Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.

A health worker wears Ebola protection gear in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 2,000 people have now been infected with the disease.Credit: Baz Ratner/Reuters

The number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has doubled in just over two months, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). “I’m profoundly worried,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, told Nature in May. Despite continuous outreach, many people remain suspicious of Ebola responders — who are often not from the region — and a small proportion assaults health workers﻿. “The number of cases increases with the frequency of attacks,” says Ghebreyesus.

Nature | 3 min read

Source: WHO

A study in the British Journal of Anaesthesia rules out a link between stronger doses of anaesthetic and death in elderly patients. Right beside it in the same journal, another paper concludes that the trial didn’t include enough patients to reach any conclusion about mortality. The opposing takes are the result of an unusual peer-review experiment at the journal to tackle reproducibility of results in the field. “I think it’s brilliant,” says medical researcher Frederick Sieber, the original paper’s lead author. “We’re all biased and this gives a second pair of eyes.”

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: British Journal of Anaesthesia paper 1 & paper 2

Thousands of scientists and their supporters marched through the streets of Budapest on 2 June to protest against a proposed law that would give the Hungarian government direct control of the country’s top research institutes. In an open letter published on 29 May, winners of the academy’s prestigious Momentum grants — which are designed to encourage talented young scientists to remain in or return to Hungary and run their own research groups — urged the prime minister and government not to support the draft law.

Nature | 3 min read

An international group of stem-cell researchers is urging China to cancel draft regulations that would permit some hospitals to sell therapies developed from patients’ own cells, without approval from the nation’s drug regulator. The International Society for Stem Cell Research warns in a statement that China’s newly proposed regulations could harm its people, undermine public health and discredit the international standing of the Chinese regenerative medicine community.

Nature | 2 min read

FEATURES & OPINION

Nearly every space agency in the world is sketching a proposal to explore our long-neglected neighbour, Venus. Once a water-rich Eden, the hellish planet could reveal how to find habitable worlds around distant stars.

Nature | 14 min read

Everyone wants more data sharing in science, but the impact of research continues to be measured by primary publications, rather than by subsequent uses of the data. Simply citing a paper fails to capture the connection to specific researchers or the data’s importance to the scholarship, argue policy adviser Heather Pierce and colleagues. They outline a robust system for tracking and crediting data reuse.

Nature | 9 min read

Read more: Make scientific data FAIR (7 min read)