Status of Dark Matter in the Universe [CEA]
Courtesy of arXiver, here’s a nice review article if you want to get up to date with the latest ideas and evidence about Dark Matter…
http://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01840
Over the past few decades, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. I begin with a review of the observational evidence for the existence of dark matter: rotation curves of galaxies, gravitational lensing measurements, hot gas in clusters, galaxy formation, primordial nucleosynthesis and cosmic microwave background observations. Then I discuss a number of anomalous signals in a variety of data sets that may point to discovery, though all of them are controversial. The annual modulation in the DAMA detector and/or the gamma-ray excess seen in the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope from the Galactic Center could be due to WIMPs; a 3.5 keV X-ray line from multiple sources could be due to sterile neutrinos; or the 511 keV line in INTEGRAL data could be due to MeV dark matter. All of these would require further confirmation in other experiments…
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In the Dark 
January 13, 2017 at 3:28 pm
I once encountered a related case as a journal editor. We received a complaint from scientist X that scientist Y had reproduced verbatim a sequence from one of X’s papers. Y’s response was that (A) the paper by X had been cited; (B) the passage in question was being given by way of background review rather than claimed as original. I thought this was pretty thin ice, but what swayed the case away from outright removal of the paper was examination of the TeX source. Although there was quite a long sequence of equations that looked identical in print, the TeX commands to implement them were really quite different. So this was plagiarism involving intellectual effort, rather than just by cut-and-paste. You might say that plagiarism is plagiarism period, but there must be a special circle of hell reserved for the use of cntrl-C cntrl-V. Plagiarism of ideas is murkier territory: as Tom Lehrer memorably stated, all research involves this to some extent.
January 13, 2017 at 3:57 pm
I usually prepare for writing articles by writing the main equations (some of which would come from other sources) out in longhand and making rough notes about what should be written in between. I find that gives a better sense of the shape of the article than sitting down at the screen and starting from scratch. An approach like that in a review article might lead to the result you describe. It’s remiss not to include a reference when you quote a result, but it may be error rather than misconduct. Copying and pasting chunks of text is much harder to explain.
I do remember once, about 20 years ago, writing the introduction to a paper (which had a few co-authors). In the first or second sentence I included a nicely turned phrase which just popped into my head.
It turns out that this phrase had appeared very recently in another paper (which we had cited). I had honestly forgotten where it came from and fooled myself into thinking that I was smart enough to think it up myself.
The author of that other paper contacted me, we discussed it and the matter was settled amicably, though I was quite perturbed by the whole affair.
That, however, was just part of a sentence rather than several entire paragraphs!
January 13, 2017 at 4:00 pm
To be honest I didn’t realise that the arXiv did plagiarism-checking at all. It’s a positive development, I think.
January 13, 2017 at 4:19 pm
Does WordPress check whether you stole your posts from other blogs???
January 13, 2017 at 4:37 pm
I don’t think so. Or if it does, the system doesn’t work…
January 13, 2017 at 5:06 pm
I knew that arXiv checked. What I don’t know is if there is any way to pre-check your manuscript before submission. That would be a useful facility: then you could avoid inadvertent embarrassments like your own earlier example. But maybe then that would open the door for people to doctor any deliberate plagiarism until it was just below threshold.
January 13, 2017 at 5:22 pm
That’s how Turnitin works for online coursework submissions by undergraduates. It wouldn’t be too difficult to get a similar system on the arXiv.
January 15, 2017 at 5:35 pm
I do think that the “WIMP miracle” has been oversold. IF WIMP miracle was correct, we should have seen a WIMP-proton x-section of 10^{42} cm^2
January 16, 2017 at 10:33 am
This issue is being investigated and I’ll hopefully be able to post an update soon.
January 16, 2017 at 4:41 pm
I have been in communication with Katherine Freese about this. She sent me this comment by email and asked me to post the content here:
The issue has also been investigated by the arXiv team who wrote the following to Professor Freese:
It is now very clear that Professor Freese is not the one guilty of plagiarism.
January 16, 2017 at 4:58 pm
It also appears that Professor Riotto has now modified his paper to include a reference to Professor Freese’s earlier paper.
January 17, 2017 at 2:55 pm
To whit: “This section is taken verbatim from Freese [20]”. This is no longer plagiarism, but still appears to be copyright infringement and, well, rude.
January 17, 2017 at 2:56 pm
Yes, I saw that. It’s hardly a satisfactory response.
January 16, 2017 at 4:43 pm
Update: see the comment below.
January 17, 2017 at 3:46 pm
Even in Riotto’s Introduction, he manages to sleight Freese by omitting her input saying, “Since these lectures were delivered at a school, we shall not provide an exhaustive list of references to original material, but refer to several basic cosmology books and reviews where students can find the references to the original material [1–8],” again excluding her contribution to his paper even in his updated mea culpa version.