Salk study pinpoints a pathway between two brain regions responsible for driving social isolation-related alcohol consumption in mice. The same pathway has opposing outcomes in male and female mice—activating that pathway increases alcohol consumption in male mice but decreases it in females. Findings may be used to improve risk assessment and treatment strategies for alcohol use disorder, and highlight the importance of sex as a key variable in designing optimal therapies and interventions.

Intelligent people tend to perform better at school and at work, as numerous studies have shown. But what happens in domains where incentives such as good grades or financial rewards don’t apply, and where socio-economic status is not a significant factor? Wine knowledge is a case in point. Intelligence researcher Maximilian Krolo of Saarland University has investigated whether intelligence can predict the acquisition of deep knowledge in a specialized domain. The findings have now been published in the journal Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities in an article co-authored with Professor of Psychology Timothy C. Bates of the University of Edinburgh.

Envy plays a greater role when resources are allocated through majority voting than when we make decisions individually. This is shown by new research from Linköping University, Sweden. According to the researchers, the explanation may be that our sense of personal responsibility diminishes when an individual vote is unlikely to determine the outcome.

Applying palaeoproteomics to ancient dental calculus from eight premodern commoners buried in the Umeda cemetery in Osaka, Japan, researchers identified 38 dietary proteins from 17 taxa, including high‑grade sea bream, salmonids from distant waters, terrestrial mammal meat, and cottonseed oil products. These findings show that even relatively poor urban commoners in premodern Osaka accessed an unexpectedly diverse range of foods supplied through the city’s role as the “Kitchen of the Realm."

A peer-reviewed narrative review published in Brain Medicine draws anthropology, archival history, and comparative genomics into a single frame in order to reassess what industrialization actually did to human sleep. Field data from three hunter-gatherer societies place nightly sleep at roughly 6.4 to 7.1 hours, similar to or shorter than industrialized averages, which shifts the argument away from duration and toward timing, regularity, and circadian alignment. The synthesis reconsiders the segmented sleep hypothesis, follows conserved regulators such as DEC2 and hypocretin across lineages, and reviews evidence that urban noise, light, heat, and housing distribute sleep health unequally. Split sleep remains untested.