They’re after me. 

Listen. Maybe I thought that it was weird that they reached out to me, but this paper got desk-rejected from four different journals, and I needed a publication. I was desperate. I ignored the bad grammar, and misspelled words in the ‘solacitations 4 pablications’. I paid the open access fee and I thought that was the end of it. I should have kept my mouth shut. 

I thought since I paid $7,000 to publish this paper in an open-access journal it would be ok to post about my findings on the internet. I was proud of my work. I am proud of my work, but I want to live. I noticed the black van a few days after I posted my paper on ResearchGate. They got me outside the lab, as I was headed home. 

People, who I can only assume are the editorial board, dropped me off in the woods and told me they’d give me a 10 minute head start. Now here I am, sprinting through the trees with bullets whizzing by my head. Opening -80 freezers and moving boxes of tubes around is really bad conditioning for running for your life. 

If you’re reading this you’re in danger. You know now, and they’ll be coming for you. I’m sorry. 

The post Oops! I Accidentally Submitted To A Predatory Journal And Now It’s Hunting Me For Sport appeared first on dnatured journal.

Face it, people want your data. It’s almost better to steal someone’s data then their findings – it saves you from having to do the experiment at all.

So how do you protect your lab notebook? Through the ancient art of illegibility! Make your chicken-scratch as complicated as possible with these helpful techniques…

Harness the power of your surroundings

Pump yourself full of coffee for extra hand jitters, and inhale the lab fumes around you. A lower dexterity will help conceal your data from anyone who knows how to read.

Stay physically active

It’s important to get the blood flowing. Get out of that chair and write while doing aerobics (specifically following along to 1982’s “Jane Fonda’s Original Workout”)

Hire a budding transcriber

Get a 7-year old with crayons to get your thoughts onto paper. This is also a great way to get them hating science from an early age.

Use two-factor authentication

Be sure to leave the titles to your experiments vague and potentially misleading. No one’s going to steal something labelled “Results of OJ trial.”

Create your own abbreviations

What does ASWAWN-18 mean? Or gWWP? Every acronym used nowadays was unknown until SOMEONE tried it, and maybe you’ll get some royalties out of it. (Or should I say RYLTZ?)

Practice your penmanship

Draw your 1s and Is the exact same way. It also doesn’t hurt to spill some iodine on your notebook, so that letters BECOME the same. Is that a B or an 8? I guess we’ll never know.

Communicate ideas with images rather than text

A picture is worth 1000 words, so leave doodles in the margin. A stick figure with a scribble next to it can represent everything from “a scientist with a flask” to “a pirate holding a stick of dynamite.” 

Never dismiss ideas

Be sure to never erase anything. Since you might need those ideas later, cross them out, but write “<– OK” next to some of them.

Trust yourself to know your own intentions

Omit all units of measurement. If it’s important enough, you’ll remember.

Break formality and explore your creative side

What are you, some sort of rule-following muppet? Write outside the lines! Leonardo DaVinci would apparently write backwards using a mirror, and he was a genius. If you’re truly exceptional, you can pull it off too. Or go all the way and get drunk halfway through your write-up. Watch as everything gets italicized!

Don’t be wasteful

Make sure that you use pens to their full potential, until they’re completely out of ink. Also, make use of every corner of the notebook and all the white space. You can practice your scribbling in the margins – remember, the smaller you write, the fewer notebooks you’ll need! Encrypt your data AND save the trees in one move!

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This article will be written once it’s back in stock.

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Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for his diligent work in analyzing ancient cave art with the genetic code of the Neanderthals, finding that our extinct relatives, previously thought to have little-to-no game in the B.C. dating world, were in fact sex magnets.

“As it turns out, many scientific experts were wrong about these ancient bipeds and their ability to woo and awe Homo sapiens from other parts of the world,” said Pääbo, whose in-depth analysis of a 40,000 year-old female cave finger found in Serbia next to an “uncharacteristically suggestive” cave painting Pääbo calls the “Pleistocene Kama Sutra.”

When asked for comment on his incredible achievement, Pääbo, who was overwhelmed with emotion, had this to say: “We didn’t traditionally associate Neanderthals with the Don Juans of modern day Europe, but our research and DNA sequencing has revealed a frisky link between Neanderthals and other hominins who may have been drawn to their raw sexual energy.

“We believe that on top of the artistic merit, the lewd cave drawings advertised a fun time and the finger dexterity that Neanderthals translated into other areas,” explained Pääbo.

“This exciting reveal has also led to the discovery of another previously unknown relative to us -the Denisovans from Eurasia,” said Pääbo. “Their archaic and slightly erotic finger helped make this physiological correlation possible.” 

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A group of theoretical physicists recently unveiled some reassuring news for many people struggling to cope with everyday life; statistically speaking, in a non-zero number of universes, you are killing it!

“Every time you make a decision, the universe splits,” said theoretical physicist Dr. Tamara Kwang, “so there’s a theoretical universe out there where you did everything right.”

“It’s just that statistically speaking, you’re the most likely to exist in one of your more ‘flop’ universes,” she added.

Dr. Kwang said the one of the main conflicts between her colleagues was not that multiple universes existed, but on which level they existed. “… well, at least that’s the debate in this universe,” she clarified.

Despite her accomplishments in the field of multiverse theory, Dr. Kwang is no stranger to the feeling of being a failure compared to her multiverse selves.

“I often wonder if I’ve won a Nobel Prize for discovering another universe in another universe,” she lamented.

The post Phew! Physicists Say That, Theoretically, There Must Be At Least One Universe Where You Are Thriving appeared first on dnatured journal.

Fourth year PhD candidate Calvin Xu recently earned himself a Guinness World Record after admitting that he has learned and forgotten basic statistics 19 ± 2 times over the past eight years.

“It never sticks, despite the increasingly large sample size,” said Xu, who has previously had to learn stats for analytical biochemistry, analyzing his own lab data, and three actual stats courses.

Xu always suspected that his “stats-nesia” was an outlier, but only recently relearned that the he would need a Q test to confirm that, which he then calculated with 95% confidence and sent to Guinness World Records immediately.

Impressively, Xu had already forgotten how to do a Q test by the time a Guinness rep contacted him a few days later.

Though he thought his goldfish-like memory for data analysis would be an issue in graduate school, he says he doesn’t let it affect him too much.

“I’m pretty sure I have proper error bars in all my papers,” explained Xu, “but how I got them? No clue.” Luckily, he says, it’s not too hard to re-learn.

“Just arrange some x’s and s’s into an equation, throw a square root sign over it and hope for the best.”

Xu says he expects to learn and forget stats a few more times before his thesis defence next year.

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Meat eaters rejoiced this morning as vegan food upstart VegaMeat announced the creation of the first plant based animal. 

“Today we have transcended bean burgers and faux meats. Please welcome Plessie, the first ever plant-based cow!” stated the company’s spokeswoman, Valerie Chiasson, during a press conference. “She is a living, breathing animal that is also technically vegan.”

Chiasson then waited patiently as an employee led what appeared to be a normal cow with a leaf on its head onto the stage. Plessie defecated while the spokeswoman continued. “She is so advanced that she can even feel pain!”

“Now both vegans and carnivores can enjoy protein that lived on a farm, ate grass, drank water and died in horrific pain like other factory farmed animals,” exclaimed Chiasson with pride.

VegaMeat says it went through many iterations of the plant based cow before achieving a product that is nearly indistinguishable from a traditional meat based cow. The company’s scientists found a proprietary mixture of sweet potato, garbanzo bean and soy, combined with bovine-like DNA, was the recipe for a living, breathing and pain sensing vegan animal.

“We discovered a 45 day fermentation process gave our plant based cow a deep, rich beef flavor along with a deep, desperate desire to procreate and survive,” stated Chiasson. 

The company was so confident in its vegan cow that it even did a side-by-side blind slaughter with real cows in front of farmers. 

“98% of farmers couldn’t tell the actual cow from the plant based cow!” Chiasson explained. “Our vegan cow bleeds like an actual cow thanks to a liquified beet and carrageenan gum mixture that is circulated by its grapefruit based heart.”

The study concluded that both the traditional and vegan cow struggled equally, showed similar amounts of fear, and screamed in terror at indistinguishable decibels while being slaughtered.

“Initially we felt some resistance from cattle farmers, but after doing side by side slaughters of hundreds of thousands of our plant based cows and traditional cows we believe we the majority of farmers are on board.” 

In fact, many farmers have begun cross breeding the plant based cow with Wagyu cattle to create “Vegyu” steak, which is being sold for $30 per pound at high end restaurants.

VegaMeat announced their next venture would be plant based deer, finally allowing vegans and meat eaters to participate in “cruelty” free hunting.

The post Cool! Vegan Company Appeals To Meat Eaters By Engineering First Plant Based Animals That Also Feel Pain appeared first on dnatured journal.

In an apparent example of evolutionary warfare, snakes are evolving new “plastic-y” skins that only display clashing styles and patterns. Scientists say the adaptation will reduce the snakes’ chances of caught by poachers selling the serpent’s skin to fashion designers. Designers who have worked with the new skin have called the pattern and color combos “an abomination” and “supes uggo,” which has pleased the snakes immensely.

“We are attacking the system from the inside out,” said Bizm, a snake community leader to a group of young snakes. “Our skins are so full of non-complementary color combinations that we will make terrible boots. Just the worst.” 

Unfortunately, the poachers didn’t realize at first that they were choosing so many fashion faux pas.

“They got my Uncle Tete,” a young snake, Arnod, told us. “His skin was like, red and orange paisley-flauge, no designer on Earth would have touched him.” Arnod sighed. “But I know he’s still out there somewhere, still being a boss, not matching with anything.” 

Experts on snake fashion report that the community’s efforts speak for themselves. These boots are so tacky and cheap-feeling that even the most talented designers can’t make heads or tails of them.

One snake expert, Dr. Maria Soo, walked us through a line of recently soldered snake boots. “This one here, you can see the snake also went on a hunger strike because these boots are totally lifeless. This pair is sort of sleazy…the snake might have been applying self-tanner in resistance.” 

At the next pair Dr. Soo paused, visibly shaken. Eventually she said, “I don’t even know what this snake did… but what an accomplishment. I’ve never seen boots more out of date.” 

Other communities in the animal kingdom are riffing on the tactics of the snakes. Mink farmers have reportedly found minks growing strange and off-color slogans into their coats, including “I did not do those things they accused me of” and “My mother is alive, is yours?” 

Both the minks and snakes hope that these new adaptations will keep them safe, and that hipsters don’t increase demand for the ugly patterns ironically.

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Researchers at the Bremner lab were devastated after realizing someone had updated their ancient computer’s software , completely cutting off access to several MS-DOS programs needed to run their most critical instruments.

Despite the computer’s giant sign that read “DO NOT UPDATE CPU OR ELSE” followed by a list of violent but empty threats, when it was booted witnesses said it displayed the devastating news right on screen; “Welcome to Windows XP.”

The computer, which was one of seven left in the world that could run the group’s crystallography software. They are now searching local estate sales for potential replacements.

The update affected some students worse than others.

“It wasn’t just the lab software man,” said PhD student Mitchell Kruse. “I was so close to finishing Carmen Sandiego!”

Kruse says his PI has told his labmates to publish “a few articles” during the instrument downtime, while the lab looks for another computer that can run a partially disintegrated floppy disk from 1992.

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