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There’s a Name for the People Who Drain You
... The PNAS study didn’t measure what, precisely, hasslers do that is so annoying. But Karen S. Rook, a UC Irvine psychologist who was not involved with the study but who has researched similar phenomena, told me that her study participants frequently complain about people who fail to provide help when it’s needed, or who provide it in a grudging way. (Sometimes, Rook noted, people keep hasslers in their life because of how much they do need help, even if the help is imperfect.) Hasslers might also be overly critical, or exclude others from social activities.
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How We Chose the 2026 Young American Scientists
Scientific American used expert recommendations and data analysis to identify 28 exceptional early-career researchers. In late 2025 we asked the world’s top researchers a simple question: Who are the best, most promising early-career scientists working in the U.S.? We then read through nominations, mined scientific journals and performed a rigorous data analysis to choose the inaugural class of Scientific American’s Young American Scientists. While we used multiple methods to identify our honorees, the final selections are based on the qualitative judgment of outside experts and our editorial staff.
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How Does One Brain Speak Two Languages?
Speak a language your whole life and its grammatical rules become ingrained. That’s why you might correctly guess that the present participle of the verb “absquatulate” is “absquatulating,” even if you are completely unfamiliar with the word. ... Early research viewed bilingualism as an “add on” or “disruption” to the processing of one’s native language, said Judith Kroll, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study.
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Socioeconomic Factors Are Becoming ‘Biologically Embedded’ In Children’s Brains
The most powerful factors affecting a child's brain development involve socioeconomic opportunities, according to a study in the journal Science. The analysis of more than 2,300 9- and 10-year-olds found that environmental factors ranging from household income to education to neighborhood quality are associated with brain differences that can clearly be seen in MRI scans. ... The research "highlights the fact that the environment in which we grow up and live has powerful impacts on our brain," says Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.
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Can Smartphones Help Explain the Drop In Birth Rates?
... The drop in birth rates has affected women of all ages, but it's most pronounced among teenagers. That sounds plausible to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. In books like Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents, Twenge has documented the profound behavioral changes that accompanied smartphones, especially among young people. "The smartphone fundamentally changed the way adolescents spent their time outside of school," Twenge told NPR.
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The Midlife Habits That Could Make Or Break Your Brain Health Long-Term
... Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, said that idea really hit home in the past year with the “overwhelmingly disappointing” results of several treatments for Alzheimer’s in older adults, including GLP-1s and some drugs targeting the amyloids, or plaques, that accumulate in the brain. “It seems if you wait until later life to intervene it’s too late, the damage that has been done is really irreversible,” he said. “That kind of naturally shifts the timeline back to midlife.” Hariri believes future brain scans and blood tests will identify people whose brains are aging unusually quickly.
