A new study finds that more than half of the new paints tested sold in retail outlets in Mexico contain hazardous concentrations of lead.  The testing also revealed that the country’s failure to regulate the lead content of these products has resulted in the common use of lead chromate pigments. More than 90% of the lead paints purchased in 2025 contained lead chromate pigments. Lead Chromate is a well-known human carcinogen and a lead poisoning hazard. This is the first study documenting the widespread use of lead chromate pigments for multiple paint applications in any country. Given the carcinogenicity of these pigments and the other adverse health effects of lead, workers and the general public are at greater risk due to the presence of lead and hexavalent chromium.

Learning a new language — or learning to speak again after a stroke — involves a fine-tuned set of movements requiring precise coordination in brain networks. This includes the orofacial sensory system (input like touch and position from the lips, tongue, jaw, and face) and motor system (commands that move the muscles in the right way at the right time).

New study findings from researchers at Yale School of Medicine challenge a long-held assumption in neuroscience: that speech motor learning and the memory of newly learned speech movements are fundamentally driven by motor regions of the brain. Instead, the study findings indicate that retention of newly learned speech movements relies chiefly on sensory brain processes.

The work has implications for rehabilitation and emerging neurological technologies, pointing to the sensory cortex as a potential neural target for rehabilitation after a stroke or brain injury affecting speech. The findings may also inform brain-computer interfaces, by highlighting the relevance of sensory cortical activity for movement control. The results also suggest that speech-processing and -recognition technologies could improve by more explicitly integrating auditory and somatic sensory signals.

The study was led by Nishant Rao, an associate research scientist at Yale Child Study Center. “These findings establish a sensory basis for speech motor memory, indicating that plasticity in sensory brain areas is necessary for learning and retaining newly acquired speech movements,” Rao said.

The average age of a young fatal stab victim is now 14, indicates an analysis of the causes of death among children and teens in England between 2019 and 2024, published online in Emergency Medicine Journal.  Those of Black ethnicity are 13 times more likely to be fatally stabbed than their White peers, while children living in the most deprived areas of the country are 7 times more likely to die of their wounds than those living in the most affluent areas. Experience of domestic abuse, violence, and adversity before death is also common, the findings indicate.

A chemical widely used in food preservation is implicated in an uptick in recent UK deaths by suicide, with a disproportionately high number of cases among young people and boys/men, finds a comprehensive analysis of available data for the period 2019-24, published in the open access journal BMJ Public Health. There’s now an urgent public health need to review unrestricted access to this source, to avoid further preventable deaths, say the researchers.