Laughter is contagious, but does hearing it change how we learn? Erica Cartmill's lab at Indiana University Bloomington tested this in orangutans by asking them to learn and remember which materials contained hidden food rewards. Before some learning sessions, orangutans listened to orangutan play vocalizations; before others, they heard neutral wind noises. When later asked to choose between materials, orangutans preferred the materials paired with play vocalizations, even though the food rewards associated with them were the same size. This preference suggests that positive social vocalizations do more than signal a good mood: they actively shape how experiences are learned, remembered, and valued.

AIResQ ClimSols, an IIT Gandhinagar-incubated deep-tech startup, is translating cutting-edge research into practical solutions for urban flooding. Founded by Prof Udit Bhatia and Dr Divya Upadhyay, the venture combines physics-informed artificial intelligence with hydrological modelling to deliver hyperlocal, real-time flood intelligence, even where data is limited. Building on research from IITGN’s Machine Intelligence and Resilience Lab, the startup is working with Gurugram Municipal Corporation and expanding its solutions across Indian cities. Through technology that helps identify flood-prone areas, vulnerable infrastructure, and inaccessible roads, AIResQ ClimSols aims to strengthen urban resilience and support better-informed decisions by city authorities.

Researchers from the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (Stevens INI) at the Keck School of Medicine of USC will lead a worldwide effort to map how eight common psychiatric disorders affect brain function, supported by a five-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The Global Initiative for Harmonized Functional MRI in Psychiatry will analyze over 94,000 brain scans collected at 257 research sites in 27 countries, from participants ages 4 to 95. The project covers schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, and anorexia nervosa. The investigators say it will be the largest functional MRI study ever conducted, both in the number of people scanned and the number of labs taking part. The project relies on resting-state functional MRI, which records brain activity while a person lies quietly in a scanner. The scan tracks small shifts in blood oxygen that rise and fall as brain regions work. When two regions rise and fall in step, like musicians keeping time in an orchestra, researchers consider them functionally connected. Recent work has discovered functional networks involved in attention, rumination, and planning, with a complex pattern of switching and interactions between them that is disturbed in mental illness. The effort expands the ENIGMA Consortium, a global network of over 2,500 scientists in 47 countries who conduct some of the largest brain imaging studies of neurological and psychiatric disease. For this project, eight separate international research groups, each focused on one disorder, have agreed to analyze their functional scans with the same standardized processing pipeline, a shared set of software steps that cleans each scan and measures brain connections and dynamic brain changes identically. According to the investigators, it is the first global effort to standardize how functional brain scans are analyzed in psychiatry.

 

 

 

IIT Gandhinagar (IITGN) startup Oreejoy Medtech Private Limited has won the Boeing BUILD National Finals, securing a ₹10 lakh grant to advance its AI-powered wearable technology. The achievement comes in the fifth edition of Boeing BUILD, Boeing’s University Innovation Leadership Development Program, which received around 2,200 applications from across India, with 28 teams shortlisted for the National Finals and seven ultimately selected for the grant.

Engineering students at the University of Cincinnati are developing an easy-to-use system to deploy autonomous drones in warehouses to take inventory and alert workers about leaks from containers.