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posted by takyon on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the scat-ado dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Boffins don't give a sh!t, slap Trump's face on a turd in science journal

A pair of boffins are in hot water after the image of President Donald Trump made an unexpected cameo in a paper on how to gather animal DNA from their poop at scale.

The paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-20427-9] [DX], which was published in Nature Scientific Reports, discusses the difficulties of gaining high-quality DNA samples from wild animals in a non-invasive way. Feces is the obvious option, but it is dominated by DNA from other organisms, such as bacteria – so the authors proposed a way to enrich the desired animal's DNA from the sample.

However, the pair also buried an Easter egg in a figure depicting the method, which shows a baboon sitting next to an average-sized turd. And on that turd, is a tiny image of the leader of the free world.

[...] Here's a close-up of the image in question:

— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) December 17, 2018

[...] "The editors have become aware of unusual aspects to the 'Extract fecal DNA' illustration in figure 1. We are investigating, and appropriate editorial action will be taken once the matter is resolved," a note said.

Here is the graphic referenced:

Figure 1: | Scientific Reports


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @04:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @04:26PM (#775889)

    Postdocs are already living on rice and bean salaries.
    Professors get their funding from government grants, personally.
    The university can't order them to do anything, it would have to be the faculty senate or something like that who could threaten denial of tenure.
    If they have tenure, they will use that to shut down any followup. It's not like the professor said that Trump was a good president and drove a snowflake student to rend her clothes in mental anguish.

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