Look you can't expect results every single time. Sometimes you get resluts instead.
Heat wave duration is accelerating faster than global warming, researchers find
Jul 2025, phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-duration-faster-global.html
"If you have large variations in current climate, then a fraction of a degree change will have less impact than if you have a more stable climate. ... Each fraction of a degree of warming will have more impact than the last. The acceleration means that if the rate of warming stays the same, the rate of our adaptation has to happen quicker and quicker, especially for the most extreme heat waves, which are changing the fastest."
via UCLA and Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Santiago in Chile: Cristian Martinez-Villalobos et al, Accelerating increase in the duration of heatwaves under global warming, Nature Geoscience (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-025-01737-w
40% of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
Dec 2025, phys.org
According to the findings, there is no generally valid coupling between the oxygen content measured by MRI and neuronal activity. An increased fMRI signal is associated with reduced brain activity in around 40% of cases. At the same time, they observed decreased fMRI signals in regions with elevated activity. "This contradicts the long-standing assumption that increased brain activity is always accompanied by an increased blood flow to meet higher oxygen demand. Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them."
via Technical University Munich and Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg: Samira M. Epp et al, BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex, Nature Neuroscience (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02132-9
Meta-analysis challenges the link between economic inequality and mental health
Jan 2026, phys.org
How can we explain that so many previous studies concluded that there was a harmful effect? The researchers identified a significant publication bias: studies with small samples reporting a detrimental effect of inequality on health were overrepresented in the literature, while null results more often remained unpublished. ... By correcting for this bias, the research team demonstrated that the estimated effect converges toward zero. Finally, a standardized tool for assessing the quality of existing studies showed that around 80% had methodological weaknesses leading to a high risk of bias.
via University of Lausanne: Nicolas Sommet et al, No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09797-z
For decades, this bias test looked inside minds - now its biggest blind spot is coming into focus
Apr 2026, phys.org
The implicit bias test - where you're shown pictures of faces and asked to sort them into categories like good or bad, and where a white person might call a white face "good" faster than a different color face, implying that person is biased against non-white faces.
Oops.
Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that in some cases the test can mistakenly predict strong biases, when participants are simply cautious and responding slowly to avoid mistakes."Using racing diffusion models across 39 topics, we found that response caution explained significantly more variance in D-scores beyond decision ease. Response caution also best predicted explicitly reported biases."
via Case Western and Harvard: Kyle J. LaFollette et al, Challenging the mechanism for the implicit association test, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02439-y
Physicists refute famous 2025 study claiming daylight saving time poses severe health risks
Apr 2026, phys.org
"What the world read as scientific evidence against time change has turned out to be a mathematical illusion." (This is about the 2025 Lara Weed and Jamie M. Zeitzer of Stanford University article linking seasonal time changes to negative health outcomes.)The original model computes the difference between the rhythm of the biological clock—the circadian rhythm, determined by the time at which body temperature is at its minimum—and the rhythm of Earth's rotation. According to the original authors, this difference represents the "regulatory circadian shifting necessary to stay synchronized with the outer world."Global health effects were inferred from the annual sum of these daily readjustments. However, when performing this calculation, the authors consistently accumulated the magnitude of the readjustment, regardless of whether it was positive or negative. "The use of absolute readjustments instead of real readjustments is the critical error.""What the authors did makes little sense; it is as if, while driving, we recorded every small adjustment made by moving the steering wheel back and forth to stay in the lane, but then added them all up in the same direction to report a large value instead of allowing them to compensate for each other. By their logic, maintaining a straight course with small left-and-right adjustments (what actually happens) would be the same as a car drifting further and further in one direction until it ends up facing the wrong way. This alone refutes the study's conclusions."Consequently, the annual cumulative total of these readjustments was zero, even with the time change.
via University of Seville: José María Martín-Olalla et al, The sum of absolute circadian shifts: Questioning the metric linking daylight saving time policy to stroke and obesity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2532075123
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