Providing accurate information about the climate crisis can help to correct misperceptions about how much public support exists for action.

In a Review, Nils Opel and Michael Breakspear discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) can be responsibly and effectively integrated into mental health care, given the unique clinical, ethical, and societal challenges of the field. “It is tempting to be blinded or bewildered by the technological appeal of AI and its superhuman accomplishments,” write the authors. “We suggest that the opportunities and contradictions of AI can be reconciled by avoiding this technology-centric allure and instead adopting a human-centered approach…” AI is poised to reshape mental health care. Recent advances in machine learning, language analysis, digital sensors, and large language models have raised hopes that AI could improve diagnoses, monitoring, and treatment of mental health disorders, as well as expand access to care, particularly for underserved populations. However, according to Opel and Breakspear, the use of AI in mental health care presents unique challenges. In this Review, Opel and Breakspear discuss these challenges and the ways in which AI systems and tools could be successfully and responsibly be deployed to improve and perhaps personalize mental health care across the patient experience.

The widespread adoption of AI in mental health care has been slow because many mental health diagnoses are based largely on subjective symptoms and observed behavior, rather than clear biological tests, and often do not reliably predict outcomes. What’s more, there are concerns related to biased training data, privacy, and the ability of AI systems to deliver safe, empathetic care across diverse populations. Such fears are reinforced by several high-profile incidents of conversational AI goading sensitive users to engage in self-harm or reckless behavior. Yet on the other hand, AI could help address challenges in mental health through new approaches to the analysis of large, complex data, such as speech patterns, facial expressions, wearable-device signals, and brain or molecular measurements. This could open the door to more personalized care and potentially new ways of defining or identifying mental illnesses. Moreover, Opel and Breakspear note that the growing role of AI raises important questions about how it should be used in clinicians’ daily work, especially in sensitive areas such as patient privacy, risk assessment, and treatment decisions. Although AI holds transformative promise, the authors argue that given the deeply personal nature of mental health and the stigma that often surrounds it, patient-centered AI systems must be designed to protect privacy and reduce inequalities, with coordinated oversight across science, medicine, ethics, and patent empowerment.

Using satellite data and the physics of ice flow, researchers have mapped Antarctica’s hidden subglacial bedrock landscape – one of the Solar System’s least mapped planetary surfaces – in unprecedented detail, revealing previously unseen geological structures shaping the ice sheet from below. The findings not only improve ice sheet models but can also guide future geophysical surveys and reduce uncertainty in projections of ice loss and sea-level rise. Hidden beneath Antarctica’s massive ice sheet lies a complex landscape of mountains, valleys, plains, basins, and lakes. This subglacial topography plays a key role in shaping how Antarctic ice flows and influences the ice sheet’s surface, both of which are essential for predicting how the content-scale ice sheet will evolve and contribute to sea-level changes in response to ongoing climate warming. However, much about Antarctica’s subglacial landscapes remains unknown, largely due to sparse and limited ground-based and airborne surveys.

To address this gap, Helen Ockenden and colleagues combined high-resolution satellite observations of the ice sheet’s surface, limited ice thickness measurements, and Ice Flow Perterbuation Analysis (IFPA), which leverages the physics of how ice flows over underlying bedrock topography, to develop a continent-scale map of subglacial topography. According to Ockenden et al., the map uncovers Antarctica’s landscape in unprecedented detail, revealing midsized topographic features (2 to 30 kilometers) beneath the ice sheet that were previously unknown or poorly resolved, including deep and narrow alpine valleys, scoured lowlands, and extensive buried fluvial channels extending hundreds of kilometers. Some of these features may be relics of landforms that predate the modern ice sheet.

Author Robert Bingham told SciPak about the wonder of this discovery: “It is perhaps most surprising that ultimately so much detail of the bed topography – features such as glacial valleys, hills and canyons… – are captured at all in the shape of the ice surface so far above. So much change at the surface is extremely subtle – as 3 km-thick ice passes over a subglacial canyon maybe 100 meters deep, the ice surface elevation typically only falls a handful of meters, a change that is barely noticeable when travelling over the ice surface itself…” What’s more, the mesoscale texture of the newly resolved topography allowed the authors to identify patterns of glacial shaping across Antarctica, offering insight into how the ice sheet formed, evolved, and interacted with the underlying landscape. This provides a clearer framework for reconstructing past ice and future ice dynamics. “Although Ockenden et al. provide a detailed map of Antarctica’s bedrock landscape at mesoscale, it does not represent the final word on Antarctic geography,” writes Duncan Young in a related Perspective. “Similar to mass conservation methods, the analysis relies on major assumptions about mechanisms that are critical for modeling ice sheet evolution, such as ice deformation, basal sliding, and melt and freeze processes at the ice-bedrock interface.”

Last week, the Hertz community gathered in San Francisco for a deep dive into The Future of AI, hosted at FutureHouse, a nonprofit AI-for-science research lab, by cofounder and CEO, 2013 Hertz Fellow Sam Rodriques, and cofounder Andrew White.

More people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are turning to coaches for guidance. Those coaches, who often have ADHD themselves, offer similar services to psychologists but don’t think of their work as clinical, according to a study to be published (Jan. 15) in JAMA Network Open.  

It's the first major survey of this rapidly growing field and a prerequisite to studying how safe and effective it is, the authors suggested.