Bureaucracy continues to burden Germany. The bureaucracy index developed by Professor Dr. Stefan Wagner from the University of Vienna, in collaboration with ESMT Berlin and the legal platform www.buzer.de, shows that the volume of federal legislation continues to rise and has reached a new all-time high.

A large-scale study from the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort has uncovered distinct sex-based patterns in how panic disorder relates to substance use. Males with panic disorder demonstrated substantially higher alcohol risk scores compared to females with the same condition, while ancestry appeared to have no significant impact on these associations.

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A new study examines the acceleration of social-ecological changes in the first kingdom in Poland, the Piast dynasty, identifying the factors that contributed to its failure. Using new high-resolution pollen records, as well as historical and archaeological data, the study shows a period of rapid ecological change and wealth concentration, followed by a period of rewilding and the collapse of political structures. Using perspectives from complex systems theory, the authors argue that sustainable political systems require a balance between capital accumulation and social connectivity, and that a lack of social cohesion tipped the Piast state towards collapse.