Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2026

Working in academia can be stressful. Laurel Raffington suggests treating it as ‘just a job’ to reduce performance pressure and advocate for structural improvements.

At the World Health Summit, diversity in representation is increasing — but influence remains uneven. Drawing on 11 years of speaker data from one of the most prominent global health forums, we uncover patterns in gender, geography and sector. We propose three areas for future reform to ensure global health platforms move beyond tokenism towards meaningful inclusion and accountability.

The bioecological model of human development is among the most influential frameworks in the social sciences. We argue that it is time to integrate natural ecosystems into this model. This approach will shape research, practice and policy to promote both healthy human development and an environmentally sustainable future.

Although navigation and memory are known to be linked in the brain, it is still unknown how a location affects our memory for the objects within it. In an ambitious study that merges virtual reality and brain imaging, Masís-Obando and colleagues discover that places that elicit more stable brain patterns boost the memory for objects put in those places.

Catastrophic forgetting is a common problem for artificial learning systems, but whether it occurs in humans is unclear. We revealed that both humans and neural networks show similar patterns of forgetting, which reflect a fundamental trade-off: reusing prior knowledge speeds up new learning but can corrupt old memories. Individuals differed in how they navigate this balance.

We hypothesized that, if the olfactory system involves fine-grained sensorimotor feedback, similarly to what has been observed in other sensory systems, the brain might modulate sniffs in real time according to detailed perceptual features of odours. We analysed more than 13,000 sniffs in response to 160 distinct odours to show that sniff patterns reflect fine-grained perceptual information and are potentially modulated by the amygdala.

Despite the great diversity of human languages, recurring grammatical patterns (termed ‘universals’) have been found. Using the Grambank database of more than 2,000 languages, spatiophylogenetic analyses reveal that while only a third of 191 putative universals have robust statistical support, there are still preferred feature configurations that have evolved repeatedly — consistent with shared cognitive and communicative pressures having shaped the evolutionary dynamics of languages.

Adolescents are especially vulnerable to misinformation but also possess unique strengths. This Perspective outlines a forward-looking research agenda to understand these vulnerabilities and foster resilience through age-appropriate interventions.

Using intracranial EEG recordings in epilepsy patients, Pacheco-Estefan et al. describe changes in the neural representations of cues and contexts during fear and extinction learning in the human brain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When learning new tasks, both humans and artificial neural networks face a trade-off between reusing prior knowledge to learn faster and avoiding the disruption of earlier learning. This study shows that people and artificial neural networks have similar patterns of transfer and interference and vary in how they balance this trade-off.

Despite their great diversity, human languages are shaped by recurring grammatical universals. Verkerk et al. show that about one-third of the proposed universals hold cross-linguistically through analyses of the Grambank database.

Sagar et al. show that human sniff behaviour is sensitive to the perceptual characteristics of the odour being detected.

In a quasi-experimental analysis of emergency calls in California communities, Dee and Pyne find that having mental health first responders accompany police on qualified calls reduces the number of individuals placed in involuntary psychiatric detentions.

Opie and Atkinson conduct a global phylogenetic analysis of 868 cultures and find evidence indicating that cereal grain cultivation, not agricultural surplus, drove state formation. Their findings also link taxation and writing to state emergence.

This study shows that spatial contexts with more reliable brain representations better support memory for future experiences within them, revealing how stable neural maps help the brain organize and recall life events.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Buchanan et al. show evidence confirming the phenomenon of semantic priming across speakers of 19 diverse languages.