Hello and welcome to Backchat. If the Nature podcast is a well-managed and tranquil aquarium, then Backchat is feeding time at the zoo.

Our menagerie of topics this month includes predatory journals, the prognosis for coral, and a rare species called a time crystal.

And no, most reporters who covered that didn't know what it was either.

I'm Kerry Smith, and here are my three rare and exotic fauna. Hello, Kerry. I'm Lizzie Gibney. I am

a reporter here in London. I cover physics and astronomy. Hello everyone. I'm Daniel

Cressy. I'm another reporter here in London. And I'm Monia Baker. I'm a editor in San Francisco.

Lovely. Thanks, everyone. Now, coming up in the show, nice work if you can fake it. A completely

made-up scientist gets given editing positions at a rather long list of journals with questionable

acceptance standards. The Great Barrier Reef is in peril, bleaching for the second year in a row due to warmer

ocean temperatures. So what is in its future? And at the end of the show, we get familiar with

time crystals, just one of the many scientific phrases that sound cooler to the average person

than perhaps they actually are. Now, firstly, Monia, to you and the results of a sting operation that you're

publishing this week. Well, it started with four researchers at the University of Rocklow in Poland.

They were getting annoyed by all these invitations they were getting from journals that had

nothing to do with their field of research. So a predatory journal is a journal that does not care about quality

and is publishing articles just to collect fees from authors.

They don't provide peer review or other quality assurances that they say they do.

So these authors decided that they were going to try to catch the predators out. They made up a scientist.

Her name is Anna Osust, and that means Anna Afrod in Polish. They made up her CV. They made her

fairly unqualified to be an editor at a journal,

and then they popped off an email requesting an editor position at 360 journals.

120 had been named as predators by a librarian in Colorado,

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