Summary: Laughter is a universal vocal behaviour shared by all living great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans—and by humans. New comparative research has tracked a deep evolutionary timeline for this behaviour and identified a 15‑million‑year‑old neurobiological signature hidden in the rhythm of laughter. The study reveals a conserved rhythmic structure across species that likely provided key … Read more

Summary: Deep in the dark limestone caves of northeastern Mexico, the blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) has evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in perpetual darkness, losing eyes and pigmentation while developing striking behavioral and neural adaptations. Because this species exists as sighted surface fish and as more than 30 independently evolved blind cave … Read more

Summary: A large-scale study from the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London finds that popular music lyrics have grown more negative over six decades, suggesting a notable shift in cultural values. Using advanced artificial intelligence and computational language analysis, researchers examined more than 380,000 songs released between 1960 and 2023, producing … Read more

Summary: A first-of-its-kind remote study has launched to investigate cybersickness, one of the most persistent technical and clinical barriers to wider virtual reality (VR) adoption. Cybersickness arises from a sensory-motor mismatch: high-fidelity visual motion experienced inside a headset conflicts with the user’s stationary bodily orientation, producing symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, and disorientation. To scale … Read more

Summary: When you catch a cold or the flu, the physical symptoms—congestion, fever, chills—are often accompanied by a predictable psychological shift: low mood, a desire to withdraw from others, and a diffuse feeling of illness. These behavioral changes are not accidental side effects of infection but arise from a specific neurobiological state triggered by immune … Read more

Summary: For three decades, efforts to develop effective pharmacological treatments for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have largely stalled: more than 90% of candidate drugs fail when moving from preclinical models to human trials. A new peer-reviewed Perspective argues that one overlooked solution may be an unexpected translational model—the laboratory Beagle. Rather than reporting new experiments, … Read more

Summary: A new controlled study provides clear mechanistic evidence linking late-night eating to weight gain. Researchers show that the body’s internal 24-hour clock—our circadian system—directly regulates diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT), the extra calories burned to digest, absorb, and store a meal. The study demonstrates a pronounced daily rhythm in DIT that peaks in the biological morning … Read more

Summary: A large prospective study has found a strong association between natural daytime light exposure and lower dementia risk. Researchers observed that adults who experience higher levels of daytime light—measured objectively with wearable devices—had a significantly reduced likelihood of developing dementia over time. In this analysis of 87,577 dementia-free adults, participants wore wrist accelerometers with … Read more

Summary: Deep in the subterranean caves of northeastern Mexico, the blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) has adapted to perpetual darkness over hundreds of thousands of years. In that process it has lost its eyes and pigmentation and evolved behaviors and neural circuitry suited to life without light. Because this species exists both as sighted surface … Read more

Summary: For bilingual people, switching between languages often feels effortless. Researchers have now traced how the brain accomplishes this at the level of single neurons, revealing that bilingual brains encode meaning in a shared semantic map that spans multiple languages. Individual hippocampal neurons are largely language-specific, yet their coordinated activity creates a unified conceptual map … Read more