Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
France was one of the places affected by a heatwave that hit Europe around 26 June.Credit: Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Climate change linked to Europe’s heatwave
Climate change made the record-breaking heatwave in Europe at least five times more likely. Scientists grabbed the opportunity to do a real-time analysis of the event while attending a climate conference in France. They used climate models to compare temperatures with those that would be likely in a world without global warming. Adding factors such historical temperature records and air pollution into the mix raised the bar even higher: in that analysis, such a heatwave in June has become 100 times more likely since around 1900.
“Some say the uncertainties are too big,” says climate researcher Friederike Otto. “There are indeed caveats, mostly to do with imperfect climate models. But even with large uncertainty bars we think it is useful to provide quantitative evidence for how climate change is affecting extreme weather.”
‘Unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge’
“Faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge — because of their Chinese ethnicity alone,” says an open letter from the president of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The open letter follows similar statements from at least ten other top US universities (including Yale and Stanford) and Chinese-American scientific groups. MIT scientists tell Nature about discomfiting experiences with government officials in recent months — and say they are changing their behaviour in response.
UK university will ban lectures
The leaders of a new university in London will ban lectures in favour of tutorials and online learning modules completed on campus. PLuS Engineering is a spin-off of a collaboration between King’s College London, Arizona State University and the University of New South Wales Sydney. The university is responding to evidence that lectures are not great for learning, are “soul-destroying at times” for teachers and won’t work for tech-savvy ‘generation alpha’ students (born between 2010 and 2025, apparently).
FEATURES & OPINION
Does psychology have a conflict-of-interest problem?
Some star psychologists don’t disclose in research papers the large sums they earn for talking about their work. Many editors and psychologists say it’s fine — this kind of income should not count as a conflict of interest because “there would not seem to be incentives aligned with making one claim versus another” in the words of author and psychologist Steven Pinker. Critics argue that lax disclosure norms could create problems by encouraging some scientists to play down — perhaps unconsciously — findings that contradict their arguments, and could lead them to avoid declaring other conflicts.
India’s fight against shoddy scholarship
“Fending off the attack of trash science will be a long battle,” says grant commissioner Bhushan Patwardhan, part of the effort by India’s higher-education regulator to cull hundreds of journals from a list of approved titles. Patwardhan argues that the more important work is still to come to correct the emphasis on quantity over quality as an academic performance indicator.
Read more: India culls hundreds more ‘dubious’ journals from government approved list (Nature, 2 min read)
