Cheating with statistics: Famous honesty researcher found to have lied to himself with faked data
A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data. According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than...
Teaching of UN-protected Spanish dialect Silbo in schools guarantees future of whistled language
In essence, people who listen to whistled speech piece together its meaning from fragments of the full speech signal, just as all of us do when listening to someone at a crowded cocktail party. “Regular speech is so complex – there is so much redundant information,” says Fanny Meunier, a...
Whistling: How some traditional cultures use whistled language for long-distance communication
Tourists visiting La Gomera and El Hierro in the Canary Islands can often hear locals communicating over long distances by whistling – not a tune, but the Spanish language. “Good whistlers can understand all the messages,” says David Díaz Reyes, an independent ethnomusicologist and whistled-language researcher and teacher who lives...
Nigeria launches secret plan to lure top Boko Haram commanders out of the bush
Editor’s note: This story was based on six months of reporting and research. Government officials, former jihadists, analysts, journalists, displaced people, and civil society workers were interviewed, but nearly all asked to have their names withheld or altered due to security concerns. Malam Aliyu* lives in a neat, two-bedroom house...
Decolonising science: Researchers out to demystify scientific data through African languages
There’s no original isiZulu word for dinosaur. Germs are called amagciwane, but there are no separate words for viruses or bacteria. A quark is ikhwakhi (pronounced kwa–ki); there is no term for red shift. And researchers and science communicators using the language, which is spoken by more than 14 million...
Revealed: Research funders suppress nutrition, sexual health, physical activity and substance use results
A survey of public-health researchers has found numerous instances of trial results being suppressed on topics such as nutrition, sexual health, physical activity and substance use, with 18 per cent of respondents reporting that they had, on at least one occasion, felt pressured by funders to delay reporting, alter or...
Africa’s first youth games raise hopes the continent is getting ready to host Olympic Games
For decades, African athletes have travelled all over the world to take part in the Olympic Games. At the recent Tokyo Games, they took home gold, silver and bronze medals. And yet Africa has never hosted the Games, and some people are asking what it would take for the Olympics to be held on...
Bleak future: Biodiversity is not in decline, what’s changing rapidly are ecosystems
In June 2018, 180 cars fanned out across Denmark and parts of Germany on a grand insect hunt. Armed with white, funnel-shaped nets mounted on their car roofs, enthusiastic citizen naturalists roamed through cities, farmlands, grasslands, wetlands and forests. The drivers sent the haul from their ‘InsectMobiles’ to scientists at...
Ethiopia detains Tigrayan children for ‘supporting’ rebels against government
Young children among those held amid a new wave of detentions of ethnic Tigrayans suspected of supporting Tigray forces in Ethiopia’s growing war, one detainee says, while witnesses and a human rights watchdog describe fresh disappearances in recent weeks. In an interview with The Associated Press on a hidden phone,...
Sports research shows female athletes twice more likely to develop concussions than male counterparts
Liz Williams was standing pitch-side at a women’s rugby match and she did not like what she was seeing. Williams, who researches forensic biomechanics at Swansea University, UK, had equipped some of the players with a mouth-guard that contained a sensor to measure the speed of head movement. She wanted...
