Diederik Stapel, the infamous “lying Dutchman” who in 2011 admitted to inventing the data in dozens of psychology research papers, unwittingly signalled his deceit through the language he used. As well as inflating the certainty surrounding his results, Stapel included more science-related terms to describe his methods when writing up his fraudulent “findings” than when describing genuine results.

Researchers who have analysed Stapel’s papers say they can separate his genuine research from the fictional with about 70 per cent accuracy. Now they are studying a larger sample of papers from many different scientific fraudsters, to see if the detection method works more generally.

‘s team at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has previously studied the language used by liars in situations including politics and . When US presidents make false statements, for instance, they tend to use negative words such as “fear” or “doom” more frequently.

Leaking language

“Lying is a very stressful act,” says , a member of the team. “This anxiety sometimes leaks through into people’s language.”

Context matters: when presidents lie on the subject of war, they use fewer personal pronouns like “I” and “me”. But people who write deceitful online dating profiles actually use these pronouns more than those who tell the truth.

Markowitz and Hancock suspected that there may be specific linguistic tics that signal deceit in science. Stapel’s outrageous fraud provided the ideal testing ground. “He produced a tremendous amount of writing,” says Markowitz. “And the fact that he was investigated so closely provided us with a unique opportunity.”

So the pair selected 24 of Stapel’s papers now known to be fraudulent, and a further 25 that have withstood official scrutiny. They chose only papers of which Stapel was the first author listed – indicating that he actually wrote the paper.

Stapel, who worked at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, used more “amplifiers” – words like “profoundly” and “extreme” – in his fraudulent papers, and fewer “diminishers” – like “merely” and “somewhat”.

“He tried to overvalue the fraudulent research,” suggests Markowitz, who is now investigating whether this pattern holds true for other scientists who have been forced to retract fraudulent papers.

Screened by machine

If it does work more widely, it might be useful for policing the scientific literature. It couldn’t provide firm evidence of fraud, but might help flag research labs turning out large numbers of suspicious papers, prompting closer investigation.

Still, the current false-positive rate of about 30 per cent means that there would be many false leads.

“It’s not really good enough as a screening tool,” says of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who has developed software to screen published papers for examples of plagiarism.

However, Markowitz hopes that it will be possible to improve accuracy by employing machine learning – using examples of fraudulent and genuine scientific papers to train algorithms to detect subtle differences in the way that they are written.

Journal reference:

THE popular image of Antarctica as a frozen, almost lifeless desert needs a makeover. For the first time, water from a lake beneath the ice has been found to harbour a vibrant microbial ecosystem.

“Our discovery proves that water is habitable space, even if it’s at sub-zero temperatures and there is no sunlight,” says of Montana State University in Bozeman. He co-led the US team that drilled into Lake Whillans, 800 metres beneath the west Antarctic ice sheet.

“Water is habitable space, even if it’s at sub-zero temperatures and there is no sunlight”

The finding is good news for astrobiologists hoping to discover life elsewhere in the solar system: in the ocean beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, for instance, or clinging on under the Martian polar ice caps.

Antarctica is home to about 400 subglacial lakes, many of which are linked in drainage basins. Priscu calls it “the planet’s largest wetland”.

Lake Whillans (see map) is one such lake. As it fills up with water from inland, the ice above swells. About every three years, the pressure builds up so much that water rushes out into the Southern Ocean, like fuel being siphoned from a car’s tank.

Priscu’s team broke into Lake Whillans in January 2013, using to melt a 60-centimetre-diameter hole through the ice. The water used was kept sterile using filters, heating, ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide. That should lay to rest any suggestion that the microbes found were contaminants from the surface.

Such doubts have dogged claims about life in Lake Vostok in eastern Antartica. A Russian team took samples from the lake in 2012, but they used non-sterile kerosene as the drilling fluid.

In any case, the sheer numbers of microbes found in the samples from Lake Whillans argue against contamination. “We were surprised by the cell densities we observed,” says Priscu’s colleague of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “They are very similar to what you’d find in low-nutrient lakes on the surface or in the open ocean.”

The team found almost 4000 species of single-celled organisms (). Most seem to be feeding on sediments on the lake bed, laid down when the area was last ice-free and under the ocean, at least 120,000 years ago.

Many of the microbes convert ammonium to nitrite. The most common species, accounting for about 13 per cent of the DNA sequences found, takes that nitrite and converts it to nitrate. Others seem to feed on methane.

Whillans is not necessarily representative of other subglacial lakes. For instance, Lake Vostok is thought to have been completely cut off, including from other lakes, for at least 15 million years. That means any microbes there may have to feed instead on chemicals released as bedrock is ground away by the surrounding ice. “What we have is one point on the map. We need more,” says of Imperial College London.

“We’ve got to get down and sample these lakes,” says Priscu. But it will be hard to reach lakes nearer the centre of Antarctica, where conditions are harsher, without contaminating them with drilling fluid. Siegert heads a team that was thwarted in its 2012 efforts to reach Lake Ellsworth by boring through 3 km of ice. He hopes to try again in a few years.

Exploring beneath the ice of other bodies in our solar system will be an even tougher challenge. Still, finding a flourishing ecosystem beneath Antarctica boosts the idea that life may exist beyond Earth. “I believe the implications for life elsewhere in our solar system are significant,” says of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Life thrives under Antarctica”

Species:
Habitat: forests of Central and South America, in the trees, on the ground – and sometimes in water

If you’re an insect, don’t mess with the trap-jaw ant Odontomachus bauri. Like other Odontomachus, it uses its massive jaws to attack prey and defend against predators. The jaws are slowly drawn back and held open by catches in its head, springing forward when the catches are released at . This is faster even than the fearsome claw strikes of mantis shrimps.

“They can literally toss invaders out of the nest with their jaws,” says of William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey.

By striking against the ground, the jaws can also propel the ants through the air. Spagna says the vertical leaps – which, scaled up, would propel a human more than 10 metres into the air – . However, sometimes the ants jump unintentionally when their jaws hit the ground.

Spring-loaded gnashers would be enough of a novelty for most creatures. But it now turns out that O. bauri is also a champion swimmer.

Not quite butterfly stroke

Ants have many claims to fame. They are , they and they make great farmers. One thing ants are not generally renowned for is their swimming.

At least, until recently. In the last decade, biologists have found some ants are surprisingly at home in water. One Australian species, for example, seems to be , hiding out in air pockets in mangroves. Fire ants, meanwhile, cope with rising water levels by teaming up to form unsinkable rafts. Nevertheless, swimming ants seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

In the forests of Central and Southern America, though, swimming seems to come naturally to many ant species. Here, there are plenty of rivers and floods are frequent, making death by drowning or predatory fish a threat for any ant that loses its footing as is scurries through the canopy.

Wet behind the antennae

Conservation biologist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and his student Dana Frederick collected ants belonging to 35 local species and dropped them into water to see how they deal with this occupational hazard.

Ten of them proved to be surprisingly strong swimmers, able to propel themselves along at more than three times their body length per second. For comparison, when Michael Phelps set the in Beijing, he was covering almost exactly his standing height each second.

Odontomachus bauri was one of the champions. These ants are around 1 centimetre in length on average, but can swim at speeds exceeding 10 centimetres a second.

Aquatic prowess seems to have evolved multiple times in different lineages of ants, say Yanoviak and Frederick – perhaps to provide an escape route for frequent but unintentional dives into the water. O. bauri will swim towards dark poles rising vertically from the water, which provide a path back to dry land, suggesting they are keen to get out of the water.

You might think that the ants would simply “walk on water”, rather than really swimming. But high-speed video shows that the ants do adopt an unusual swimming stroke when they fall into the wet stuff. Their back legs, which provide forwards movement on dry land, are simply held behind the body, apparently to provide stability (see video, above).

They can also steer, by sweeping one set of legs harder than the other. It’s “just like you’d steer a rowboat,” says Yanoviak.

Journal reference:

Take a hot new method that’s opened up a new era of genetic engineering, apply it to the wonder stem cells that in 2012 won their discoverer a Nobel prize, and you might just have a tool to cure HIV infection.

That’s the hope of researchers led by of the University of California, San Francisco – and they have proved the basic principle, altering the genome of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to give them a rare natural mutation that allows some people to resist HIV.

Kan’s work relies on “genome editing” – snipping out a particular DNA sequence and replacing it with another. It’s much more precise than traditional forms of genetic engineering, in which sequences are added to the genome at random locations.

To alter the stem cells, Kan’s team turned to the CRISPR-Cas9 system, a super-efficient method of genome editing based on an ancient bacterial “immune system”. In bacteria, the system takes fragments of DNA from invading viruses and splices them into the cell’s own DNA, where they act like “wanted” posters, allowing the viruses to be recognised and attacked in future.

Natural resistance

About 1 per cent of people of European descent are resistant to HIV, because they carry two copies of a mutation in the gene for a protein called CCR5. The virus must lock onto this protein before it can invade white blood cells, and the mutations prevent it from doing so.

Using a bone marrow transplant from a naturally HIV-resistant person, Timothy Ray Brown was famously “cured” of HIV infection. Kan’s goal is to achieve the same result without the need to find compatible HIV-resistant bone marrow donors – who are in vanishingly short supply.

It’s fairly easy to make iPSCs from a person’s cells, which then have the potential to grow into any type of cell in the body. So if iPSCs could be given two copies of the protective mutation, it should be possible to make personalised versions of the therapy that cleared HIV from Brown’s body. Kan’s team has now shown that CRISPR-Cas9 can efficiently make the necessary genome edit. As expected, white blood cells grown from these altered stem cells were resistant to HIV upon testing.

“It’s a really fantastic application of the tool,” says Philip Gregory, chief scientific officer with of Richmond, California. However, he warns that there is a long way to go before it can be turned into a practical therapy.

Transplant hurdle

Kan has not yet grown the iPSCs into the specific type of white blood cells – called CD4+ T cells – that are ravaged by HIV. What he instead plans to do is turn the iPSCs into blood-forming stem cells, which when transplanted into the body would give rise to all of the cell types found in the blood. “One of the problems is converting iPSCs into a type of cell that is transplantable,” says Kan. “It is a big hurdle.”

Regulators will also need to be convinced that cells that have been subjected to extensive genetic manipulation – both to create the iPSCs, and to give them the protective mutation – are safe.

Meanwhile, Sangamo is already testing a therapy that uses an older genome editing technique to disrupt CCR5 in patients’ CD4+ T cells so that HIV is locked out. In an initial clinical trial involving a handful of people with HIV, levels of the virus circulating in the blood decreased – becoming undetectable in one person.

Journal reference:

In the blue corner: US first lady Michelle Obama, champion of healthy eating. In the red: Congressional Republicans, who want to roll back federal standards for healthy school meals.

It’s a partisan food fight, over the meals served daily to more than 30 million schoolchildren. And , with a barrage of media reports last week suggesting that kids are rejecting their new-look healthy lunches, leading to massive waste.

The of 2010 was intended to improve school meals across the nation, requiring the US Department of Agriculture to draw up national standards that upped fruits and vegetables, while cutting sugar and fat. These were introduced in 2012, but now Congressional Republicans . The main complaints: healthy meals are too costly, and children aren’t eating the fruit and veg they are being served, so food is ending up in the trash.

Few people question the wisdom of improving school nutrition: according to an analysis of the World Health Organization’s Global Burden of Disease Study published last week, around – a rate that could reduce the nation’s average life expectancy.

There is evidence that stricter standards for school lunches can help. Obesity and poverty go hand-in-hand, so kids who qualify for free or subsidised meals are more likely to be obese than those who don’t. But a 2013 study from the University of Illinois in Chicago found that the in states that have adopted stricter nutritional standards for school meals.

Waste woes

On the contentious issue of waste, two studies have produced conflicting results – although both suggest that the rules are increasing the amount of fruit and veg eaten.

A team led by at the Harvard School of Public Health studied four schools in low income urban areas of Massachusetts. In April, they reported that kids at these schools consumed more fruit and vegetables, after the new nutritional standards were introduced. Children were leaving food on their plates – but that was an existing problem, . “We do need to deal with waste, but rolling back the school nutrition standards won’t help that,” Cohen says.

A study of schools in Utah by of Brigham Young University in Provo and of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, found that requiring children to put fruit and vegetables on their lunch trays increased the fraction of kids who ate a serving of fruit of vegetables, but .

But the researchers agree that it is possible to reduce food wastage. Just has found that subtle changes, such as adding labels giving vegetable dishes attractive-sounding names, can help. , a specialist in nutrition and public health at New York University, suggests that interaction between staff and children is key. She says she can tell whether kids will eat what they are served just by listening to the servers: “Do they call the kids by name? Do they say, ‘I made these peas just for you because I know you like them’?”

“We can find ways to get kids to eat fruit and vegetables,” says Just. “I’d like to see us try that before we abandon this effort.”

Journal references: Cohen’s paper: American Journal of Preventative Medicine, DOI: ; Price and Just’s paper: Public Health Nutrition, DOI:

First the bad news. Humans are driving species to extinction at around 1000 times the natural rate, at the top of the range of an earlier estimate. We also don’t know how many species we can afford to lose.

Now the good news. Armed with your smartphone, you can help conservationists save them.

Interactive map: “Where the threatened wild things are”

The new estimate of the global rate of extinction comes from of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues. It updates a calculation Pimm’s team released in 1995, that human activities were driving species out of existence at 100 to 1000 times the background rate ().

It turns out that Pimm’s earlier calculations both underestimated the rate at which species are now disappearing, and overestimated the background rate over the past 10 to 20 million years.

Gone gone gone

The assessments of endangered species, conducted by the (IUCN), are key to Pimm’s analysis. They have evolved from patchy lists of threatened species into comprehensive surveys of animal groups and regions.

“Twenty years ago we simply didn’t have the breadth of underlying data with 70,000 species assessments in hand,” says team member of the IUCN in Gland, Switzerland.

By studying animals’ DNA, biologists have also created family trees for many groups of animals, allowing them to calculate when new species emerged. On average, it seems each vertebrate species gives rise to a new species once every 10 million years.

It’s hard to measure the natural rate of extinction, but there is a workaround. Before we started destroying habitats, new species seem to have been appearing faster than old ones disappeared. That means the natural extinction rate cannot be higher than the rate at which they were forming, says Pimm.

For the most part, the higher estimate of the modern extinction rate is not caused by any acceleration in extinctions since 1995. One exception is an increase in threats to amphibians, partly due to the global spread of the killer chytrid fungus.

Save everything

The big unknown is what the high current extinction rate means for the health of entire ecosystems. Some researchers have suggested , but there’s still no scientific way to predict at what point cumulative extinctions cause an ecosystem to collapse. “People who say that are pulling numbers out of the air,” says Pimm.

Still, it seems unlikely that extinctions running at 1000 times the background rate can be sustained for long. “You can be sure that there will be a price to be paid,” says Brooks.

Pimm’s team has also compiled detailed global maps of biodiversity, showing the numbers of threatened species and total species richness in a global grid consisting of squares 10 kilometres across.

Such maps can help conservationists decide what to do.

For instance, Pimm and his colleague of the Institute for Ecological Research in NazarĂ© Paulista, Brazil, noticed high numbers of threatened species on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Local forests were being cleared for cattle ranching. So they are working with a Brazilian group, the Golden Lion Tamarin Association, to .

But conservationists need more data, and you can help, through projects like . Users share photos of the creatures they see via and apps, and experts identify them. “Right now, someone is posting an observation about every 30 seconds,” says co-director of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Journal reference:

The Islamist group Boko Haram, which kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls, has issued a video . The group say the girls will be held until the prisoners are freed. About 100 of the girls are apparently shown in the video, and one says they have not been harmed. Whatever the truth of their ordeal, if they are eventually returned to their families, research from other African war zones suggests the prospects for psychological recovery are surprisingly positive.

The most complete picture of the consequences of abduction by armed groups comes from the , which tracked the fates of 1300 of tens of thousands of young people taken by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) during . Some were kept for just a few days, but others were held for months or years. That often meant enlistment as a child soldier for the boys, and forced “marriage” for the girls.

Young women who had been abducted showed more symptoms of emotional distress than the men – a gender difference that has been seen in other studies of conflict. But overall, the story was one of surprising resilience: most successfully reintegrated into society on their release ().

Mass abduction is a relatively new tactic for Boko Haram, which makes it difficult to know what lies in store for the girls. released last week, the group’s leader Abubakar Shekau said they would be sold on the open market. That’s a real threat: human trafficking is big business, and children make up two-thirds of the victims in Africa and the Middle East, .

But Boko Haram’s latest video shows that the group might be willing to negotiate.

Forbidden education

Boko Haram translates loosely as “western education is forbidden”, and disrupting is one of its central goals. However, , an anthropologist at University College London who has worked for decades in northern Nigeria, believes that the group’s main aim in is to cast the government as weak and unable to protect its own people. “It’s a very nasty form of PR,” he suggests.

The closest parallel to the current situation again comes from northern Uganda, and indicates that the economic consequences for the affected families may be severe. In 1996, the LRA from a boarding school in Aboke. Like the girls taken in Nigeria, they were the children of middle-class families – and the Aboke families’ financial security took a major blow as the parents devoted themselves to trying to recover their children.

If the situation drags on, financial prospects for the families are bleak. “Those parents are going to lose their jobs,” says of Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts, who has studied the effects of conflict on women in countries including Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique. “They’re going to spend all their time looking for their girls.”

A MURDER has been committed, and all the cops have to go on is a trace of DNA left at the scene. It doesn’t match any profile in databases of known criminals, and the trail goes cold. But what if the police could issue a wanted poster based on a realistic “photofit” likeness built from that DNA?

Not if, but when, claim researchers who have developed a method for determining how our genes influence facial shape. One day, the technique may even allow us to gaze into the faces of extinct human-like species that interbred with our own ancestors.

It’s already possible to make some inferences about the appearance of crime suspects from their DNA alone, including their racial ancestry and some shades of hair colour. And in 2012, a team led by of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, identified five genetic variants with detectable effects on facial shape. It was a start, but still a long way from reliable genetic photofits.

To take the idea a step further, a team led by population geneticist of Pennsylvania State University and imaging specialist of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium used a stereoscopic camera to capture 3D images of almost 600 volunteers from populations with mixed European and West African ancestry. Because people from Europe and Africa tend to have differently shaped faces, studying people with mixed ancestry affecting facial structure.

Kayser’s study had looked for genes that affected the relative positions of nine facial “landmarks”, including the middle of each eyeball and the tip of the nose. By contrast, Claes and Shriver superimposed a mesh of more than 7000 points onto the scanned 3D images and recorded the precise location of each point. They also developed a statistical model to consider how genes, sex and racial ancestry affect the position of these points and therefore the overall shape of the face.

Next the researchers tested each of the volunteers for 76 genetic variants in genes that were already known to cause facial abnormalities when mutated. They reasoned that normal variation in genes that can cause such problems might have a subtle effect on the shape of the face. After using their model to control for the effects of sex and ancestry, they found 24 variants in 20 different genes that seemed to be useful predictors of facial shape ().

Reconstructions based on these variants alone aren’t yet ready for routine use by crime labs, the researchers admit. Still, Shriver is already working with police to see if the method can help find the perpetrator in two cases of serial rape in Pennsylvania, for which police are desperate for new clues.

To get a sense of the method’s current power, żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” asked Claes and Shriver to predict the appearance of a young woman based on a scan of her DNA performed by the Californian company . You can judge for yourself how closely their prediction resembles former żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” reporter Sara Reardon in the photos below.

Narrow the search

The next step is to run larger studies in different populations to confirm that the variants found so far are statistically reliable. The researchers also plan to use the method to discover further genetic variants that affect facial structure. “I believe that in five to 10 years’ time, we will be able to computationally predict a face,” says Claes.

“In five to 10 years’ time we will be able to predict a person’s face from their DNA profile”

Even if it becomes possible to produce accurately reconstructed faces, the photofits wouldn’t be used as evidence in a criminal trial. Instead, any person identified via the images would have their DNA compared to the crime scene sample in the usual way. In that sense, the technique is more like psychological profiling, used to narrow the search for a suspect, than conventional forensic DNA testing.

of the University of North Texas in Fort Worth, formerly the FBI’s leading expert on forensic DNA analysis, hopes that the method will also lead to better facial reconstructions of people from skeletal remains. “It’s an easier step, because the skull gives you an anchor,” Budowle says. “If you have genetic information that could guide the artist, so that they’re not just freewheeling it, that might help us identify the remains.”

Then there is the intriguing possibility of producing facial reconstructions of extinct human relatives. Even for Neanderthals, where there are numerous fossil skulls, palaeoanthropologists have little idea about the soft tissues of the face. “We don’t know how far out their noses extended,” says Shriver. This means that artists’ impressions of what the species looked like are partly guesswork. Shriver hopes that there will be enough overlap between the Neanderthal and modern human genomes for variants that influence face shape to start filling in such gaps.

“The technique could also allow us to create facial reconstructions of extinct human relatives”

For other ancient hominins, such as the Denisovans – who once occupied a vast expanse of Asia from Siberia to Indonesia – there are so far no confirmed skulls to go from, so reconstruction from DNA is the best hope of putting a face to the species name.

Both the Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred on occasion with our own ancestors, leaving telltale traces of their DNA in some modern human genomes. Indeed, evolutionary geneticists believe that early Homo sapiens hybridised with a variety of extinct hominins, which means that the human genome should be littered with signatures of these ancient cross-species sexual encounters.

of the University of Washington in Seattle, who is looking for such DNA “fossils”, is excited about the possibility of using these to reconstruct what the extinct hominins may have looked like. “We’re not quite there yet,” he says. “But this ultimately might be a really profound tool.”

Leader: “Facing up to the limits of DNA-based forensics“

This article appeared in print under the headline “DNA mugshot gives cops another lead”

You might have wondered, looking up at the night sky, how many other beings are out there looking back at us. Help is at hand. Using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” has made an .

The grid of squares to the right represents the patch of sky that Kepler stared at for nearly four years. So far, the space telescope – nicknamed the Planet Hunter – has confirmed the existence of 151 exoplanets and identified more than 3500 strong candidates.

Now, using what we know from Kepler, and simulations from its data by and of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” has estimated and mapped the density of habitable worlds across the whole sky. Given that the Milky Way is thought to contain between 100 and 200 billion stars, our best estimate of the total number of such planets in our galaxy is 15 to 30 billion.

“This illustrates the wow factor emerging from the Kepler mission,” says of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who wrote the software that analyses the Kepler data. “The galaxy is just full of potentially habitable planets.”

How many of these worlds harbour life? We don’t know, but if we are alone in our galaxy, it’s not for a lack of accommodation.

(Image: REX/Jesus Espinoza)

This woman and her baby, rescued from floodwaters by the Mexican military, are the lucky ones. Battered and drenched by tropical storms on both coasts at once, Mexico is counting a terrible cost that has .

That toll seems certain to rise significantly, given the dire situation in the coffee-growing village of La Pintada in the Pacific state of Sonora, that has left 68 people missing, presumed dead.

Although tropical storms brew each summer in both the eastern Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, it is highly unusual for the nation to be hit simultaneously on both coasts. This week’s double blow from Ingrid in the east and Manuel in the west marked the that tropical storms had hit both of Mexico’s coasts within 24 hours of one another.