A replication drive focused on results that lean on three methods commonly used in biomedical research in Brazil. Credit: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty In an unprecedented effort, a coalition of more than 50 research teams has surveyed a swathe of Brazilian biomedical studies to double-check their findings — with dismaying results. The teams were able to replicate…

Science & Nature The City Nature Challenge Is Here. Upload Those Wild Photos, Chicagoans All wildlife — animals, plants and fungi — is fair game for the City Nature Challenge. (Patty Wetli / WTTW News) Hey, Chicagoans, you’ve been drafted by a team you probably didn’t even know was recruiting. For the 2025 City Nature…

Credit: Laurence Dutton/Getty “As of my last knowledge update”, “regenerate response”, “as an AI language model” — these are just a few of the telltale signs of researchers’ use of artificial intelligence (AI) that science-integrity watchers have found sprinkled through papers in the scholarly literature. Three ways ChatGPT helps me in my academic writing Generative…

Social constructs of descent-based identity, such as race and ethnicity, do not align with genetic groupings.Credit: Adamkaz/Getty In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last…

Several research institutes in Germany are joining a worldwide grass-roots effort to save science data sets that researchers fear could be deleted or decommissioned on the orders of US President Donald Trump’s administration, Nature has learnt. ‘Totally broken’: how Trump 2.0 has paralysed work at US science agencies An official with Pangaea, a massive environmental…

NEWS 24 April 2025 Democratic-led congressional committees and left-wing think tanks reference research papers more often than their right-wing counterparts.

There is a large body of research into the experiences of participants in citizen science events, but what about those who organize them? It is largely assumed that the main drive is to gather data. However, organizers may have motivations beyond this. We examined the experiences of those who organized participation of UK cities in…

Abstract Driven by rapid advances in high-performance supercomputing, computational materials science has emerged as a powerful approach for exploring, designing, and predicting material properties at the atomic and molecular scales. Among the various computational tools developed in this field, the Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package (VASP) stands out as a widely adopted and highly versatile…

Gregor Mendel cross-bred some 28,000 garden pea plants (Pisum sativum) and studied traits such as their flower colour to make discoveries about genetic inheritance.Credit: imageBROKER/Alamy The Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel completed his groundbreaking work on genetic inheritance more than 160 years ago, after carefully studying seven traits in peas, including the shape and colour of…

A Hibbertia flower, named after George Hibbert, who was in favour of slavery.Credit: Getty When did humans begin to assign names to each other? It’s a question that has occupied researchers for decades. What is clear, however, is how important consistent naming is in helping us to make sense not just of people, but of…