A new study led by Aalto University examines how AI companions impacted people’s mental health and social lives over a two-year period. Combining large‑scale data from the discussion platform Reddit with in-depth interviews, it showed that while interacting with an AI companion can support users, it also coincided with increased signs of distress in their online language. The work offers one of the first causal, long-term examinations of AI companions’ mental health impact at scale, grounded in first‑hand accounts of users’ everyday lives.

Colour coding on food product labels is becoming more common. How does it influence consumers and their dietary choices? Recent research by scientists from SWPS University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Massachusetts indicates that colour coding is much more effective than simple nutritional tables, and it is all due to the way the brain responds to benefit and risk signals.

Kyoto, Japan -- "It takes a village to raise a child" doesn't apply merely to humans. Many species of mammals, birds, fish, and various invertebrates have evolved complex social care systems known as cooperative breeding. In these animal societies, offspring receive attention not only from their parents but also from other group members called helpers.

Such social systems have evolved independently multiple times across various taxa, yet most studies have focused on birds and mammals. After studying fish in Lake Tanganyika, one of Africa's great lakes bordering four countries, a team of researchers at Kyoto University was inspired to investigate the forces behind cooperative breeding in lamprologine cichlid, a fish variety endemic to the lake. Specifically, they aimed to elucidate the evolutionary history of cooperative breeding and its correlation with the life history traits of several of these species.

"I have long been interested in how animals cooperate with other individuals," says first author Shun Satoh. "Even when social systems appear superficially similar, the environmental factors that promoted increasing social complexity may have differed among mammals, birds, and fish, and I find that especially fascinating."

For more than two thousand patients who had cycled through years of antidepressant regimens without relief, the problem was never solely in their heads. A new study published in Brain Medicine tracked 2,197 individuals across six years and found that specific dysfunctions of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, namely alpha-sympathetic withdrawal and parasympathetic excess, were starving the brain of adequate blood flow in ways that mimicked or magnified depressive states. Once clinicians identified and corrected those autonomic imbalances using low-dose pharmacologic and lifestyle interventions, 95 percent of subjects experienced symptom relief, plummeting from an average of 23.2 reported symptoms at baseline to 5.2 at final follow-up. The findings challenge the assumption that patients who fail standard antidepressants are simply treatment resistant.