Remember The-Shadow-Scholar, the deeply disturbing confirmation of that academia generally selects for meaningless drivel while making critical information unheard; the story that especially academic media try to contain as a side issue about student writing although it is obviously symptomatic of the whole of academia and much of modern society?

Transparency is the slogan of a new, heterogeneous movement. The demand for transparency unites very different orientations. Many conservatives still feel that transparency is similar to anarchy. However, transparency is not primarily there to make it difficult for the powerful to hide their ways. That is just how transparency sells among liberals.

Transparency is stability! Opaque systems may fail entirely due to compromised secrecy. A transparent system is immune against that failure mode.

The fourth circuit element called “memristor” [1] is an intriguing case for the sociology of science [2] and it still unfolds. Especially annoying and I think entirely unnecessary are the detractors who do not grasp the trivial core issue. There are certain engineers that peddle mere technicalities as huge discoveries on the vixra crackpot archive after having been kicked out of the real (mostly non-crackpot) archive, claiming that the “memristor” is incomplete. So what? Being incomplete does not make it bad science, on the contrary. They hand easily refuted charges on a silver platter to Goliath so he can point to them laughing: “Look, all that criticism is mere confused schoolboys not getting it”.

In the spirit of blog carnivals, several of us—cosmologists, physicists, astronomers, and writers who just love all these subjects—decided to write about one of the abiding mysteries of modern cosmology. That mystery is dark energy, the name we give to the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

In 2008, “The missing memristor found” [1] was published in the respected science journal Nature, and this claimed discovery was announced on the front pages of most major newspapers. This “discovery” is simply a misinterpretation of devices that had been discovered many years before in India [2,3]. Those original inventors did not misinterpret their work in order to make it into the news. Given the serious doubts that have been presented in many places, one seriously wonders whether the fact that the cheated are ‘just a bunch of Indians in India’ has anything to do with the embarrassing situation of that science media do almost not care.

One of the pretty boys of science writing has fallen. Jonah Lehrer has finally been called out for distorting science. Many more are going to fall. Or wait. No, wait, what? Oh – I see – he misquoted some singer-song writer dude! Ohhhh – how tragic! And without misquoting Bob Marley or whoever that was (please correct me in the comments because I really really care so much), he would be still one of those celebrated “science writers” selling better than porn these days.

Jonah Lehrer - dared falsely quoting Britney Spears instead of pulling Einstein out of context. Some deeds go too far even in science writing.