A new study of 2,000 U.S. adults shows dark web users report much higher rates of depression, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, self-injury and digital self-harm than surface web users. People with suicidal thoughts were nearly three times more likely to use the dark web, while those engaging in self-injury or digital self-harm were up to five and 19 times more likely, respectively. Researchers suggest dark web use may reflect underlying mental health struggles and urge professionals to reach vulnerable users in these hidden spaces.

A new proof-of-concept study from researchers at Bar-Ilan University reveals a surprising finding: incorporating more walking into public transportation commutes can improve health—without adding extra travel time.

The study, part of Prof. Jonathan Rabinowitz’s More Walking Project and conducted in collaboration with the Israeli Smart Transportation Research Center (ISTRC), analyzed potential commuting routes for over 2,100 employees traveling to Bar-Ilan University. By increasing the walking distance thresholds in trip planning, researchers found that most commuters could benefit from an average of nine minutes of walking—without lengthening their total travel time.

To see if a fish is fresh, people recommend looking at its eyes and gills or giving it a sniff. But a more accurate check for food quality and safety is to look for compounds that form when decomposition starts. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sensors have developed a simple, effective electronic device that quickly measures one of these compounds. The prototype sensor can determine how fresh a fish is in less than two minutes.

In International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, researchers from Tsinghua University proposed a novel tip-based vibration carving processing method for shape-customized convex microstructures for the first time. Their work combined the advantages of tip-based machining and vibration texturing, showing great potential in the convex microstructure processing of customized functional surfaces. Such method will significantly expand the design boundaries of functional surfaces to address the challenges in thermal, electrical, acoustic, and optical fields.

A researcher from the University of Tokyo and a U.S.-based structural engineer developed a new computational form-finding method that could change how architects and engineers design lightweight and free-form structures covering large spaces. The technique specifically helps create gridshells, thin, curved surfaces whose members form a networked grid. The method makes use of NURBS surfaces, a widely used surface representation format in computer-aided design (CAD). It also drastically reduces computation cost — a task that previously took 90 hours on a high-end GPU completes in about 90 minutes on a standard CPU.

Silicon anodes can greatly boost the energy density of all-solid-state batteries, but their large volume changes often cause contact loss with solid electrolytes. Using operando synchrotron X-ray micro- and nano-computed tomography, researchers at Ritsumeikan University directly visualized the 3D evolution of the silicon–electrolyte interface during charge and discharge cycling. They found that even as silicon expands and shrinks, the thin, solid-electrolyte layers remain adhered, preserving partial ion pathways and enabling stable operation.