The Guardian recently published an article saying “People won’t get ‘tired’ of social distancing – and it’s unscientific to suggest otherwise”. “Behavioural fatigue” the piece said, “has no basis in science”. ‘Behavioural fatigue’ became a hot topic because it was part of the UK Government’s justification for delaying the introduction of stricter public health measures. They quickly reversed this position and we’re now in the “empty streets” stage of infection control. But it’s an important topic and is relevant to all of us as we try to maintain important behavioural changes that benefit others. For me, one key point is…

Unverifiable researchers are a harbinger of paper mill activity. While journals have clues to identifying fake personas — lack of professional affiliation, no profile on ORCID or strings of random numbers in email addresses, to name a few — there isn’t a standard template for doing so.  The International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers (STM) has taken a stab at developing a framework for journals and institutions to validate researcher identity, with its Research Identity Verification Framework, released in March. The proposal suggests identifying “good” and “bad” actors based on what validated information they can provide, using passport…

Astronomy has long been dominated by expert amateurs but with geospatial data everywhere, thanks to widely available internet and smartphones, it is not just that directions that were once only available in a paper map are now updated on your phone in real time to account for traffic. It is changing the relationships of science also. Crowdsourced scientific data will go from obscure folding protein folding of 15 years ago to relevance everywhere. That evolution will continue to be driven by how the data is gathered. Credit: Xiao Huang, Emory University   According to the authors, urban planning, transportation and environmental monitoring…