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Illustration of two black holes orbiting each other. Eventually the black holes will merge.

As black holes merge (illustration), they produce gravitational waves that ripple across the Universe.Credit: Mark Garlick/SPL

Glut of gravitational-wave detections

Gravitational-wave observatories have released their latest catalogue of cosmic collisions, including one featuring the lightest neutron star ever detected in this way, as well as two clashes involving surprisingly large black holes. The detections come from the LIGO and Virgo observatories in the United States and Italy, respectively, which made the landmark first detection of gravitational waves in 2015.

Nature | 5 min read

Scammers impersonated guest editors

Hundreds of junk-science papers have been retracted from reputable journals after fraudsters used ‘special issues’ to manipulate the publication process. The poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — were snuck in by scammers who impersonated scientists and offered to guest-edit special issues of the journals they targeted. Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal. There could be many more retractions to come.

Nature | 6 min read

(Nature, and this Briefing, is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)

COP26

Kofe stands at a lectern in the shallow water, flanked by UN flags.

Simon Kofe, Tuvalu’s foreign minister, delivered a recorded speech to COP26 standing thigh-deep in the ocean to hammer home the threat of sea-level rise to the South Pacific archipelago.Courtesy Tuvalu's Ministry of Justice, Communication and Foreign Affairs/Social Media via Reuters

COP26 scientists speak up

Climate scientist Corinne Le Quéré is a member of the Global Carbon Project, a consortium of scientists that tracks worldwide carbon emissions. She is attending COP26 as a policy adviser to the United Kingdom and France, and is the first in a series of scientists who spoke to Nature about their hopes and fears for the momentous climate summit — and what they hope to achieve by attending. Le Quéré’s COP highlight so far is India’s surprise commitment to get to net zero by 2070. “If a country like India can develop strongly on renewable energy, it means that many other developing countries can do it too — with the right financing — and that limiting climate change near 1.5 °C stays within reach.”

Nature | 4 min read

Climate pledges built on flawed data

The reporting system that underlies global climate commitments is riddled with flaws and undercounting, reports The Washington Post. Its analysis of 196 countries’ reports to the United Nations finds a significant gap between the amount of greenhouse gases they say they emit and what they’re really putting into the atmosphere. The Post estimates that there are between 8.5 billion and 13.3 billion tonnes of underreported emissions each year. Differing measurement techniques, spotty reporting and uncertainty around emissions from land are among the biggest factors causing the discrepancies.

The Washington Post | 24 min read

Reference: The Post’s methodology

The pandemic harmed researcher productivity

The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously dented the productivity and mental health of researchers, according to two studies that surveyed scientists in Europe and the United States. But the full effects could take years to be felt across academia, and researchers studying the problem warn that measures are urgently needed to support the scientists most acutely affected by disruptions, especially women, parents of young children and people of colour. “The worst may be yet to come,” says network-science researcher Dashun Wang, who led a study that involved 2 polls of a total of nearly 7,000 principal investigators, conducted 9 months apart.

Nature | 7 min read

References: Nature Communications paper & Supporting Staff Wellbeing in Higher Education report.

Features & opinion

Drug labels should be clear about the benefits

Amid all the soul-searching over the controversial US approval of the Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab, something has been largely missing, argues pharmaceutical-policy researcher Jonathan Darrow: a clear description of benefits. Experts know “that most new drugs offer only modest incremental benefit over drugs already available”, he writes. “Drug labelling should clearly state what effectiveness was demonstrated and how. … Radical transparency would favour drugs that work best over those approved despite only marginal benefits.”

Nature | 5 min read

‘What if we just give everything away?’

Organic chemist and self-proclaimed “fluorescent dye nerd” Luke Lavis designs colourful, glowing molecules that help researchers to visualize cellular activity. In 2015, he and his colleagues decided to share their dyes with researchers at no cost and no authorship requirements — just a request to cite their paper, and pay for shipping if they could. Over the past 4 years, they have sent some 12,000 aliquots to more than 500 labs in 32 countries. Making dyes available to researchers has led to some out-of-the-box experiments, from developing ways to ‘timestamp’ biological processes as they unfold, to building new types of sensor, says Lavis. “Giving researchers the opportunity to exercise their creativity unfettered is one of the best ways to push science forward.”

eLife | 6 min read

Quote of the day

“Why do we continue to speak a ‘temperature language’ that the American public does not understand?”

Science communicators should consider using the Fahrenheit temperature scale when writing for a largely US audience, argues meteorologist Marshall Shepherd, because the 1.5 ℃ Paris climate goal loses urgency compared to its 2.7 ℉ equivalent. (Forbes | 3 min read)