Forgive us for revisiting our family traditions, but the story of Hanukkah tells how the Maccabees managed to coax eight days worth of light from a day’s worth of olive oil. Some Tunisian chemists are probably wishing their paper on olive oil had the same staying power.
But their 2013 article, in the Journal of Oleo Science — a publication of the Japanese Oil Chemists’ Society — has been retracted because the group evidently wasn’t much of a group after all.
The paper, “Effect of Storage on Refined Olive Oil Composition: Stabilization by Addition of Chlorophyll Pigments and Squalene,” purported to come from Ghayth Rigane, Mohamed Bouaziz, Sami Sayadi and Ridha Ben Salem, who work in Tunisia and have published together before on more than one occasion. As the abstract states: Continue reading Hanukkah it ain’t: Oil paper burns out as authors bicker