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.