Author Archives: Davide Castelvecchi

Nobel laureates call for release of Iranian physicist

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Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro.

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Omid Kokabee (pictured at left) was among 13 Iranian prisoners featured in an exhibition across from the United Nations in New York in February.
{credit}Unlock Iran{/credit}

[Update 14 October: An Iranian court has granted Kokabee a retrial, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.]

Eighteen Physics Nobel laureates have signed an open letter addressed to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, calling for the release of Omid Kokabee, a 32-year-old physicist who has spent the last 3 years and 8 months in a Teheran prison.

The letter is a joint initiative by Amnesty International; the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS), an international human-rights organization headquartered in New York; and the Committee on the International Freedom of Scientists of the American Physical Society (APS), based in College Park, Maryland.

In January 2011 Kokabee, who at the time was a PhD student at the University of Texas in Austin, was arrested during a visit to his native Iran. He was later sentenced to 10 years of jail on charges of ‘communicating with a hostile government’.

Kokabee denied all charges in an April 2013 open letter, in which he claimed that his jailing was an attempt to pressure him into collaborating with a military research project (see ‘Iranian says he was jailed for refusing to engage in military research‘). Kokabee’s research included work on a type of laser that could be used in nuclear enrichment.

The Nobel laureates’ letter describes the accusations as “spurious charges related to [Kokabee’s] legitimate scholarly ties with academic institutions outside of Iran”. It also urges Khamenei “to exhibit compassion and allow him to return to his studies”.

Eugene Chudnovsky, the co-chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists, says that the letter’s release has been timed to coincide with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s visit at the United Nations (UN) in New York, where on 25 September he addressed the UN General Assembly.

Earlier this month, the CCS has said that Kokabee’s health conditions have worsened, and that he was allegedly being denied medical care.

Kokabee has received sustained support from the international scientific community since Nature first covered his case in the West. In 2013, he was awarded the APS Andrei Sakharov Prize, which recognizes scientists who promote human rights. Amnesty International declared him to be a prisoner of conscience last year.

In March Kokabee submitted a paper to the physics preprint archive, signed from Teheran’s Evin jail. He has also submitted several contributions to local and international optics conferences, among them the 2014 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO), which took place in June in California. Although some of these papers were accepted, he was allegedly denied permission to leave the jail temporarily to attend any of those conferences.

The Nobel laureates who signed the open letter are Alexei Abrikosov, Nicolaas Bloembergen, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Leon Cooper, Andre Geim, Sheldon Glashow, John Hall, Anthony Hewish, Wolfgang Ketterle, Klaus von Klitzing, Toshihide Maskawa, John Mather, Konstantin Novoselov, Arno Penzias, David Politzer, Jack Steinberger, Daniel Tsui and James Cronin.

Ephemeral superheavy atoms coaxed into exotic molecules

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Posted on behalf of Katharine Sanderson.

If you were ever to get excited about a chemical reaction, now might be the time.

An international team led by Christoph Düllmann at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, has managed to make a chemical compound containing the superheavy element seaborgium (Sg) — which has 106 protons in its nuclei — and six carbon monoxide groups.

The resulting molecule, reported on 18 September in Science, could be the start of a new chemical repertoire for the manmade superheavy elements, which do not exist in nature.

These elements are interesting not only to nuclear physicists — who use them to test how many protons they can pack into one nucleus before mutual electrostatic repulsion makes it explode — but also to chemists. The protons’ electrostatic pull on the electrons orbiting the nucleus is stronger in these elements than it is in lighter ones. This means that the electrons whiz around the nucleus at almost 80% the speed of light, a regime where Einstein’s special theory of relativity — which makes particles more massive the faster they get — begins to have a measurable effect. “It changes the whole electronic structure,” says Düllmann, making it different from those of elements that sit directly above the superheavy elements on the periodic table (see ‘Cracks in the periodic table‘).

Some chemists therefore expect superheavy elements to violate the general rule that elements in the same column should have similar electron structures and thus be chemically similar.

It is a brave chemist who attempts chemical reactions with superheavy elements. These cannot be studied with normal ‘wet chemistry’ methods and ordinary bunsen burners because they are made in very small numbers by smashing lighter atoms together, and tend to be extremely unstable, quickly ‘transmuting’ into other elements via radioactive decay. But it can, and has, been done, and researchers have identified fluorides, chlorides and oxides of these elements.

The difference this time is that the chemical reaction was done in a relatively cool environment, and a different kind of chemical bond was formed. Rather than a simple covalent bond, where the metal and the other element share electrons, Düllmann made a compound with a much more sophisticated sharing of electrons in the bond, called a coordination bond.

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Nuclei of the superheavy element seaborgium were created from a beam of neon ions (top right) and slowed down in a gas-filled chamber (RTC), where they reacted with carbon monoxide to produce a new kind of molecule.
Credit: P. Huey/Science

Düllmann’s team used the RIKEN Linear Accelerator (RILAC) in Japan to make seaborgium by firing a beam of neon ions (atomic number 10) at a foil of curium (96). This process yielded nuclei of seaborgium-265 — an isotope with a half-life of less than 20 seconds — at a rate of just one every few hours.

The beam also produced nuclei of molybdenum and tungsten, which are in the same column of the periodic table as seaborgium. The team separated the resulting seaborgium, molybdenum and tungsten from the neon using a magnetic field, and sent them into a gas-filled chamber to cool off and react with carbon monoxide. Molybdenum and tungsten are known to form carbonyls (Mo(CO)6 and W(CO)6).

Using a technique called gas chromatography, the team found that the seaborgium formed a compound that was volatile and tended to react with silica, the way its molybdenum- and tungsten-based siblings would. This indirect evidence was enough to convince Düllmann that he had made the first superheavy metal carbonyl (Sg(CO)6). “It was a fantastic feeling,” he says.

In this case the prediction — which the experiment confirmed — was that special relativity would make the molecule behave more like its lighter counterparts than might analogous compounds of different superheavy elements.

In an accompanying commentary, nuclear chemist Walter Loveland of Oregon State University in Corvallis writes that similar techniques could be applied to other superheavy elements from 104 to 109. In particular, the chemistry of element 109 (meitnerium) has never been studied before, he notes.

New details emerge on retracted STAP papers

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Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski.

New leaked e-mails showing the comments of referees for  Science and Nature provide more insight into the saga of the STAP papers, which Nature published in January and retracted in July.

The papers had promised new, simpler ways to produce stem cells by applying stress to cells taken from a patient’s tissues. But no other lab was able to reproduce the results, and experts pointed to several problems and inconsistencies in the papers. In April,  first author Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, was declared guilty of scientific misconduct; the controversy later took a tragic turn as another co-author, Yoshiki Sasai, committed suicide on 5 August.

An investigative report into the papers, released in May, revealed that a previous version of the work had been rejected by Nature, Cell and Science in 2012, before being resubmitted and accepted by Nature. (Nature’s news and comment team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.)

That report gave details from the Science referees who pointed out that one figure had been “reconstructed” in a way at odds with normal scientific practice and another one had a “suspiciously sharp” band (see ‘Misconduct verdict stands for Japanese stem-cell researcher‘).

The blog Retraction Watch posted the full comments of three referees who reviewed the paper for Science on 10 September.

The reviews include a modicum of support, but overall the paper was panned by all three. Reviewer 2 notes, “Unfortunately, the paper presents only a superficial description of many critical aspects of the work,” before launching into 21 points that “need to be addressed”, ranging from seemingly sloppy mistakes to fundamental problems with the data.

Reviewer 3 noted, “If these results are repeatable, a paradigm of developmental biology would be changed.”

The manuscript itself is not available, so it is impossible to know exactly how similar the rejected Science manuscript is to the version that was eventually published in Nature.

When the committee initially brought the problems in the Science paper to her attention, Obokata defended herself by saying that the published Nature paper had main conclusions that differed from those in the rejected Science manuscript, and she refused to show the latter to the investigative committee.

The cells in that manuscript were called stress-altered somatic cells (SAC) cells, whereas those in the paper that was eventually published bore the now-infamous name of the method: stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP. But judging from the reviewers’ comments,  STAP cells and SAC cells seem to be very similar.

Nature‘s research editors do not comment on their correspondence with authors, but on 11 September Science revealed new e-mails said to have been exchanged between Obokata and a Nature editor in April 2013.  Those e-mails allegedly quote Nature‘s reviewers as having many reservations similar to those expressed by Science‘s reviewers, and unanimously recommending that the paper be rejected — which Nature did. The Nature editor did leave open the possibility of publishing the paper if the problems were solved. About 9 months later, in December, Nature accepted both papers.

Indian Ocean signal was not crash of flight MH370

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Posted on behalf of Declan Butler.

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Hopes have faded that hydroacoustic signals picked up on the floor of the Indian Ocean might help to locate the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 airliner that disappeared in March. Data from an additional sensor suggest that the signal probably resulted from geological activity and not the sound of an aircraft crashing into the ocean’s surface.

In June, Australian scientists had reported that sensitive microphones off the Australian coast had detected a distinctive signal at 01:30 coordinated universal time (UTC) on 8 March, around the time satellites lost contact with the Boeing 777 airliner.

The initially reported signals were discovered by an ocean acoustics group at Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology in Perth, Australia. They were studying data from an acoustic station in Perth Canyon, about 40 kilometres west of Rottnest Island off the country’s west coast (see ‘Sound clue in hunt for MH370′).

That station is one of six belonging to Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). The team then confirmed the signal using data from the Cape Leeuwin acoustic station, operated by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) southwest of Australia. This gave a rough fix on the location of the origin of the sound as somewhere along a strip in the northwest of the Indian Ocean (see ‘Lost trail’).

On 3 September the researchers recovered data from another IMOS station at Scott Reef, off northwestern Australia. It contains a signal at 01:32:49 UTC that the researchers believe could correspond to the sound event they had detected earlier. Combining the data gave a fix on the location of the sound as the geologically active Carlsberg Ridge, midway between the Horn of Africa and India.

The sound signal also had a low amplitude tail, and taken together these two findings suggest that the event was geological — caused, for example, by an earthquake, underwater landslide or volcanic eruption, says Alec Duncan, a scientist in the Curtin University group.

Chimps from controversial lab move to retirement home

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Posted on behalf of Katia Moskvitch.

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Julius, 46, is one of 110 research chimps who are now permanently retired at a sanctuary in Louisiana.
Credit: Chimp Haven

Tosha, Sassy, Paula, Julius and their 106 friends will now be munching peppers and bananas without worries of being used to test new drugs. The chimpanzees, formerly used for biomedical research by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) facility New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana, have now arrived at Chimp Haven, a federally funded sanctuary in Keithville, Louisiana.

“Our dreams have finally been realized for these amazing animals,” said Chimp Haven’s president Cathy Willis Spraetz in a statement.

The move comes two years after the NIH announced it would retire the NIRC’s 110 chimps, following an undercover video investigation by the Humane Society of the United States that exposed animal mistreatment at the facility (see ‘NIH retires research chimps at troubled facility‘).

Initially, the NIH had planned to send only ten of the animals to Chimp Haven and the rest to the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio. The NIH changed its mind after the sanctuary embarked on an extensive campaign that resulted in making extra room at Chimp Haven to accommodate many more animals and raising money for their care.

Although experiments on chimps contributed to several medical breakthroughs, such as vaccines against hepatitis B and polio, recent scientific developments have created viable alternatives to primate research.

The retirement plan for the NIRC’s chimps was just the first step in scaling back the NIH’s primate research. In June 2013, the NIH announced it would retire to sanctuary nearly all of its research chimpanzees, about 310 of them, leaving only up to 50 for scientific experiments. NIH director Francis Collins said at the time that chimps, as humans’ closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, “deserve special respect”.

The decision followed a landmark report by the US Institute of Medicine published in December 2011, which outlined strict criteria for the use of chimps in biomedical and behavioural research.

 

 

 

 

French science needs ‘smarter’ spending, OECD says

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Posted on behalf of Barbara Casassus.

French scientists are increasingly alarmed about what they see as a dearth of funds in labs and universities and poor prospects for those hoping to start a career in research. Meanwhile a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) agrees that the country’s great scientific tradition is in peril, but puts the blame on slow reforms.

The scientists’ protest started in mid-June with a plenary meeting of the National Committee on Scientific Research of the main basic research agency, the CNRS. Since then, other campus meetings have been held, and seven scientists from Montpellier University have called for a three week ‘march on Paris’ with participants converging on the capital by foot or bicycle during the Science Festival, which will take place from 27 September to 19 October. “We have had a more enthusiastic response to the initiative than we had expected,” says biologist Patrick Lemaire, who is one of the seven.

A website called Urgency of scientific employment was created two weeks ago, and has gathered more than 10,000 signatures for a petition demanding that the government immediately launch a long-term plan to create several thousand permanent scientific jobs “to avoid sacrificing an entire generation of young scholars”. The activists behind the petition pledged to continue the protest until the government gives in.

Coincidentally, the OECD warned last week that French science would continue its slow but steady decline over the next couple of decades. But the OECD sees the problem differently than the protesters. Although France has made some necessary changes in research and innovation in recent years, major blockages remain, the OECD’s review of innovation policy says. The stultifying pre-eminence of the basic research agency CNRS is still a major handicap, as are the lack of partnership research with business — despite a huge increase in public funding in that direction — and the continued support for underperforming universities, it adds.

The basic criticisms are not new, and for the OECD show that former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reforms did not go far enough. Although Socialist President François Hollande’s government, which was elected in 2012, is sticking to the same line on some scores, such as maintaining university autonomy and Investments for the Future schemes, it is backtracking on others, such as shifting some funding back from project-driven to basic research (see ‘Hollande pledges to avoid cuts to France’s science funding‘).

The result is that prospects are bleak, and no one is happy — neither the pro- nor the anti-reformists. Key OECD recommendations include transferring responsibility for research policy and priorities from agencies to the state, and giving universities exclusive management control over mixed university-agency labs, which account for well over 90% of all those in the public sector. The necessary structures are in place, but they coexist alongside the old ones, with the result that each cancels the other out in efficiency and effectiveness, the OECD adds.

Even before the report was published, the government had responded by creating a 20-strong National Commission for the Evaluation of Innovation Policies. The commission is headed by Jean Pisani-Ferry, Commissioner-General for Policy Planning, who said last week that there is no deadline for results, but he hoped for some soon.

Commenting on the new body, Alain Trautmann, a cell biologist at the Cochin Institute in Paris and a founder of the advocacy group Sauvons la Recherche, says: “In France we have a technique that whenever you want to bury a problem, you create a commission to write a report about it.”

Higgs particle linked to matter, not just force, particles

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Posted on behalf of Alexandra Witze.

Part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector being assembled.

Part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector being assembled.
{credit Maximilien Brice/CERN}

COPENHAGEN — Physicists working at CERN, the European particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, have snared a new first for the Higgs boson. They have watched it decay directly to the particles that make up matter (called fermions) rather than just the particles that convey force (bosons), as they had before.

“It’s yet another important step in understanding the behaviour of the particle,” Fabiola Gianotti, a CERN physicist, said today at a meeting of the EuroScience Open Forum here.

A CERN spokesman called it the most important Higgs discovery since the particle itself was revealed in July 2012 (see ‘Higgs triumph opens up field of dreams‘).

The results appeared on 22 June in Nature Physics. They come from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which smashed protons together at great energies to tease out the Higgs. Until now, the Higgs had been seen to decay directly only to other bosons — namely, the carriers of the electromagnetic force (photons) and those of the weak force (Z and W particles). There had been indirect hints that it might decay to fermions as well, but measuring the fermion link directly is more challenging, Gianotti said. It needed to be done, though, to confirm that the Higgs was behaving as predicted.

CMS scientists measured the Higgs decaying to two different kinds of fermions: bottom quarks and their antimatter counterpart, and tau leptons and their antimatter counterpart. “Now we have actually observed it with very high significance,” said Gianotti of the CMS findings. (Gianotti is a member of ATLAS, another giant experiment on the LHC ring.)

The LHC has been shut down since early 2013 for maintenance and upgrades to its instruments and to the superconducting magnets that guide particle beams through it at high energies. It had to be opened every 20 metres along its 27-kilometre length for the upgrades. The machine is expected to re-start around April 2015, CERN director Rolf-Dieter Heuer told the meeting. Plans for this second science run call for it to operate with an energy of 6.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) in each beam, giving a total combined energy when they smash of 13 TeV.

Only after scientists get some initial data from the 13-TeV run, Heuer said, will CERN consider beefing up the accelerator even more to get to its final design energy, of 14 TeV.

Between 2009 and 2012, in its first science run of smashing protons, the collider operated at a maximum of 8 TeV. “Altogether we foresee another 20 years of additional running,” said Heuer. “Discovering the Higgs boson was easy — the work starts here.”

Kavli Prizes reward cosmic inflation, memory research and imaging

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Posted on behalf of Gene Russo.

The 2014 Kavli Prizes, announced today, were shared among nine scientists for their work on the theory of cosmic inflation, for contributions to the field of nano-optics and for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition.

The Kavli Foundation has awarded prizes every two years since 2008 in the disciplines of astrophysics, nanotechnology and neuroscience. The prizes are administered in cooperation with the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and consists of a cash award of US$1 million, as well as a gold medal.

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Alan Guth, Andrei Linde and Alexei Starobinsky shared the astrophysics prize.

The prize in astrophysics went to Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; Andrei Linde of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California; and Alexei Starobinsky of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Russian Academy of Sciences near Moscow. The three earned the award for pioneering work on the theory of cosmic inflation, which holds that the Universe underwent a short-lived phase of exponential expansion soon after it came into existence.

Studies of inflation now occupy thousands of theorists. Indeed, recently reported results seemed to suggest that scientists had found the imprint of the Big Bang by examining cosmic microwave background using the BICEP2 telescope; those results, however, have now been called into question.

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Thomas Ebbesen, Stefan Hell and John Pendry shared the nanotechnology prize.

For the field of nanoscience, the Kavli prizes went to Thomas Ebbesen of the Université Louis Pasteur in Paris; Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany; and John Pendry of Imperial College London. The three countered long-held beliefs about the resolution limits of optical imaging and microscopy, showing that light can interact with nanostructures smaller than light’s wavelength. Previous convention had suggested that only details larger than approximately 200 nanometres could be imaged. In a press release, the Kavli Foundation calls this ability to see and image nanoscale objects “a critical prerequisite to further advances in the broader field of nanoscience”.

Ebbesen’s experiments in the late 1990s, which challenged accepted theory of light propagation through small holes, led to new means of increasing the efficiency and spatial focus of photonic devices and the sensitivity of optical sensors. Hell developed a technique that enables imaging at dimensions much smaller than optical wavelengths, including the processes in living cells. Pendry developed a model for the ‘perfect lens’, or superlens, using materials such as silver, gold and copper. Pendry is most famous for developing the concept of an invisibility cloak, which, like perfect lenses is based on the use of ‘metamaterials’ that have a negative index of refraction (see ‘Invisibility cloaks are in sight‘).

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Brenda Milner, John O’Keefe and Marcus Raichle shared the neuroscience prize.

Kavli awarded prizes for neuroscience to Brenda Milner of McGill University in Montreal, Canada; John O’Keefe of University College London; and Marcus Raichle at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri. Through a variety of research techniques, these neuroscientists elucidated how specialized nerve cells perform different functions and revealed details about brain regions involved in memory. The Kavli announcement notes that memory “defines who we are” and that “loss of memory can have devastating effects on an individual’s personality”.

Milner studied a celebrated patient known as H.M. and others who had incurred brain damage, and found that the medial temporal lobes are necessary for the formation of what is now known as episodic memory. O’Keefe showed that the hippocampus contains neurons that encode an animal’s specific location. And Raichle designed methods for visualizing the brain’s activity.

The Kavli Foundation, based in Oxnard, California, was established in 2000 by Norwegian-born entrepeneur Fred Kavli (1927–2013), and funds more than a dozen Kavli Institutes around the world.

The award ceremony will take place in Oslo on 9 September.

Pictures courtesy of Kavli Foundation (Guth); Linda A. Cicero/Stanford University (Linde); Landau Institute/RAS (Starobinsky); Eirik Furu Baardsen (Ebbesen); Bernd Schuller/Wikimedia Commons (Hell); Mike Finn-Kelcey/Imperial College London (Pendry); Owen Egan/McGill University (Milner); Kavli Foundation (O’Keefe and Raichle).

Unknown appointed as new India science minister

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Posted on behalf of K. S. Jayaraman.

India’s newly elected government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has appointed a first-time parliamentarian to be science minister.

Jitendra Singh, 57, a physician — as well as an author and newspaper columnist — was a professor of diabetes and endocrinology at the Government Medical College and Hospital Jammu until 2012, when he became a politician. He ran for the first time as a BJP candidate in the recent parliamentary elections in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and won. On 26 May Prime Minister Narendra Modi inducted Singh into his government as a junior minister, unlike his predecessor, Jaipal Reddy, who held cabinet rank.

Singh has been given independent charge of the departments of science and technology and Earth sciences. The departments of space and atomic energy will continue to be directly under the prime minister as before, but Singh will oversee their activities.

Few in the science community had heard of Singh until he took the oath. “We were expecting a senior figure and veteran politician to head this very important ministry, with cabinet rank,” says Dipankar Chatterji, a biologist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and president of Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences. “But we have to give the new man a chance,” he adds. “Being a newcomer does have an advantage as, given his excellent credentials as a physician, he may be a much-needed breath of fresh air.”

C.N.R. Rao, who was science adviser to the previous government, says that the rank of junior minister given to Singh shows that science is not regarded as important by Modi’s government.

Observers say that although it may take some time for the new minister to settle down, he cannot delay the important appointments to top science posts that have been vacant for months. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with 40 laboratories under its control, has been headless for five months, and since the secretary to the department of science and technology — India’s main agency for funding basic research and promoting science and technology activities — retired in April, his position has not been filled.

Misconduct verdict stands for Japanese stem-cell researcher

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Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski.

The RIKEN institute today confirmed reports out yesterday that it would turn down Haruko Obokata’s request for a re-examination of her case, and advised her to retract two Nature papers she published in January.

In the Nature papers she co-authored, Obokata, a researcher at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, presented a new method to reprogram cells to an embryonic state, which the authors called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) (see ‘Acid bath offers easy path to stem cells‘). The papers awed other stem-cell researchers, but several problems in the data supporting the STAP phenomenon cropped up. (Note: Nature’s news and comment team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.) Based on two of those problems, a RIKEN investigative committee found Obokata guilty of scientific misconduct on 1 April.

Obokata fought back, and at a tearful press conference on 8 April announced she would appeal the judgment (see ‘Biologist defiant over stem-cell method‘).

On 7 May, the committee delivered a report detailing why they believed Obokata’s appeal should be denied. The 21-page document, available on RIKEN’s homepage (PDF, in Japanese), is a point-by-point rejections of Obokata’s defense. For example, the committee had previously deemed an image of an electrophoresis gel that had been made by combining different gel lanes as scientific misconduct. Obokata defended herself by saying that she did not intend to deceive in creating the image. But the committee obtained a review letter, from when an earlier version of the paper had been rejected by Science, that warned Obokata that such composite images need to be clearly marked. The committee concluded that Obokata had acted knowingly in making the composite image.

Today RIKEN officially endorsed this judgment. In a statement, RIKEN president Ryoji Noyori said the institute today notified Obokata and advised her to retract the STAP papers. Noyori says that the allegations of problems in the papers of the committee members would not affect the decision. “The investigation has been carried out properly,” he wrote.