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1 What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. In a meta-analysis of 18 surveys of researchers, he found only 2 percent fessed up to falsifying or manipulating data...but 14 percent said they knew a colleague who had.

2 After studying retracted biology papers published between 2000 and 2010, neurobiologist R. Grant Steen claimed that Americans were significantly more prone to commit fraud than scientists from other nations.

3 But when two curious bloggers reanalyzed Steens data, they found that Americans arent so shifty after all.

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4Chinese scientists were actually three times as likely as Americans to commit fraud. (French researchers were least likely to misbehave.)

5If caught stealing someone elses ideas, scientists have a handy defense: cryptomnesia, the idea that a person can experience a memory as a new, original thought.

6 But theres no shortage of excuses. In the 1970s the FDA investigated Francois Savery, a doctor who submitted identical data to two drug companies, claiming that they were from two different studies. When confronted, he explained that he was forced to re-create his data sets because he took the original research with him on a lake picnic and lost it when his rowboat capsized.

7 Government authorities later learned that Savery never conducted the studies in the first placeor received a medical degree.

8Even geniuses succumb to temptation. Researchers have found that Isaac Newton fudged numbers in his Principia, generally considered the greatest physics text ever written.

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20 Things You Didn't Know About... Science Fraud | DISCOVER