Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University examined how the concept of biodiversity is taught in schools. In a survey of schoolteachers in Hachioji City, Tokyo Prefecture, they found that key topics were being covered extensively and evenly, though omissions of topics like mass extinctions stood out. Importantly, they discovered that personal experiences of nature strongly influenced what teachers chose to highlight. Their findings reveal the challenges of effectively teaching a core component of environmental science.

Researchers have developed "MetaRL," a meta reinforcement learning model that provides near-optimal, individualized investment strategies for goals-based wealth management, i.e., the portfolio composition and the decision to take a goal or not. Pre-trained on thousands of scenarios, MetaRL achieves 97.8% of optimal utility while operating over 100 times faster than traditional methods. The model delivers immediate "zero-shot" solutions in milliseconds and remains robust against changing market regimes and stochastic inflation, enabling high-throughput, sophisticated financial planning for a broad range of investors.

In the first international study of wildlife values, research led by Colorado State University found a distinct difference between Latin American views toward wildlife and those in the United States and Canada – and traced the divergence in views to European colonization centuries ago. The difference in values has important implications for wildlife management policies.

Blood tests to detect potential signs of prostate cancer likely reduce the risk of dying from prostate cancer, an updated Cochrane review finds. This is a shift from the previous version of the review, which did not find sufficient evidence that screening reduced prostate cancer deaths.