Can you tell if someone is lying? Our ability to spot a lie is only just better than guessing with the flip of a coin. But, surprisingly, it’s easier to tell whether a person is fibbing if they are wearing a veil, suggests a fresh study.

The experiment was devised by researchers at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Canada, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. They filmed two videos of a woman watching a stranger’s bag, one of which showed the woman stealing items from it. They then played one or the other video separately to female volunteers designated as “witnesses…

Read the rest of this article at New Scientist – the home of Brain Scanner, my weekly column.  Image: Chris Short

It’s another blow for neuroscience. The discovery of major software flaws could render thousands of fMRI brain studies inaccurate.

The use of fMRI is a common method for scanning the brain in neuroscience and psychology experiments. To make sense of the data produced, researchers sometimes use a technique called spatial autocorrelation to identify areas of the brain that appear to “light up” during particular tasks or experiences. But some software flaws in the popular fMRI data analysis packages SPM, FSL and AFNI meant this technique routinely produced false positives, resulting in errors 50 per cent of the time or more….

Read the rest of this article at New Scientist – the home of Brain Scanner, my weekly column. 

Call it a crisis. Researchers are finding it harder to replicate each other’s findings, while the rate of retractions of published studies is rapidly rising. But why is this happening?

It’s difficult to determine to what extent the retraction trend is caused by more studies reporting false findings, and how much is down to the fact false findings are now more likely to be identified. Some speculate that the internet has made it far easier for scientists to scrutinise each other’s work, and plagiarism can now be detected automatically.

However, new research supports the idea that, in fact, we are encouraging poor scientific practices by accident….

Read the rest of this article at New Scientist – the home of Brain Scanner, my weekly column. Image: Giuseppe Donatiello

To many, the rise of Donald Trump in the US and the UK’s vote to leave the European Union have come as a shock. It is feared that right-wing movements may now rise across Europe, including Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France. Why is the face of global politics changing so quickly, and could we have predicted this rightwards shift?

Read the rest of this article at New Scientist – the home of Brain Scanner, my weekly column. Image: Sam