Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 📝 Scientific publishers have a growing legitimacy issue
• 🐳 Orcas are attacking boats again
• 💎 How the global diamond industry got thrown into turmoil

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~4.62-minute read (1,230 words).

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"Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

–Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774)

Scientific journals around the world are increasingly running into a similar problem – some of the papers they’ve published were either partially or completely fabricated, leading to thousands of retractions in recent years.

The most affected has been New Jersey-based publisher Wiley, which yesterday announced the closure of 19 scientific journals it owns. The move comes after Wiley retracted 11,300+ papers from some of the publications over the past two years.

• At least two additional publishers have retracted hundreds of papers each, while several others have pulled smaller batches of research.

How this happens: The faked reports usually come from “paper mills” that offer to list a scientist as an author in exchange for money. The mill submits the fabricated work to scientific journals, typically targeting publishers with less-thorough review processes.

In the case of Wiley, the problem emerged in 2022 when scientists noticed peculiarities in studies published in journals owned by a company Wiley had purchased two years earlier. The papers featured a wide range of anomalies, including:

• Irrelevant citations and references
• Technical-sounding passages that experts described as “an AI gobbledygook sandwich”
• The tweaking of certain phrases to avoid plagiarism detectors, resulting in expressions like “bosom peril” instead of “breast cancer”

Analysts say the current system incentivizes such behavior. Scientists worldwide are often required to publish regularly in peer-reviewed journals to win grants or earn promotions, while journals typically charge publishing fees ranging from $100-$10,000. Researchers say these factors motivate scientists to cheat the system – and also incentivize some journals to ignore fabricated submissions.

Bottom line: Research flagged as fraudulent represents a tiny percentage of the 2+ million scientific papers published each year. But its growing presence could threaten the legitimacy of the ~$30 billion/year academic publishing industry, as well as harm the public perception of science as a whole.

📊 Flash poll: How would you best describe your personal confidence in the scientific community?

• A great deal of trust
• A fair amount of trust
• Not too much trust
• No trust at all
• Unsure/other

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🐳 Orcas attacked and sank a boat near the Mediterranean Sea for the seventh time since 2020. On Sunday, a pod of orcas repeatedly rammed into a yacht off the coast of Morocco, with all passengers safely evacuating before the ship sank. Researchers say a group of ~15 orcas collectively named “The Free Willies” “Gladys” is behind all of the recent incidents, and argue their behavior isn’t intentionally malicious but rather related to their curiosity, their fondness for play, or some form of caution.

🇺🇦 US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits Ukraine as US aid begins to arrive. Blinken met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday to kick off a two-day trip aimed at facilitating the delivery of ~$60 billion in US military aid recently approved by Congress. Blinken’s visit came days after Russia launched a renewed offensive in northeastern Ukraine, which analysts describe as its most significant border incursion since the early days of the war.

🇬🇪 Georgia (the country) approved a controversial “foreign agents” law in the face of mass protests. Georgia’s parliament passed the new law in an 84-30 vote on Tuesday, meaning all domestic media and nongovernmental organizations must now register as foreign agents if they receive 20+% of their funding from abroad. Tens of thousands of Georgians have gathered daily in Tbilisi for nearly a month to protest the legislation, which critics frame as a Russian attempt to extend its legal standards to former Soviet countries and prevent Georgia from joining the EU.

As part of a sweeping restructuring of its business, mining giant Anglo American announced plans to spin off subsidiary De Beers, the 136-year-old diamond behemoth who gave us the iconic phrase "a diamond is forever" in an ad campaign in the 1940s.

The move comes at a time of turmoil in the diamond industry. Over the past few years, technology has made the creation of lab-grown diamonds cheaper – which, in addition to bringing baseball’s Steroid Era debates to the diamond industry (lab-grown or natural?), has led to pricing and supply chaos.

• Prices for a polished 1-carat natural stone have dropped more than 25% since their 2022 peak to reach their lowest level in eight years ($5,185; data as of August 2023).
• Prices for synthetic diamonds have dropped even more, falling from ~$5,000 per 1-carat polished stone in 2016 to $1,425 as of August 2023. Experts attribute this to a rush of suppliers entering the market.

Lab-grown diamonds may as well buy a house and start planting some roots – because they’re here to stay. Synthetic/lab-grown diamonds comprised ~18% of the $89 billion global diamond jewelry market in 2023, up from 3.5% in 2018. Analysts expect the category to account for more than 20% of the industry’s sales this year.

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💬 Quoted: “We did not expect this to be a smooth road. But these [inflation readings] were higher than I think anybody expected.”

• In a speech yesterday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell reiterated that US inflation is falling slower than the central bank expected, which means the Fed will likely hold interest rates at their current level of 5.25%–5.5% for the foreseeable future (the highest rate since 2001). Nearly two-thirds of economists now predict the Fed will cut interest rates a total of two times in 2024, starting in September – though those predictions could change following the release of the latest CPI data this morning.

💉 Stat of the Day: Weight-loss drugs have drawn a lot of media attention in recent months – but how prevalent are they, really? According to new data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 1 in 8 US adults have ever used a GLP-1 drug, a category that includes injections like Wegovy, Ozempic, Zepbound, and Mounjaro. Around 6% are currently using one of the treatments. The KFF also found 38% of adults who took the medication did so specifically to lose weight, with an additional 23% using the treatments for both a chronic condition and weight loss.

🤔 Did You Know? There are 41 buildings in New York City that have their own zip code, either due to their size, the amount of money they generate, or the number of people who work in them.

📰 Worth a Read: How Sicily's plan to sell homes for one euro helped revive the island → (AFAR)

• ☝️ The German Society for Nature Photography announced the winners of its annual GDT Nature Photographer of the Year competition, which featured 8,000 entries from 13 countries.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with NoNetz

• 💰 US markets rose across the board (S&P: +0.5%; Dow: +0.3%; Nasdaq: +0.8%); the Nasdaq closed at a new record high. | 📈 Meme stocks are back: GameStop (+74% on Monday; +60% on Tuesday) and AMC (+78%; +32%) continued to climb.
• 👷 Home Depot posted revenue below Wall Street's expectations; the favorite haunt of DIY dads everywhere also indicated it's seeing signs of a consumer pullback.
• 💳 An increasing share of Americans are falling behind on credit card payments, per new data. (Read more)

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 📺 Comcast is launching a streaming bundle of Peacock, Netflix, and Apple TV+; pricing has not yet been announced.
• 🐉 HBO released the official House of the Dragon Season 2 trailer. | 🌋💍 Amazon Prime Video unveiled a teaser trailer for Rings of Power Season 2 along with its release date (August 2). | 🥊 A sequel to Road House is in the works at Amazon MGM Studios, with Jake Gyllenhaal reprising his leading role.
• 🏀 The WNBA has a new expansion team for the first time since 2008: The Golden State Valkyries.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Commons

• 💉 Patients taking Wegovy maintained an average of 10% weight loss after four years, per long-term data presented yesterday by drugmaker Novo Nordisk.
• 🤖 Google unveiled Gemini 1.5 Flash, the latest addition to its AI model series, at the company’s annual developer conference yesterday. | 🤖 Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, announced his departure from the Microsoft-backed startup.
• 📅🚀 Boeing’s first crewed spaceflight using its Starliner spacecraft has been delayed again, this time due to a small helium leak; instead of this Friday, the new launch will be no earlier than May 21.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🎓 The interest rate on federal undergraduate student loans for the 2024-2025 academic year is 6.53%, up from 5.5% last year and the highest rate in over a decade.
• 🏥 Arizona’s Supreme Court agreed to delay the enforcement of a Civil War-era abortion ban for another 90 days, pushing the date back to September 26.
• ⚖️ The bribery and corruption trial of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) began this week. (Read more)

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When Marie Fowler first began her doctorate at Howard University, she wasn't sure if she'd make it to graduation. 

• "After all, I had been out of school since 1959," the recent grad told WJLA-TV. "I didn't even know if I could retain information."

📚 Well, she proved herself wrong. Three years later, the 83-year-old walked across the stage at graduation to receive her doctorate from the School of Divinity, becoming Howard U's oldest-ever graduate. 

• "She was the life of the party," said Dr. Alice Ogden Bellis, one of Marie's professors. "She knew what she wanted and she came here and she did that."

Can you identify the group names for each of the following animals? (Ex: A group of crows is called a murder)

1. 🐜 Ants
2. 🐔 Chickens
3. 🐬 Dolphins

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1. 🐜 A colony of ants
2. 🐔 A brood of chickens (also a flock or herd)
3. 🐬 A pod of dolphins