[wrycoder]

I think that referring to the incident as a "scandal involving data manipulation" is unfair. An independent review stated the following:

On the same day as the retraction, an independent report written by four physicists that was commissioned by TU Delft concluded there were no instances of data fabrication. “There was some degree of data selection in what was published,” says Patrick Lee from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was one of the authors of the report. “I don’t think this was done with malice. I think they were caught up at the excitement of the moment.” Lee notes that “some mistakes” were made by the team such as a calibration error, which they discovered after the publication of the paper. “They were aware of it and they came out with it without holding back anything,” says Lee. Indeed, Lee adds that he does not think that Microsoft is in trouble given its links to TU Delft. “It is a setback, but it should not derail the whole enterprise,” adds Lee.

https://physicsworld.com/a/retraction-of-nature-paper-puts-m... (March 2021)

[klyrs]

"Some degree of data selection" is a helluva spin on chopping out a large, central portion of the data in the region of interest.