FLICKR, JOHN MARTINEZ PAVLIGARussian biochemist Dmitry Kuznetsov has been accused repeatedly of research misconduct since the mid-1990s. From work on the mRNA of wild timer voles to the carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin, the legitimacy of Kuznetsov’s research has been questioned by fellow scientists. He has never been formally investigated, and none of his papers appear to have been retracted, but researchers were still concerned to learn that he now heads two peer-reviewed journals launched in 2011 by open-access publisher ScienceDomain.
The accusations against Kuznetsov, if true, amount to “one of the worst fraud records in the history of science,” Dan Larhammar, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, told The Scientist. “That should be a major concern to” the publisher that recruited Kuznetsov as editor-in-chief, he said.
WIKIMEDIA, REYTANOne of the functions of fat is to keep a body warm. The well-established pathway for fat-based thermogenesis involves the conversion of chemical energy into heat via the sensory nervous system and brown fat cells. But new research points to an alternative route, involving white and beige fat cells that can directly sense when the temperature drops. When exposed to temperatures below 33°C, white and beige fat cells initiated a thermogenic gene program and increased cellular respiration. Brown fat cells, on the other hand, were not able to detect the cooler temps without the β-adrenergic receptors known to play a role in establishing the thermogenesis pathway.
“It looks like classical brown fat cells depend on wiring from the nervous system, but white cells and beige fat cells seem to respond directly to temperature,” said Bruce Spiegelman, a cell biologist at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the new study. “What this is ...
