The reviewer was not impressed with the paper written by Israeli brain researcher Idan Segev and a colleague from Switzerland.
“Professor Idan,” she wrote to Segev. “I didn’t understand anything that you said.”
Segev and co-author Felix Schürmann revised their paper on the Human Brain project, a massive effort seeking to channel all that we know about the mind into a vast computer model. But once again the reviewer sent it back. Still not clear enough. It took a third version to satisfy the reviewer.
“Okay,” said the reviewer, an 11-year-old girl from New York named Abby. “Now I understand.”
Such is the stringent editing process at the online science journal Frontiers for Young Minds, where top scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, submit papers on gene-editing, gravitational waves and other topics — to demanding reviewers ages 8 through 15.
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