Maya Cederlund

Rita Bennett remembers the day a twister ripped through Topeka, Kansas, like it was yesterday. Bennett, her mother, father and grandmother were returning from a grocery run in north Topeka, when the sirens went off. She and her family went to her aunt’s home and sheltered under tables in the basement corner.Bennett, who was about to turn 10 years old at the time, got separated from her parents in the basement. She remembers desperately grasping for her father’s hand, but he was just out of reach...

When Melissa Howell’s former professor made sexual and romantic advances toward her on WhatsApp, she brought it to American University’s Office of Equity and Title IX, assuming that it would be what she described as a cut-and-dry case.

Instead, for several months, the Office gave her the impression that it was interested in pursuing an investigation, only to tell her that her professor’s actions did not violate AU’s Title IX policy.

Cosette Eisenhauer-Epp, a Chinese transracial adoptee with white parents, said she remembers a salient moment after the March 2022 Atlanta-area spa shootings.

“The people he shot look like me, but he’s the same ethnicity as my parents, so where do I go from that?” said Eisenhauer-Epp, a 23-year-old master’s student at the University of Texas at Arlington.

For Eisenhauer-Epp, the shootings were just another reminder of how complicated it was navigating her identity as an adoptee.

But over the past 2 years questions have arisen about some of Masliah’s research. A Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots—images used to show the presence of proteins—and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions.

After Science brought initial concerns about Masliah’s work to their attention, a neuroscientist and forensic analysts specializing in scientific work who had previously worked with Science produced a 300-page dossier revealing a steady stream of suspect images between 1997 and 2023 in 132 of his published research papers. (Science did not pay them for their work.) “In our opinion, this pattern of anomalous data raises a credible concern for research misconduct and calls into question a remarkably large body of scientific work,” they concluded.

Lucy had no issues with her first child and said going from one to two children was significantly more complicated in terms of sleep and nursing, especially after the pandemic.

“So, I think a lot of it was just the go, go, go of, ‘Okay, you have a baby. Get back on your feet, get back to work after 12 weeks, do all these things for your family, continue to feed your baby, and also don’t sleep,” she said in an interview.