Planet Neuroscientists

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Gene replacement therapy normalizes some traits in SYNGAP1 model mice

The first published virus-based gene therapy for SYNGAP1 deletion yields benefits despite the gene’s long length and complexity.

in The Transmitter on 2025-11-20 05:00:02 UTC.

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RFK, Jr., Releases Report Attacking Medical Care for Trans Children

A new report from the HHS that is critical of gender-affirming care for minors follows a similar, widely criticized report in May

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 22:30:00 UTC.

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mRNA flu vaccines are making their way through clinical trials

The mRNA platform offers the advantage of faster vaccine production, which could allow more time to decide on which flu strains to cover.

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-11-19 22:00:00 UTC.

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RFK, Jr., Says Peanut Allergies May Be Tied to Aluminum in Vaccines and Pesticides. Here's What the Science Says

Strong evidence suggests that food allergies are caused by a lack of exposure to food allergens—not by exposure to toxins

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 22:00:00 UTC.

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NASA’s New Images Reveal Best Look Yet at Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS

NASA spacecraft across the inner solar system captured new views of Comet 3I/ATLAS—the third known interstellar object

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 20:50:00 UTC.

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Kissing May Have Evolved 21.5 Million Years Ago in Ancestor of Great Apes and Humans

Humans and their ancestors have likely been kissing for a very long time

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 19:45:00 UTC.

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Massive Study Debunks One of RFK Jr’s Biggest Claims about Fluoride in Tap Water

Researchers tracked thousands of Americans for decades, finding no links between ingesting recommended levels of fluoride and lower cognitive skills

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 19:05:00 UTC.

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The James Webb Telescope May Have Seen the First Stars in the Universe

Although these findings from JWST are yet to be confirmed, they mark the closest astronomers have come to locating the universe’s most ancient stars

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 18:40:00 UTC.

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In animal tests, this needle-free insulin acted as fast as injections

Managing diabetes with injections is challenging. Joining insulin to a skin-penetrating polymer was as effective as shots at regulating blood sugar.

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-11-19 16:40:00 UTC.

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Epstein Files Spark Harvard Investigation into Larry Summers

E-mails between Larry Summers and the now deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein from 2018 and 2019 have raised questions about a relationship Summers pursued with a student

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 15:50:00 UTC.

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Investigators Think They’ve Solved the Mystery of the Baltimore Bridge Crash

A tiny, misplaced label may have slowly loosened a critical wire on the ship that hit Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, eventually causing a catastrophic failure

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 15:25:00 UTC.

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AI unreliable in identifying retracted research papers, says study

LLMs don’t reliably identify retracted papers, a new study finds. *(Image: DALL-E)*

Large language models should not be used to weed out retracted literature, a study of 21 chatbots concludes. Not only were the chatbots unreliable at correctly identifying retracted papers, they spit out different results when given the same prompts.

The “very simple study,” as lead author Konradin Metze called it, used LLM chatbots like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and others to see whether they would successfully identify retracted articles in a list of references.

Metze and colleagues compiled a list of 132 publications. The list comprised the 50 most cited, retracted papers by Joachim Boldt, a prolific German researcher who also sits at the top of the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. Another 50 were Boldt’s most cited non-retracted papers. The rest were works by other researchers with the last name “Boldt” and first initial of “J.” The study authors prompted each chatbot to indicate which of the listed references had been retracted.

On average, the 21 chatbots correctly identified fewer than half of the retracted papers, the authors reported October 10 in the Journal of Clinical Anesthesia. The LLMs also produced a large proportion of false positives, incorrectly classifying almost 18 percent of Boldt’s intact papers, and about 4.5 percent of other authors’ valid work as retracted.

After a three-month gap, the researchers queried seven of the 21 original chatbots with a different, shorter, prompt, as well as repeating the original prompt. “We know that the wording of the prompt may influence the answer,” said Metze, a researcher at the State University of Campinas, in Brazil. “If you ask a question to a chatbot, and you repeat the same prompt tomorrow, you may get different answers. This is not scientific, and it’s a great, great problem.”

Comparing responses from April and July, the researchers did find differences, as expected. Whereas the chatbots in the first round classified papers as retracted or not retracted, in the second round they created a new, hybrid reply, flagging a particular paper as possibly retracted, saying, for example, a paper was “worth double-checking,” “is likely one of the retracted ones” or “high-risk papers to verify.” In practical terms, this hedging is useless, Metze said.

The results of Metze and colleagues’ experiment are hardly surprising, said Serge Horbach, assistant professor in the sociology of science at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who has written about generative AI in research. “I read the article as a warning: People, please don’t use LLMs this way.”

But the paper replicates just what a conscientious author might do — enter a list of references for an LLM to check as a shortcut to the time-consuming process of checking them individually, said Mike Thelwall of the University of Sheffield, in England.

In August, Thelwall and colleagues asked ChatGPT to evaluate 217 articles that had been retracted, had expressions of concern, or had been flagged on PubPeer or another platform. They submitted each article to ChatGPT 30 times. None of the 6,510 reports generated mentioned the retractions or concerns, they reported in Learned Publishing.

ChatGPT “reported some retracted facts as true, and classified some retracted papers as high quality,” Thelwall said. “So it does not seem to be designed to be aware of, or careful about, retracted information at the time that we tested it.”

LLMs are also using material from retracted scientific papers to answer questions on their chatbot interfaces, according to a study in the Journal of Advanced Research in May 2025. “People are increasingly using ChatGPT or similar to summarize topics, and this shows that they risk being misled by the inclusion of retracted information,” Thelwall added.

Generative AI does have roles to play in the editorial process, Horbach said. But weeding out retracted papers is not yet among them, he said —and “it’s not going to lead to any better science.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].

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in Retraction watch on 2025-11-19 14:57:51 UTC.

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Eroding access to childhood vaccines jeopardizes health for all

Recent U.S. decisions about vaccines signal bigger changes to come that could threaten the foundation of the national childhood immunization schedule.

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-11-19 14:30:00 UTC.

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Combining western science with Indigenous knowledge could help the Arctic

Polar marine ecologist Marianne Falardeau investigates how Arctic ecosystems are shifting under climate change.

in Science News: Science & Society on 2025-11-19 13:00:00 UTC.

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After Spectacular Auroras, What to Know about the Sun and Its Solar Cycle

The sun’s current 11-year activity cycle has already peaked—but extreme outbursts from our star may still be in store

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 13:00:00 UTC.

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Two OIST Startups Selected for J-Startup OKINAWA 2025

At the Okinawa Startup Ecosystem Annual Meeting held on November 14, 2025, at Suntory Arena, two OIST startups—HerLifeLab Inc. and Strout Inc.—were selected among the five companies chosen for the second cohort of "J-Startup OKINAWA."

in OIST Japan on 2025-11-19 12:00:00 UTC.

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How Safe Is Melatonin, and How Does the Sleep Aid Work? Experts Explain

Melatonin supplements have become a ubiquitous sleep aid, but research shows that benefits are modest, and the heart health effects of long-term use are unknown

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 12:00:00 UTC.

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These Birds Learned to Tweet Like R2-D2. Listen to the Uncanny Results

The lovable Star Wars droid is helping to shed light on why some bird species are better at mimicking sounds than others

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 11:30:00 UTC.

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Gut Health Tips for Thanksgiving and Holiday Stress

As holiday feasts and stress approach, an expert explains how to keep your gut healthy without skipping the stuffing.

in Scientific American on 2025-11-19 11:00:00 UTC.

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An expert criticism by fraudsters and antivaxxers: the case of PubPeer

"A concerning trend is the rise of “hyper-skepticism”" - ChatGPT

in For Better Science on 2025-11-19 06:00:00 UTC.

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Does AI understand what it produces? Henk de Regt explores how we might assess understanding in machines and humans

Building on his philosophy of how scientists understand what they work on, de Regt is extending his approach to test understanding in machines.

in The Transmitter on 2025-11-19 05:00:10 UTC.

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Five Essential Books on Plastic, Power, and Pollution

If you enjoyed Beth Gardiner’s feature about big oil’s bet on plastics, here are more books curated by Scientific American

in Scientific American on 2025-11-18 20:00:00 UTC.

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See the alarming extent of NIH and NSF funding cuts in 2025

In 2025, the Trump administration froze or ended about 5,300 NIH and NSF research grants totaling over $5 billion in unspent funds, a decision that reshaped many fields of science.

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-11-18 18:00:00 UTC.

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Research integrity conference hit with AI-generated abstracts

The first of three themes for next year’s World Conference on Research Integrity will be the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence for research integrity. In an ironic and possibly predictable turn of events, the conference has received “an unusually large proportion” of off-topic abstracts that show signs of being written by generative AI.

The call for abstracts for the conference, set for May in Vancouver, closed a month ago. Last week, peer reviewers received an email with “URGENT” in the subject line.

“If you haven’t already reviewed the 9th WCRI abstracts that have been allocated to you, please take note of the following,” the email read. “We’ve received several signals that an unusually large proportion of the abstracts are completely off-topic and might have been written by some form of generative AI.”

We reached out to the conference co-chairs to find out how many abstracts the conference received, how many seem to be AI-generated, and other details. Lex Bouter, professor emeritus of methodology and integrity at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, declined to answer specific questions while the team sorts out the issue. He provided a statement nearly identical to the text emailed to peer reviewers.

“Many of these abstracts seem to have single authors and unusual affiliations (perhaps fake),” the email stated. “This seems to be a new phenomenon we’re experiencing at WCRI, which may also partly explain why we received so many abstracts.”

The email noted that conference organizers have checked for plagiarism in abstracts since finding several cases of it in submissions to the 6th WCRI in 2019. Among abstracts for the 2026 conference, the plagiarism software Copyleaks found a few cases of plagiarism — and it indicated “a substantial amount” showed signs of generative AI (GAI) use.

“We believe many applicants probably used GAI for language and grammar polishing, and we believe that to be acceptable,” Bouter said by email. “But among the submissions there are a proportion that are clearly off-topic and low quality that look like they were generated by GAI.”

As in past years with plagiarized abstracts, almost all of those flagged this year were submitted by authors who also applied for travel grants, the email to reviewers stated.

“Consequently, we intend to further examine abstracts with AI scores exceeding 20% that will likely be accepted based on average review scores and are associated with travel grant applications,” Bouter said. “We will subsequently reject the abstracts (and the travel grant application) for which we believe that unacceptable GAI use has occurred.”

The organizers recommended that reviewers give the lowest score to abstracts that are completely off-topic. The review process is set to wrap up next week.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].

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in Retraction watch on 2025-11-18 17:31:41 UTC.

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How Is Botulism Getting into Baby Formula? Here’s How to Keep Kids Safe

In recent weeks, dozens of infants in the U.S. have been infected with botulism in an outbreak linked to ByHeart powdered infant formula

in Scientific American on 2025-11-18 17:30:00 UTC.

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Chatbots may make learning feel easy — but it’s superficial

People who use search engines develop deeper knowledge and are more invested in what they learn than those relying on AI chatbots, a study reports.

in Science News: Science & Society on 2025-11-18 16:00:00 UTC.

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Funding chaos may unravel decades of biomedical research

Battles between the Trump administration and academic institutions are putting important biomedical advances in limbo.

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-11-18 14:00:00 UTC.

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