Skin phantoms help researchers improve wearable devices without people wearing them

| Insights & Views

Wearable devices have become a big part of modern health care, helping track a patients heart rate, stress levels and brain activity. These devices rely on electrodes, sensors that touch the skin to pick up electrical...

Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

| Insights & Views

Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers...

South African poetry has a new digital archive – what’s behind the project

| Insights & Views

South African poetry, rich with history, has long been an underappreciated cornerstone of the countrys cultural landscape. But a new free-to-access digital archive is helping change that. Focused on the poets published by...

Femicide in Kenya: William Ruto has set up a task force – feminist scholar explains its flaws

| Insights & Views

Gender-based violence is a major challenge in Kenya, which has recorded a significant rise in deaths of women and girls in recent years. In January 2024, a coalition of organisations across the east African nation...

Chad’s parliamentary election hands Mahamat Déby absolute control. Here’s why it’s dangerous

| Insights & Views

Chad held parliamentary elections in late December 2024. The final results released on 21 January 2025 gave the well-established former ruling party, the Movement Patriotique du Salut (MPS), 124 seats out of 188. The...

Why building big AIs costs billions – and how Chinese startup DeepSeek dramatically changed the calculus

| Insights & Views

State-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems like OpenAIs ChatGPT, Googles Gemini and Anthropics Claude have captured the public imagination by producing fluent text in multiple languages in response to user prompts....

Problematic Paper Screener: Trawling for fraud in the scientific literature

| Insights & Views

Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of tortured...