The term "vegetative electron microscopy" keeps showing up in scientific papers

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-up-in-scientific-papers-but-why

95•SCEtoAux•3h ago

Comments

rendall•3h ago

Vegetative Electron Microscopy is now the name of my new Psychedelic Darkwave Doom Metal project.

rjsw•2h ago

To be known as "The Vegs" for short.

boothby•2h ago

The only thing left to do is pipe the output of a coma patient in an fMRI into the controls of an electron microscope.

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

saltcured•2h ago

Shouldn't they start with dead salmon?

mattlondon•2h ago

Fascinating that in Farsi "scanning" and "vegetative" differ only by a single dot in the word!

Kinda blows my mind, but then I am only really familiar with English and basic knowledge of a few other European languages.

Anyone here got any more details on this? To me it seems like its as minor as just like missing a dot on an I but totally changes the meaning?

sindriava•2h ago

Think about the difference between "tart" and "fart".

nh23423fefe•1h ago

fuck luck

cant cunt

Mistletoe•1h ago

If you are James Joyce, you are interested in both.

badc0ffee•1h ago

This is a good example - you just flipped the t upside down.

chimpanzee•2h ago

The presence of the single dot determines how to read the grapheme, ie which specific letter of the alphabet it is.

A missing dot over the “i” in the Latin alphabet is unambiguously a mistake (depending on the font or script style). But if you missed the horizontal crossbar within the letter “t”, you would read it as an “l”. For example, confusing “mate” as “male”.

Rygian•2h ago

A missing dot over the "i" in the Latin alphabet is not a mistake in Turkish. It's a different letter.

https://haacked.com/archive/2012/07/05/turkish-i-problem-and...

stevenbedrick•2h ago

Ages and ages ago a group of colleagues of mine did a study of faxing Arabic-language prescriptions- the low resolution of the fax machine, as well as the textured appearance of the forgery-resistant paper that prescriptions had to be printed on, meant that diacritic marks got smudged in ways that were leading to clinically-meaningful confusion on the part of the reader. Here's their paper about it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22178294/

moses-palmer•2h ago

I don't speak Farsi, but some Arabic, and the Farsi alphabet is related.

The letters are completely different in pronunciation: with one dot, it's like the English letter B, and with two it's either like Y or the pronunciation of double E.

kirubakaran•1h ago

"Let's eat, grandma"

"Let's eat grandma"

peaseagee•1h ago

Great band!

penguin_booze•42m ago

"The panda, eats, shoots, and leaves"

vs.

"The panda eats shoots and leaves"

SAI_Peregrinus•34m ago

Or the more vulgar

"I helped my uncle, Jack, off a horse"

"I helped my uncle jack off a horse"

floxy•2h ago

>As of today, "vegetative electron microscopy" appears in 22 papers, according to Google Scholar.

Is there any reason that journals shouldn't retract those 22 papers? I suppose those are probably pretty suspect journals in the first place.

jszymborski•2h ago

So i just chose two at random now and they don't appear to be predatory journals, just journals with Impact Factors lower than 1.

zahlman•2h ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43022628

perihelions•2h ago

Some related past threads,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43759130 ("A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers (theconversation.com)" — 38 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35423290 ("Chemist Rafael Luque suspended without pay for thirteen years (elpais.com)" — 120 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759862 ("Tomatoes roaming the fields and canaries in the coalmine (deevybee.blogspot.com)" — 33 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107614 ("Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science (nature.com)" — 259 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137980 ("A dubious writing style emerging in science (arxiv.org)" — 40 comments)

nancyminusone•2h ago

Given how often I've heard this story over the last few months, I'd half expect the total number of papers to increase with research about this topic itself.

recursive•2h ago

This was seemingly unintentional, but I bet there are "trap streets" already in the models that use this principle.

gamescr•30m ago

Vibe microscopy is here

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