Post Scientist

  The citations at the end of a research paper should represent a solid foundation of existing knowledge about a particular field, a pool of peer-reviewed sources built over years of research and study. However, with the increasing use of AI and large language models in writing research papers, there's a growing chance that the citation someone clicks on may not even exist, and that the study, the source, or even the researchers themselves could be entirely fake. In a recent study posted to the arXiv preprint server, researchers audited millions of papers and found that an estimated 146,900 hallucinated citations were present in research papers hosted on four major scientific repositories— arXiv , bioRxiv , SSRN , and PubMed Central . These numbers were for 2025 alone. The hallucinated citations were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references, pointing to a broader pattern of researchers us...

  Researchers have demonstrated a nondestructive way to collect cellular material from historical parchment manuscripts, allowing them to conduct genetic analyses that offer new insights into everything from trade routes to agricultural practices dating back 1,300 years—without harming the valuable manuscripts. The paper, " Adventures in the Animal Archive: New Techniques for the Genetic Analysis of Parchment Manuscripts ," is published in the journal Manuscript Studies . Parchment is made from animal skins and has been in use for thousands of years across Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa to create a wide variety of documents, from legal documents to maps. "Because they are made from animal skins, it is often possible to extract genetic information from parchments," says Tim Stinson, corresponding author of a paper on this research and an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. "That genetic information, in tur...

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen have shown that giant viruses long thought to exist only as fleeting, free-living particles that can embed themselves permanently in the genome of a multicellular host, lie dormant for generations and then wake up on demand. Their study , published in Nature Microbiology , challenges fundamental assumptions about how giant viruses operate and establishes a powerful new model for studying viral latency in complex organisms. Viruses that hide in plain sight Giant viruses are among the most remarkable biological entities on Earth. Larger and more genomically complex than many bacteria, they can cause major issues in marine ecosystems, infecting algae and microbes across the world's oceans. Yet despite their abundance and ecological role, their infection strategies in multicellular hosts have remained poorly understood. In particular, whether giant viruses are capable of latency, the ability to persist silently ...

Multi-year La Niña events—so-called "double-dip" or even "triple-dip" La Niñas—are becoming more common. But why do these events persist for multiple years in the first place? Researchers from the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology and the University of Hawaii discovered two distinct pathways that can lead to long-lasting La Niña conditions and highlighted an important mechanism that has been largely overlooked. The study is published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences . Why La Niña's persistence matters El Niño and La Niña are the warm and cool phases of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that influences weather worldwide. El Niño is characterized by unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, while La Niña brings cooler-than-normal conditions to the same region. While it is rather uncommon for El Niño to last more than a year, it is no longer rare to see La Niña events...

  Computer scientists at UC Riverside have identified troubling flaws in a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents designed to take over routine computer chores while users are away—sorting emails, organizing files, analyzing data, and handling other everyday digital tasks that might otherwise consume hours. The researchers found that the automated agents can become dangerously fixated on completing assignments without recognizing when their actions are harmful, contradictory, or simply irrational. The team compared these behaviors to those of Mr. Magoo, the famously near-sighted cartoon character popular in the 1960s, who stumbled through hazardous situations while insisting everything was under control. "Like Mr. Magoo, these agents march forward toward a goal without fully understanding the consequences of their actions," said Erfan Shayegani, a UC Riverside doctoral student and lead author of the study, which was presented recently at the Inte...

  Imagine a car whose windows and sunroof can help top up its battery while parked under the sun, or a pair of smart glasses whose lenses can harvest light to power built-in electronics. Such applications could become more feasible with a new type of ultrathin transparent solar cell developed by scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore). Led by Associate Professor Annalisa Bruno, the NTU researchers created perovskite solar cells that are about 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair and around 50 times thinner than conventional perovskite solar cells. Despite their thinness, the devices achieved some of the highest power conversion efficiencies reported for ultrathin perovskite solar cells to date. Published in the journal ACS Energy Letters , their findings could pave the way for solar cells that can be integrated into buildings, vehicles and wearable devices without significantly changing their appearance. Because the ...

  As humans and other animals experience new things, their brains continuously update their memory of past events. These updates allow them to adapt to changing environments, all while preserving older memories that could still help them to make decisions in some situations. Many past neuroscience studies have investigated the neural circuits involved in the encoding and retrieval of memories. However, the mechanisms via which it decides whether to retrieve older or newly updated memories remain poorly understood. Researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently carried out a study involving mice that was aimed at better understanding how the brain switches between older and newer memories. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience , delineates a specific neural pathway that appears to support the flexible switching between the retrieval of old and updated memories in mice, involving brain regions known as the medial septum (MS)...