Different artists create different art, a new study has confirmed. Adults and children were asked to recreate a famous Jackson Pollock painting, and researchers analyzed the characteristics. They found artists of different ages created paintings with distinct characteristics, and that children’s paintings shared more similarities with artworks by some of the most famous expressionists of the last century than adults’. They also found that characteristics typical of children’s and expressionists’ paintings may make art more pleasant to look at, which could be due to humans’ million-year-long exposure to similar shapes and patterns in nature.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly transforming scientific research, with researchers across multiple areas of physics leading the development and application of these tools. To meet the needs of this fast-growing research community, the American Physical Society is launching PRX Intelligence, a highly selective open access journal that will welcome manuscripts on AI and machine learning methods and their application to advance scientific understanding. The journal will accept submissions starting February 2026.

A new meta-analysis led by researchers in Japan investigates whether lithium (LIT) supplementation can slow cognitive decline in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Building on preclinical evidence of LIT’s neuroprotective effects, the study systematically evaluates data from six randomized controlled trials to clarify its clinical potential. The findings aim to shed light on whether LIT, long used in psychiatry, could play a future role in MCI or AD prevention or treatment.

Researchers have developed a graph-based expert system that improves the accuracy and prediction stability of automated bank reconciliation. By modelling historical transactional data as a network graph, the system can learn complex one-to-many matching scenarios that existing tools often fail to predict correctly. The findings point to more reliable automation for high-risk domains such as finance and accounting.

A research paper by scientists at Cortical Labs investigate the complex network dynamics of in vitro neural systems using DishBrain, which integrates live neural cultures with high-density multi-electrode arrays in real-time, closed-loop game environments..

The research paper, published on Aug 4, 2025 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems.