Volume 6 Issue 3, March 2022

Teaching students the nature of science can be difficult, but the COVID-19 pandemic offers a range of teachable examples in a form of ‘living textbook’, explains Wei-Zhao Shi.

Open scholarship has transformed research, and introduced a host of new terms in the lexicon of researchers. The ‘Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Teaching’ (FORRT) community presents a crowdsourced glossary of open scholarship terms to facilitate education and effective communication between experts and newcomers.

Combatting climate and ecological change is often framed as the responsibility of either individuals or national governments. Organizations, which are intermediate in size and influence, have enormous potential to deliver effective policies. As an illustration, we consider approaches taken by UK organizations to reduce meat consumption.

Despite substantial attempts to end the global trade in elephant ivory, illegal transnational networks continue to operate. A new study by Wasser and colleagues¹ uses genetic matches between related elephants to reveal the scale, interconnectedness and audacity of traffickers in illegal ivory.

To make sense of what we hear, the brain must integrate information over time. How is this temporal integration orchestrated in human auditory cortex? A new study by Norman-Haignere and colleagues¹ introduces a promising method to estimate neural integration windows and demonstrates that category-specific versus more generic computations operate on distinct timescales.

Low-carbon innovations in technology and behaviour are increasingly prevalent, but they are not always equitable. This Review examines how such innovations can introduce and perpetrate inequalities, and discusses ways to ensure that a low-carbon future is both sustainable and equitable.

Our social lives involve interactions in many different domains, including networks of family members, friends, colleagues and online contacts. Su et al. show that networks with multiple domains of interaction tend to promote cooperative behaviour.

Using tweets in over 100 countries, Wang et al. examine evidence of global sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find that COVID-19 outbreaks caused a decline in sentiment worldwide, and the effects of lockdowns differed across countries.

In a systematic review and meta-analysis of 45 studies, covering a sample of 116,999 individuals across 22 countries, McGuire et al. find that cash transfers improve the subjective well-being and mental health of recipients in low- and middle-income countries.

Using over 600 genetic matches of elephant tusks from the same individual or close relatives, from 49 ivory seizures across Africa, Wasser et al. reveal the scale, connectivity and movements of transnational criminal organizations that trade in ivory.

In two audit experiments with politicians and students, and an online experiment, Kirgios et al. show that women and racial/ethnic minorities seeking help are more likely to receive support when they explicitly mention their marginalized demographic identity.

Across 26 countries, Imhoff et al. find that conspiracy mentality is more prevalent at both ends of the political spectrum than the centre. This U-shaped pattern is accentuated for supporters of political parties not in government, particularly on the political right.

How do we predict other peoples’ behaviour across a dizzying array of social settings? Van Baar et al. propose a structure learning mechanism that uncovers the hidden motives of others, which allows us to adaptively respond to their future actions.

Schlichting et al. investigate how the developing brain forms memories that support later decisions. Using fMRI decoding, they show that children and teens do not anchor new memories into existing, related ones, but rather store them separately.

Speech is produced and perceived at a rate of 4–5 Hz. Gagl et al. show that the temporal structure of our eye movements during reading is similar (3.9–5.2 Hz), suggesting a temporal link between reading and speech.

Xiao et al. report that toddlers with autism, who have reduced behavioural preference for motherese speech as indexed through eye tracking, also have impaired brain responses to motherese in language regions, while typical toddlers show the opposite pattern.

Norman-Haignere et al. present a general method for estimating neural integration windows. Applied to human intracranial recordings, the method reveals how human auditory cortex integrates across the multiscale temporal structure of natural sounds.