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    Top universities warned against unfair research partnerships on their doorstep

    Events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which put a spotlight on US health disparities, led to increased domestic helicopter research in the country.Credit: Scott Hurd/Alamy‘Helicopter research’ doesn’t happen just when researchers from rich countries swoop in and exploit the resources of low-income ones — rich universities are increasingly taking advantage of poorer institutions in the same country, and often in the same neighbourhood.Marylin Fraser, the head of the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, a non-profit organization in New York City that focuses on community health and education, has experienced this at first hand. Several times a year, she says, researchers at prestigious US institutions come to her asking to recruit study participants from her community.Fraser turns many away for neglecting to consider the community’s input or failing to recognize and compensate the work that the institution would contribute by facilitating collaboration. She now accepts only the proposals that share funding and project leadership with researchers at Arthur Ashe. It’s exhausting, says Fraser. “You feel as though you are always in a constant fight.” This experience is not unique. Around the world, many resource-poor institutions that support marginalized communities, such as Indigenous peoples or Black and Latine groups, are courted by staff and researchers at nearby well-off institutions who lack the understanding to create equitable partnerships. “The issue is that a privileged person is taking advantage of a less-privileged one. It can be very patronizing,” says Adriana Romero-Olivares, a microbial ecologist at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.Described as ‘domestic helicopter research’ in Cell last year1, the term refers to a well-documented scenario in which scientists from wealthy countries conduct research in low- or middle-income countries with little to no involvement of local communities and researchers. The “helicopter” or “parachute” collaborators leave, taking data and expertise from local people instead of working to ensure that they are engaged with and benefit from the research. 2024 Research LeadersDomestic helicopter research — often focused on race, ethnicity or genetic ancestry — occurs when unequal partnerships form between researchers in the same country. It results in the “erosion of trust between researchers and the communities they aim to serve”, wrote Marcus Lambert, a public-health epidemiologist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in New York City, and his co-authors in the Cell commentary. A major concern, he says, is that the practice seems to be on the rise in the United States and elsewhere.Harmful effectsOne damaging aspect of domestic helicopter research is that it “saps funding” from poorer institutions, Lambert and his co-authors say. In the past three years, less than one-third of funding from the US National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities — a department that aims to address health challenges faced by minority racial and ethnic groups, rural populations and those with low socio-economic status — has gone to the poorer institutions that serve these communities.Researchers are also concerned that such work often doesn’t serve the people who were asked to participate, and can sometimes harm them. A 2020 paper led by Brandon Brown, a public-health researcher at the University of California, Riverside, describes a case study in which a community leader had agreed to work with a researcher from a US university on a survey about HIV and ageing2. The local leader was expected to recruit participants and pay for a space to conduct the survey. He then had to fight to get access to the resulting survey material, which he discovered contained stigmatizing and outdated terminology. He also found out that there were no plans to disseminate the data or results in a way that might help the participants or their wider community.When Brown presented the paper at a conference, he received criticism from some attendees for naming the researchers involved. “I responded that this is why it keeps happening — because it’s invisible,” he says.Lambert and his colleagues say that the COVID-19 pandemic — which brought US health disparities into sharp focus — has led to an increase in domestic helicopter research across the country. Health-equity studies gained more funding as a result of the pandemic, and the recipients sought out more researchers and participants from poorer communities. This has led to surging cases of domestic helicopter research, the Cell commentary states.There are no data on the incidence of domestic helicopter research worldwide, but Fernanda Adame, an environmental scientist at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, says that it’s likely to be more common in countries that have large wealth disparities. “If you don’t address it, your research is not going to be as good, as you will have limited information and limited impact,” she adds. “If you didn’t speak to the people involved [in the research], they are less likely to use that information.” Positive changes

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    Kids’ real-world arithmetic skills don’t transfer to the classroom

    Download the Nature Podcast 5 February 2025In this episode:00:45 How arithmetic skills don’t transfer between applied and academic environmentsMathematics skills learnt in real-world situations may not translate to the classroom and vice versa, according to a new study. A team surveyed children in India who work in markets, to see whether the skills they learnt there transferred to the classroom. Although proficient at solving market-based arithmetic problems, they struggled to solve problems typically used in schools. The reverse was seen for children enrolled in schools with no market-selling experience. The authors hope this finding could help adjust teaching curricula and bridge the gap between intuitive and formal maths.Research Article: Banerjee et al.12:38 Research HighlightsWolverine populations rebound in Sweden and Norway, and why wobbly arrows launch faster than rigid ones. Research Highlight: Who’s the new furry neighbour? It might be a wolverineResearch Highlight: How a wobbly arrow can achieve superpropulsion14:59 The unexpected movements seen in super-dense crowdsA study has revealed that when packed crowds reach a certain density, large groups of people suddenly start to move in circular patterns — a finding that could be used to identify dangerous overcrowding. By assessing footage of the densely packed San Fermín festival, a team observed this spontaneous phenomenon, and modelled the physics underlying it. Studying the movements of giant crowds has been difficult, and the team hope this work could help event organizers to identify and respond to situations where people could get hurt.Research Article: Gu et al.News and Views: Crowds start to spin when their densities hit a thresholdSound effects: Crowd Cheering – Ambience by GregorQuendel via CC BY 4.0Cupinzano sounds by Europa Press – Footage News via Getty Images24:00 Briefing ChatAn update on the US National Science Foundation’s scrutinizing of grants to comply with President Trump’s directives, and why scratching an itch may have unexpected antibacterial properties.Nature: Exclusive: how NSF is scouring research grants for violations of Trump’s ordersNature: Why it feels good to scratch that itch: the immune benefits of scratchingSubscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too. More

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    Guerilla rewilding undermines evidence-based conservation

    In January, an attempt to illicitly release lynx (Lynx lynx) into the Scottish Highlands failed (see go.nature.com/42nhzqu), with all four animals being captured and one subsequently dying. High-profile illicit releases of now-established beaver (Castor fiber) and pine marten (Martes martes) populations in Scotland have complicated politically sensitive discourses around the reintroduction, translocation and removal of species.
    Competing Interests
    The authors declare no competing interests. More

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    The world must move forwards with plastics treaty

    Those attending the fifth meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a global plastics treaty (see Nature https://doi.org/n2b3; 2024) failed to reach an agreement — largely because of concerns about potential economic losses.
    Competing Interests
    The authors declare no competing interests. More

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    Researching endangered animals in the Sahara has its own dangers

    “Ever since the first time I visited, I’ve been in love with the Sahara. That was in Morocco in 2011, to survey the situation of the Saharan cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki). I am a conservation biologist at the University of Granada, Spain, and I quickly realized the importance of preserving these forgotten animals. It’s especially key in the context of climate change, to see how they adapt to drought, for instance.The scientific community has paid little attention to Saharan wildlife. Almost nobody knows about the sand cat (Felis margarita), for example. This beautiful animal highlights the challenges that all ecological research faces in hostile and remote environments, such as the Sahara. My colleagues and I have published the only scientific estimate of the sand cat’s abundance (J. M. Gil-Sánchez et al. Eur. J. Wildl. Res. 69, 20; 2023).It is difficult to work in such an isolated area. We must take a lot of care to avoid landmines left from regional conflict, for example, by using maps and steering clear of the areas that local camel herders also avoid.I’m the chair of the non-governmental organization Harmusch Wildlife Research and Conservation, Ciudad Real, Spain. My fieldwork group is made up of a translator, scientists and wildlife experts. Some of the members also have skills as mechanics. We usually travel in two cars, with eight to ten people in total. Our expeditions last for 10–20 days. We need to carry enough water, food and fuel to see us through. We try to avoid the summer, because it’s impossible to carry as much water as we would need.

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    Who’s the new furry neighbour? It might be a wolverine

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    Wolverines are recolonizing Norway and Sweden, moving from more remote and rocky alpine areas into forested regions1.

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    References

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    Want to get a species protected? Publish in a small, niche journal

    The yellow-legged frog (Rana muscosa) is a federally listed species endemic to California.Credit: Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via GettyPlants and animals that gain protection by US law owe much more to studies published in small, specialist journals than they do to those published in prestigious titles such as Nature and Science. That’s the finding of a study1 that tracked citations linked to the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a US law designed to protect and support the recovery of species at risk of extinction.Given that the ESA has the power to halt logging, construction, problematic fishing practices and other human activities that threaten vulnerable wildlife, getting a species added to it can be an important way for a conservation biologist to help protect populations. But publishing in the kinds of journal that are more likely to influence the ESA could set conservation researchers back in their careers, says study co-author Brian Silliman, a marine conservation biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For decisions about who gets hired, promoted or funded, he says, a researcher’s impact is too often equated with the number of citations they receive and the impact factor of the journals they’ve published in (the standard way of calculating a journal’s impact factor is by dividing the number of times all the papers it has published in the past two years were cited in the last year by the total number of papers published in those two years.) “When you have graduate students who are trying to get jobs, you generally advise them not to publish in taxon-specific journals, because they’re going to be low impact factor,” says Silliman. “Even if it’s great science and it has applications to other systems, it’s a very limited audience and it’s going to be harder for them to get a job.” This disconnect between what’s valued in academia and what has real-life impact prompted Silliman to ask a graduate class to think of alternative ways to evaluate research. PhD student and co-author Jonathan Choi suggested that they investigate which journals are publishing the studies that are cited in the ESA when new species are added to it.2024 Research LeadersChoi and his colleagues examined documentation for the 260 species that were added to the ESA by the administration of Barack Obama between 2012 and 2016. They counted 4,836 citations for academic papers published in 785 journals. Categorizing the journals according to their impact factor, they showed that only 7% of ESA citations came from journals with an impact factor of more than 9, whereas 87% came from journals with an impact factor of less than 4 or no impact factor at all. Mid-ranking journals accounted for 6%. Journals that have not been given an impact factor by Clarivate — often because they are not considered influential enough — represented 13% of ESA citations. The team also created an “ESA listing impact factor”, which was based on the fraction of papers that a journal publishes that go on to be cited by the ESA. The highest ranked journal was Pacific Science, a regional journal with a conventional impact factor of just 0.74.Collectively, regional journals, such as The Southwestern Naturalist and The American Midland Naturalist, and taxa-specific journals, such as the Journal of the Lepidopterists Society, American Fern Journal and American Malacological Bulletin, were the most important sources of ESA citations, says Choi. Habitat-specific journals such as Coral Reefs and Rangeland Ecology & Management were also important, he adds. The study, published in Conservation Biology, highlights how conservation law relies on the type of rigorous practical work that is typically published in niche journals but is not rewarded by academic promotion and funding systems.Greater support needed for fieldworkChoi is careful to point out that the study’s findings do not devalue the kind of theory-driven science that appeals to high-impact-factor journals. Rather, they emphasize the need to support researchers who want to do other kinds of work, such as long-term population-monitoring studies, without sacrificing their career prospects. “That is really important science when it comes to conservation that we stand to lose if we don’t incentivize this kind of very baseline data collection,” says Choi.

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