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The Asiatic cheetah. Research studying the endangered animal were arrested on spying charges last year.Credit: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty

Leading conservation groups, human-rights organizations and European politicians are urging Iranian authorities to give a fair trial to eight environmental researchers charged with spying — four of whom face the death penalty. A ninth researcher has already died in jail. Anonymous sources say secretive trials have begun, despite several Iranian government agencies, including a special committee appointed by President Hassan Rouhani, concluding last year that there is no evidence to support the charges.

Nature | 5 min read

Scientists in fields from seismology to particle physics are racing to update their devices to fix a bug in the US Global Positioning System (GPS) that could cause thousands of scientific instruments to malfunction starting this Saturday. GPS signals are time-stamped using a binary ten-digit number, which rolls back to 0 every 1,024 weeks. A 1999 rollover caused several high-end devices at a neutrino experiment to start “spitting out funky date numbers”, says engineer Hans Berns.

Nature | 4 min read

Three science groups have just published a guide on how organizers can make scientific meetings more diverse and inclusive, in part by avoiding ‘manels’ — all-male panels. “The metric to judge all of this by is what the impact is on the people, on science, on the participants in your meeting and on society,” says atmospheric scientist Angie Pendergrass. “It’s not about your intentions.”

Nature | 5 min read

New drugs will no longer have to be trialled in India if they have been approved for sale in other countries, including the European Union and the United States. The government hopes that the rules will speed up drug approvals and improve clinical research in India, which hosts only 1.2% of the world’s clinical trials, despite having a high burden of disease.

Nature | 3 min read

FEATURES & OPINION

A significant chunk of the worldwide timber trade is illegal — up to 70% of some nations’ production. But tracking the source of a piece of wood once it has been integrated into a piece of furniture, sheet of plywood or even a bag of charcoal has been almost impossible. Now scientists are using DNA tests and machine vision to pinpoint the true origin of timber.

Nature | 11 min read

Kicking off a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on technology and scientific careers, innovation researcher Mark Dodgson predicts how artificial intelligence will change academic teaching, assessment and research.

Nature | 17 min listen

The ‘Little Ice Age’ that enveloped the planet around the midpoint of the last millennium left its fingerprint on every aspect of human history, argues a new book by historian Philipp Blom. From the Great Fire of London to the fall of the Ming dynasty, the disruption was widespread and total — and sowed the seeds of today’s clash between capitalism and global survival.

The New Yorker | 10 min read