Private equity firms have acquired more than 500 autism therapy centers across the U.S. over the past decade, with nearly 80% of those acquisitions occurring over a four-year span, according to a new study from researchers at the Brown University Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research.

The first Editorial of the year at Science always gives the Editor-in-Chief an opportunity to reflect on notable developments for the Science journals. In this Editorial, Holden Thorp focuses on AI, discussing how it “will allow the scientific community to do more if it picks the right ways to use it.” He revisits the journals’ policies and approaches related to AI. The journals do use select AI tools. Over the past year for example, Science has collaborated with DataSeer to evaluate adherence to its policy mandating the sharing of underlying data and code for all published research articles. “The initial results are encouraging in that of 2,680 Science papers published between 2021 and 2024, 69% shared data.” (A related Science Editor’s Blog post provides additional details for the DataSeer project.) But Thorp notes that “although AI is helping Science catch errors that can be corrected or elements that are missing from a paper […] its use and the evaluation of the output require more human effort, not less.” This is because the reports generated by AI tools must be assessed by people. “As a small family of journals that can put more human effort into each paper,” Thorp writes, “the Science journals are less susceptible—and contribute less—to the accumulation of “AI slop” in the literature, but no system, human or artificial, can catch everything. Potential degradation of the literature by technology reinforces the value of a record maintained with human scientific experience and expertise.”

This special issue examines the multifaceted impact of climate change on business and finance, bringing together eight studies that explore how climate risks, opportunities, policies, and sentiment shape corporate behavior, investment decisions, and market dynamics. Key findings reveal that state ownership and environmental regulations significantly influence corporate environmental investment, while climate opportunity exposure can lower firms’ cost of capital in emerging markets. The research also highlights how climate policy uncertainty drives ESG performance improvements, and how both physical and transition climate risks amplify volatility in cryptocurrency markets. These insights underscore the growing integration of climate considerations into financial decision-making and point to actionable strategies for firms, investors, and policymakers navigating a climate-conscious economy.

Price stabilization mechanisms (PSMs), one of a set of key policy elements aiming at supporting increasing and stable carbon prices, may affect the performance of emissions trading systems (ETS) in terms of green innovation. By using the case of China’s regional carbon market pilots and data of listed firms, the research team found that pilots adopting both price-based and quantity-based PSMs significantly induced green innovation activities in covered firms, while a single type does not guarantee the effect. PSMs help to do so by lifting carbon prices and reducing firms’ perceived uncertainties. The above effects would be enhanced in firms with lower asset reversibility, lower ability of cost passthrough, higher ability of innovation, and state-owned enterprises.