A new survey-based study suggests that the “unhappiness hump”—a widely documented rise in worry, stress, and depression with age that peaks in midlife and then declines—may have disappeared, perhaps due to declining mental health among younger people. David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on August 27, 2025.

Breathwork while listening to music may induce a blissful state in practitioners, accompanied by changes in blood flow to emotion-processing brain regions, according to a study published August 27, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Amy Amla Kartar from the Colasanti Lab in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, U.K., and colleagues. These changes occur even while the body’s stress response may be activated and are associated with reporting reduced negative emotions.

Humans could learn a thing or two from orangutans when it comes to maintaining a balanced, protein-filled diet.            Great apes native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia, orangutans are marvels of adaptation to the vagaries of food supply in the wild, according to an international team of researchers led by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick scientist. The critically endangered primates outshine modern humans in avoiding obesity through their balanced choices of food and exercise, the scientists found.                                                                                                                                                  The researchers reported their findings, based on 15 years of firsthand observations of wild orangutans in the jungles of Borneo, in Science Advances.

Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) affects millions of women, causing pain and diminished quality of life. Current options are limited, with surgery often the only choice. Lehigh University bioengineer Anand Ramamurthi, in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, has received NIH funding to develop a nonsurgical therapy using nanoparticles to regenerate pelvic tissue and slow or reverse POP progression.