Inside out

Back page gossip from the 27 September issue of Research Europe

Fake youths A French arts college has apologised after a photo of a graduate class used on a website for a school it is launching in the United States was crudely manipulated to darken the skin colour of some of the students. The offensive and amateurish effort was caught by the students themselves. In a statement, École Émile Cohl, which is based in Lyon, blamed the botched blotching on a website provider, saying it had terminated their contract. It said: “We reaffirm that we do not need to manipulate images to demonstrate our openness to the world.”

Due credit EU research commissioner Carlos Moedas, another big fan of openness, fought his own fight for representational diversity on Twitter recently. Quoting a tweet that credited only the UK for developing the first satellite to clean up orbiting space debris, he sought to set the record straight. “To be fair, the ‘UK satellite’ mentioned is funded by the #EU research programme #FP7,” he said. He then tweeted the national flags of the other organisations that worked on the satellite to drive his point home.