Young men are being encouraged to undergo testosterone testing and start hormone therapy through Instagram and TikTok content that promotes unproven health claims while downplaying medical risks, a new international study has found.  

Plastic pollution is causing severe problems worldwide. However, negotiations at the United Nations in Geneva last August did not result in the expected global plastics treaty. On 7 February 2026, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on Plastic Pollution will reconvene in Geneva to elect a new chairperson. In order to secure an agreement, the new chairperson must urgently reform INC procedures, argue Paul Einhäupl, Linda Del Savio (Research Institute for Sustainability), Melanie Bergmann (Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research) and Annika Jahnke (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research) in a recent Nature Comment.

University of Texas at Arlington Professor Dana Litt contributed to a study led by Alex Russell, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, that found many parents turn to online peer advice when facing concerns about substance use among their children.

A new study published in the Strategic Management Journal challenges long-standing assumptions about managerial specialization by examining when organizations perform better by having leaders collectively pursue multiple objectives rather than dividing responsibilities among them. Addressing the growing complexity of modern organizations—where financial, social, environmental, and technological goals increasingly coexist—the research introduces what the authors call the “common purpose advantage.”

Fruit fly larvae adjust their behaviour in response to their social surroundings. A research team at the University of Konstanz uncovered the underlying mechanisms.

The Barrow-in-Furness (UK) accent is very different from the rest of Lancashire and Cumbria because of an intense mixing and rapid population change in the late 1800s, says new research by Lancaster University, which used the voices of Victorian speakers to inform the study.

People moved to Barrow, a shipbuilding centre now in Cumbria, from other parts of the UK, Scotland and Ireland, as well as surrounding areas and, says the research, the ensuing mix and population change led to the development of a new dialect in the town.

The new study, published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics and undertaken with researchers at Leiden University, in The Netherlands, looks at how northern dialects evolved in the nineteenth century.

Using recordings from the Elizabeth Roberts Working Class Oral History Archive, held at Lancaster University Regional Heritage Centre and Lancashire Archives, researchers tracked the Victorian origins of accent in Preston, Lancaster and Barrow.