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Record number of papers retracted in 2023
The number of retractions issued for research articles this year has passed 10,000 as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud. Among large research-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades. The bulk of this year’s retractions were from journals owned by the publisher Hindawi. These journals have pulled more than 8,000 articles this year.
CAR T promising against immune disorders
Engineered immune cells have given 15 people with once-debilitating autoimmune disorders — lupus, systemic sclerosis or idiopathic inflammatory myositis — a new lease on life. CAR-T cells, which are created from a person’s own immune cells, work by targeting certain cells for destruction and are often used to treat cancer. All 15 participants have remained disease-free or nearly so since their treatment. At this stage, it’s unclear how much of this is due to the engineered cells and how much is because of the intensive chemotherapy that kills off many existing immune cells in preparation for CAR-T treatment.
Reference: The Lancet Neurology paper
First look at asteroid dust brought to Earth
NASA is still working to get inside the sample capsule that its spacecraft OSIRIS-REx brought back from the asteroid Bennu more than two months ago. In the meantime, curators have used tweezers to pull out what they could: 70.3 grams of material, much more than the mission’s goal. Early analysis suggests that the Bennu fragments are rich in volatile chemical elements preserved since the birth of the Solar System. “This alone makes the whole mission worthwhile,” says planetary scientist Dante Lauretta. “We now have abundant pristine material.”
Features & opinion
For open science, don’t overlook librarians
To ensure a smooth transition to open-access science, people need to overcome outdated misconceptions of librarianship, argues digital archivist Jessica Farrell. Librarians and archivists are already experts at preserving knowledge, and they can help to ensure that data don’t become inaccessible because of proprietary software or a lost password. “Information management is an academic discipline and should be treated as such,” writes Farrell.
What the Ottomans did for science
A monumental project is uncovering the untold story of science during six centuries of the Ottoman Empire. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu’s The Ottoman Scientific Heritage contains some of the results of this decades-long work. It delves deep into the empire’s scientific history, from early institutions of higher learning to modern medicine and military technology. “It is up to today’s and future generations to use this knowledge and further assess the role of science in the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire,” writes reviewer and Nature bureau chief Ehsan Masood.
Image of the week
This photograph of melt water pouring through the Austfonna ice cap on the Arctic island of Nordaustlandet, Norway, was one winner in the 2023 Drone Photo Awards. The melting sea ice is one of Nature’s picks of the best science images of 2023.