I wonder how many of them have embellished their accomplishments, too? Seems pretty common in academia these days.

It's actually exceptionally rare. Anil Potti, the Duke cancer researcher who falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar, was an unusually notorious case simply because it was so unusual. (Also because he may have been committing outright fraud in his research.) It's very rare to come across someone in the academic community falsely claiming a degree, simply because it's such a stupid idea: most of us aren't paid enough for it to be worth the risk. More often, the people getting caught are the ones who aren't happy with a merely middle-class lifestyle and want a managerial position that will propel them into at least the upper-middle class. Or they want a more elite teaching post than they might otherwise merit.

I do suspect there are a significant number of people in primary education who have done this. My favorite story was about a public school superintendent: in the course of writing an article about the school district, a local newspaper reporter interviewed one of the superintendent's underlings. At one point during the interview, the reporter referred to the superintendent as "Mr. Smith", and was quickly corrected by the minion: "it's Dr. Smith". If the reporter was like most people, (s)he probably thought, "what a pompous asshat." (Even most people with PhDs think that insistence on titles is the sign of a self-important douche; when I'm asked for a title I just give "Mr.".) In any case, the reporter was motivated to dig a little deeper into the background of the superintendent, which pretty quickly turned up evidence that a) he hadn't actually received a PhD, and b) he'd already lost a previous job because he lied.

people in the job market today face some unpalatable options: You can either forego the degree and slam into the glass ceiling in a mid-level position as HR passes over you repeatedly, or get it and wind up a bit farther ahead in your career but be financially worse off than your subordinates who aren't paying back hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to some corporation who will just keep jacking the rates up year after year so you're paying off mostly just the interest and doing very little to hit the principal of your student loan

As someone pointed out below, PhD programs don't usually require student loans. (Most actually pay you - not a ton, but if you're in your 20s and don't have children or family members to support, it is enough to lead a reasonably comfortable lifestyle and still have a little bit left at the end of the month, even in high-cost areas. Subsidized housing is often available too.) And every time I've read about someone lying on their resume about academic credentials, it's a false claim to have earned a PhD. People who reach the level where that matters usually don't have any problem getting jobs anyway, and they're rarely in debt.

The idea is nice, but the actual images are completely wrong. WiFi is just electromagnetic waves and those in turn are nothing other then light at another wavelength, i.e. a different color if you will, see this infrared image. This means being able to see WiFi signals would look fundamentally no different then just seeing ordinary light. You wouldn't see waves shooting out of your router, as you can't see waves unless they actually hit your detector, so the thing would simply glow like a light source. The thing where it gets interesting is in how different materials react to the WiFi, materials that are obaque to regular light would be transparent for WiFi signals, while others that are transparent for light would be opaque to WiFi. How much or how little WiFi gets reflected would also change. Being able to see how directional the signal of different antenna could also be interesting. There might also be issues with image resolution, as the wavelength determines how good you can resolve an image (not sure if that's just a practical limit of detector size or actually a physical limit).

Anyway, some simple photoshopping won't cut it, it would probably need a raytracer to simulate the wave propagation properly.

Linus Pauling died at age 93... At a time when living past 90 wasn't as common as it is today.

Only because there were so many other things that could kill you before you reached the end of your "natural" lifespan. The maximum age of the human body appears to have been constant throughout recorded history. The massive increase in actual life expectancy (to somewhere in the 70s) in the developed world coincided with Pauling's life, so he benefited from all of the many advances in medicine, public health and sanitation, and an overall decrease in violent crime.

Don't assume that because he was a competent and careful scientist in one area (the one where he he earned the Nobel Prize), that he couldn't or didn't have a bee in his bonnet in another (in which he had no formal training or qualifications).

In fact, there is no shortage of other examples of this: just about anyone acquainted with the history of science can pull up multiple other examples of otherwise brilliant scientists who went completely batshit insane when they tried to step outside their area of expertise. Or sometimes even within a closely related field: Peter Duesberg was indisputably an expert on viruses, and might have eventually won the Nobel prize himself, but his activities related to HIV have been incredibly stupid, and his theories on cancer are just about as insane.

Only one of Pauling's Nobels was the peace prize - the other was for chemistry.

Genius that strikes out and proves how stupid the person is. e.g. Shockley, Pauling, Chomsky... ...Duesberg, Mullis, Montagnier, Hoyle... I could probably spend all day doing this.

Another example of how great marketing helps get your research funded. The reason this is being widely reported is because they chose a cool name.

Everyone in the academic sciences loves popular media exposure, but it usually doesn't matter for funding the individual research projects. The fact is, these viruses are an intrinsically important enough discovery that the research article would have been worthy of Science magazine regardless of the name they chose, and that's what they're going to be bragging about on their next grant application, not an NPR story. The media coverage is just a bonus ego boost for the professors involved.

The people who really care about popular media coverage are typically the parent institutions (universities, etc.) and megaprojects like the LHC, which are more likely to have to appeal directly to politicians for money, and also need to compete for the best researchers and students. I'm sure the head of Aix-Marseille Université is just as thrilled as the scientists who wrote the paper right now.

I understand people who are sitting around smoking pot and speculating like that, but scientists are supposed to apply sober reason to their conjectures.

Why can't scientists do both? The actual paper is quite reasonable and sober, and methodologically sound as far as I can tell; the Mars bit was just a bit of hand-waving for the benefit of popular media. A little of this goes a long way (the notorious "arsenic bacteria" are a really excessive example), but we all get excited sometimes.

Most virus species carry only RNA, but not all of them. The type knowns as retroviruses carry DNA, and actually gene manipulate their host, making them really tough to get rid of. Examples are HIV and Hepatitis.

I think your terminology is confused. Retroviruses carry RNA, which is then converted into DNA in the cell using the viral reverse transcriptase (typically integrating into the host genome), then back to RNA for protein translation. DNA viruses produce RNA using their own RNA polymerases, but their complete package is just DNA and protein.

The near future for US people will probably involve medical researchers migrating to friendlier jurisdictions and medical-tourism cruise ship vacations to route around the FDA damage.

And it will also involve charlatans promising miracle cures to anyone desperate enough or dumb enough to fork over thousands of dollars for an unregulated and unverified medical procedure. I'm not a fan of what the FDA is doing in this specific instance - although I suspect you're overstating the case - but entities like that exist for a good reason.

I think at a certain point you're gonna get a test result back and either you do the right thing, or you elect to have a human pet that is a drain on society (but nice for you).

Classy. So, by the same logic, we should also euthanize stroke victims, Alzheimer's patients, and so on, lest they be a drain on society?

If the effort to maintain a Down's syndrome child keeps an otherwise middle-class family in squalid poverty for the rest of their lives, please tell me how that's better than having it aborted. Everyone loses, and the portion of the child support that comes from tax money is stolen money, immoral from the start. There are more to costs than dollars, there's the destruction of established human lives.

If the effort to maintain an aging parent with dementia keeps an otherwise middle-class family in squalid poverty for the rest of their lives, please tell me how that's better than having it euthanized. Everyone loses, and the portion of the elder care support that comes from tax money is stolen money, immoral from the start. There are more to costs than dollars, there's the destruction of established human lives.

I'm extremely reluctant to defend the CIA in most circumstances, but I think the poster (or possibly the source article) may have misunderstood the point of this study. If there was a potential superweapon that could be used against your country, wouldn't you want to know everything possible about it so you could a) possibly detect it in advance, and b) defend against it? Who knows what the CIA's real motivations are - it's not like they have any kind of democratic accountability - but assuming that this whole concept is something of genuine concern and not just some sci-fi fantasy, they'd be idiots not to research what could potentially be a threat to national security.

I actually moved in the opposite direction from a pure research position in the hard sciences to a programming position in support of research. At the time, I received similar advice from a senior researcher. It was a little more strident though, something like: "What are you nuts? You won't ever be able to propose research again and no one will ever take you seriously."

This is sometimes true, but it depends on what exactly you do and who you work with. I moved from doing molecular biology research (as a PhD student) to writing software in support of same. I have far more exposure now than I was ever likely to get by doing my own research, and I have lots of other researchers (both junior and senior) constantly asking me for help. As a result I've been able to rack up enough publications and visibility that I don't think I'd have a problem moving back to pure research. However, as long as I'm doing methods development, it would be very difficult to get a tenure-track faculty position; I'd basically have to demote myself back to postdoc and do more basic research for a while. Fortunately I have no such delusions.

The bigger problem for the submitter, as others have implied, is the lack of a PhD; this is always going to limit his (?) career advancement.