GoKawiil
Tech News
A large international research collaboration compared three common ways of measuring a person's capacity for cognitive reappraisal—self-report trait questionnaires, task-based emotional ratings, and amygdala activity during brain scans—and found the measures don't align with one another. The findings were published in Nature, a rare instance of a high-profile journal accepting a study reporting null results.
A new study by Sicorello and colleagues, published in Nature, re-examines a long-standing assumption in emotion-regulation research: that commonly used tasks measuring cognitive reappraisal accurately capture how good someone is at this strategy. Cognitive reappraisal involves reframing one's thinking about an event to change its emotional impact, such as finding a 'silver lining', and has long been linked to social, occupational and health outcomes.
A Nature study analyzing more than 2,300 neurons found that over a quarter of neurons sampled from fetal brains carried major chromosomal gains or losses, compared with only about 6% in neurons examined after birth. Researchers, led by Diane Shao of Boston Children's Hospital, say this points to a natural culling process that removes genetically abnormal neurons around the time of birth.
Engineers at the National University of Singapore, led by Fu Heng, created millimeter-thick fibers embedding thousands of LED chips and pressure sensors, woven into a sweater sleeve to act as an interactive display. The fibers survived 50 machine washes and 1,000 bending cycles, and can be produced up to 10 meters long with added components like microphones and temperature sensors, though the prototype still needs external batteries and controllers.
Researchers led by Josef Parvizi at Stanford University have produced a detailed map of the insular cortex, a deep brain region long difficult to study. Published in Nature, the study identifies distinct zones handling pain signals from the body, sensations like nausea from internal organs, and a frontal region that connects to areas involved in cognition and emotion.
A large-scale study reported in Nature found that disruptions to the body's internal clock, or circadian rhythm, are associated with roughly one in four cases of depression. The research adds to a growing body of evidence pointing toward a distinct 'circadian depression' subtype, though the findings stop short of establishing causation.
A Nature commentary argues that peer review should be taught explicitly as a core research skill rather than learned informally by osmosis. It proposes preprint journal clubs as a scalable method to give students and early-career researchers structured practice in evaluating scientific work before they review for journals.
Imperial College London's Good Science Project, led by Dr Stephen Webster, partnered with Nature editor-in-chief Magdalena Skipper to organize a conference called Failure in Science, held in April 2026 at Imperial. About 150 delegates attended to discuss mistakes, missed opportunities and neglected findings in research. The event is now the basis for a six-part podcast series exploring failure at personal, institutional and societal levels in science.
Researchers from Columbia University, publishing in Nature, found that common consumer-grade microplastics are not chemically inert but instead generate reactive, high-energy radicals when exposed to water-rich environments like the human body. Study co-author Wei Min said this activity stems from the massive surface area created as plastic breaks into smaller fragments, and likely contributes to biological damage seen in animals and potentially humans.
Researchers from Columbia University and UC Berkeley found that microplastics, unlike larger plastic objects, become chemically reactive when exposed to water, spontaneously generating reactive oxygen species such as hydroxyl radicals. The study, published in Nature, shows this reaction occurs under ordinary environmental conditions without sunlight or other degradation triggers, and is attributed to the much larger surface area of smaller particles.
Microsoft researchers published a study in Nature describing a machine learning system that corrects bias in existing physics-based and AI weather models, improving forecast accuracy two to six weeks ahead. The tool, now available as open-source software, can run on standard CPUs rather than requiring supercomputers or powerful GPUs.
A study published in Nature by Kim and colleagues applies time-resolved X-ray liquidography to observe azobenzene molecules undergoing light-triggered photoisomerization while dissolved in a solvent. The technique captured structural changes of the light atoms in the molecule despite being surrounded by a much bulkier solvent medium, detailing the rearrangement process as it unfolds.