Volume 8 Issue 6, June 2024

Given the increasing sophistication of virtual reality systems in providing immersive nature experiences, there is the potential for analogous health benefits to those that arise from real nature experiences. We call for research to better understand the human–nature–technology interaction to overcome potential pitfalls of the technology and design tailored virtual experiences that can deliver health outcomes and wellbeing across society.

The impetus behind the development of various Chinese dialects is as yet unknown. In a comprehensive quantitative coanalysis of linguistic and genetic data across China, Yang et al. find evidence to suggest that demographic diffusion, cultural diffusion and linguistic assimilation all contributed to the expansive diversity of Chinese dialects.

Humans are unusually adept at endurance running, due in part to specialized muscle fibres and heat elimination by sweating. Cost–benefit analyses and an ethnohistorical survey of hunting methods suggest that these features could have evolved through the pursuit of evasive species until they are overcome with exhaustion and easily dispatched.

Long ties that bridge socially separate regions of networks are critical for the spread of contagions, such as innovations or adoptions of new norms. Contrary to previous thinking, long ties have now been found to accelerate social contagions, even for behaviours that involve the social reinforcement of adoption by network neighbours.

For patients affected by speech disorders, brain–machine-interface (BMI) devices could restore their ability to verbally communicate. In this work, we captured neural activity associated with internal speech — words said within the mind with no associated movement or audio output — and translated these cortical signals into text in real time.

Recent advances are revealing visual working memory representations to be richer than mere imperfect copies of perceptual events. Bays et al. discuss the latest theories of working memory function, capacity and neural basis from a computational perspective.

To study cognition, researchers have traditionally used laboratory-based experiments, but games offer a valuable alternative: they are intuitive and enjoyable. In this Perspective, Schulz et al. discuss the advantages and drawbacks of games and give recommendations for researchers.

Kozyreva et al. review evidence from individual-level interventions for fighting online misinformation featured in 81 scientific papers. They classify the interventions in nine different types and summarize their findings in a toolbox.

How is contagion affected by changes to network structure? Recent work has claimed a ‘weakness of long ties’ for complex contagions that rely on social reinforcement, unlike biological contagions. Eckles et al. substantially revise this conclusion.

Using foraging theory and ethnohistoric data, the authors’ analysis supports the hypothesis that the human ability to sweat while running long distances evolved in the context of persistent, endurance-based pursuits of game.

Among 406,438 adults in the UK, Wang et al. find that people with SARS-CoV-2 infection were at increased risk (at 1 year) of incident and prevalent psychiatric disorders and psychotropic prescriptions, especially those hospitalized for COVID-19 or those not fully vaccinated.

This pre-registered systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis examined the effects of receiving touch for promoting mental and physical well-being, quantifying the efficacy of touch interventions for different ways of administration.

Challenging long-held assumptions, this research reveals that people can learn to control bionic hands just as effectively, and in some ways better, using arbitrary control strategies compared with control strategies that mimic the human body.

How does the brain support a wide range of behaviours? Mohan et al. examine how the direction of travelling waves of neural oscillations coordinates interactions between brain regions to support different functional processes in memory.

Wandelt et al. describe a brain–machine interface that captures intracortical neural activity during internal speech (words said within the mind with no associated movement or audio output) and translates those cortical signals into real-time text.

This study demonstrates the decomposition of an odour compound in olfactory perception and central neural representation and establishes a direct correspondence between the coding of submolecular chemical features and odour quality.

By digitizing a large lexical dataset of Chinese dialects and comparing it to genetic profiles, Yang et al. reveal a hybrid model of language diffusion, consisting of both population migrations and social learning across different regions of China.

In 653,790 individuals, this multi-ancestral meta-analysis of tobacco use disorder finds 461 potential risk genes and hundreds of associations with health outcomes, showcasing the utility of electronic health records for genetic research.

In this large-scale exome-wide association study, Deng, Wu, Yang, He et al. report genetic associations of protein-coding variants with neurodegenerative diseases and mental disorders, including for 50 new genes.

The authors introduce Ouvrai, an open-source solution that facilitates the design and execution of remote virtual reality studies, capitalizing on the surge in virtual reality headset ownership.