Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Population-weighted exposure to tropical storms and hurricanes increased in the USA between 1992 and 2017. The attractions of high-risk areas currently outweigh incentives to reduce exposure to future storms through migration.
Children successfully solved a challenging sorting task by spontaneously discovering efficient sorting strategies, such as selection sort and shaker sort. Older children outperformed younger ones, demonstrating developmental progress in strategic thinking and problem-solving abilities.
This online study with 3,371 participants from 13 societies found that perceived societal honour norms predicted both greater competition and greater cooperation at both societal and individual levels.
A Swedish study examined whether the risks of maternal and paternal suicide attempt differ during and after pregnancy and found a reversed sex difference in risk of suicide attempt during and after pregnancy compared with the general population.
Jia et al. experimentally show that when individuals can tailor their actions to each neighbour—a freedom termed social networking agency—they display higher levels of cooperation, trust and fairness in economic games.
Social norms approaches are widely applied in health promotion. This pre-registered systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs using social norms messaging in developed countries aimed to evaluate their effectiveness for changing health behaviours. An initial small effect disappeared when controlling for publication bias.
This RCT finds that providing information and support to target cognitive and behavioural barriers eliminates early childcare application gaps for low-income and immigrant families in France. While application rates increased, the impact on access rates for low-SES and immigrant households was limited.
In this randomized controlled trial, Baudouin et al. find that both pedagogical activities and a chatbot improve ninth graders’ attitudes and knowledge about vaccination, offering scalable ways to counter vaccine hesitancy in adolescents.
How do humans and large language models (LLMs) represent sentences? Liu et al. design a rule inference task revealing that both humans and LLMs implicitly decompose sentences into tree-structured constituents.
Herpell et al. use data from Germany to study the short- and medium-term effects of a programme to match Ukrainian refugees with private hosts on integration outcomes. Hosting led to improvements in social, psychological and navigational integration.
A network meta-analysis of 152 randomized controlled trials finds that personalized and group-customized digital interventions, especially SMS and app-based tools, improve smoking cessation versus standard care, with greater benefits among middle-aged adults in short- to medium-term programmes.
Yücel et al. examine how skin and hair characteristics impact functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signal quality and provide recommendations for inclusive use of fNIRS.
Boucherie et al. apply physics-based models to the arrangement of locations to study how geography shapes human movement. They find an underlying pattern in how people choose to move, independent of geographical layout.
The use of complementary, alternative and integrative medicine (CAIM) is highly prevalent among autistic individuals. This umbrella review finds that there is no high-quality evidence to support the efficacy of any CAIM for core or associated symptoms of autism. Although several CAIMs showed promising results, they were supported by very low-quality evidence.
A study of millions of couples shows spouses often share psychiatric disorders. This pattern is consistent across cultures (Taiwan and Nordic countries) and has persisted for generations, impacting how these disorders are inherited.
Akinyemiju et al. develop and validate a theory-driven, empirical measure of cultural racism and identify its associations with public health disparities in the USA, including a positive association with mortality and a negative association with life expectancy.
This systematic review and meta-analysis of 53 randomized controlled trials finds that educational interventions can help students reduce cognitive biases, with a small but statistically significant overall effect.
This study analyses how older adults across the USA access key services such as health care, food and housing, revealing geographic disparities and highlighting the need for more equitable planning as the population continues to age.
Egan et al. examine multisensory evidence accumulation and show that auditory and visual evidence is accumulated in distinct processes during multisensory detection, and cumulative evidence in the two modalities sub-additively co-activates a single, thresholded motor process.
Cash transfers reduced AIDS incidence and mortality among 12.3 million Brazilian women, especially those with overlapping social vulnerabilities, highlighting the role of social protection in addressing health inequalities.