Scientists have discovered that dopamine in a part of the brain called the tail of the striatum helps animals adapt to recurring threats and shift their focus toward rewards.

Six years after COVID-19 disrupted childhood around the world, new research following the same children from before the pandemic through today finds that the damage was far less widespread than early warnings predicted. A Special Section in the Society for Research in Child Development's flagship journal Child Development, synthesizing 17 long-term studies across six countries, finds that most children's health, learning, social development, and wellbeing recovered substantially. Setbacks that persisted were concentrated among children who already faced other risks before the pandemic began. This new research, tracking children over a longer period, tells a different story: pandemic impacts were real and wide-ranging, but not as severe as initially feared, and many effects weakened over time. The children who fared worst and recovered more slowly were disproportionately those shaped by pre-existing risks — not the pandemic alone.

Today the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) and the West Health Policy Center announced a new collaboration to develop the 2026 “Launch Price and Access Report”, an independent analysis of drug prices and patient access for newly launched FDA-approved treatments. ICER published its first report in 2025.

A team of USC researchers is developing an AI-driven platform that aims to predict both risk factors and protective factors for depression and suicide using patterns in brain activity and behavior. The project, supported by a contract award of up to $4 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), will continuously monitor college student mental health through a combination of lab tests, wearable sensors and smartphone data. Its findings could help pinpoint when a mental health crisis is imminent and how best to intervene. The new study, known as Scalable Evaluation of Neurobehavioral Trajectories in Everyday Life (SENTINEL), will track approximately 210 USC students for up to 36 months. Study participants will be evenly split between three groups: students with no mental health concerns, students with depression, and students with depression that includes suicidal thoughts or behaviors. Once enrolled in SENTINEL, participants will complete a series of tasks and tests in the laboratory every six months. These include EEG (a measure of brain activity), eye tracking and detailed psychiatric questionnaires. They will also be given wearable devices, such as an Oura Ring or Fitbit, to gather additional data on their daily habits and well-being. These devices provide information on heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, skin conductance (a measure of stress), blood oxygen levels, physical activity, and sleep stages and duration. In addition, students will complete weekly questionnaires through a smartphone app about their stress, anxiety, mood, overall well-being, and daily challenges and positive experiences. They will answer some questions by voice so researchers can analyze speech patterns. With consent, researchers will also collect smartphone data on app usage, communication patterns and attention. The study is designed to capture not just periods of distress, but also moments when students are doing well. Researchers aim to rapidly translate its findings into tools that can help clinicians identify risk and intervene early.

A new study suggests that routine clinical measurements, which are widely available and repeatedly collected, may provide a practical way to assess aging at population scale. The study, which was published in Nature Aging on August 25, analyzed routine clinical data from 104,208 adults aged 18–98 across three centers in China. It established sex-specific clinical aging clocks based on 172 commonly measured indicators and provided a practical approach to estimating physiological aging from routine health examinations.