Honestly, the authors of the retracted paper that the article mentions were lucky the whole thing just blew over without consequences for them (probably because

Honestly, the authors of the retracted paper that the article mentions were lucky the whole thing just blew over without consequences for them (probably because a very high-profile researcher was involved). I think if a less well-known research group would've edited experimental data like they did the community would not have been this forgiving. To be clear the authors didn't fabricate new data but they edited a graph in a way that can only be described as highly misleading and possibly fraudulent. My advisors would've killed me had they discovered me doing something like that. So IMHO interpreting this as a naive mistake or overzealousness doesn't do it justice. That said I'm no longer working in academia so I don't really care, just thought the handling of this incident was odd given previous cases of data manipulation in the Physics community. Anyway, topological quantum computing and Majorana fermions are interesting but the research in that area is at a stage where we've been with superconducting systems 30-40 years ago, i.e. people making the first fundamental experiments and trying to assemble the basic building blocks for a qubit. So I don't think anyone seriously bets on topological quantum computers to win the race.