Research Highlight |
Featured
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News & Views |
Context is key for learning motor skills
A sophisticated theory for learning motor skills places emphasis on the need for inferring context — drawing conclusions about the structure of the environment — for efficiently storing and expressing motor memories.
- Anne G. E. Collins
- & Samuel D. McDougle
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Article |
Contextual inference underlies the learning of sensorimotor repertoires
A theory of motor learning based on the principle of contextual inference reveals that adaptation can arise by both creating and updating memories and changing how existing memories are differentially expressed, and predicts evoked recovery and context-dependent single-trial learning.
- James B. Heald
- , Máté Lengyel
- & Daniel M. Wolpert
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News |
Millions of helpline calls reveal how COVID affected mental health
Data from almost 20 countries suggest that many callers were anxious and lonely rather than experiencing abuse or suicidal impulses.
- Heidi Ledford
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Article |
Mental health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic as revealed by helpline calls
Data collected from crisis helplines during the COVID-19 pandemic show that pandemic-related issues replaced rather than exacerbated underlying anxieties, and demonstrate that helpline data are useful indicators of public mental health.
- Marius Brülhart
- , Valentin Klotzbücher
- & Stephanie K. Reich
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News |
When are masks most useful? COVID cases offer hints
Masks offer the greatest protection indoors and during long exposures to people infected with the coronavirus — but other public-health measures matter, too.
- Ariana Remmel
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Research Highlight |
Deadline divide: women shy away from asking for extensions
Even when deadlines are flexible, women are less likely than men to seek extra time for assignments.
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Nature Careers Podcast |
The mentoring messages that can get lost in translation
The scientific workplace can be a melting pot of different cultures and mentoring styles, leading to some interesting lab dynamics.
- Julie Gould
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News |
Face masks for COVID pass their largest test yet
A rigorous study finds that surgical masks are highly protective, but cloth masks fall short.
- Lynne Peeples
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Research Highlight |
Victims of Mt Vesuvius reveal ancient Romans’ gendered diets
Skeletal remains suggest that men and women in Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the same eruption that buried Pompeii, had distinct diets.
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News |
Genetic patterns offer clues to evolution of homosexuality
Massive study finds that genetic markers associated with same-sex encounters might aid reproduction. But some scientists question the conclusions.
- Sara Reardon
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Research Highlight |
‘Robber’ experiment tests generosity — with sobering results
People who give freely to a single individual get selfish in a crowd.
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News & Views |
Text-message nudges encourage COVID vaccination
A field trial shows that text-message ‘nudges’ encourage people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. To be effective, nudge approaches such as this must combine three aspects: they must prompt, enable and motivate behaviour.
- Mitesh S. Patel
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News |
A simple text has the power to increase COVID vaccinations
People who received a short ‘nudge’ by mobile phone were more likely to get a jab than were those who did not.
- Max Kozlov
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Article
| Open AccessBehavioural nudges increase COVID-19 vaccinations
Two randomized controlled trials demonstrate the ability of text-based behavioural ‘nudges’ to improve the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, especially when designed to make participants feel ownership over their vaccine dose.
- Hengchen Dai
- , Silvia Saccardo
- & Daniel M. Croymans
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Correspondence |
Global climate models do not need more behavioural science
- M. Granger Morgan
- & Hadi Dowlatabadi
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News |
COVID vaccines have higher approval in less-affluent countries
Surveys show that people in ten low- and middle-income nations are generally more eager to receive the COVID-19 jab than are people in two wealthier nations where vaccine is plentiful.
- Max Kozlov
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News Feature |
Gun violence is surging — researchers finally have the money to ask why
With historically high levels of new funding, US gun-violence research is starting to find its footing.
- Nidhi Subbaraman
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Comment |
Everyone should decide how their digital data are used — not just tech companies
Smartphones, sensors and consumer habits reveal much about society. Too few people have a say in how these data are created and used.
- Jathan Sadowski
- , Salomé Viljoen
- & Meredith Whittaker
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Perspective |
Human social sensing is an untapped resource for computational social science
The ability of people to understand the thoughts and actions of others—known as social sensing—can be combined with computational social science to advance research into human sociality.
- Mirta Galesic
- , Wändi Bruine de Bruin
- & Tamara van der Does
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News & Views |
Trip frequency is key ingredient in new law of human travel
An analysis of mobile-phone tracking data has revealed a universal pattern that describes the interplay between the distances travelled by humans on trips and the frequency with which those trips are made.
- Laura Alessandretti
- & Sune Lehmann
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Research Highlight |
Why national attitudes about science matter for vaccine acceptance
Views on vaccination are coloured by an individual’s stance on science — and by their society’s stance, too.
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Correspondence |
Afghanistan: vaccinate drug users against COVID-19
- Attaullah Ahmadi
- , Blaise Ntacyabukura
- & Don Eliseo Lucero-Prisno III
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Comment |
Cooperative AI: machines must learn to find common ground
To help humanity solve fundamental problems of cooperation, scientists need to reconceive artificial intelligence as deeply social.
- Allan Dafoe
- , Yoram Bachrach
- & Thore Graepel
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Research Highlight |
Want fresh results? Analysis of thousands of papers suggests trying new teammates
A deep dive into the physical-science literature links the most original research with the most recently formed teams of co-authors.
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News & Views |
Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving
A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.
- Tom Meyvis
- & Heeyoung Yoon
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Article |
People systematically overlook subtractive changes
Observational and experimental studies of people seeking to improve objects, ideas or situations demonstrate that people default to searching for solutions that add new components rather than for solutions that remove existing components.
- Gabrielle S. Adams
- , Benjamin A. Converse
- & Leidy E. Klotz
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Article |
Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online
Surveys and a field experiment with Twitter users show that prompting people to think about the accuracy of news sources increases the quality of the news that they share online.
- Gordon Pennycook
- , Ziv Epstein
- & David G. Rand
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Research Highlight |
How long should a conversation last? The people involved haven’t a clue
Participants in a tête-à-tête often misjudge when the other person is ready to call it quits.
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Research Highlight |
Spice is nice in many cuisines — but for unexpected reasons
A huge collection of recipes helps to overturn the idea that spicy food gained popularity for its antimicrobial powers.
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News Q&A |
This COVID-vaccine designer is tackling vaccine hesitancy — in churches and on Twitter
Immunologist Kizzmekia Corbett helped to design the Moderna vaccine. Now she volunteers her time talking about vaccine science with people of colour.
- Nidhi Subbaraman
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News |
Tracking QAnon: how Trump turned conspiracy-theory research upside down
By taking fringe ideas mainstream, the former US president taught new and dangerous lessons about manipulating social and mass media.
- Jeff Tollefson
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Research Highlight |
Hands speak: how casual gestures shape what we hear
Emphatic movements called beat gestures play a subtle but important part in communicating a speaker’s meaning.
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News & Views |
Brain rhythms that help us to detect borders
Oscillations in neuronal activity in the medial temporal lobe of the human brain encode proximity to boundaries such as walls, both when navigating while walking and when watching another person do so.
- Hugo J. Spiers
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Article |
Boundary-anchored neural mechanisms of location-encoding for self and others
In real-world spatial navigation and observation tasks, oscillatory activity in the human brain encodes representations of self and others, with oscillatory power increasing at locations near the boundaries of the room.
- Matthias Stangl
- , Uros Topalovic
- & Nanthia Suthana
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News Explainer |
Coronavirus and public holidays: what the data say
With the festive season ahead, Nature examines what is known about the risks of COVID spread, and how researchers will spend their time off.
- Giorgia Guglielmi
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Article |
Sixteen facial expressions occur in similar contexts worldwide
An analysis of 16 types of facial expression in thousands of contexts in millions of videos revealed fine-grained patterns in human facial expression that are preserved across the modern world.
- Alan S. Cowen
- , Dacher Keltner
- & Gautam Prasad
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Outlook |
Sustainable nutrition
The world’s population is estimated to reach 10 billion by 2050. Providing everyone with a nutritious diet and protecting the planet requires a global response.
- Catherine Armitage
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Outlook |
Changing diets at scale
Researchers are working out how to achieve a widespread change in eating behaviour.
- Benjamin Plackett
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Outlook |
Could a better diet improve mental health?
Brain function and food are thought to be connected through the community of microorganisms that live in the gut.
- Clare Watson
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Correspondence |
Combine resilience and efficiency in post-COVID societies
- Benjamin D. Trump
- , Igor Linkov
- & William Hynes
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Outlook |
The race to deliver the hypoallergenic cat
Researchers are looking beyond allergen immunotherapy to help people whose pets make them sneeze.
- Amber Dance
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Article |
Memory failure predicted by attention lapsing and media multitasking
Lapses in attention before remembering partially account for why we remember or forget in the moment, why some individuals remember better than others, and why heavier media multitasking is related to worse memory.
- Kevin P. Madore
- , Anna M. Khazenzon
- & Anthony D. Wagner
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Outlook |
How China is getting its farmers to kick their antibiotics habit
Worries about antimicrobial resistance and disease outbreaks have pushed farms to decrease drug use and improve hygiene.
- Kevin Schoenmakers
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Outlook |
The art of infection prevention
Public-health experts hope that by reducing the spread of disease, society can cut back on its use of antibiotics.
- Kristina Campbell
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Editorial |
Why Nature needs to cover politics now more than ever
Science and politics are inseparable — and Nature will be publishing more politics news, comment and primary research in the coming weeks and months.
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News & Views |
Encounters with inequality lead to demands for taxes on the rich
A field experiment reveals that people are more likely to demand that rich members of society should pay more taxes when reminded about ongoing inequality through exposure to a symbol of wealth.
- Colin Tredoux
- & John Dixon