Despite decades of research, the structural and functional brain abnormalities in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain unclear. Now, researchers from Japan have used advanced neuroimaging to identify white matter differences linked to autism symptoms. Alterations in the left hemisphere were associated with repetitive behaviors and communication difficulties. These findings could lead to more objective diagnostic tools and potential therapeutic strategies, improving early detection and intervention for children with ASD.

In some countries, the number of dogs has increased so much that it now exceeds the number of children. While the emotional significance of dogs is clearly rising worldwide, it remains uncertain whether people are choosing to keep dogs instead of having children or whether other factors are driving this trend. Professor Enikő Kubinyi, head of the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), has proposed a groundbreaking theory in one of the world's leading psychology journals. According to her, there is indeed a connection between dog ownership and declining birth rates — but not in the way we might think.

Children who have their own smartphones fared better than kids who don’t on nearly every measure of wellbeing assessed. Efforts to limit digital media use among kids don’t appear to be working, as more than 70 percent of 11-year-olds surveyed have their own smartphone.

A new study from the Air Force Medical University, China shows that Sevoflurane (Sev) influences social functioning via the gut-brain axis, with microbiota-derived bile acids serving as critical mediators in this pathway. This insight offers novel avenues for investigating the mechanisms underlying Sev toxicity and its prevention.

In a Genomic Press Interview, Dr. Consuelo Walss-Bass, a leading psychiatric geneticist, explores how genetic and environmental factors shape mental health disorders like schizophrenia. Motivated by her family’s experience with the illness, she has pioneered research that integrates genomics, proteomics, and clinical studies to uncover the biological mechanisms behind psychiatric conditions. As the founder of the UTHealth Houston Brain Collection for Research in Psychiatric Disorders, she is advancing personalized medicine in psychiatry. Dr. Walss-Bass also champions leadership development in science, mentoring the next generation of researchers. Her work aims to destigmatize mental illness by highlighting its biological foundations and improving patient care.

Humans and other primates learn cause-and-effect relationships in their environments by predicting the likelihood of an event, such as a reward, through direct and/or indirect experience. Recently, researchers studied the activity of neurons in the dorsal part of the medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) of macaques to determine which neurons are responsible for encoding “self” reward prediction error (S-RPE) and “other” reward prediction error (O-RPE). The neurons encoding S-RPE and O-RPE are independent and work simultaneously, which may allow macaques and other primates to learn stimulus-outcome relationships more efficiently.