The only thing he is "on to" here is offloading critical reading of cited papers on to an LLM. Checking links is not the same as proper, critical citation. Also, an LLM is not a search engine (even if it is integrated with one).

The problem is the phrase "checked the links." Checking a link tells you a URL resolves. It does not tell you the paper behind it says what you claim. He trusted the model on the content, did not read the sources himself, and announced it in public.

Screenshotted for the record, in case it vanishes. The Editor-in-Chief of Science, explaining how the citations in his latest piece were checked. Short thread. 🧵

Sidney is wishing you a happy caturday!

Case in point: γ-graphyne, an acetylenic 2D carbon allotrope. Xiaoli Cui's group at Fudan claims to make it by ball-milling hexabromobenzene (or just benzene!) with calcium carbide. Their 2018 Carbon paper alone has 319 citations. The claimed chemistry is ridiculous and impossible.

Here is what the Russians actually published in 2013 (doi: 10.30906/0023-1134-2013-47-8-41-44). DBU is specifically used in the VI --> VII ring closing step. The advantage of using DBU there is that VII is clean enough to crystallize. No annoying column chromatography!

@theins.press article specifically quotes their source as claiming DBU being the "most important ... reliable marker" for the synthesis of epibatidine. That is simply incorrect, and the quote from their source (attached here) is something of a word salad. I doubt they were a real chemist.

DBU is easily accessible (standard industrial synthesis involves caprolactam and acrylonitrile). It is one of the most standard bases used in organic synthesis, and is also used as a curing agent for some epoxy resins. It is very inexpensive and universally available. Russia likely makes its own.

This brings me back to @theins.press reporting. Quoting the article: "...the key component for creating the bicyclic compound: 1,8-diazabicyclo[5.4.0]undec-7-ene..." The name sounds complicated, so that stuff must be rare and unique. Except it is not. It is just DBU - one of the commonest reagents.

Now, 6-chloropyridine-3-carboxaldehyde is not particularly hard to make, and not especially expensive. Current Thermo Fisher price is $127 per gram. Quirky building blocks like this would rarely if ever show up in importer databases. It is a small-volume, obscure research chemical.

The second thing that is apparent is that all the compounds on the list, with one critical exception, are generic, and not related specifically to the structure or synthesis of epibatidine. The one exception? 6-chloropyridine-3-carbaldehyde. If you think it looks like a part of epibatidine - yes!

@theins.press article lists compounds involved in the published synthesis of epibatidine, and the number of RU importers. So far, so good... or not. The first thing to notice is that 3-buten-2-one is methyl vinyl ketone (MVK), which Russia certainly makes on multi-ton scale, and likely imports too.

This wonderful letter is also very likely generated by an LLM. Even without running it through the detector, the slop is easy to see. So classy. I feel bad for those on the receiving end.

This you? For the interested readers: first image failing vertical line test is a crop from doi.org/10.1016/j.im... Second is from a PubPeer post related to doi.org/10.1038/s414... The 2024 "NanoImpact" paper already cited ~24 times, Nat Comm ~255 times. Good times.

So many things wrong with this post. 1. In the 90s RU, Communists were the *conservatives*. There were ~14 parties in the '93 Congress, with a slight conservative majority 2. The crisis was not "oligarchs vs people". It was infighting in the power structure, with Yeltsin arguably the "better" guy.

1. You used "Democrat" precisely because it is relevant. 2. We have a 2-party system. The right-wing party devolved into Nazis. Your (in)actions helped Nazis. The dismantling of USAID and ongoing genocides in Gaza and Ukraine are on you. 3. Yes, Greens support genocide (see attached). Any comments?

It's a shame he is a Putin supporter. ocdn.eu/sport-images...

Around 2016–17, creeping Apple hardware enshittification pushed me to Windows. By then Windows had WSL2 providing a proper bash shell, and, crucially, Photoshop, Illustrator, ChemDraw, and MS Office, all well integrated.

Perspective matters: I’m far from a Linux/Unix noob. I started on IRIX 6.5 on an SGI Octane, an Red Hat 7.x on my trusty PII-450 around 2000. SGI's Indigo Magic was polished and Just Worked™; early Linux… less so. 🧓

You’re in a desert walking along when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

Here are a few more doi's from the same journal, some already flagged on PubPeer, some not, all 💯 fabricated with hand-drawn or nonsensical spectra and PXRDs, and citation padding. 10.1002/app.57648 10.1002/app.56053 10.1002/app.56837 (the "IR spectrum" is Fig. S2, 10.1002/app.57648).

Or how do you make peace with the main scheme of the paper? While the "initiator" is KMnO4/oxalic acid, PAN chains magically grow directly from chitosan. It must be magic, because this cannot be accomplished with chemistry. This passed 🍐review, and has been on display in this journal for 15 years.

"We have asked the authors to provide a detailed explanation and supporting data to address the concerns. The authors were able to do so to our satisfaction, hence we consider the matter resolved. " How do you "resolve" pixel-identical stretches of background in two NMR spectra?

Re-posting Dr. Wittmers' thread, with a some supporting info. Fabian flagged a paper in J. Appl. Polym. Sci for region duplication in PXRD (see pubpeer.com/publications... ), and reported it to Wiley. I have found additional duplications and crazy chemistry. Wiley's response? All 💯 👍 #ChemSky

De-extincted species be like (image attribution: halloweencostumes.com)

Right here (see the screenshot).

Sydney the woodworker cat. Happy #Caturday ! In case you were wondering: the plane is a Type 4 No. 5 Stanley (1874-1884). Probably the oldest I have ever restored.

And here are some cool pictures! The periodicity of the "bumps" on the lateral force image corresponds to the crystallographic planes bisecting aromatic rings. And the triple bonds are very visible in Raman, even in films ~20 atoms thick (or thin?).

We synthesized few-layer films of γ-graphyne (the ≡ bond carbon allotrope) at a liquid/liquid interface. It's a much cleaner synthesis than our original batch method - and the stacking of the layers is orderly! Coming soon to a 🍐-reviewed journal. Preprint 🠟🠟🠟 #ChemSky doi.org/10.26434/che...