The future of sleep science has arrived at Center for BrainHealth, with the January launch of the Sleep Innovation Laboratories. This multi-disciplinary research initiative is led by inaugural director Dr. Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and bioengineering at UT Dallas’ School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Serving as associate director of the Labs is Eti Ben Simon, PhD. Dr. Ben Simon is a neuroscientist and a sleep scientist, studying the neural mechanisms of sleep-dependent behavior in humans, specifically the emotional and social changes that take place as a result of sleep loss. Her pioneering research was the first to demonstrate the negative impact of sleep deprivation on prosocial altruism and identify its neural underpinnings using several neuroimaging tools. She previously served as a sleep researcher in the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley.

A research team from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology has shown in a new study that ants returning from habitats affected by air pollution are attacked when they re-enter the colony. The cause: air pollution, especially ozone, changes the colony-specific odor profile of the animals. In experiments with six ant species, the scientists were able to demonstrate in five species that ants exposed to ozone were no longer recognized by their nest mates – and were instead attacked as enemies. This is due to alkenes: organic compounds with carbon-carbon double bonds that form a small but crucial part of the odor signature of a colony. Ozone reacts specifically with these double bonds and destroys them. Even tiny changes in the odor signal are enough to distort social identity – a dramatic example of how human pollution can disrupt social systems in nature.

A study by UC Riverside and USC education scholars found that Black and Latino teens report having significantly more digital literacy skills, such as detecting online disinformation, than their white peers—particularly content related to race and ethnicity. These youth are quicker to identify false claims and racist propaganda and more likely to verify posts with credible sources and respond with corrective, fact-based content, the study found.