As scientists from myriad fields rush to perform algorithmic analyses, Google’s Patrick Riley calls for clear standards in research and reporting. | Continue reading
Why are people so often overconfident? Schwardmann and van der Weele show that people self-deceive into higher confidence if they have the opportunity to persuade others for profit and that higher confidence aides persuasion. | Continue reading
The government plans to build a monitoring network in the wake of a study that attributed a spike in an ozone-depleting chemical to two Chinese provinces. | Continue reading
Tim Radford celebrates chemist Primo Levi’s extraordinary short-story collection. | Continue reading
Electrical stimulation has promised huge gains for people with paralysis. Now comes the hard part — getting beyond those first steps. | Continue reading
The drug-resistant form of the virus has been detected at unacceptable levels across Africa, Asia and the Americas. | Continue reading
Scientists will inject particles of calcium carbonate into the atmosphere and study their effects on incoming sunlight. | Continue reading
As scientists from myriad fields rush to perform algorithmic analyses, Google’s Patrick Riley calls for clear standards in research and reporting. | Continue reading
Researchers often find themselves coding algorithms in one programming language, only to have to rewrite them in a faster one. An up-and-coming language could be the answer. | Continue reading
Groundwater wells in the United States are under more stress than ever before due to drought conditions and rising demand, but the extensive nature of deeper drilling has been unreported. This analysis compiles nearly 12 million groundwater wells across the United States to deter … | Continue reading
Correlation of microbiome features with host quality of life and depression identified specific taxa and microbial pathways in two independent, large population cohorts, identifying links between microbial neuroactive potential and depression. | Continue reading
By creating synthetic strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae that differ in their sucrose metabolism strategies, the authors show that private-metabolizers may outcompete communities of public-metabolizers and cheater-strains, but their lower growth rate ultimately causes instabilit … | Continue reading
Jessica Garb et al. report the transcriptome of the major ampullate silk gland of Darwin’s bark spider, known for its extraordinarily tough silk. They identify a novel predicted protein, MaSp4, which is highly divergent compared to related proteins in other species and has proper … | Continue reading
Increasing the size of mesoscopic devices based on van der Waals heterostructures triggers additional quantum effects. Here, the authors observe distinct magnetoresistance oscillations in graphene/h-BN Hall bars only in devices wider than 10 μm due to resonant scattering of charg … | Continue reading
For more than 98% of the globe, the warmest period in 2,000 years has been in the past century. Plus, how virtual-reality mazes are unlocking brain mysteries and why opponents to a telescope in Hawaii are not anti-science. | Continue reading
Kava (Piper methysticum), an ethnomedicinal shrub native to the Polynesian islands, produces psychoactive kavalactones and anticancer flavokavains. Structures of key enzymes in their biosynthetic network may enable heterologous production. | Continue reading
Long thought to be a glitch of memory, researchers are coming to realize that the ability to forget is crucial to how the brain works. | Continue reading
This supremely complex organ is slowly giving up its valuable secrets. | Continue reading
The research could eventually lead to new sources of organs for transplant, but ethical and technical hurdles need to be overcome. | Continue reading
Animal-rights group’s campaign to end forced-swim tests comes amid debate over whether method is overused. | Continue reading
As efforts to chart the brain’s neurons gather pace, researchers must find a way to make the accumulating masses of data useful. | Continue reading
The end of pre-industrial climate — the baseline for assessing the extent of human-induced warming today — is not easy to pinpoint in time. Regardless, the past decades stand out from two millennia of climate fluctuations. | Continue reading
Violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has interrupted clinical trials and forced scientists to change how they immunize people. | Continue reading
The International Seabed Authority must commit the mining industry to a sustainable future. | Continue reading
Misconceptions about disinformation leave us vulnerable to manipulation online, says Kate Starbird. | Continue reading
A growing understanding of consciousness could lead to fresh treatments for brain injuries and phobias. | Continue reading
A reconstruction of Earth’s climate history over the past 2,000 years. | Continue reading
Three academics who are active on social media explore the motivations for and benefits of engaging with social media, as well as its costs and risks. Overall, they conclude there is a net benefit for themselves, their employers and wider society. | Continue reading
The drivers of acute periods of abnormal warmth in the ocean. | Continue reading
Anonymization has been the main means of addressing privacy concerns in sharing medical and socio-demographic data. Here, the authors estimate the likelihood that a specific person can be re-identified in heavily incomplete datasets, casting doubt on the adequacy of current anony … | Continue reading
Scientists struggle to detect the unauthorized sale of gene-edited crops whose altered DNA can mimic natural mutations. | Continue reading
Whether testosterone changes responses in moral dilemmas is a long-standing question. In a Registered Report, Brannon and colleagues show that unexpectedly, exogenous testosterone increased sensitivity to norms in moral dilemmas. | Continue reading
Exposing the eggs of yellow-legged gulls to adult conspecific predator alarm calls, the authors show that this information can be socially transmitted to other embryos in the clutch, even when they are naive to these calls. | Continue reading
Ice deposits up to around 50 m thick infill some craters near the Moon’s south pole and Mercury’s north pole, as inferred from the poleward shallowing of simple craters. | Continue reading
Anaesthetist John Carlisle has spotted problems in hundreds of research papers — and spurred a leading medical journal to change its practice. | Continue reading
The research community needs to find ways to reward study design and methodology as much as the final result. A publishing format called Registered Reports offers a means of addressing this challenge. | Continue reading
Extracting light from silicon is a longstanding challenge. Here, the authors report an experimental demonstration of free-electron-driven light emission from silicon nanogratings and investigates the feasibility of a compact, all-silicon tunable light source integrated with a sil … | Continue reading
Chandrayaan-2 is India’s second Moon mission and its first to attempt a soft landing. Plus: artificial intelligence takes on protein folding and what not to do in graduate school. | Continue reading
Deep learning makes its mark on protein-structure prediction. | Continue reading
The Research Misconduct Board is one of the first national agencies tasked with investigating serious research misconduct. | Continue reading