Memrefuting
tl;dr: Scientific American published an article about an analog computing technique that the author claims can solve NP-complete problems, but which contains an elementary mistake that invalidates the result. Before SciAm published it, an arXiv preprint circulated and commenters on HN and Reddit pointed out the mistake. The editor either did not read these replies, or did read them but decided to publish anyways.<p>This is an embarrassing fuckup on their part, but one that is endemic in mass-market scientific publications, which want to publish sensational results but lack the expertise to recognize them or to summarize results without major distortions. The problem is so severe that I recommend avoiding these sources entirely, because the frequent major errors will effectively leave you less knowledgeable than you started.