Tue 21 April 2026: People recovering from eating disorders often use social media for support, seeking out recovery content, body-positive creators and others with similar experiences. But recent research my colleagues and I have conducted suggests these platforms can also steer users back towards the very content they are trying to avoid. We carried out in-depth interviews with people […]
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Mon 20 April 2026: Social media users condemn Western silence on attacks on religious symbols and sites by Israeli soldiers and settlers. A viral photograph showing an Israeli soldier hitting a statue of Jesus Christ in southern Lebanon with a sledgehammer has sparked outrage. In a statement on Monday, the Israeli military confirmed the authenticity […]
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Mon 20 April 2026: Many people have compared the addictive nature of social media to cigarettes. Checking your likes, they say, is the new smoke break. Others say the unease over social media is just the next round of moral panic about new technologies. We are a pair of researchers who investigate how social media affects the mental health of […]
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Sun 19 April 2026: For years, big tech companies have placed the burden of managing screen time squarely on individuals and parents, operating on the assumption that capturing human attention is fair game. But the social media sands may slowly be shifting. A test-case jury trial in Los Angeles is accusing big tech companies of creating “addiction machines”. […]
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Sat 18 April 2026: An average of at least 47 women and girls were killed each day during the war in Gaza, according to figures published by UN Women on Friday, and the agency warned that deaths have continued six months into a fragile ceasefire. More than 38,000 women and girls were killed in Gaza […]
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Sat 18 April 2026: Plans to launch reflective satellites and up to 1 million additional spacecraft in low Earth orbit could disrupt human sleep, wildlife, and ecosystems, scientists have warned. “The proposed scale of orbital deployment would represent a significant alteration of the natural night-time light environment at a planetary scale,” said the presidents of […]
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Sat 18 April 2026: Is it possible to spot personality dysfunction from someone’s everyday word use? My colleagues and I have conducted research that suggests you can, and often sooner than you might expect. Whether in a quick text message, a long email, a casual chat with a friend, or a comment online, the words […]
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Fri 17 April 2026: Five widely used AI chatbots frequently produced problematic answers to health and medical questions, a new study revealed. Researchers in a study published in the BMJ Open on Tuesday tested Gemini, DeepSeek, Meta AI, ChatGPT and Grok with 50 prompts across five misinformation-prone categories. These included cancer, vaccines, stem cells, nutrition […]
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Fri 17 April 2026: With the internet and its widespread accessibility, many of us have front-row seats to widespread suffering and death across the globe for the first time in history, even when we are not directly affected. We’re living in what scholars describe as a “polycrisis” — a set of interconnected crises that compound and intensify one another. […]
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Thu 16 April 2026: In recent years, residents of Spain, France and the UK have looked up to see an eerie sight: deep orange sunrises and skies thick with a yellowish haze. These hazy skies often deposit “blood rain”, rust-colored precipitation that leaves a fine grit on cars and windows. These events are caused by […]
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