New research reveals it takes around 25 minutes for patients and therapists to truly “connect”. 

The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology and led by Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, discovered that heart-rate synchrony - a key marker of emotional alignment - builds gradually during music therapy, peaking only after 20-25 minutes. 

The findings suggest monitoring heart-rate data during therapy could highlight hidden moments of connection, while shorter sessions risk missing meaningful moments between patient and therapist. 

A new study of wild bats reveals that an animal’s immune system is shaped by more than its need to fight infections. Researchers from the University of Maryland found that sex, age and competition for mates influence how bats balance different types of immune defenses—providing new insight into how evolutionary pressures shape immune strategy.

Why do people make the choices they do? Researchers from the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) at TUD Dresden University of Technology, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and the University of Basel present their new approach to finding answers to that question. The approach combines observed choices with participants’ own descriptions of their decision processes, allowing researchers to study human behavior in greater detail than is possible with behavioral data alone. They merged behavioral experiments and free-text explanations, to uncover the reasons underlying human decisions with the help of large language models (LLM). Their results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Violence has a financial dimension. War has devastating effects on a country's economy. Yet the greatest cost to society comes from a very different form of violence. It is not military conflict – but domestic violence – that has the highest cost worldwide. Conflict researchers Anke Hoeffler and James D. Fearon say that the resulting financial impacts are several times larger than the cost of war.