In a preregistered experiment, participants were randomly assigned to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that this endorsement affected polarized trust in scientific expertise and caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters.

How can we help people tell truth and lies apart? Verschuere et al. find that a simple heuristic that instructs people to use only the level of detail in a message, and nothing else, increases deception detection rates.

Partners are often similar in traits, such as their education and political views, but it is unclear what exactly causes this similarity. Using Mendelian randomization and data on 50,000 partner pairs, the authors show that similarity in different traits can be explained by partner choice, confounding factors and convergence over time.

Williams et al. show that structural and functional brain asymmetry is already seen in the newborn brain, but that adult patterns of brain asymmetry are not fully developed.

Examining real-world data that tested different headlines for the same news story on real news readers, Robertson et al. find that people are more likely to click on a headline when it contains negative words compared to positive words.

Using data on roughly half a million cases and 10,000 judges from Pakistan and India, Mehmood et al. estimate the impact of the Ramadan fasting ritual on criminal sentencing decisions. They find that fasting increases judicial leniency and reduces reversals of decisions in higher courts.

An analysis of 2,500 public-health claims reveals that organizations rarely communicate uncertainties around the benefits of behavioural change. To be ethical, public-health communication should be accurate and transparent.

‘Big team’ science challenges researchers to revisit three issues around authorship: (1) how to define authorship-worthy contributions, (2) how contributions should be documented and (3) how disagreements among large teams of coauthors should be handled. We propose steps that the community can take to resolve these issues.

The ‘makeshift medicine’ framework describes how individuals address healthcare needs when they are unable to access the US healthcare system. The framework is applied to gender-affirming care, the health of people who inject drugs and abortion access. Recommendations for future research, advocacy and policy are made.