Our senses are fallible and sometimes you measured the wrong thing with the wrong tool. You shouldn't trust science, you scrutinize it and use what you find works until it doesn't (and then publish that).
> Nobody should wonder why people do not trust science
Taking an iterative approach where you make a prediction, test the prediction, and adjust course in response to the test (AKA science) is literally the only possible thing that can work to discover true things about the world. So if someone distrusts science they're basically giving up on a belief in objective reality.
But I agree it's not surprising that people don't trust science, any more than it's surprising that people believe in astrology, lizard people, or ESP. Human minds don't have a special science sensor that lights up when they read true things. It's pretty much garbage in garbage out.
Don't miss the story here, which is that the study failed to replicate and the fraud was detected. In many human endeavors there are frauds that have persisted for centuries.
> That on its own is scandalous
Yeah it is, I agree. Providing data should be mandatory to the reviewers. It should IMO also be provided publicly if feasible (at least upon request if it's financially burdensome to host) if the work is publicly funded.
Maybe it should be. "Peer reviewed" is taken as a sign of reliability in many contexts, including public policy. If it isn't actually such a sign, then either it needs to change so it is, or we need to stop taking it as a sign of something it isn't.
I am not sure you appreciate the scope of distrusting submissions. Does this mean the reviewer has to clean-slate replicate everything? What if the author spent three years breeding a particular mouse model? Purified 8pg of an antibody extracted from flea tears? Spent six months of HPC time to simulate molecular dynamics? Some science is hard and incredibly difficult and expensive to do.
Even just reevaluating a submitted dataset is no guarantee. Someone committing an elaborate fraud could have faked the raw datasets as well.
> I am not sure you appreciate the scope of distrusting submissions.
What you're saying is, the first option I gave, to fix the peer review process so it is a good indicator of the reliability of research, is not feasible.
If that's the case, that just means we have to pick the second option: stop treating peer reviewed research as if it is reliable.
That's actually exactly correct. Peer review is supposed to characterize the research in terms of quality, not validate it. Otherwise, those peers who validate it would practically be co-authors.
It's a system built upon honesty. A dishonest person is obviously going to take advantage of it. Really blatant things are caught in peer review, but sneaky fraud will definitely slip through.
> Peer review is supposed to characterize the research in terms of quality
Fraudulent research would obviously not be of the desired quality, wouldn't it?
> It's a system built upon honesty.
But if the purpose is to characterize the research in terms of quality, this can't be right. Since fraud is known to happen, and there are known to be incentives for fraud, any process that claims to judge the quality of research would have to have some way of checking for fraud.
I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by "quality" in this context. It's not quality as in something like meat, it's quality as in "a quality education". Does it go above and beyond vs. do the bare minimum to address the scientific question proposed by the authors.
Something can appear to be of very high quality and yet still be completely fraudulent. This occurs in countless fields; art, counterfeit money, deepfakes, etc.
Scientists are attempting to address fraudulent research in other ways, but peer review is not the best means for it and it should not be thought of in that way.
> If that's the case, that just means we have to pick the second option: stop treating peer reviewed research as if it is reliable.
It is the case, and that second option is exactly what we do. One article is nice, but replication is key before some new finding is accepted. That is exactly what happened with LK-99, for example, which is interesting because it was very public.
Nature very specifically wants to be the venue where the most important and impactful discoveries are first reported, and they tolerate a very high false positive rate to achieve it. Quick, light peer review is part of that process.
We always joked that if you read it in Nature, it was certain to be wrong, but realistically, it meant that the topic was likely an important one with a small number of competitive groups who could all evaluate each other's papers and will loudly complain about every inconsistency or irreproducible detail.
Rather common question on Academia StackExchange for exactly the scary reasons mentioned. Almost every time, the rational is something close to "my professor will ruin my life if I don't do what they say."
The big problem in academia very often is that you cannot simply take your research and finish your PhD elsewhere. With jobs you mostly can switch without losing much. Obviously depends on the situation.
Relatively minor. Most senior people I know who leave with bad blood end up with equally senior roles, and often "fail upwards" to even more senior roles in another company.
Bonuses/Vesting: Very common to get good vesting at a new company to make up for what you're losing. Of the people I know who've moved, it's the exception that didn't get decent replacement for vesting.
Resume damage: What? Person spent 4 years at a company and left. What resume damage? Your experience still counts.
Contrast with a PhD who leaves in the middle of a program: The years he spent are 0. Generally, the experience/knowledge accumulated is not factored into it when he applies elsewhere for a PhD - unless he has some fantastic publication.
Still, this is the good outcome - I've often seen students leave an advisor or school and succeed elsewhere. The real danger is when you get your PhD and the advisor will not write letters of recommendation. Unless you've made some really special connections, it means your academic career is over. You won't get a post doc. You won't get an academic position. You won't get into a national lab. And depending on your field, you won't get a research position in industry either.
> Contrast with a PhD who leaves in the middle of a program: The years he spent are 0. Generally, the experience/knowledge accumulated is not factored into it when he applies elsewhere for a PhD - unless he has some fantastic publication.
When I relised this kind of power inbalance during my PhD resulting docile behaviour of my collegues and partly myself, I even did not even wanted to chage my supervisour nor make a protest as the power inbalances are normalized. This awareness made my PhD easier as I did not put false hopes and did not invest my leisure time into becoming more specialised or come up with my own ideas which could latter be turned down to not allign with funded project as my collegues did. I found the remedy in fight for a better tooling and investing my leisure time in completely different field in which papers were still not been written by robots.
Those are a thing but probably not as bad. You may gain seniority. The second is unavoidable. The last can be dealt with and there are levels of ethics around that.
I think it's much worse for a grad student. It may have to do with the cultures of industry and the academe.
In industry, competitive hiring and job-hopping are considered to be normal. Confidentiality is assumed, for the most part. There are some stock, face-saving reasons why you're leaving your previous job, that don't open cans of worms. There are lists of questions that you don't ask. And It's not weird if you're changing jobs after a couple of years. Your seniority and promotion clocks don't typically get reset to zero.
Measuring the wrong thing, even if it is highly correlated to what you really want to measure, often results not in a slightly suboptimal result, but in the worst possible result.
It's not a failed system ism.. But the sad truth is, we should go back to the 1800 were proof was travelling with others to the lab and watch the experiments happen life. Reproduction by the author under expert supervision and with a camera recording of the whole ordeal.
That and reputations trees. The tree that spawned this rotten apple, root to roof, has spawned many more.
People in the industry think that doctoral advisors are something like bosses in companies. They aren't. A Ph.D. is an all-or-nothing experience. When leaving on bad terms, you not only lose a few years of your life, but it is likely to ruin your career. With very competitive hires, an anti-recommendation might be a kiss of death.
Sometimes, this power balance pushes people over the edge. There is a case of a PhD student who, after a struggle with his PI wanting him to publish fraudulent results, had a breakdown and took his own life. https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-the...
For foreign PhD students their kids can be ripped out of school and they and their family deported if they can't get another advisor within 30-60 days depending on the visa.
Nope. A student's ability to stay in the US (along with his dependents) is by remaining a student at the university (i.e. registering for a full time load each semester). They're not dependent on whether they have funding/assistantship, or whether they have an advisor.
If you are a doctoral student you need a new advisor to remain in status. This is playing out at my institution right now, a female PhD student had had enough of the sexual advancements of her advisor, who is a favourite of the departmental chair, so she filed a Title IX complaint and needed a new advisor. There was exactly one faculty member who was in a position to take her on, an established figure close to retirement age. US immigration law is fucked up beyond reasonable.
To remain in the US on a student visa, you need to be "in status". The government has rules on what that is, and mostly it is that you continue to register for a full load. I do not think the government has specified additional requirements.
However, each university has an international programs office and they are required to specify for each international student whether the person is compliant with the university's guidelines. In your university's case, that office may have decided that "Hey, if you're a PhD student, you can't go too long without an advisor, because that would mean you're not making progress towards a PhD." I've seen them say similar things if it's taking too long to get a degree (e.g. over 6 years for undergrad or 8 years for PhD). Or if the GPA is too low and you're on probation
Typically, these rules apply to all students, and not just international ones. It's essentially the university saying "You're about to be kicked out/expelled, so we can't tell the immigration folks that you are progressing towards your degree"
Still, I really doubt your university has a rule specifying only 30-60 days to find a new PhD advisor. To give you an idea, in many sciences, it's common that you don't have a thesis advisor until after your first year (you focus in the first year on passing your qualifying exams, and only once you pass it are professors interested in taking you on).
If indeed your university is enforcing a 30-60 day rule, it's a really crappy university.
TLDR: The law doesn't require it, but each university has its own policies.
It's essentially the university saying "You're about to be kicked out/expelled, so we can't tell the immigration folks that you are progressing towards your degree"
Yes, exactly that, it was something along the lines of "you are not sleeping with me, consequently you are not progressing to your degree".
It happens in all fields, at all levels. You cannot trust any papers without reproducing them. The intentional fraud is rampant. There is too much reward for publishing junk as quickly as possible and too little punishment for misbehavior.
Surely with something as concrete as a substance, you accept the paper to give it a priority date, and then you wait on publication until an independent lab has verified the claimed properties? It either is or it isn't a room-temperature superconductor.
Of all the problems in science, this seems like one of the easier ones to fix.
Who's going to pay for the independent replication, especially if the result hasn't been published? Peer review is done for free because it's relatively less effort compared to a replication, and even then it's only barely tolerable.
That is replicating the study when the study is about the superconducting properties of a material.
I think the LK-99 thing made it pretty clear that it is pretty difficult to do, there are lots of variables and lots of things that need to be ruled out to prove that something is superconducting.
What are you talking about? Dias claimed to have measured the properties of the material he had made. The material exists, who needs to replicate anything? Send the material that was made to a lab where they'll probe it with a multimeter and wave a magnet at it. (I bet the reviewers of the paper could do this actually.)
Nobody is going to do this on their free time. We have our own work to do, and our own milestones to keep funding bodies happy in order to be able to keep doing research. So you’d need to set up a system from scratch to pay for (sometimes very expensive; a neutron source does not come cheap) replication studies. And then you get perverse incentives because reviewers can benefit financially or materially from this.
The way it works now is already reasonable, actually. One paper is not a proof of anything, it is a claim. A ground-breaking article starts a gold rush of people who want to be where the action is, which leads to a lot of follow-up or exploratory studies, which leads to independent verification and replication. At this point, the initial claim starts being accepted. For all the noise in mainstream media, something does not become the state of knowledge after a single article. This is actually quite robust because that system works even if individual articles are unreliable.
Showing your co-authors the manuscript for the first time a few hours before you submit it to Nature is not how it's done, not at all. That is really unusual and a giant red flag, though the PhD students were probably not experienced enough to judge just how weird this was. And I could imagine that in that field the PI could convince them e.g. by stating they wanted to avoid getting scooped or something like that.
What is the point of fabricating data here? An extraordinary claim about room-temperature superconductivity is going to receive a lot of scrutiny that it wouldn't stand. It's not an average publication made to pad up the H index and meet the dept requirements.
I was wondering the same, and it seems like the only way it makes any sense is if you think that you really are on to something, and you want to make sure that nobody beats you to the punch. So you fudge the numbers and publish it, hoping that you, or maybe even someone else, makes it actually work, and your name gets associated with the discovery.
I'd love to hear any other possible explanations for this behavior, because it seems to delusional to fabricate this and think you wouldn't get caught.
It’s very common for researchers to be convinced of things they can’t currently prove. Why else are you going to spend years of your life bashing your head against a brick wall trying to prove it?
Sometimes that belief pays off spectacularly. Often it results in a junior researcher’s career going down the toilet because they or their supervisor backed the wrong horse and they ended up with nothing exciting to publish.
Ok Dias is an a**hole (especially for manipulating students), but Nature is at fault here. They chose to publish those papers, ignoring referee/data concerns.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadI had figured the LK-99 team might actually have something interesting considering that they were promising a proper presentation of their work at the American Physical Society. I had heard it had been withdrawn and wrote it off as another case of academic fraud, but looking it up right now, apparently it's weirder than that.
Someone pretended to be the corresponding author and submitted a withdrawal, but this was fixed and the conference the presentation is at should be happening around these days.
And I don't mean what you probably infer from that. If you look into the way that hydrogen adsorbs into a platinum lattice, and how phonon resonance modes can induce tremendous crushing forces on anything between two platinum atoms, cold fusion actually looks quite plausible. It's not like perpetual motion--there's a clear possible mechanism for it which is surprisingly fully compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. That said, Pons and Fleischmann rushed publication on shoddy data, making a mockery of themselves and causing cold fusion to become an untouchable subject no one would go near a generation later due to perceived guilt by association.
The theory behind LK-99 is pretty solid. The linear structure of these apatite compounds create chains of conductive electron bands that in theory might have sufficient band gaps to enable superconductivity. If you could get atomic precision in the copper/lead alternating pattern that creates those stresses. However I fear any research into room-temperature linear superconductors will now be as taboo as cold fusion.
Yes, they were shoddy
But no, the field was swamped within weeks with people trying to replicate it. It has lost its luster, and become a parody, but that is because it was wrong
It took a decade for the excitement to die down
LK-99, or at least the manufactured samples of it, is not a superconductor. But some other variation or different manufacturing technique might. Yet I predict no one is going to look very hard in the years to come.
No, it is not. These things are well understood. The behaviour of hydrogen in crystals is studied a lot. In metals because of issues with hydrogen embrittlement and fusion stuff, in some oxides for the storage of hydrogen for energy applications, and in material in general because proton irradiation is a common tool when studying them. All of this to say that this is not something that was never investigated.
> It's not like perpetual motion--there's a clear possible mechanism for it which is surprisingly fully compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them.
The orders of magnitude just do not match. The pressures involved is typically 1 GPa (usually less in metals, more in ceramics). That is far from enough to bring nuclei sufficiently close for fusion. There is a reason why nobody claims this, and it is not because we don’t look at the behaviour of hydrogen (or other light nuclei like deuterium, tritium, helium, or lithium for that matter).
> The theory behind LK-99 is pretty solid. The linear structure of these apatite compounds create chains of conductive electron bands that in theory might have sufficient band gaps to enable superconductivity.
Again, it is not. Some preliminary electronic structure calculations showed interesting features, but these features were no indication of superconducting behaviour, and indeed LK-99 is not a superconductor. There were plenty of people who tried to reproduce the results and it clearly showed that the initial paper was wrong.
> If you could get atomic precision in the copper/lead alternating pattern that creates those stresses.
Our understanding of what causes superconductivity and the creation of Cooper pairs is not complete. Otherwise, we’d design materials with the right properties from the beginning, rather than testing a lot of stuff just to see what works.
> However I fear any research into room-temperature linear superconductors will now be as taboo as cold fusion.
Contrary to cold fusion, superconduction is actually a thing. Current high-temperature superconductors work at the temperature of liquid nitrogen; finding one that works 100K higher is not that much of a stretch. The gap is not 6 orders of magnitude like with cold fusion.
In fact, there is quite a lot of funding for research on high-temperature superconductors even this year so your fear is not really well founded.
We're just starting to get a handle on the mathematics underlying this phenomenon, but it does exist. And the causes of the phenomenon transpose directly into crystal latices. So we absolutely should expect "rogue phonons" that have energies orders of magnitude above average phonon energy, enough to overcome Coulomb barriers and trigger D-D or D-T fusion reactions.
Of course thinking of using this to generate energy is something else entirely. It's a freak occurrence, and if there is a way of making it predictable or enhanced in some way, that solution is not obvious. But it should be detectable with very sensitive equipment, and would be a wonderful experimental physics result.
Not at that scale. 10m waves are common. 5 orders of magnitudes from this is not a rogue wave, it’s a wave that goes higher than the moon. I understand you are convinced you had a bright new idea, but if you want others to be convinced as well you need more solid arguments than “it could happen”.
Again, the kind of stresses at the atomic scale in materials are a few GPa. You need much more than that, on top of a few million kelvins to have deuterium fusion (hydrogen is even harder).
> So we absolutely should expect "rogue phonons" that have energies orders of magnitude above average phonon energy, enough to overcome Coulomb barriers and trigger D-D or D-T fusion reactions.
We really should not, after just basic napkin maths. The energy given by 1 GPa is around 0.001 eV. The energy barrier for a deuterium-tritium reaction is 0.1 MeV. The difference is not an order of magnitude or two; it’s 8. It is just not going to happen in anything that looks like a solid, which is exactly why we do it in confined plasmas.
But even if we take this for granted and think a bit about the consequences it gets even more absurd. The same deuterium-tritium fusion reaction releases 17 MeV. This is going to first, melt the crystal close to where the reaction is taking place; and the shred the structure of the material over centimetres.
> It's a freak occurrence, and if there is a way of making it predictable or enhanced in some way, that solution is not obvious.
Or rather, it would be a freak occurrence if it were happening. The likelihood of this being in the same realm as a wave putting some water on the surface of the moon.
> But it should be detectable with very sensitive equipment, and would be a wonderful experimental physics result.
You don’t need very sensitive equipment to see the damage caused by 17 MeV neutrons in a crystalline material. Fairly standard electron microscopes are enough.
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-...
(Could skip to "Cornelis Drebbel".)
So the term was used more as a synonym for "continuously working", like a water wheel, without presuming any violation of the laws of thermodynamics that had yet to be invented :
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-perpetual-...
(Today we would call that one "a resume-padding buzzword.)
I agree publish or perish may not be the best system but we should not excuse people for being corrupt. People can and do chose to behave ethically. Those who don't should be punished.
Legend has it that the submissions tracking system consisted of a particularly wide windowsill, in which the submitted manuscripts were stacked up in piles for each month.
- Nature published a paper twice after the reviewers voted "no". Of course, it is not a voting process, the editor makes their decision. But evidently the editor didn't use the referee's input for that decision. That input, must I say, is free work that academics do for the journal. Click-baitiness simply weighted more to the editor and her supervisors. People should just stop paying attention to what Nature publishes.
- The students... I think this is the worst part of the story. Sometimes, students are on a student visa that depends on them holding for dear life to their university position. Been there, done that. I remember when I did my PhD: four to five international students--very well prepared I must say--to one from the host country. The ones from the host country were the ones with the best soft skills but they rarely put the long hours. I'll never forget that Iranian student who was a political refugee passing as a PhD student, because she couldn't bear the indignity of an asylum process. She couldn't return to her home country either.
- The replication...For the first retraction, I could find nowhere in the article that replication attempts were made. If those replication attempts were impossible to produce with the data published in the article itself, then its not a scientific paper, but a promotional brochure. In fact, some promotional materials are more extensive than Nature's articles; they really want to make the thing very short and academics are forced to jump through hoops to condense their publications, until they are practically impossible to understand, not to mention replicate. Again, the only solution to that problem is to ignore Nature.
The LK-99 paper, lots of attempts at replicating the results. Crazy quick. Like front-running the published results.
These results, like people never even had the thought to try, and it devolved into arguing sampling issues rather than just trying the material.
There is some certain sub-segment of humanity that often feels that way. Like 8B humans will all bend over backward to let them get away with almost anything. Totally abandon all normal procedures, safety checks, laws, replication, validation, ...
I appreciate that Nature's news team is willing to publish information about Nature's massively embarrassing failure to do their job reviewing the paper, and I hope they mean it when they say “We are looking at this case carefully to see what lessons can be learnt for the future.”
It's "loss" in the sense that our truth determining apparatus (e.g. peer review) appears to be highly unreliable, and a massive, unquantified amount of bullshit research has already passed it and is actively being used as a foundation for subsequent research.
Nature intentionally plays loose with potentially world-changing discoveries. It probably makes sense to have some journals that publish with fairly high rates of (post-hoc determined) false positives, simply to move the fields forward more quickly.
How else can it be interpreted?
Most fraud uncovered has been careless. So the fastidious fraudsters are flying high?
That would be the logical conclusion
Science needs to win its credibility back, not claim this is "...[a] win for science."
Science needs to be realistic about its decaying social license
That although scientists are people and so there will always be some who try to cheat and lie, those lies will eventually be found out and when that happens the record will be put right. It shows that science is not only non-dogmatic in the sense that new information which challenges or improves on our previous best understanding of a given topic will be used to update or replace the old, but that even when there is no new evidence, new research is still being openly challenged and tested by other scientists.
Scientific journals have their problems, but finding and correcting mistakes, and being transparent about the correction and about how those mistakes were made, are all indications of credibility. Even better, in this case, the alarms were sounded very very early and yeah Nature really fucked up by ignoring them for as long as they did, but there were people who cared about the truth who were persistent and in the end Nature did the right thing. That's says something really good about science.
The replication crisis is still a big problem. Lots of less dramatic results are probably false and will likely go unchallenged for a longer time, but that's just something we have to consider when deciding how confident we are in those results. Results which have been independently verified multiple times are those we can be more confident in, results which haven't been verified should be taken with a much larger grain of salt. It'd be silly to take examples like this as a sign that science as a whole shouldn't be trusted.
I hope science can one day overcome people like you and actually address the systemic issues it is facing. Denial that there is anything really wrong, that ultimately everything works fine so nothing has to fundamentally change, is exactly the problem that causes those systemic failures we are seeing in science and academia all the time.
This is exactly why Nature can write about their own failure, because there are no expectations beyond "hoping" and trusting they change. But of course nothing will ever actually change.
Here are my reasons why I think peer review will not reach a higher standard.
1) Peer review is hard work and probably tedious. In order to do a really good job, someone would have to spend tens or hundreds of hours reviewing a paper. The best reviewers would actually replicate the research. This probably will not happen often.
2) Peer review is not rewarded. No one is going to get tenure for being an excellent reviewer.
3) Good reviewers may even be punished. Unfortunately, many humans do not like critical feedback and hate having their work invalidated. Some of these people take revenge, and "shoot the messenger".
I think the solution is to stop thinking something is correct because it is published in a peer reviewed journal. Instead, people need to recognize that while the scientific process may eventually get the right result, it often makes mistakes, and is not perfect.
203 K is -70 °C, not +70 °C
Indeed it is scary, because as a student your PI can in fact ruin your life and ruin your career, without much recourse in most cases. This behind-the-scenes is a good insight into the bad incentives and lack of accountability for PIs in academic research. I suspect this kind of thing happens all the time in smaller fields, and never gets discovered because it's not a headline-grabbing topic like room-temp superconductivity.
I had a bioengineering PhD friend who said she spotted obviously fraudulent papers all the time in her field--publications claiming they grew such-and-such bacteria in so-and-so medium, when she knew damn well that said bacteria cannot grow in said medium.
The students here didn't really do anything wrong, but Dias used his position of authority to essentially blackmail the students into becoming complicit in fraud, and attempted to justify it essentially with an "everybody does it" excuse. Kudos to them for taking the initiative to retract their paper over the head of their PI! That takes a lot of courage, given the immense powers an advisor holds over their students.
Explain to me why Nature would publish a paper without having access to/requiring the data. Could it be Nature wanted to be the first to publish such a ground breaking discovery? Dishonest people are simply a fact of life. The entire point - supposedly - of peer review is to insure that scientist do not make unsubstantiated claims. Job well done Nature. Job well done.
Hence, it doesn't surprise me at all to see that he was the one to call out Dias. Some things never change!
BTW: I am not criticizing the actual reviewer of the paper. Data availability should be a policy of the journal and required for publication. How can you improve quality without access to the data? In this instance requiring data would have likely prevented the paper from even reaching peer review and wasting a busy individuals time.
I am not in the field, so I cannot comment on the specific relevance of the request, but in my area, there are absolutely some mandatory data inclusions which should block a paper from being published. Presumably this was not on that list.
Nature is a "premier journal" known for publishing cutting edge research. Any data - in this case a bunch of numbers - used to support the conclusion should be made available. I am sure there are disciplines where the evidence would be difficult to provide directly - fossils, physical items etc. Maybe this PI did the experiment himself - thought he won a Noble - only to find he could not in fact reproduce the results after publication - oops. IMO Nature did not do its job. Just pointing that out.
[1] https://plos.org/resource/how-to-store-and-manage-your-data/
Requiring (raw) data is relatively new, and is only in a few fields. For most of the history of peer review data was not required. In fact, none of the PIs I worked in during grad school would ever agree to releasing the raw data. I'm pretty sure they're still not in most of physics.
IMO, it's reasonable to require it, but understand that this is a relatively new requirement and not part of peer review culture.
That on its own is scandalous
I was reading of the "reproducibility crisis", in computing, in the nineties
Science still wants to be the warm friendly club, whilst playing competitively for high personal stakes.
Cannot be both. Fraud, deliberately cynical fraud and hopeful naive fraud, has been rampant for decades
The journals benefit directly and seem to be utterly complicit. The system is dreadfully broken
Nobody should wonder why people do not trust science
Science isn't a religion, nor is it a paper, thesis, or journal. It's a method for understanding the world around us through rigorous application of testing and retesting.
Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted.
We call people in the field of Science, Scientists. Perhaps we should stop labeling fallible and untrustworthy humans as such. Science is trustworthy. Humans are not.
This is an important point and I think people should make it more often.
A human scientist who is committing fraud is misrepresenting facts about the world. And the way you would accurately describe those facts is with science. It's not that science is in the wrong here, it's that the human is lying about what the science says.
You want to be able to say "objectively, this guy lied about his research." But if you want to say that, then you need to be able to accurately describe both the world and the research so you can compute the diff between them. So if you throw out the science with the human scientist, then you've thrown out any objective means by which you were going to say the human scientist did anything wrong in the first place.
>Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted.
I still wouldn't go so far. Science doesn't provide a pure understanding of the world it produces at best a model based on observations and axioms. These both can be wrong without politics,money, or personal bias. Our senses are fallible and sometimes you measured the wrong thing with the wrong tool. You shouldn't trust science, you scrutinize it and use what you find works until it doesn't (and then publish that).
Taking an iterative approach where you make a prediction, test the prediction, and adjust course in response to the test (AKA science) is literally the only possible thing that can work to discover true things about the world. So if someone distrusts science they're basically giving up on a belief in objective reality.
But I agree it's not surprising that people don't trust science, any more than it's surprising that people believe in astrology, lizard people, or ESP. Human minds don't have a special science sensor that lights up when they read true things. It's pretty much garbage in garbage out.
Don't miss the story here, which is that the study failed to replicate and the fraud was detected. In many human endeavors there are frauds that have persisted for centuries.
> That on its own is scandalous
Yeah it is, I agree. Providing data should be mandatory to the reviewers. It should IMO also be provided publicly if feasible (at least upon request if it's financially burdensome to host) if the work is publicly funded.
Maybe it should be. "Peer reviewed" is taken as a sign of reliability in many contexts, including public policy. If it isn't actually such a sign, then either it needs to change so it is, or we need to stop taking it as a sign of something it isn't.
Even just reevaluating a submitted dataset is no guarantee. Someone committing an elaborate fraud could have faked the raw datasets as well.
What you're saying is, the first option I gave, to fix the peer review process so it is a good indicator of the reliability of research, is not feasible.
If that's the case, that just means we have to pick the second option: stop treating peer reviewed research as if it is reliable.
It's a system built upon honesty. A dishonest person is obviously going to take advantage of it. Really blatant things are caught in peer review, but sneaky fraud will definitely slip through.
Fraudulent research would obviously not be of the desired quality, wouldn't it?
> It's a system built upon honesty.
But if the purpose is to characterize the research in terms of quality, this can't be right. Since fraud is known to happen, and there are known to be incentives for fraud, any process that claims to judge the quality of research would have to have some way of checking for fraud.
Something can appear to be of very high quality and yet still be completely fraudulent. This occurs in countless fields; art, counterfeit money, deepfakes, etc.
Scientists are attempting to address fraudulent research in other ways, but peer review is not the best means for it and it should not be thought of in that way.
So in other words, peer review does not judge actual quality. It only judges apparent quality. Which is not what anyone actually wants to know.
It is the case, and that second option is exactly what we do. One article is nice, but replication is key before some new finding is accepted. That is exactly what happened with LK-99, for example, which is interesting because it was very public.
I don't think so. I see claims made all the time about science being "settled" purely on the basis of it being peer reviewed.
> replication is key before some new finding is accepted
If only that were true. In many cases it isn't.
We always joked that if you read it in Nature, it was certain to be wrong, but realistically, it meant that the topic was likely an important one with a small number of competitive groups who could all evaluate each other's papers and will loudly complain about every inconsistency or irreproducible detail.
My own research is creepy and I want to leave (except my professor will ruin me): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa...
My professor is using us to rig the IEEE elections (except afraid of losing scholarship and grad courses): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/69486/what-shou...
My professor is rigging nanotechnology data and plagiarizing (except I don't stand a chance against him): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/31265/my-profes...
There are bad professors in academia just like there are bad bosses in industry.
Hopefully anyone with bad ones will find better ones.
Seniority, bonuses, equity vesting, resume damage
Relatively minor. Most senior people I know who leave with bad blood end up with equally senior roles, and often "fail upwards" to even more senior roles in another company.
Bonuses/Vesting: Very common to get good vesting at a new company to make up for what you're losing. Of the people I know who've moved, it's the exception that didn't get decent replacement for vesting.
Resume damage: What? Person spent 4 years at a company and left. What resume damage? Your experience still counts.
Contrast with a PhD who leaves in the middle of a program: The years he spent are 0. Generally, the experience/knowledge accumulated is not factored into it when he applies elsewhere for a PhD - unless he has some fantastic publication.
Still, this is the good outcome - I've often seen students leave an advisor or school and succeed elsewhere. The real danger is when you get your PhD and the advisor will not write letters of recommendation. Unless you've made some really special connections, it means your academic career is over. You won't get a post doc. You won't get an academic position. You won't get into a national lab. And depending on your field, you won't get a research position in industry either.
In the industry, no boss has that power.
When I relised this kind of power inbalance during my PhD resulting docile behaviour of my collegues and partly myself, I even did not even wanted to chage my supervisour nor make a protest as the power inbalances are normalized. This awareness made my PhD easier as I did not put false hopes and did not invest my leisure time into becoming more specialised or come up with my own ideas which could latter be turned down to not allign with funded project as my collegues did. I found the remedy in fight for a better tooling and investing my leisure time in completely different field in which papers were still not been written by robots.
Once you are in a PhD program you are locked in for 5+ years. It's almost as bad as the green card timeline.
In industry, competitive hiring and job-hopping are considered to be normal. Confidentiality is assumed, for the most part. There are some stock, face-saving reasons why you're leaving your previous job, that don't open cans of worms. There are lists of questions that you don't ask. And It's not weird if you're changing jobs after a couple of years. Your seniority and promotion clocks don't typically get reset to zero.
What a mess.
After the "metrics" revolution we started to measure and incentivise everything. It has not worked well for science.
That and reputations trees. The tree that spawned this rotten apple, root to roof, has spawned many more.
Sometimes, this power balance pushes people over the edge. There is a case of a PhD student who, after a struggle with his PI wanting him to publish fraudulent results, had a breakdown and took his own life. https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-the...
To remain in the US on a student visa, you need to be "in status". The government has rules on what that is, and mostly it is that you continue to register for a full load. I do not think the government has specified additional requirements.
However, each university has an international programs office and they are required to specify for each international student whether the person is compliant with the university's guidelines. In your university's case, that office may have decided that "Hey, if you're a PhD student, you can't go too long without an advisor, because that would mean you're not making progress towards a PhD." I've seen them say similar things if it's taking too long to get a degree (e.g. over 6 years for undergrad or 8 years for PhD). Or if the GPA is too low and you're on probation
Typically, these rules apply to all students, and not just international ones. It's essentially the university saying "You're about to be kicked out/expelled, so we can't tell the immigration folks that you are progressing towards your degree"
Still, I really doubt your university has a rule specifying only 30-60 days to find a new PhD advisor. To give you an idea, in many sciences, it's common that you don't have a thesis advisor until after your first year (you focus in the first year on passing your qualifying exams, and only once you pass it are professors interested in taking you on).
If indeed your university is enforcing a 30-60 day rule, it's a really crappy university.
TLDR: The law doesn't require it, but each university has its own policies.
Yes, exactly that, it was something along the lines of "you are not sleeping with me, consequently you are not progressing to your degree".
Of all the problems in science, this seems like one of the easier ones to fix.
I think the LK-99 thing made it pretty clear that it is pretty difficult to do, there are lots of variables and lots of things that need to be ruled out to prove that something is superconducting.
The way it works now is already reasonable, actually. One paper is not a proof of anything, it is a claim. A ground-breaking article starts a gold rush of people who want to be where the action is, which leads to a lot of follow-up or exploratory studies, which leads to independent verification and replication. At this point, the initial claim starts being accepted. For all the noise in mainstream media, something does not become the state of knowledge after a single article. This is actually quite robust because that system works even if individual articles are unreliable.
1. https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegatio...
2. https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.adi2603/full/dias...
I'd love to hear any other possible explanations for this behavior, because it seems to delusional to fabricate this and think you wouldn't get caught.
Sometimes that belief pays off spectacularly. Often it results in a junior researcher’s career going down the toilet because they or their supervisor backed the wrong horse and they ended up with nothing exciting to publish.