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Children and young people in Canada have participated in a series of recent protests calling for action on climate change. Credit: Michael Wheatley/Alamy

A group of children and young adults have filed a lawsuit alleging that the Canadian government has violated their constitutional rights by promoting and enabling fossil-fuel development in spite of acknowledged risks from global warming. Because there is no explicit right to a healthy environment under the Canadian constitution, the case hinges on an untested legal theory: that the adverse impacts of global warming will impinge on other fundamental rights, such as life, liberty and security.

Nature | 3 min read

An ambitious effort to digitize ten centuries’ worth of documents that record the history of Venice is at risk of sinking thanks to a disagreement over data. Two key organizations behind the project, which aimed to make the data freely available online for researchers, have to come to an impasse over data processing. The stalemate potentially renders useless eight terabytes of information collected over the past five years.

Nature | 4 min read

Some scientific ideas seem immune to criticism. A new analysis has reviewed a number of papers citing a 2000 study that challenges the Hawthorne effect — a theory suggesting that people change their behaviour if they know they're being watched. The latest analysis found that most of the 196 papers analysed miscited the 2000 paper, and said that it affirmed rather than questioned the validity of the effect. A similar pattern was found for two earlier papers critiquing the Hawthorne effect but, interestingly, these were initially cited correctly, and became increasingly mis-cited over time.

Nature Index | 5 min read

Reference: PLoS ONE paper

Credit: Nature Index

FEATURES & OPINION

All kinds of everyday objects are radioactive to varying degrees. This causes headaches for particle-physics experiments, which can be thrown off should any particles from the decay of these objects hit their detectors. One way to protect against this, is to surround the experiments with a few inches of lead that is barely radioactive. And the best source of that? Sunken ships, some of which have been languishing in the depths for as long as two millennia.The Atlantic | 7 min read

Lithium-ion batteries power much of our modern lives. But once upon a time, the element below lithium in the periodic table, sodium, was a contender. Now, interest in sodium-ion batteries is seeing something of a revival, thanks to the element’s cheaper cost and wider availability.

Chemistry World | 12 min read