IntroductionAppearance-related attentional bias has been body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and in individuals with elevated concern; however, it remains unclear whether similar attentional are observed in individuals with objectively verifiable jaw deformities. Appearance-related attentional bias has been observed across clinical populations with elevated appearance concern, highlighting its relevance as a general perceptual-cognitive mechanism associated with appearance monitoring.MethodsSixty patients with jaw deformities and 40 age-matched completed the Body Image Concern Inventory (BICI), a validated measure of dysmorphic appearance concern, and underwent eye-while viewing photographs of self and others’ faces. Gaze duration analyzed across six regions (forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, and Associations between gaze patterns and BICI scores were examined.ResultsPatients exhibited significantly higher BICI scores than controls. both self- and other-face viewing, patients showed prolonged gaze region. Furthermore, exploratory correlation analyses showed that gaze positively associated with BICI scores within the patient group and other’s faces.DiscussionIndividuals with jaw deformities exhibit elevated dysmorphic appearance concern and increased attention to perceptually salient features. These findings characterize appearance-related attentional individuals with jaw deformities and provide insight into perceptual-processes associated with dysmorphic appearance concern.
Cyclothymic and anxious affective temperament in perinatal depression: findings from an exploratory cross-sectional study
IntroductionThe perinatal period represents a vulnerable period in which women may experience high psychic distress due to psychological, biological and social changes. The prevalence of perinatal depression (PND) is estimated around 15%-20% during pregnancy and 16%-18% after childbirth. Although several risk factors have been investigated in the PND development, few studies explored the role of affective temperaments, well known to exert a role in any mood disorders. The aim of our study was to explore which is the most represented affective temperamental profile in PND as well as which is its role in the development and severity of depressive symptoms during perinatal period.MethodsAll pregnant women admitted at the Perinatal Mental Health Outpatient Service, Unit of Clinical Psychiatry, University Hospital of Marche, Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy, between April 2021 and July 2025, were screened for PND through Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) and a semi-structured clinical interview (SCID-5-CV). Temperament Evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego (TEMPS-M) was administered to all pregnant women. ResultsThe PND prevalence was 33.1%. PND was significantly associated with higher cyclothymic (B = 0.356, p = 0.001) and anxious TEMPS-M scores (B = 0.247, p = 0.026) and a positive psychiatric history (B = 5.245, p < 0.001) (R = 0.6, R2 = 0.36, F(3,129) = 24.189, p < 0.001). Logistic regression indicated that cyclothymic (Exp(B)=1.118, p=0.008), hyperthymic (Exp(B)=0.911, p=0.049), anxious temperaments (Exp(B)=1.109, p=0.029), presence of medical comorbidities (Exp(B)=0.224, p=0.003) and psychiatric history (Exp(B)=5.144, p=0.001) were independent predictors of PND.DiscussionAffective temperaments, particularly cyclothymic and anxious profiles, and prior psychiatric history are predictors of perinatal depression. Incorporating temperament assessment alongside standard screening tools such as the EPDS may improve early identification of women at risk, supporting tailored preventive and therapeutic strategies.
BOLD fMRI reflects both vascular and metabolic signals
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 23 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02288-y
A recent study by Epp et al. uses advanced, quantitative functional MRI measures to demonstrate that the ‘canonical’ interpretation of blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) — that increases and decreases in brain activation are accompanied by corresponding changes in blood flow and oxygen metabolism — does not strictly hold across the human brain. Although the authors provided a balanced interpretation, this has been viewed by others as undermining fMRI. We discuss whether the findings bring into question the validity of fMRI-based measures of brain function.
STAT+: Can Erasca be biotech’s next big thing? We’ll see
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I wore my Tottenham Hotspur hoodie while shopping at Market Basket last Sunday. One fellow shopper laughed at me. He must have been an Arsenal fan. But another guy commiserated.
If none of this means anything to you, I’m sorry. My favorite soccer team is circling the drain and I feel sad.
The promise of a better pan-RAS inhibitor
Erasca has been described as the poor man’s Revolution Medicines. Impoverished doesn’t exactly fit, not with Erasca’s market value nearing $7 billion on the promise of a better pan-RAS inhibitor for pancreatic cancer. But RevMed’s value now tops $30 billion, so you can see why biotech investors are motivated to find the next big thing.
Whether Erasca is worthy of that description will become clearer in May when the company reports initial results from an early stage study of its drug, called ERAS-0015.
“RevMed has been a real pioneer in this space,” Erasca co-founder and CEO Jonathan Lim told me when we spoke on Tuesday. “What a day it was last week seeing their data with 13.2 months of median overall survival. It’s great for patients with pancreatic cancer.”
Will fusion power get cheap? Don’t count on it.
Fusion power could provide a steady, zero-emissions source of electricity in the future—if companies can get plants built and running. But a new study suggests that even if that future arrives, it might not come cheap.
Technologies tend to get less expensive over time. Lithium-ion batteries are now about 90% cheaper than they were in 2013. But historically, different technologies tend to go through this curve at different rates. And the cost of fusion might not sink as quickly as the prices of batteries or solar.
It’s tricky to make any predictions about the cost of a technology that doesn’t exist yet. But when there’s billions of dollars of public and private funding on the line, it’s worth considering what assumptions we’re making about our future energy mix and its cost.
One crucial measure is a metric called experience rate—the percentage by which an energy technology’s cost declines every time capacity doubles. A higher figure means a quicker price drop and better economic gains with scaling.
Historically, the experience rate is 12% for onshore wind power, 20% for lithium-ion batteries, and 23% for solar modules. Other energy technologies haven’t gotten cheap quite as quickly—fission is at just 2%.
In the new study, published in Nature Energy, researchers aimed to improve predictions of fusion’s future price by estimating the technology’s experience rate. The team looked at three key characteristics that can correlate with experience rate: unit size, design complexity, and the need for customization. The larger and more complex a technology is, and/or the more it needs to be customized for different use cases, the lower the experience rate.
The researchers interviewed fusion experts, including public-sector researchers and those working at companies in the private sector. They had the experts evaluate fusion power plants on those characteristics and used that info to predict the experience rate. (One note here: The study focused only on magnetic confinement and laser inertial confinement, two of the leading fusion approaches, which together receive the vast majority of funding today. Other approaches could come with different cost benefits.)
Fusion plants will likely be relatively large, similar to other types of facilities (like coal and fission power plants) that rely on generating heat. They will probably need less customization than fission plants—largely because regulations and safety considerations should be simpler—but more than technologies like solar panels. And as for complexity, “there was almost unanimous agreement that fusion is incredibly complex,” says Lingxi Tang, a PhD candidate in the energy and technology policy group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and one of the authors of the study. (Some experts said it was literally off the scale the researchers gave them.)
The final figure the researchers suggest for fusion’s experience rate is between 2% and 8%, meaning it will see a faster price reduction than nuclear power but not as dramatic an improvement as many common energy technologies being deployed today.
That means that it would take a lot of deployment—and likely quite a long time—for the price of building a fusion reactor to drop significantly, so electricity produced by fusion plants could be expensive for a while. And it’s a much slower rate than the 8% to 20% that many modeling studies assume today.
“On the whole, I think questions should be raised about current investment levels in fusion,” Tang says. (The US allocated over $1 billion to fusion in the 2024 fiscal year, and private-sector funding totaled $2.2 billion between July 2024 and July 2025.) “If you’re talking about decarbonization of the energy system, is this really the best use of public money?”
But some experts say that looking to the past to understand the future of energy prices might be misleading.“It’s a good exercise, but we have to be humble about how much we don’t know,” says Egemen Kolemen, a professor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
In 2000, many analysts predicted that solar power would remain expensive—but then production exploded and prices came crashing down, largely because China went all in, he says. “People weren’t exactly wrong then,” he adds. “They were just extrapolating what they saw into the future.”
How fast prices drop depends on regulations, geopolitical dynamics, and labor cost, he says: “We haven’t built the thing yet, so we don’t know.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Neurodevelopmental Disorder With Issues Social Behavior, Communication Issues, GI Dysfunction. Study is Multimodal Interventions Targeting These Pathways With cSVF, Stored MSCs, FMT and Diet Modification. Role of Autoimmunity, Gut-brain Issues, & Issues Examined.
Conditions: Autism Spectrum Disorder; Autism
Interventions: Procedure: Autologous MSC isolation, concentration, and cryopreservation of adult mesenchymal stem cells; Dietary Supplement: Fecal Biomicrome Transplantation (FMT); Dietary Supplement: Ketogenic RESET Diet Protocol; Behavioral: Trial combines use of cSVF and MSCs (cryopres) with diet modification and FMT (fecal material Transplant in adult ASD patients; Dietary Supplement: FMT (Fecal Material Tranplantation); Biological: Use autologous cSVF + MSCs (cryo) for management of autoimmune component, anti-inflammatory and immune modulation
Sponsors: Black Tie Medical, Inc.
Enrolling by invitation
Interventions: Procedure: Autologous MSC isolation, concentration, and cryopreservation of adult mesenchymal stem cells; Dietary Supplement: Fecal Biomicrome Transplantation (FMT); Dietary Supplement: Ketogenic RESET Diet Protocol; Behavioral: Trial combines use of cSVF and MSCs (cryopres) with diet modification and FMT (fecal material Transplant in adult ASD patients; Dietary Supplement: FMT (Fecal Material Tranplantation); Biological: Use autologous cSVF + MSCs (cryo) for management of autoimmune component, anti-inflammatory and immune modulation
Sponsors: Black Tie Medical, Inc.
Enrolling by invitation
Global Mapping of Telemedicine Regulation and Ethical Safeguards: Mixed Methods Exploratory Document Analysis
Background: Telemedicine has become central to digital health strategies, yet the regulatory environment that shapes ethical safeguards and equitable access remains uneven and incompletely assessed across countries. Legal and normative instruments matter because they define requirements for privacy, consent, accountability, professional readiness, and barrier reduction. Objective: This study aimed to map the current global landscape of normative instruments related to telemedicine and identify which ethical and social safeguards are explicitly addressed, with particular attention to equity. Methods: We conducted a document analysis guided by the READ (ready the materials, extract data, analyze data, and distill findings) framework. From February 2024 to February 2026, we conducted a structured web-based search across all World Health Organization (WHO) member states with no language restrictions, using official government sources, statutory professional regulators, and institutional publication channels. Retrieval combined internal site searches, direct navigation, external search engine queries, and targeted snowball sampling to identify currently in-force instruments. Two researchers independently extracted and coded data using a predefined codebook. We operationalized 10 binary items covering regulatory presence and scope (questions 1 and 2), safeguards for data protection (question 3), consent and disclosure (questions 4 and 5), prior in-person prerequisites (question 6), monitoring (question 7), training requirements (question 8), and equity (questions 9 and 10). We summarized frequencies overall and stratified by WHO region and World Bank income group and conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of included normative instruments. Results: Of the 194 WHO member states, 81 (41.8%) had at least one current normative instrument related to telemedicine in force. Among these, 72.8% (59/81) defined telemedicine or telehealth. Data protection provisions were most common (73/81, 90.1%), followed by mandatory informed consent (n=71, 87.7%) and monitoring mechanisms (n=65, 80.2%). Fewer countries required disclosure of telemedicine limitations (n=36, 44.4%) or mandated telemedicine-specific training (n=26, 32.1%). Prior in-person consultation requirements were uncommon (n=8, 9.9%). Equity-related safeguards were uneven: 51.9% (n=42) referenced justice, equity, or nondiscrimination, whereas 30.9% (n=25) included concrete barrier reduction provisions (eg, digital inclusion or accommodations for people with disabilities and minors). Conclusions: Telemedicine regulation is becoming more common, but both coverage and safeguarding content remain uneven. While privacy, consent, and monitoring are frequently addressed where regulation exists, disclosure, physician competency, and operational equity measures are less consistently specified. Strengthening telemedicine governance will require translating ethical commitments into enforceable standards that address digital determinants of access and protect groups at risk of exclusion.
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Exploring User Experiences of an Augmented Reality Smartphone App Prescribing Exercise for Children and Young People With Cancer: Results From a Qualitative Study
Background: Mobile health (mHealth), and specifically smartphone apps, have grown exponentially in both functionality and accessibility and are becoming an important component of health care. Research exploring the use of mHealth for managing or treating chronic diseases, such as cancer, has shown promising effects. Yet, comparatively little work has examined how such technologies can enhance exercise interventions for young people with cancer. To optimize the effectiveness of mHealth in these contexts, it is essential to build a stronger evidence base on user experience. Objective: This study aimed to investigate how healthy children and young people engaged with an augmented reality (AR) app developed specifically for children and young people undergoing cancer treatment, and to identify design features that may support engagement and behavior change in the intended clinical population. Methods: School and university students, aged 8‐21 years, were eligible to participate in the study. Practical workshops allowed participants to engage with the AR exercise app before taking part in focus groups to explore user experiences. Data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis, which also involved a critical friend approach using 2 researchers (HM and KS). Suggested improvements were mapped against the motivational affordances’ taxonomy. Results: A total of 39 participants aged 8‐21 years took part in the focus group study. Participants found the demonstrations and varied exercises useful but expressed some concerns regarding data safety and functionality of the novel AR avatar. It was proposed that additional educational components, challenges, and rewards, as well as a customizable avatar, social support features, and audio instructions for a more inclusive design would be desirable and could enhance user experience. When mapped against the motivational affordances taxonomy, the suggested improvements aligned primarily with mechanisms of user education, challenges, feedback, cooperation, and comparison. Conclusions: This study provides an understanding of how apps that prescribe exercise can be optimized to enhance motivation and user experience. By assessing feedback and suggestions for improvements, the findings highlight key design features that may support engagement. While this initial work focused on healthy, age-matched participants, further evidence specifically in children and young people with a childhood cancer diagnosis is needed. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID): RR2-10.1177/14604582241288784
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Knowledge, Attitudes, and Training Needs for AI in Primary Care: National Survey Study of Clinicians in the Veterans Health Administration
<strong>Background:</strong> Clinicians are the interface between artificial intelligence (AI) applications and patient care. To maximize benefits and minimize risks of AI, clinicians must be “AI-ready”—that is, willing and able to understand, evaluate, and appropriately use AI tools in practice. Prior literature suggests that clinicians lack fundamental competencies in the use of AI. These gaps could be especially problematic in primary care, given its broad reach into patient care. We surveyed primary care providers (PCPs) in the United States’ largest integrated health care system, relatively early in its widespread implementation of clinical AI for frontline use, in order to identify readiness gaps that may warrant particular attention as part of a comprehensive AI implementation strategy. <strong>Objective:</strong> The aim of this study was to characterize PCPs’ use, knowledge, attitudes, and training priorities related to AI in order to inform health system AI implementation efforts. <strong>Methods:</strong> We conducted a national cross-sectional survey of United States Veterans Health Administration (VA) PCPs in October 2025, assessing AI use, self-reported knowledge, attitudes, and training experience. Descriptive analyses summarized responses with exploratory bivariate comparisons across clinician subgroups. Conventional content analysis with inductive coding was used to characterize open-ended responses providing a definition of AI. <strong>Results:</strong> Among 170 respondents (170/989, 17.2% response rate), 66.5% (113/170) reported current AI use, most commonly generative AI and decision support tools. Overall attitudes toward AI were positive, with 70.6% (120/170) mostly enthusiastic or more enthusiastic than apprehensive. Confidence in understanding sources of AI bias (62/170, 36.5%) and ethical issues (81/170, 47.6%) was limited. When asked to define AI, very few respondents provided an accurate technical definition. Key concerns about use of AI included accountability, accuracy, and transparency. Though 88.2% (150/170) identified AI training as a priority, only 26.5% (45/170) had any training. Training experiences ranged widely in source, focus, and structure. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> PCPs are eager to harness AI’s practical advantages but lack foundational competencies to do so in ways that maximize benefit and minimize risk. Our findings highlight a need for targeted education that prioritizes critical appraisal, workflow integration, and risk mitigation, supported by governance that addresses clinicians’ concerns and validated measures to evaluate progress toward an AI-ready workforce. These steps can empower PCPs to leverage AI safely and effectively and strengthen the quality and safety of primary care delivery at scale.
Counterclockwise Virtual Reality–Based Embodiment of a Younger Self and Revisit of a Past Iconic Event in Older Adults: Between-Groups Study of Cognitive and Physical Performance
Background: The original counterclockwise study carried out in the late 1970s provided an extreme example of “reminiscence therapy,” reporting improvements in older adults’ cognitive and physical functioning after they had lived for 5 days in a house set up as if decades earlier (the 1950s). We tested a virtual reality (VR) analog of this approach, enhanced by embodying participants in a virtual body that looked like themselves at the corresponding younger age. Objective: This study aimed to examine whether brief VR exposures combining (1) embodiment in a virtual body as one’s younger self and (2) immersion in an iconic past event improve age-related subjective and performance outcomes compared with a current-self VR control condition. Methods: We carried out a between-groups study with 23 healthy older adults (aged 65‐85 years; mean age 71.2, SD 4.03 years). Participants were randomly allocated to either a Young Self condition (n=11; mean 72.3, SD 4.17), where they were embodied in a virtual body that looked like themselves from the 1960s, or in a Current Self control condition (n=12; mean 70.1, SD 3.75), where participants were embodied in their current body. There were 5 sessions. In Session 1, participants completed a baseline assessment. There were then 2 VR exposures, approximately 1 week apart (Sessions 2‐3), and follow-ups at 1 week (Session 4) and approximately 2 weeks (Session 5) after the final VR exposure. Outcomes included subjective age, awareness of age-related change, World Health Organization–Five Well-Being Index, Trail Making Test performance, and physical functioning (eg, grip strength). Results: A hierarchical Bayesian analysis revealed that 1 week after the final VR exposure, those in the Young Self condition demonstrated lower subjective age than those in the Current Self condition (prob=.95). They had higher awareness of positive age-related change (prob=.89) and a higher score on the World Health Organization–Five Well-Being Index (prob=.84). Moreover, with respect to performance variables, they took less time to trace a trail (prob≥.99), made fewer mistakes in doing so (prob=.89), had greater right-hand (prob=.85) and left-hand (prob≥.99) grip strength. However, 2 weeks after their final VR exposure, these differences diminished apart from positive awareness of age-related change (prob=.82), trail-making mistakes (prob=.83), and left-hand grip strength (prob≥.99). Here, “prob” refers to posterior probability. Conclusions: The results demonstrate that even 2 short VR exposures, where people were embodied in their younger body and immersed in an iconic event from more than 50 years earlier, resulted in improvement in some age-related responses. This is encouraging for further research with more extensive VR experiences over a longer time period.
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