Scientific community articles from across Nature Portfolio

Two comprehensive data sets concerning students who graduated from 141 business schools over 29 years and 200 law schools over 21 years show that higher racial diversity is associated with higher median salary at graduation. Policies that promote racial diversity seem likely to enhance education and benefit society overall.

Nature readers are invited to compose couplets about SI units, and a report on an Anglo-Saxon burial ground, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Virtual interviews have now become standard practice in health professions training admissions following the COVID-19 pandemic, but the advent of generative AI technologies has raised concerns about the fairness and integrity of such practices. Admissions programs are responding with AI detection software, increased proctoring, and outright bans, all of which are difficult to enforce. A recent randomized controlled trial by Eva and colleagues examining Generative AI tool use among applicants to a medical school during virtual Multiple Mini‑Interviews (MMIs) suggests a different solution: good interview structure may be more resistant to AI advantage, and minor modifications can limit AI use without compromising reliability,authenticity or acceptability. Reframing generative AI as a design problem rather than a detection problem may also help align integrity, equity, and learning values.

Science routinely discards valuable knowledge, from unpublished negative results to the tacit expertise lost when researchers move on. Here, the authors propose a roadmap for preserving this hidden knowledge through community-driven platforms, open standards, and AI-assisted documentation.

Burnout is a systemic problem, but individuals can take steps to cope with it and pave a path forward.

AI tool spots copied peer reviews, helping to uncover fraud in academic publishing.

A new climate coalition to steer the transition away from fossil fuels is good news, but it must avoid undermining existing global scientific structures.

The entrepreneur was also a pioneer of synthetic biology.

Synthetic biologists are engineering bacteria to feast on oil, plastic and toxic chemicals.