WELL ACKSHUALLY its a clay tablet, you just press into it with a little stick, then its fired…

Gotta love the low-quality-copper memes

While I agree that publishers charging high open access fees is a bad practice, the ACS journals aren’t the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel predatory journals you’re describing. ACS nano in particular is a well respected journal for nanochem, with a generally well-respected editorial board, and any suspicions of editorial misconduct of the type you’re describing would be a three-alarm fire in the community.

I will also note that this article is labelled “free to read” – when the authors have paid an (as you said, exhorbitant) publishing fee to have the paper be open access, the label used by ACS journals is “open access”. The “free to read” label would be an editorial decision, typically because the article is relevant outside the typical readerbase of the journal, and so it makes sense both from a practical perspective (and more cynically for the journal’s PR) to make it available to everyone, not just the community who has institutional access.

Also, the fact that the authors had a little fun with the title doesn’t mean its low-effort slop – this was actually an important critique at the time, because for years people had been adding different modifications to graphene and making a huge deal about how revolutionary their new magic material was.

The point this paper was trying to make is that finding modifications to graphene which make it better for electrocatalysis is not some revolutionary thing, because almost any modification works. It was actually a useful recalibration for expectations, as well as a good laugh.

Edit: typo

I think its because while its under water it doesn’t have a chance to diffuse into a larger volume of air – normally farts are pretty dilute by the time it makes it to anyone’s nose.

My favorite overheard undergrad story:

I was walking past the lecture hall right after an organic chemistry midterm, and there was a cluster of 4-5 students talking about the exam. One asked about question 8b, and another one said “you’re not supposed to mix nitric acid and ethanol, that makes TNT, right?” I had to stifle a chuckle as I walked by.

So close, and yet so far! Nitrated acetone is explosive, and TNT (trinitrotoluene) is also made with nitric acid, but toluene is a much more complex molecule than acetone. If those undergrads could figure out how to turn acetone into TNT efficiently, they’d get a Nobel!

Lol I was trying to play Dragon Age games a couple months ago, and the EA app is so terrible that I couldn’t get them to run on windows. But on Linux in the proton sandbox? No problem, worked right out of the box. 😂😂