Hello and welcome to Backchat, Nature's Monthly Digest of the Best of the Newsroom.

This month's edition is brought to you by robots and by a selection of possibly fake data.

All be revealed shortly.

I'm Kerry Smith and joining me in the studio, I have Lizzie Gibney.

Hi Kerry. I'm a reporter I write about physics here in London.

And I have Richard Van Norton.

Hi, Gary. I edit Nature's News from London. And on the line from Washington, D.C. is Lauren Morello.

Hey, I'm a news editor here in D.C. Excellent. Now, coming up this month, research misconduct,

scientists doing naughty things like maybe faking their data, plus an update on the latest of those

such scandals, and we'll be meeting the robots that can recover from injury all by themselves.

And of course, desperate to avoid an antibiotic resistance crisis, scientists are getting

inventive and looking in some really odd places, so we're going to look at some of those

as well. Now, first, to the most gossipy of the

stories that I just mentioned, scientists doing naughty things, otherwise known as research

misconduct. Now, let's start with the recent case and then broaden out to the wider picture.

The recent case I'm talking about is a paper published in science at the end of last year that

one author has asked to be retracted

because of data irregularities. Now, science published an editorial expression of concern a few days ago.

They haven't yet retracted the paper. The study was about political canvassing, and it claimed

that a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser could change someone's mind about voting in favour of same-sex marriage. And the first author was a UCLA grad student called Michael LeCore.

Richard, nature hasn't covered this story, has it, but has been picked up a lot elsewhere in the media.

Yeah, we didn't cover this story. It seems like an almost standard, I hate to say it, but an almost standard

...