A new international study led by researchers at Tulane University shows that the El Niño and La Niña climate patterns affect nearly half of the world’s mangrove forests, underscoring the vulnerability of these vital coastal ecosystems to climatic shifts. Mangroves are shrubs or trees that grow in dense thickets mainly in coastal saline or brackish water. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, isbased on nearly two decades of satellite data from 2001 to 2020 and is the first study to demonstrate global-scale patterns in how El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences mangrove growth and degradation. Previously, impacts had only been documented…

Psychologists have been measuring reaction times since before psychology existed, and they are still a staple of cognitive psychology experiments today. Typically psychologists look for a difference in the time it takes participants to respond to stimuli under different conditions as evidence of differences in how cognitive processing occurs in those conditions. Galton, the famous eugenicist and statistician, collected a large data set (n=3410) of so called ‘simple reaction times’ in the last years of the 19th century.  Galton’s interest was rather different from most modern psychologists – he was interested in measures of reaction time as a indicator of…

Elsevier has removed a journal from its Scopus database after Retraction Watch inquired about its review process for the journal, whose editorial board lists fake names and digital fingerprint shows other red flags. Scientific sleuth Anna Abalkina uncovered several issues with Science of Law, which she details in a post published today. Besides editors and editorial board members who cannot be verified and don’t seem to exist, the journal’s history doesn’t match its publication record, early articles show signs of fabrication, and its publisher data in Scopus doesn’t match that in Crossref. Despite this, Scopus added the journal to its…