Copenhagen University Hospital’s VIRTU Research Group reports that an immersive virtual reality-assisted therapy called Challenge-VRT yielded a statistically significant, short-term reduction in auditory verbal hallucination severity among Danish adults with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.
Auditory verbal hallucinations rank among the most frequent and distressing features of schizophrenia, affecting roughly 75% of patients and resisting medication in about one-third. Approximately 13% of patients experience worsening hallucinations during their first decade of illness.
Current cognitive behavioral and relational psychotherapies show modest effects, leaving a clear unmet need for innovative treatment approaches.
Why do so many people relapse after quitting cocaine? A new study from The Hebrew University reveals that a specific “anti-reward” brain circuit becomes hyperactive during withdrawal—driving discomfort and pushing users back toward the drug. Surprisingly, this circuit may also serve as a built-in protective mechanism, offering new hope for addiction treatment.
Cocaine addiction has long been understood as a tug-of-war between reward and restraint. The rush of dopamine keeps users hooked, while withdrawal triggers anxiety, depression, and despair. But a new study by researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem reveals that it’s not just the craving for pleasure—but the brain’s aversion to pain—that plays a powerful role in relapse.
Led by Prof. Yonatan M. Kupchik and Ph.D. student Liran Levi from the Faculty of Medicine, the study, appearing in Science Advances, identifies a specific “anti-reward” network deep in the brain that undergoes lasting changes during cocaine use, withdrawal, and re-exposure. This glutamatergic network, located in the ventral pallidum, is emerging as a key player in addiction—and a promising target for future therapies.
A new study of children in schooled and unschooled environments, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raises questions about some of the assumptions underlying the way psychologists and scholars of cognitive science think about these processes.
Instead of defining an innate, basic feature of human cognition, the executive functions supposedly captured in the assessments are likelier to depend on the influence of formal schooling.
The study, “The cultural construction of ‘executive function,’” tested children in the Kunene region of Africa, which spans the countries of Namibia and Angola, as well as children in the U.K. and Bolivia. Children in rural areas of Kunene who received limited or no formal schooling differed profoundly in so-called executive function testing from their schooled peers, or a “typical” Western schooled sample.
When a 100-year flood hits a city, traffic doesn’t suddenly stop or disappear—it adapts.
“In spite of increasing flood risks, more and more people are moving into flood-prone areas,” said Jianxi Gao, associate professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “This makes it even more urgent to understand how resilient our infrastructure is—and how people adapt when disaster strikes.”
Gao is part of an international team studying how urban transportation systems adapt to extreme weather events like floods. Their work, “Adaptive capacity for multimodal transport network resilience to extreme weather,” published in Nature Sustainability, uses an innovative modeling approach to uncover a universal law governing how travelers shift between private vehicles and public transit during such disruptions. This law reveals that shifts between transport modes, such as from cars to buses, follow predictable patterns driven by changes in travel demand, the density of transport networks, and how modes either compete or support each other.
A University of Colorado Denver engineer is on the cusp of giving scientists a new tool that can help them turn sci-fi into reality.
Imagine a safe gamma ray laser that could eradicate cancer cells without damaging healthy tissue. Or a tool that could help determine if Stephen Hawking’s multiverse theory is real by revealing the fabric underlying the universe.
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Aakash Sahai, Ph.D., has developed a quantum breakthrough that could help those sci-fi ideas develop and has sent a ripple of excitement through the quantum community because of its potential to revolutionize our understanding of physics, chemistry, and medicine.
The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science has successfully developed a length measurement system that achieves a level of precision approaching the theoretical limit allowed by quantum physics.
The system boasts world-leading measurement accuracy while maintaining a compact and robust design suitable for field deployment, making it a strong candidate to serve as the new benchmark for next-generation length metrology. The work is published in the journal Laser & Photonics Reviews.
Currently, the most precise instruments for measuring length are national length measurement standards, which define the unit of one meter. These instruments, operated by leading national metrology institutes including KRISS, utilize interferometers based on single-wavelength lasers to perform ultra-precise length measurements.
Researchers from SANKEN (The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research) at The University of Osaka have developed a new program, “postw90-spin,” that enables high-precision calculations of a novel performance indicator for the spin Hall effect, a phenomenon crucial for developing energy-efficient and high-speed next-generation magnetic memory devices.
This breakthrough addresses a long-standing challenge in spintronics research by providing a definitive measure of the spin Hall effect, overcoming ambiguities associated with traditional metrics. The research is published in the journal npj Spintronics.
The spin Hall effect, where many researchers recognize an electric field generates a perpendicular spin current, is key to spintronic devices. Previously, the spin Hall conductivity was used as a performance indicator. However, this metric is affected by how the spin current is defined, leading to inconsistencies.
Radar from airports and military systems may expose Earth to alien detection. These signals could be used to find intelligent civilizations. New research indicates that radar systems operated by both civilian airports and military facilities may be unintentionally broadcasting Earth’s presence to
