The way two orbiting spacecrafts manage to rendezvous is quite ingenious! Engineers back then might not have had our modern computers, but they sure knew their Newtonian mecanics!

It all comes down to what we want in a vehicle, I suppose. The people I know who own an electric car rave about how silent it is, how insane its acceleration can be and about how they never, ever have to worry about gas prices. They're also very happy about reducing their carbon footprint, even though they know that it is not zero.

They're not for everyone, true. If you have to drive long distances, they're limited. If you drive in winter, be prepared to have to plug it in often. And they're expensive. But they also have a lot of interesting aspects to them, especially when they're plug-in hybrids that combine the best of both worlds. My daughter-in-law's mom has a hybrid and her car is amazingly thrifty; I would have expected a hybrid to be very efficient only in town, where you break often, but it turns out it's also pretty good on the highway because you recover part of the energy used climbing a slope when you come down the other way.

(Me, I'm more of a bicycle kind of guy. It's just lousy in winter).

He was caught, and will now have to explain himself (and likely be fired from his university). Since the original paper was a fairly important one and inspired a whole line of research on the disease (focusing on a peptide named Aβ*56), and because a doctored figure suggests that the paper's original conclusions were wrong, other scientists working on the same thing since then may have wasted a lot of effort and money chasing a phantom. That would be quite upsetting, but the important word here is may. A doctored image does not invalidate a whole paper. And even if the dude did cheat beyond pimping up his figures, no scientific field -and certainly not one involving as many people as Alzheimer's disease- rests on a single paper; the very concept is absurd. Irrespective of what happens with Aβ*56, Alzheimer's research is progressing, and we have learned a lot in the past decades.

So when I see supposedly serious journalists claim that fifteen years of research on Alzheimer's disease have just been flushed down the drain and that the entire scientific establishment is crumbling, I can only roll my eyes and say "heeeeere we go again". Because judging from such comments, and from the way they're interpreted on Farcebook, Twit-head and other forums, all of a sudden science isn't trustworthy, vaccines don't work, the earth is flat and we didn't go to the moon.

For what it's worth, since I teach the biology of the disease in my genetics class, let me say that the subject of Alzheimer's disease has always been a contentious one with many hypotheses being put forward -some more convincing than others, but always subject to caution. Aβ*56 was (and still is, until proven otherwise) an interesting line of research, although not one I particularly cared for... I'm more of a Aβ42 snob. That a pharmaceutical company decided to invest a ton of money into it and may now have done it in vain is regrettable, but I'm not going to cry buckets over it; if said company eventually manages to deliver a drug that works in AD, it will milk its customers for all they're worth in order to recover its loss. And then some. As pretty much usual.

At the end of the day, this whole brouhaha should be just this : a guy was caught fudging his data, and must now answer for it. The system works. It is not homeopaths, journalists, new age gurus or Youtube influencers who found out that something was wrong; it is science's self-correcting nature.