Private equity firms have acquired more than 500 autism therapy centers across the U.S. over the past decade, with nearly 80% of those acquisitions occurring over a four-year span, according to a new study from researchers at the Brown University Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research.

China’s Free Teacher Education (FTE) scholarship program, launched in 2007, aims to attract top students into teaching and address teacher shortages in underdeveloped regions. A new study finds that FTE scholarships draw high-performing students who are more likely to end up as teachers. Despite experiencing slightly higher burnout, these scholarship recipients demonstrate superior teaching effectiveness.

The first Editorial of the year at Science always gives the Editor-in-Chief an opportunity to reflect on notable developments for the Science journals. In this Editorial, Holden Thorp focuses on AI, discussing how it “will allow the scientific community to do more if it picks the right ways to use it.” He revisits the journals’ policies and approaches related to AI. The journals do use select AI tools. Over the past year for example, Science has collaborated with DataSeer to evaluate adherence to its policy mandating the sharing of underlying data and code for all published research articles. “The initial results are encouraging in that of 2,680 Science papers published between 2021 and 2024, 69% shared data.” (A related Science Editor’s Blog post provides additional details for the DataSeer project.) But Thorp notes that “although AI is helping Science catch errors that can be corrected or elements that are missing from a paper […] its use and the evaluation of the output require more human effort, not less.” This is because the reports generated by AI tools must be assessed by people. “As a small family of journals that can put more human effort into each paper,” Thorp writes, “the Science journals are less susceptible—and contribute less—to the accumulation of “AI slop” in the literature, but no system, human or artificial, can catch everything. Potential degradation of the literature by technology reinforces the value of a record maintained with human scientific experience and expertise.”