Ad hominem attacks are the most common way users confront content they perceive as wrong in comment sections beneath news videos, with over 40% of analyzed comments relying on reputation-based insults

California's dwarf Channel Island foxes mostly have relatively bigger brains than their larger mainland gray fox cousins, which may reflect island-specific evolutionary pressures Article URL: http://plos.io/4m6uyhk Article title: Increased brain size of the dwarf Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis) challenges “Island Syndrome” and suggests little evidence of domestication Author countries: U.S. Funding: Funding for this project and Kimberly's PhD research was provided by Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California; the Wrigley Institute for Environmental ...

Embargoed until 2:00 PM ET on August 20, 2025 COLUMBUS, Ohio – Older adults often don’t realize how vulnerable they are to extreme heat and most aren’t prepared for long periods of hot weather, according to a review of more than 40 studies.   In the review, researchers found that most studies focused on how older adults react when heat waves strike, such as staying hydrated or moving to cooler locations.   But there is less research on how they plan for prolonged heat events, which may be evidence of low-risk ...

Stanford Medicine scientists investigating the neurological underpinnings of autism spectrum disorder have found that hyperactivity in a specific brain region could drive behaviors commonly associated with the disorder. Using a mouse model of the disease, the researchers identified the reticular thalamic nucleus — which serves as a gatekeeper of sensory information between the thalamus and cortex — as a potential target for treatments. Moreover, they were able to reverse symptoms similar to those ...

Fewer than half of all adolescents with major depressive episode (MDE) received mental health care in the US in 2022, with the odds of specialist treatment being even lower among marginalized groups, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS Mental Health by Su Chen Tan and colleagues at University of Tennessee, USA. The prevalence of adolescent depression has increased following the COVID-19 pandemic and is often under-treated. Depression experienced during adolescence can be linked to more severe social and psychological consequences ...

Toronto, ON — A new national study led by researchers from Carleton University and the University of Toronto reveals that older adults living in greener neighborhoods were less likely to experience depression during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from over 13,000 urban-dwelling participants in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), researchers found that access to nearby green spaces — from public parks and playing fields to tree canopy cover and private gardens along ...

Patients with some cancers, autoimmune diseases, and metabolic disorders often endure time-consuming intravenous (IV) infusions to receive the best protein-based treatments available. Because these protein therapeutics require high doses to be effective and are typically formulated at low concentrations to remain stable, IV infusion has been, until now, the only option. Researchers at Stanford have developed a new delivery platform that allows these drugs to be stored and delivered in much higher concentrations. With this new formulation method, published Aug. 20 in Science Translational Medicine, many protein therapeutics could be injected quickly ...

The transition to agriculture in Europe involved the coexistence of hunter-gatherers and early farmers migrating from Anatolia. To better understand their dynamics of interaction, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the University of Fribourg and Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, combined computer simulations with ancient genetic data. The results show that population mixing increased locally over time during the Neolithic expansion, at each stage of the farmers’ advance along the “Danube route” toward Central Europe. Published in Science Advances, the study offers new insight into this pivotal period in human history. The shift ...

Wolf hunting has prevented livestock loss in a measurable way, but it is by no means a silver bullet, according to an international research team led by the University of Michigan. "Hunting, on the whole, is not removing negative impacts associated with wolves. It does have some effect on rates of livestock loss, but the effect is not particularly consistent, widespread or strong," said Neil Carter, associate professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability and senior author of the new study published in the journal Science Advances.  As governmental protections ...

Philadelphia, August 20, 2025 – In a new study led by the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), researchers found that mitochondrial dysfunction in the blood-brain barrier (BBB) may lead to neuropsychiatric disease in some patients with 22qDS. The researchers also demonstrated that a class of FDA-approved cholesterol drugs could potentially be repurposed to treat this dysfunction. These encouraging findings were published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The BBB is a specialized ...

Kyoto, Japan -- The size of our universe and the bodies within it is incomprehensible for us lowly humans. The sun has a mass that is more than 330,000 that of our Earth, and yet there are stars in the universe that completely dwarf our sun. Stars with masses more than eight times that of the sun are considered high mass stars. These form rapidly in a process that gives off stellar wind and radiation, which could not result in stars of such high mass without somehow overcoming this loss of mass, or feedback. Something is feeding these stars, but how exactly they can accumulate so much mass so quickly has remained a mystery. Observations of enormous disk-like structures that form around ...