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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an election rally.Credit: Xinhua/Avalon.red

More than 200 scientists in India have signed an open letter calling on voters to “reject those who lynch or assault people, those who discriminate against people because of religion, caste, gender, language or region”. The world’s largest democracy is in the throes of a general election, which started on 11 April and ends on 19 May. The letter, posted online last month, is an unusual move for India’s research community, which rarely comments on political or social issues. No specific party is named in the letter, but there has been a rise in attacks by Hindu right-wing groups since the ruling Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party formed a government in 2014.

Nature | 4 min read

Speech-recognition systems have a new defence against malicious commands hidden in audio signals. The defensive algorithm compares chunks of the message to the whole thingto find any patterns that are inaudible to human ears. The system works even if the attackers are aware of it and is very robust.

Nature | 5 min read

An ambitious project to test the reproducibility of Brazilian biomedical science is about to get under way. More than 60 laboratories will attempt to replicate up to 100 experiments, with each experiment tested by 3 labs. The project is one of the first to test the reproducibility of scientific research from a particular country, instead of a particular field.

Nature | 4 min read

Four Chinese researchers who were killed in the terror attacks in Sri Lanka last month were in the country as part of China’s vast infrastructure-building project known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Scientific cooperation is also a goal of the initiative, and the Chinese scientists were preparing to embark on an ocean research trip with colleagues from Sri Lanka. The researchers died when their hotel in Colombo was bombed on 21 April — one in a string of attacks that killed some 250 people.

Nature | 2 min read

FEATURES & OPINION

From learning to code to chatting on Slack, technology is changing how science is done. Tune in to the Nature Careers Working Scientist podcast for six episodes exploring the tools that are having an impact — and how to master them for yourself.

Nature | Six-part podcast

The creators of a 10,000-strong database of female scientistsare stamping out all-male panels, or ‘manels’. The developers of ‘Request a Woman Scientist’ hope that its participants can help to boost gender diversity in scientific talks. “We need men to know about the platform so they can use it but, even more than that, we need men to realize that equity and representation not only matters, but should be as important as other considerations when organizing a research team or a speaker panel,” says ecologist Jane Zelikova.

Nature | 5 min read

“A substantial number of the major genetic advances of the past 20 years can be traced back to Davis in some way,” said geneticist George Church of gene-sequencing pioneer Ronald Davis in The Atlantic. Now, Davis pursues a different calling: to cure myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The poorly understood illness affects Davis’s adult son, Whitney, so severely that he can’t speak or eat. Last month, Davis published an initial success: a blood test that might offer the first biological diagnostic for the disorder. For yesterday’s ME/CFS International Awareness Day, Davis and his wife, psychologist Janet Dafoe, share the profound impact that their son’s illness has had on their lives and work.

CNN | 10 min read

Reference: PNAS paper