Autonomous University of Madrid

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.

Using data from the UK Biobank, where black tea consumption is common, researchers have examined whether its intake is associated with a lower risk of mortality. Participants who reported drinking two or more cups a day had a 9-13% lower mortality risk compared to non-tea drinkers. The results are published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Research published in PNAS shows how, in a sample of more than 1,600 racially diverse (black and white) parents in the United States, freedom of school choice, regardless of the presence of students of other ethnicities, also increases segregation. The authors attribute this to different preferences between black parents, who favour higher school ratings, and white parents, who prefer proximity to the school.

A study of more than 630 billion words (mostly in English) used on 3 billion web pages concludes that the term 'people' is not gender-neutral: its meaning is biased towards the concept 'men'. The authors write in Science Advances that they see this as "a fundamental bias in the collective view of our species", relevant because the concept 'people' is "in almost all societal decisions and policies".