A team led by psychiatrist Richard Lyus and researcher Florian Naudet published an analysis in Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods arguing that a 2006 Iranian trial of 40 children had data flaws serious enough to undermine its reliability. They say this single study has disproportionately influenced clinical guidelines recommending fluoxetine (Prozac) for depression in children and adolescents, though they are not calling for doctors to stop prescribing it.
Nature spoke with lecturers and outdoor-education researchers, including biologist Pedro Maria Abreu Ferreira and educational scientist Janne Fengler, about teaching classes outside. The discussion covered challenges such as weather disruptions and insects, alongside practical advice for preparing students and instructors for outdoor sessions.
Nature's science fiction feature carries a short story titled 'Von Neumann's Party,' depicting a narrator trapped in an endless queue being repeatedly asked whether they attended a historical gathering linked to John von Neumann at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies in the 1940s-50s. The narrative blends recollections of real figures like Einstein, Gödel and Oppenheimer with surreal, loop-like questioning and imagery of vast server farms, leaving the narrator's situation ambiguous.
Researchers from China, Italy and Slovakia described a 57-centimetre fossil of a new microraptorine species, discovered by a local farmer in Liaoning province and estimated to be about three years old at death. The find, published in Nature Communications, shows feather traces on the limbs and tail of this close bird relative, which lived between 145 and 100 million years ago.
Mirta Galesic, co-leader of the Collective Minds research group at Vienna's Complexity Science Hub, discusses her research into hate speech and 'counterspeech' responses in an interview with Nature. She notes that hostile posts targeting specific groups have surged around events like migrant crises and elections, citing a 240% rise in anti-South Asian posts on X between January 2024 and June 2026, and points to AI-generated content and bot accounts as factors amplifying divisive rhetoric.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its 2026 Opt Out October guide on Thursday, offering instructions for disabling AI data training, social media tracking and age verification across various platforms. The guide also lists alternative services for social media, browsers, design tools and operating systems, and the EFF says it will update the guide as circumstances change.
C++ Insights is a Clang-based source-to-source transformation tool that exposes implicit compiler behavior, such as auto-generated constructors, copy assignment operators, and type casts, directly in readable C++ syntax. Its creator built the tool after researching modern C++11/14/17 features like lambdas and structured bindings, aiming to make hidden compiler operations visible to developers.
Three masked men broke into a Solihull home, beat the male resident with hammers and threatened his seven-months-pregnant wife, forcing him to transfer cryptocurrency worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. The attackers, guided by an accomplice on a live video call, took his phone and extracted his crypto holdings before fleeing in a getaway car. Crimestoppers is offering £10,000 for information, and police are investigating with help from home security footage.
A developer has released Pyxel, a retro-style game engine for Python that limits output to 16 colors and 4 simultaneous sound channels to mimic old gaming consoles. The project includes built-in art and sound editors, is licensed under MIT, and is free to use. It is maintained by a single developer who relies on GitHub stars to keep the project active.
A technical post explains the Softmax function, which converts an N-dimensional vector of real numbers into another N-dimensional vector of values between 0 and 1 that sum to 1. Using worked numeric examples, it shows how Softmax acts as a smoothed version of the maximum function, giving the largest input a disproportionately larger share of the output while still assigning smaller shares to other elements.
Researchers from the University of Exeter and University of Essex, publishing in Nature, found that butterflies' wing patterns combine with their flight to produce visual illusions that distort predators' perception of speed and direction. The team says this helps explain why few predators specialise in catching butterflies mid-flight, unlike moths, which are preyed on by many aerial hunters.
Debian's security team published advisory DSA-6528-1, addressing nearly 90 CVEs discovered in the Linux kernel. The advisory, issued by Salvatore Bonaccorso, lists vulnerabilities spanning multiple kernel subsystems and recommends users update their systems to the patched packages.
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