The new study, just published in leading international journal Science Advances, outlines that researchers have developed a “speech clock” that can estimate a person’s chronological age from hundreds of acoustic and linguistic characteristics of their speech. The difference between a person’s actual age and their speech-predicted age (called the speech age gap) was also associated with multiple independent markers of biological aging, brain health, cognition, social adversity, and dementia.

A new review of research from across sub-Saharan Africa found that inadequate access to food is linked to depression, suicide attempts, HIV vulnerabilities, and poorer sexual and reproductive health outcomes among adolescent mothers.

For the first time, researchers have identified and named the key players facilitating the growing problem of AI-generated explicit sexual imagery online.

In 2023, estimates suggested 500, 000 such videos existed online. By 2025, this number was estimated to be 8 million, mostly targeting women and girls. 

In addition, the team captured contextual data relating to each site, finding that some sites hosted hundreds of thousands of such videos, and sites primarily targeted Hollywood and Hindi-film industry stars, K-pop idols, and well-known feminists and activists, with nearly all content featuring females.

The study entitled ‘The Backbone of Abuse’ in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, is led by Sarah Morgan from Lancaster University with co-authors Dr Sophie Nightingale, also from Lancaster, and Professor Hany Farid of Dartmouth College.