Autonomous University of Madrid

A study estimates that household energy expenditure has increased by 62.6 to 112.9 % in 2022, following the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This represents an increase of 2.7 to 4.8 % of overall household expenditure. The analysis, published in Nature Energy, warns that this increase could push between 78 and 141 million people worldwide into extreme poverty.

A study published in the journal PLOS Digital Health has analysed ChatGPT's performance on the US Medical Licensing Exams (USMLE). The results indicate that it could pass or come close to passing the exam.   

People who have a parent, sibling, or step-sibling with major depression have a higher risk of major depression themselves, according to research based on data from 2.9 million people in Denmark. This risk increases with the number of affected relatives and when exposure to depression occurs in childhood and adolescence, but does not vary by sex or kinship, says the study published in JAMA Psychiatry.

A meta-analysis of 42 studies from 15 countries, including Spain, concludes that the covid-19 pandemic caused learning delays in school-aged children and a loss of knowledge equivalent to 35% of the learning of a school year. The research, published in Nature Human Behaviour, highlights that these effects persisted over time.

A study published in PLOS Medicine estimates that the implementation of sugary drinks taxes in the UK in 2018 was associated with an 8 % reduction in obesity in English girls aged 10-11, particularly among those living in more deprived areas.

The rate of death by suicide in Spain has increased between 2018 and 2021, according to a report presented today by the Complutense University of Madrid, the Centre for Biomedical Research in Mental Health Network (CIBERSAM) and the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, which points to the influence of the pandemic in this increase. In 2021, a total of 4,003 people died from this cause, 5.5% more than in 2018. During the pandemic, mortality by suicide was greater among people living in large cities and provincial capitals. The report, which includes data from 2000 to 2021, also shows the increase in deaths by suicide that occurred during the period of the economic crisis, from 2008 to 2014.

Artificial intelligence algorithms using ChatGPT - the OpenAI company's GPT-3 language model - can identify speech features to predict the early stages of Alzheimer's disease with 80 per cent accuracy. The neurodegenerative disease causes a loss of the ability to express oneself that the algorithms could recognise, according to the journal PLOS Digital Health.

The journal Nature publishes a quantum simulation of a holographic wormhole on a quantum processor. The demonstration, carried out with the Google Sycamore processor, represents a further step towards the possibility of studying quantum gravity in the laboratory.

The so-called Nobel Prize in Economics 2022 - officially the Bank of Sweden's Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences - has been awarded to Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. "They have significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, especially during financial crises," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences notes.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell's inequalities and becoming pioneers in quantum information science.