The treachery of images

This post was earlier cross-posted at Leonid Schneider's site, hence the nonfrivolity. The version there is improved by Leonid's editing and explanation of the back-story.

Three years ago, RetractionWatch reported on a leading candidate for the hotly-contested title of Year's Most Opaque Retraction.

N, S co-doped graphene quantum dots from a single source precursor used for photodynamic cancer therapy under two-photon excitation

Of the original nine authors, six denied any role in its publication (including the Corresponding Author, who had presumably submitted the manuscript to Chemical Communications and handled the revisions without noticing): "they did not participate in the experimental research that was reported in this article".
A seventh, Xifeng Liu, was involved only to the extent of improving the English, which he did not think should be dignified with co-authorship. Dr Lin is currently affiliated with the Mayo Clinic. The other non-authors' institutional affiliations were merged together in an undifferentiated welter, covered by a superfix 'a'.



That left Rijun Gui and Hui Jin, who had lost confidence in the paper: they complained that results in the Online Supplement had been copied from elsewhere, and that they were unable to reproduce the experimental results or follow the calculations in the main body. It remained unclear who (if anyone) was responsible for inserting the plagiarism, false data, or faulty equations. Nor was it clear who forged the signatures of the seven non-authors. At any rate, they bore no grudge for the theft of their names, and they continued to contribute to later Gui / Jin publications (unless those later appearances were also involuntary).

The paper subsequently attracted criticism in the form of a PubPeer thread, because the stated reasons for retraction were far from exhaustive. Close examination of Figure 1(a) ("TEM ... of the as-prepared NS-GQD") reveals the putative "graphene quantum dots" to be Photoshop clones.

The lipstick kisses of Supplementary Figure S7(a) purport to show a tissue culture of HeLa cells which have absorbed the GQDs, causing them to fluoresce on exposure to 800nm photons... so it causes concern that the same cells also appeared in Jin, Gui, Sun & Wang (2016) as Figure 5(d), where they were identified as "HeLa cells after incubation with Ag₂Te@SiO₂-NH₂ (0.1 mg mL^-1). Images were acquired upon excitation at 808 nm". Not just different nanoparticles, but an altered configuration.

Which is to say, one or both Figures is fake, and might just show some variety of sea anemone. And from there the vista expands to an entire oeuvre of papers, covered by interlinked threads at PubPeer.

Readers will be thinking "So what, another charivari of chicanery from the Nanotech literature". But there are enough novel elements in the case to reward our attention. The papers between them illustrate several of the alleged applications of Nanotechnology, favoured by researchers to loosen the purse-strings of governmental funders. They also feature an unusual phenomenon: duplicate publication of microphotographs or spectrographs (identified as different entities), with no authors in common between the papers in which they featured. To put it another way, either Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Field was working overtime, or a broad collaborative cartel of authors were drawing upon an image bank as communal property.

The authors featured in this oeuvre of PubPeer threads (covering 42 papers at the time of writing) fall into three groups:
A. Lianjiang Tan (sometimes Ran Huang; Shuiping Liu; Yu-Mei Shen; others).
B. Ajun Wan; Huili Li; Jie Sun (and a few others).
C. Rijun Gui; Hui Jin (sometimes Xifeng Liu; Min Yang; Zonghua Wang; others).

There are authorship lists combining only Group-A names, or only Group-C names, but names from Group A and Group C never overlap. Group B are the 'bridge', not appearing in the oeuvre on their own, but collaborating sometimes with Lianjiang Tan (and others from Group A), and sometimes with Rijun Gui and Hui Jin (and others from Group C) - never both at once. Perhaps the three-fold division represents departments within Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I have been advised that having gained his PhD in 2012 (with Xueqin An as advisor), Rijun Gui did a post-doc under Ajun Wan (at the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University). Ajun Wan's "bridge" position is explained by his earlier supervision of Lianjiang Tan as a previous post-doc. It further simplifies the dramatis personae to know that Hui Jin and Rijun Gui are married, while Zonghua Wang (also from Group C) heads the laboratory.

[Thanks TigerBB8]

"TEM time is expensive?"

Gui and An (2013) wrote of "Layer-by-layer aqueous synthesis, characterization and fluorescence properties of type-II CdTe/CdS core/shell quantum dots with near-infrared emission". The coauthor here is Xueqin An, Gui's PhD supervisor. Despite appearances, the panels of their Figure 3 are not maps of a mountainous archipelago, from a five-volume series of fantasy novels.

In fact they applied transmission electron microscopy to swarms of the freshly-synthesised quantum-dot cores, and their progressive expansion in a sequence of layers: "Wide-field TEM images of CdTe core QDs (a), the corresponding CdTe/CdS core/shell QDs with 1 (b), 2 (c) and 4 (d) MLs of CdS shell, TEM (e) and HRTEM (f) images of CdTe/CdS/ZnS core/shell/shell QDs with 4 MLs of CdS shell and 2 MLs of ZnS shell."

To explain how details of these panels were blown up, rotated and relabelled as different materials, across a long series of papers, PubPeer contributor "Epichloe Festucae" could only surmise that "TEM time is expensive?". Largely-overlapping enlargements appeared as "PEI-stabilised Carbon QDs" in Figure 2(a) of Gui et al (2014a), and as dopamine-conjugated CdTe quantum dots in Figure S1(a) of Gui et al. (2014b).



And at right, after a four-year delay and a vertical flip, as "CDs prepared from hydrothermal carbonization treatment of fresh black fungus juice", as Figure 3(a) of Jin et al. (2018). 'Black fungus' is innately funny. By then the journal peer-reviewers were expecting the strings of meaningless buzzwords to be longer, so these carbon dots "facilely self-assemble" with magnetic nanoparticles and aptamers to form tetradotoxin-detecting nanocomposites.

In Figure 1(c) of Gui et al. (2014c), the panels became "Ag₂S QDs".

Space does not permit demonstrations of all ten papers repurposing the 2013 Wall of Dots. We must be content with Gui & Jin (2013), where the particles were "human serum albumin-stabilized fluorescent Au/Ag core/shell nanocrystals for highly sensitive and selective sensing of copper(II)", illustrated with five enlargements from the original;

And as Ag₂S QDs again, as Figure 2(a) of Tan, Wan & Li (2014): one of two "Group-A" papers, accessing the original image despite an absence of authorship overlap with the other eight papers in this series. The second being Tan et al (2014), where the QDs became Ag₂Se and were capped with multidentate polymer.

These were not the only figures weaving these papers into a single body of work. Other cross-connections caught the eyes of commenters.

These overlapping circles are either "blank liposomes", Supplementary Figure 3(a); or "mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN)", Figure 1(c); or "CMC–FA–RBS hybrid nanospheres", Figure 2(c). But who knows? They could be something else entirely.

As is always the case when reporting on Nanomalfeasance, I am cherry-picking the Pubpeer threads, picking out only a fraction of the coincidences, in accordance with obscure aesthetic criteria. Other people’s tastes might differ (for instance, the PubPeer twitter account), so readers are urged to explore the original sources.

We can widen the investigation by going back to Tan, Wan & Li (2014). The gist of that paper was that when HepG2 cancer cells are fed a diet of silver nitrate and sodium sulfide, they synthesise Ag₂S 'quantum dots' within their cytoplasm (through the mediation of reduced glutathione). The photofluorescence of these QDs betrays their presence when they are extracted from the hepatoma cells and injected into mice. Here, at left, I have flipped Figure 4 horizontally [left]...

... to highlight its resemblance to the mouse [at right] from Figure 7 of Tan, Wan & Li (2013). Though that mouse was glowing in the dark (irradiated by 488 nm laser light) because it had been injected with CuFL and Ag₂S-GSH-SNO nanoparticles. It is a highly-trained Stunt Mouse with experience in this act; readers should not try it at home.

The HepG2 cells themselves are depicted in Figure 1, in typical scenes from a tissue culture, increasingly luminous at "(d) 12, (e) 16, and (f) 20 h after uptake of silver nitrate and sodium sulfide" as they migrate across the culture plate.

They could be goldfish, painted by Paul Klee. They could also be the HeLa cells featured in Figure 4(d) of Jin et al. (2016), glowing because they had absorbed Ag₂Te@SiO₂-FA from their culture medium (though sometimes rotated through 90º). We met Jin et al. (2016) earlier, where the glowing HeLa cells formed a rockpool gallery of sea-anemones.

I love Klee goldfish so one more sample before moving on! You will recall that Tan, Wan & Li (2013) were "Conjugating S-nitrosothiols with glutathiose stabilized silver sulfide quantum dots for controlled nitric oxide release and near-infrared fluorescence imaging". These conjugated nanocomposites not only made mice glow; they had the same effect on another line of cancer cells. Thus, Figure 6, "(b) NIR image acquired immediately upon 808 nm irradiation, and (c) NIR image acquired after 808 nm irradiation for 2 h of L929 cells incubated with 0.1 mg/mL Ag₂S-GSH-SNO nanoparticles for 3 h. ... " Here rotated through 90º...

...to facilitate the comparison with Supplementary Figure S7 of Gui et al. (2014d), where the Ag₂S quantum dots were "highly stable and biocompatible" (I have flipped them horizontally due to my Gerstmann's Syndrome). This is another of those "no authors in common" situations.

Figure 5 of Wang et al. (2015) also cries out for comparison. By 2015, the fluorescing quantum dots were "Ag₂Te ... with compact surface coatings of multivalent polymers".

Despite his youth, Rijun Gui is a prolific worker, with Group C collecting 28 Pubpeer inquiry threads. Group A is less prominent (only 14 queries for Lianjiang Tan) but we should not neglect it. Tan's work has taken a slightly different direction, pursuing nanoparticles as possible drug-delivery vehicles - especially as nanopackaging for targetted chemotherapy - more than as cytotoxic cures for cancer in their own right. Another theme running through his output is the use of retouching as well as duplication.

Notably, in the "wall of green" below, the upper half is Fig. 4 from Yang et al. (2015): "Representative fluorescence image of NIH 3T3 cells after incubation with PEG5000–PLA5000 micelles of 1.0 mg mL1 for 48 h. (The cells were stained by AO and EB.)"
The lower half is Figure 7 from Tan et al. (2017): "Fluorescence images of CT-26 cells with live-dead staining after treatments with different formulations: (a) PBS; (b) DOX; (c) UCNPs(DOX)@CS; (d) UCNPs@CS-RBS plus 30 min; (e) UCNPs(DOX)@CS-RBS plus 5 min; (f) UCNPs(DOX)@CS-RBS plus 30 min. The living cells were labeled by calcein AM (green emission), and the dead cells were labeled by propidium iodide (red emission). The scale bar represents 100 lm." The colored rectangles indicate matching arrangements of NIH3T3 and CT-26 cells... the latter modified by adroit replacement of green dots with red ones. The other three CT-26 panels may have NIH3T3 counterparts as well, but too modified to be recognisable.

A similar phenomenon occurred with Figure 6 of Tan et al. (2015), at left below: "Fluorescence images of HeLa cells before and after irradiation by 980 nm laser with the power density of 0.5Wcm^-2 over a period of 5 min in the absence (c and d) and presence (e and f) of the CuS mesostructures with the concentration of 0.3 g L^-1)." That time, four panels could be recognised within the larger wall at right.

These images invite comparison. Left is Figure 1(a) from Tan et al. (2012): "TEM micrograph of CdTe QD–CMCS nanocomposite NO donors [horizontally flipped]. Right is Figure 1(c) from Tan et al. (2014b): "TEM image of Mn2+–ZnS@CS-RBS."

Then there was a pair of papers in which Tan demonstrated how to turn a electron-microscopy scene into a congeries of googly eyes (or frog-spawn, it may be), using the photoshop equivalent of a crayon. The papers were Tan et al. (2014c) and Tan et al. (2017b). The Before and Frog-Spawned images are the respective Figures 2: "(a) TEM micrograph and (b) high-resolution TEM micrograph of Ag₂S QDs@CS-RBS nanospheres. (c) SAED pattern of Ag₂S QDs@CS-RBS nanospheres"; and "(a) TEM image and (b) high-resolution TEM image of Ag₂S(DOX)@CS nanospheres. (c) TG curve of Ag₂S(DOX)@CS nanospheres."

I was going to finish there, but there remain these X-Ray Diffraction patterns, displaying a mastery of laboratory technique capable of replicating the finest details of noise... especially as the source materials are variously identified as Ag₂S-CS-SNO nanospheres, Ag₂S QDs prepared in different ways, or Ag₂S aggregates before calcination. They come from disjoint groups of authors: Gui et al. (2014c), Tan et al. (2013), Tan et al. (2015), Tan et al. (2017), and Gui et al. (2014d).

Connoisseurs of the genre may also enjoy these wobbly, overhanging zeta functions that appear to have been left out in the sun too long, so they started to melt (Figure 1(f) of Xu et al. (2017)), at left; and this NMR spectrum, in which the baseline is composed of repeated sections, and a repeated / mirror-imaged section (Figure S2 of Tan et al. (2015)).

Early in 2018, it was asserted through social media that Rijun Gui regrets his actions and intends to resign his University position.

This has not yet been confirmed, and he is hardly alone in bringing shame upon the University. It would also leave the papers in circulation… the journals involved have shown no enthusiasm for retracting them. Until further developments, here are some recent examples of replicated and rotated images:

The nanodots are either Fe₃O₄ NPs (in Jin et al. (2018)); CuS NCs (in Xu et al. (2017)); or CD2 conjugates (in Gui et al. (2017)).

All my Whats are Fucked

The "Logo Transfer Hypothesis" has it that a biohazard warning sign fucked a mandala, and from that unnatural coupling was born the various spirograph logos of Sacha Stone's portfolio of all-lower-case Childhood's-End start-ups like humanitad and immortalis and new earth nation and bio arc.



It should not be confused with Williamson's "Larval Transfer Hypothesis", in which an earwig fucked a velvet worm (or possibly vice versa), in an implausible cross-phylum forbidden romance that was the origin of caterpillars, i.e. the porno version of a Just-So story. But I digress!

It may be that you have forgotten Simon "Sacha" Stone. He is what happens when Philip Dick's Gnostic Exegesis attains sentience, and decides that its best career path lay in far-right white-separatist politics dressed up in rave-party culture.* Here the particular Stone start-up of interest is the ITNJ... not a Myers-Briggs personality type (though personality types do come into it), but rather the International Tribunal of Natural Justice. Which is an agency transcending national boundaries and legalistic "law code" pettifoggery in the course of restorative justice, with a naff biohazard-sign-fucked-a-mandala logo... or, depending on your perspective, a cohort of grifters who pass around the crowd-source collection plate to finance their penchant for judicial- and episcopal-gown cosplay.**

Worst Hallowe'en "Sexy Jurist" costume EVAH

The underlying ITNJ narrative is "Masked gunman Sovereign-Citizen Lawman rides into town to right wrongs when local sheriffs are in cahoots with the criminals" -- Cahoots being the name of the ridden-into town -- although that storyline is embedded in a sepia cloud of New Age word-wooze. The business model is to solicit donations for the hire of a cheap venue for a 'hearing' or 'inquiry' into some crime against Oh the Humanity; invite various ranters to deliver various testimony-shaped artistic performances that they have previously rehearsed on Youtuber channels; and promise to provide a curated collection of their monologues, Real Soon Now.



In this case the cheap-venue part is "Westminister Hall"... not part of London's Parliamentary Palace as the name might imply, but instead a room that seats several dozen in the nearby Methodist Central building. The issue inspiring the Hearing is "Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse". Which is to say, the International Tribunal has become part of the accretion disk of delusions and donation buttons, swirling around the Hampstead Satanic Abuse hoax, drawn there by the irresistible force of Grifter Gravity.***

A lot has already been written about the Chief Justice of the ITNJ, Sir John Walsh of Branagh... an Australian deadbeat, conman and fabulist, whose knighthood and juristic status are both self-bestowed, just part of a lovingly-curated exhibition of hand-crafted artisanal titles and qualifications. I will accept that immodesty and grandiosity in the composition of one's CV are not prerequisites to work with the ITNJ, but too great a concern for plausibility is certainly a deal-breaker, for here is another of their leading lights, Ambassodor James Gilmore a.k.a. Ponzi the Clown:

Gilmore’s profession from the 1990s was based in both finance and economics. He has worked with clients of varying definitions to include Royalty, politicians, MI5, MI6, Mossad, and the CIA. He was granted a Top Secret clearance by the U.S. Army in his position as deputy head of M-3 (intelligence) of the world’s first Atomic Artillery organization.

Your Riddled reporters have nothing new to add about Mr Walsh, and Gilmore is an ex-parrot. So instead, meet Robert David Steele, ITNJ "Chief Counsel of Commission on Pedophilia" who models his personal appearance on a Magritte painting... he is also

Chief Enabling Officer (CeO) of Earth Intelligence Network; recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize. Former Operations Officer (C/O) in the Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency, co-founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, founder of the modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) discipline, proponent for election reform, intelligence reform, governance reform and economic reform utilizing Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE).

Not Steele

But wait, there's more! for Mr Steele is also an expert speaker on The Truth about Pet Cancer, and Special Rapporteur for human-rights abuses on Mars. In particular, the widespread abductions of children to serve as sex-slaves and ultimately as bone-marrow donors to the Mars-colony paedophile vampires. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. He sounds nice.

In a previous incarnation in the 1400s, Mr Steele was more concerned about the Jews abducting Christian children and draining their blood to bake in the ritual bread.

Now the grifter eco-system is all about the Competition and the Evolution. If an appeal proves to tug on purse-strings and loosen the heart-strings, or even vice versa, then it is adopted as a permanent piece in the repertoire; otherwise it is set aside and not repeated. The process of selection is one of algorithmic refinement, like the evolution of clickbait Youtubra channels for kids, or akin to the way the constituency of a political demogogue can train him to hoot obsessively if not coherently on their favourite topics, by cheering in response to dog-whistles at the chosen frequency.

So I am going out onna limb here to speculate that the target of ITNJ investigation was not picked capriciously or by throwing darts at the newspapers, but rather has been finely honed to appeal to the suckers (there may even have been focus groups involved!). It follows that what the suckers want to hear about most are the powerful networks of child-trafficking sexploitation vampires who constitute the Deep State. Over at Hoaxtead Research, El Coyote notes a consistent theme among the images provided by ITNJ for sharing through social networks:

Here’s the real meat of the ITNJ web page: a lovely array of children in various states of bondage, guaranteed to appeal to donors who are excited by such thoughts

There is a lot of this stuff in the fever dream of paranoid-style Truther rightwing politics [but I repeat myself]. If it's not child-sex prostitution running out of the non-existent basement of a pizza parlour, and the abduction of whole generations of children by White Slavers from Mars, it's the claim that the body of a no-longer-on-life-support child was snatched by the hospital for organ harvesting (in a case co-opted as a cause célèbre by theocratic garbage people). OR WORSE!

Not enormously relevant, but vampires!

There is the "Storm" fanfic --

Those who believe in the theory allege that cabals of high-ranking Democrats run child sex rings attended by celebrities, which Trump is breaking up.
QAnon refers to a user of internet messaging board 4Chan, who claims to be a White House official with secret knowledge of the investigation into the sex trafficking ring.
“QAnon believers are convinced that the world is run by a nefarious deep state cabal of Democrats, celebrities, and intelligence community figures (many of whom, they claim, are pedophiles),” writes blogger Will Sommer, who monitors right-wing media, on Mediate.
“Trump is about to take them all down, in their telling, often with sealed indictments that are hidden from the public. Hence Barr’s tweets about massive pedophile networks.”

One corollary of this narrative seems to be that the attention given to Trump's record of sexual harassment and payments to pr0n stars is misguided, since hey, look at his undeclared war against human trafficking! It is like a remake of 'Night of the Generals', with General Tanz as the hero. Of course the Great Unsealing of Indictments has been promised since late 2017, and still hasn't happened, but that is unlikely to cause doubt within the epistemic bubble, since maybe it did happen but the satanist-run media kept the events out of the news.

So the button chosen by Sacha Stone and the ITNJ is very hot indeed. The inside of many US voters' heads are like Goya witch-sabbath scenes, permanently stuck in 1799. There is clearly a deep-rooted weakness in the human psyche that makes these concerns lucrative to the grifters and appealing to the griftees, and when we look at the historical precedents

[H/t El Coyote @ Hoaxtead Research]

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* Delusional Sovereign-Citizen fraudster and money-launderer, Heather Tucci-Jarraf, at right.

Ratifications!

** The dress-up stage-trials are a departure for the Tribunal from its original goal of selling its services as a source of binding Judgments. The closed case of National Child Protection Alliance (‘NCPA’) v Commonwealth of Australia [Case 2015-02-NCPA] involved a genuine but misled Australian child-protection agency. The NCPA belatedly realised that for all its Proclamations and Ratifications and Mandates, and for all the torrent of bafflegab pomposity from Chief Justice Sir Mr Walsh, the Tribunal had no more legal legitimacy than the Society for Creative Anachronism, and that the moneys they had paid to change Australian law was gone beyond all hope of recovery.

The case of Unified Common Law Grand Jury of Southern Africa (‘UZA’) v Constitutional Court of South Africa [Case 2015-01-UZA] is still open. Here the appellants ("Unified Common Law Grand Jury of Southern Africa") were a bunch of Sovereign Citizen bumblefucks who want to say the magic words that will dissolve the nominal government of South Africa, but even they eventually came to terms with their position in the host / parasite relationship.

After that, the Tribunal's Trustees announced that no further cases would be taken on, freeing the Justices to spend their time and deliberations more profitably.

*** One early adopter of the Hampstead Satanic Abuse hoax was Alfred Lautreamont Lambremont Webre, a Cray-cray careerist, and expert on the Tesla technology of travel in time and between planets. Webre interviewed the hoax's instigators about the mechanics of the scam (much as a magpie interviews a collection of shiny and potentially-acquirable objects with an eye to the adornment of its own nest), giving them the run of his Youtuba channel to recount the lurid sexual / cannibalistic fantasies that they had taught to two children. I mention Webre here, singled out from all the other Full Mental Jackets drawn into the Hampstead accretion disk, because he has previously featured at Riddled (though here he is left on the cutting-room floor among the out-takes, no room in the main post!).

Webre used to provide his Seattle audience with insights into the maneuvering of alien factions and power blocs, learned though his high-level security access to all the Double-Secret-Probation details of galactic politics. These dispatches -- published as contributions to the Seattle Examiner -- were unfailingly dramatic and intense, though each seismic shift in the interstellar balance of power left Earth's tenuous neutrality preserved, amid sighs of relief. This media outlet seems to have entered abeyance, but fortunately Webre's bulletins are still available in the Wayback cache.

ET Council: War with grey-Draco reptilian ETs is won, no false flag ET invasion
My 1970s meeting with DARPA's Project Pegasus secret time travel program
Andromeda Council: East China Sea 6.9 quake - undersea reptilian base destroyed

It goes without saying that Webre's expertise extends to Mars colonies, but he is not on record as contradicting Steele's dystopian account of conditions there. Professional courtesy is still observed among the spiritual heirs of Hélène Smith.

Skullblogging: Fragile Eggshell Mind edition

Marcel Duchamp hommage? New treatment for migraines?

HA HA these suggestions are only japes of the leg-pull variety,and as any fule kno the image [above left] is really Marco Ruggiero -- a person of interest to Riddled -- ultra- scanning his head, using a LA523 linear-array soft-tissue probe (rather than a transcranial probe designed for the task of sending pulses through the skull and getting back a detectable echo) (because reasons).

This is reckless behaviour, and the Mad Scientist Anti-Defamation League is concerned for Professor Ruggiero's well-being. Really he should be performing these examinations upon villagefolk abducted from the lands around his castle, or upon unwary wayfarers who avail themselves of his hospitality, has he no respect for tradition? For Ruggiero's many contributions to the edifice of Science include his discovery that normal diagnostic-intensity ultrasound is far more biologically potent than previously believed, and in the hands of the talented radiologist a LA523 probe is a weapon OS Star-Trek Medical Tricorder, capable of many things like killing cancer, and opening the Blood-Brain Barrier to let drugs into the brain, and toggling gene function, so we go ahead and the meters are over in the red, It's a mistake in the making

Colour-coded like a tequila hangover

OOPS Sorry we're getting some interference from the Riddled Prog-Rock Channel there. Anyway I am not making this up.

it is not surprising that there are genes in our DNA that are turned on by ultrasounds, and, by a leap of imagination, we could visualize someday having a remote control that lets us turn on or off genes [...] we noticed that ultrasound at certain frequencies can kill cancer cells, leaving the healthy cells unharmed.

Published results in prestigious journals focussed on the implication of this research for ME/CFS, which is why they featured transcranial scans of individuals (the authors) without ME/CFS.


The resulting choppy seas of ripples and artefacts reveal -- when viewed through the eyes of faith -- such fine structures as Cortical Layers V and VI, while closer to the surface, the main reflective density-discontinuity is identified as the temporal bone itself, 1.4-1.6 mm thick. Other ripples are the dura mater, 3.8-5 mm thick, and the subarachnoidal space, 0.6 mm. These values would be publishable in themselves, as usual widths for these structures have ranges like 2.5-5 mm, 1 mm and 3 mm respectively.* Perhaps the authors shared the same aberrant cranial anatomy, or their skulls had been pared down to eggshells by the ultrasound radiation.

Above: Twenty-seven 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the
back of each one explaining what each one was

Another slice of the salami was published in a journal of embryology and anatomy, and therefore was couched within a comparative-anatomy frame-story. Here for shits-'n'-giggles and for tequila-hangover enhancement purposes is that paper's Introduction, garishly colour-coded to distinguish the passages copy-pasted from Schwartz et al. (2004), Lieberman (2011), Carroll (2003) and Bruner et al. (2011).

So last Thursday night after the Old Entomologist Chaetognatha Phylogeny Debate Club and Poetry Slam, and after several pints of Old Iambic Pentametric Porter [brewed with real Iams for extra Taurine], we were inspired to put these discoveries to the test of replication, having exhausted the limerick-rhyme possibilities of 'chaetognatha'.

The contents of Another Kiwi's temporal lobe were not organised quite as neatly as we had anticipated.

Pay no attention to Open Mike's complaints about "Can't find my pate" side-effects, he is just acting out and being a sook.


It was rather disturbing to find that the contents of Space-Time Eddie's skull were looking back at us.

Then we were subject to fits of hysterica shouting and even laughter, which could be the first signs of Sonic Attack, or just the usual sequelae of Old Iambic.

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* In another paper from the same group, Bradstreet et al. report that the subarachnoidal space is non-echoic and is vanishingly thin in normal children ("< 0.05 cm"), citing Authorities:

consistent with published observations of equally minimal EAF in children ages 2 and older (Lam et al., 2001), i.e., measuring <0.03 cm.

Thus we must question these authors' ability to read as well as their radiographic competence, for the actual values in Lam et al. are larger by a factor of 10, while in practice the space is hypoechoic (because full of trabeculae).

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When Marco Ruggiero attended the Inaugural GcMAF Congress (in Frankfurt, April 2013) as the newly-appointed Scientific Director of Immuno Biotech, his head-scanning party trick was hailed as one of the Highlights :

Professor Ruggiero demonstrated transcranial sonography, where the effects of an administration of GcMAF can be immediately seen on brain scans, and how the same technology can be used to improve the wellbeing of those with ME/CFS.

Such was its success that popular demand insisted a repeat performance at the 2nd GcMAF Congress (in Dubai, December 2013). Here Ruggiero passed on his expertise in repurposing ultrasonography equipment, finding meningeal details unknown to mainstream anatomy, and restoring brain function by way of sonic massage, all with professional-development points:


Alas, the recent disappearance of the "gcmafconference.org" website leaves us without the details of the professional body providing the Level One Certification.

Ruggiero was also a major attraction at the 3rd Congress (back in Frankfurt in 2014), but he was occupied by new responsibilities and collaborations with the DrReinwald Group -- purveyors of diet supplements, magic water and coloured-light-and-theremin-music Healing Machines, also co-sponsor of the Congress. So no ultrasonography on show CHIZ CHIZ.