A recent study published in Oryx proposed that the extinct Javan tiger Panthera tigris sondaica may still survive on the Island of Java, Indonesia, based on mitochondrial DNA analysis of a single hair sample collected from a location where a tiger was reportedly encountered. However, upon reanalysing the genetic data presented in that study, we conclude that there is little support for this claim. The sequences of the putative tiger hair and Javan tiger museum specimens generated are not from tiger cytoplasmic mitochondrial DNA but more likely the nuclear pseudogene copies of mitochondrial DNA. In addition, the number of mismatches between the two Javan tiger sequences is unusually high for homologous sequences that are both from tigers, suggesting potential issues with data reliability. The paper provides insufficient details on quality control measures, making it impossible to rule out the possibility that errors were introduced during the analysis. Consequently, it is inappropriate to use the sequences presented in that study to infer the existence of the Javan tiger.

Where and under what conditions the transfer of energy between electromagnetic fields and particles takes place in the solar wind remains an open question. We investigate the conditions that promote the growth of kinetic instabilities predicted by linear theory to infer how turbulence and temperature-anisotropy-driven instabilities are interrelated. Using a large dataset from Solar Orbiter, we introduce the radial rate of strain, a novel measure computed from single-spacecraft data, which we interpret as a proxy for the double-adiabatic strain rate. The solar wind exhibits high absolute values of the radial rate of strain at locations with large temperature anisotropy. We measure the kurtosis and skewness of the radial rate of strain from the statistical moments to show that it is non-Gaussian for unstable intervals and increasingly intermittent at smaller scales with a power-law scaling. We conclude that the velocity field fluctuations in the solar wind contribute to the presence of temperature anisotropy sufficient to create potentially unstable conditions.

In this research note, we document the extent to which negative beliefs about women's capacity to hold public office are widespread in Canada. Using a list experiment, our results demonstrate that many Canadians believe that men are “naturally better” leaders than are women and that women are “too emotional” and “too nice” for politics. While some groups are willing to explicitly own these views when asked directly about them (for example, older people, men, those who are more conservative and religious), others are unwilling to do so unless social desirability is mitigated (for example, younger people, left-leaning). By overcoming concerns with social desirability, we show that women still face explicit, often sexist, barriers in political work.

Good judgment is often gauged against two gold standards – coherence and correspondence. Judgments are coherent if they demonstrate consistency with the axioms of probability theory or propositional logic. Judgments are correspondent if they agree with ground truth. When gold standards are unavailable, silver standards such as consistency and discrimination can be used to evaluate judgment quality. Individuals are consistent if they assign similar judgments to comparable stimuli, and they discriminate if they assign different judgments to dissimilar stimuli. We ask whether “superforecasters”, individuals with noteworthy correspondence skills (see Mellers et al., 2014) show superior performance on laboratory tasks assessing other standards of good judgment. Results showed that superforecasters either tied or out-performed less correspondent forecasters and undergraduates with no forecasting experience on tests of consistency, discrimination, and coherence. While multifaceted, good judgment may be a more unified than concept than previously thought.

The heuristics-and-biases research program highlights reasons for expecting people to be poor intuitive forecasters. This article tests the power of a cognitive-debiasing training module (“CHAMPS KNOW”) to improve probability judgments in a four-year series of geopolitical forecasting tournaments sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community. Although the training lasted less than one hour, it consistently improved accuracy (Brier scores) by 6 to 11% over the control condition. Cognitive ability and practice also made largely independent contributions to predictive accuracy. Given the brevity of the training tutorials and the heterogeneity of the problems posed, the observed effects are likely to be lower-bound estimates of what could be achieved by more intensive interventions. Future work should isolate which prongs of the multipronged CHAMPS KNOW training were most effective in improving judgment on which categories of problems.