Are there areas of the brain, which regulate prosocial, altruistic behaviour? Together with colleagues from the universities in Lausanne, Utrecht and Cape Town, researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have studied a very special group of patients and established that the “basolateral amygdala” (part of the limbic system) plays an important role in this. In the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they describe that this region calibrates social behaviour.

We’re living in a period where the gap between rich and poor is dramatic, and it’s continuing to widen. But inequality is nothing new. In a new study published in the journal PNAS, researchers compared house size distributions from more than 1,000 sites around the world, covering the last 10,000 years. They found that while inequality is widespread throughout human history, it’s not inevitable, nor is it expressed to the same degree at every place and time.

Overall self-harm rate among young people in California more than doubled, from 191 to 453 per 100,000 person-years — a public health metric used to track the incidence of disease or other life events. Researchers also found that nearly 73% of adolescents with treated self-harm injuries in California were girls.

White girls between 15 and 19 years old had the highest rate of self-harm in 2005 and have seen rates steadily increase since then. But multiracial adolescents have seen an increase of approximately 75% in self-harm rates since 2016. By 2021, self-harm rates were highest among multiracial teen girls, followed by those who are white.