Voting models are not as scientific or certain as they may seem.

Data scientist Emilio Ferrara tells Nature that fake social-media accounts are harder to detect than ever before.

To control an epidemic, authorities will often impose varying degrees of lockdown. In a paper in the journal Chaos, scientists have discovered, using mathematics and computer simulations, why dividing a large population into multiple subpopulations that do not intermix can help contain outbreaks without imposing contact restrictions within those local communities.

A fish school is a striking demonstration of synchronicity. Yet centuries of study have left a basic question unanswered: Do fish save energy by swimming in schools? Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB), the University of Konstanz, and Peking University have provided an answer that has long been suspected but never conclusively supported by experiments: yes.

The Spanish Crown had a monopoly on the trade route between Manila and Mexico for more than 250 years. The ships that sailed this route were "the richest ships in all the oceans", but much of the wealth sank at sea and remain undiscovered. This column uses a newly constructed dataset of all of the ships that travelled the route to show how monopoly rents that allowed widespread bribe-taking would have led to overloading and late ship departure, thereby increasing the probability of shipwreck. Not only were late and overloaded ships more likely to experience shipwrecks or to return to port, but the effect is stronger for galleons carrying more valuable, higher-rent cargo. This sheds new light on the costs of rent-seeking in European colonial empires.

Do we see ourselves as part of a larger "us," a "them-and-us," or an atomised "I"?