A consortium led by the University de Zaragoza, with the participation of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), has been selected in the 2026 Health Research Call by the ”la Caixa” Foundation—one of the most competitive biomedical research funding calls in Spain and Portugal. The AIBEM project will develop artificial intelligence (AI)-driven epidemiological models capable of replicating how trust in health authorities, adherence to guidelines, misinformation, socioeconomic inequalities, and social determinants influence the spread of disease, while simultaneously evaluating the effectiveness of public health measures to mitigate community transmission.

Perceived polarization. Is the world becoming more conservative? Has German reunification been a success? Even the titles of interviews with Steffen Mau make clear that, through his research into processes of societal transformation, the sociologist reaches a broad public. Steffen Mau's analyses of social inequality, the welfare state, Europeanization, migration, digitalization, borders and political conflict have shaped debates in academia, politics and the public sphere for years. For this, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Stifterverband are now honoring him with the 2026 Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Prize.

Naming a chicken and telling about its favourite habits is enough to make preschoolers eat poultry less often. This effect translates into verbal declarations and real decisions when composing a meal, but culinary preferences still most often win over empathy, according to a new paper by researchers from SWPS University.

A global study led by Professor Jin Wu from the School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, and Professor Yuyu Zhou from the Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences, at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), with Dr Zhengfei Guo as the first author, has revealed a striking divergence in how urban and rural vegetation respond to climate stress. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) under the title “Global divergence in urban-rural vegetation resilience driven by broken ecological trade-offs”, the study found that urban vegetation is surprisingly more resilient than its surrounding rural counterparts, challenging the view that cities are uniformly detrimental to ecosystem stability and highlighting the potential role of sustainably managed urban green spaces under climate change.