You don't need new data to produce new science. A re-analysis or re-interpretation can be just as important and original as a new set of results. I say this because there's an interesting discussion going on over at PubPeer. In brief, British physicists Julian Stirling and colleagues have released a draft paper using reanalysis to criticize the idea of 'striped' nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are tiny bits of a material, such as gold. They can be coated in various chemicals (ligands), which has important biological and medical applications. It has been suggested that some mixtures of ligands form regular stripes on the surface of gold nanoparticles, and that these stripes can be seen with an AFM scanning tunnelling microscope (STM).
Stirling et al argue that these stripes are nothing more than artefacts caused by technical limitations in the STM; their argument is that the stripes are no more real than, say, the ...
