A new survey-based study suggests that the “unhappiness hump”—a widely documented rise in worry, stress, and depression with age that peaks in midlife and then declines—may have disappeared, perhaps due to declining mental health among younger people. David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on August 27, 2025.

Breathwork while listening to music may induce a blissful state in practitioners, accompanied by changes in blood flow to emotion-processing brain regions, according to a study published August 27, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Amy Amla Kartar from the Colasanti Lab in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, U.K., and colleagues. These changes occur even while the body’s stress response may be activated and are associated with reporting reduced negative emotions.

Gaps are emerging in the provision of local news across Australia, but embracing community driven content could be key to improving the viability of local news.

Bulimia nervosa is an eating disorder that often goes untreated owing to limited access to specialist care. To address this, researchers tested a guided internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy program for women with bulimia that could be delivered online. They found that online therapy reduced binge eating and purge behaviors and achieved improved remission rates compared to usual care, offering a promising way to make effective treatment more accessible for people with limited clinic access.

Semantic communications have revolutionized wireless communication in this century. In a new study, SeoulTech researchers have investigated ConcreteSC, a novel digital communication framework that eliminates massive codebooks in semantic communication systems through temperature-controlled concrete distributions. The research demonstrates up to threefold improvements in image quality metrics and 39x faster processing speeds compared to traditional vector quantization methods in wireless communication systems.