The University of Bonn has opened its own supermarket, in which pineapples, canned tomatoes, and toast are neatly lined up on black shelves. The space measuring 55 square meters (approx. 600 square feet) has pretty much everything you’d need in everyday life. The ‘clientele’, however, is very special: they are subjects participating in scientific studies. Here, researchers from the fields of food and resource economics, psychology, economics, and behavioral science are investigating how health- and sustainability-oriented purchases can be encouraged, for example, through product placement and other incentives. Robots are also demonstrating their capabilities here. 

Academics at Bournemouth University (BU) have been exploring the impact of menopause on autistic people and discovered that the transition can be life-changing.

A £3.5 million UK-Japan research project will transform sign language AI by ensuring training is on real conversations between Deaf people, not interpreted signing. 

The more often we see information, the more likely we are to believe it is truthful. This has been known for 50 years. Researchers in Bochum have now demonstrated that this “truth effect” becomes stronger when we select the information ourselves: All it takes is clicking a headline to give its contents more credence later. This effect greatly impacts the perceived reliability of true and false information in digital media. The team working around Dr. Moritz Ingendahl – from the Social Cognition Lab at the Ruhr University Bochum Faculty of Psychology – reports its findings in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from January 8, 2026.

Researchers tested what factors improve or worsen the quality of sleep in mice. A team including researchers from the University of Tokyo placed mice in two environments, one where they could see and sense other mice without physical contact, and one in complete isolation. They found that mice higher in their social hierarchy likely benefited from isolation, while those lower did not. However, the specific impact on the amount of REM sleep varied depending on the genetic background of the mice. The team hopes to investigate the relationship between social connections and sleep in humans.

Abstract

Purpose – Our study investigates how board co-option influences solvency risk in Australian and New Zealand banks. Board governance is considered one of the most critical variables impacting bank risk management practices and policies.

Design/methodology/approach – Our sample consists of commercial banks from both countries and data from 2011 to 2021. The results obtained were based on fixed-effect, 2SLS and GMM Models. Our results are robust to the other two measures of Board Co-option, Tenure-Weighted Co-Option and Residual Co-option, showing the applicability of our econometric model.

Findings – Results reveal that an increased proportion of co-opted directors on the board is associated with a notably reduced Z-Score ratio value, signifying an elevated level of solvency risk for banks. The evidence is consistent with the notion that co-opted directors bring about less effective board governance, escalating agency problems and enhancing solvency risk.

Research limitations/implications – The banks in these two countries must carefully establish a risk management framework under the Basel Accords to avoid risks like solvency risk. The regulators in the financial services industry may also devise mechanisms and regulate the banks under the second pillar of Basel-II and III, “Supervisory Review Process,” to avoid solvency risk management issues. Future researchers and scholars can extend the limits of future studies from two countries to various geographic locations, such as Europe, China and Southeast Asian regions.

Practical implications – Our study establishes the fact that banks in Australia and New Zealand are more exposed to solvency risk due to increasing board co-option phenomena at the board level.

Social implications – The unique measure of board co-option reveals the significance of board governance for bank risk management. To properly develop and implement bank risk management policies, the appointment and performance of board members must be actively monitored in Australian and New Zealand banks through a sensitive measure of board co-option.

Originality/value – Our study provides fresh insight and adds to the body of knowledge. It is a pioneering effort and a point of reference for forthcoming researchers, as there are either limited or no other such studies available in the literature to the best of our knowledge in terms of the relationship between Board co-option and solvency risk. A few previous studies are limited to US firms only.