Double-blind fMRI test at Yale links hydrocortisone to stronger emotional memories
Yale researchers report that cortisol strengthens emotional memories by changing how brain networks communicate, measured in five-second fMRI trials. Each participant was scanned once on hydrocortisone and once on placebo.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence45
Yale physicist says fixing flawed problems raised AI physics scores to as high as 94%
Yale's John Sous says correcting errors in physics benchmark problems lifted cutting-edge AI scores from as low as 30% to as high as 94%. Well-defined problems may be within reach, but the case that physics will follow maths is still open.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption15
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence45
Yale researchers built a microfluidic chip whose flexible fibers switch between two stable states, so each one can hold a bit of flow history. The Physical Review X study points to all-fluid controllers for soft robots, though the account of it describes only a chip.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence65
Letters from dealer Ibrahim Gejou trace Kish tablets to Iraqi diggers before the French arrived
Letters from dealer Ibrahim Elias Gejou show Kish tablets from Iraqi digs on offer to the British Museum in 1909, a UCL study reports. The date sits three years before the French dig of 1912, so the letters reach about 9% of a 32-year gap in official digging.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence60
Caltech and Yale researchers calculate the Kondo effect from real materials' atomic structure
Caltech and Yale researchers report in Science a way to calculate the Kondo effect from a material's actual atomic and electronic structure. Their test systems, magnetic atoms in metals, are among the simplest strongly correlated materials and well short of the superconductors Caltech says the method could help simulate.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives60
- Confidence45
Labor Department investigators have subpoenaed nine universities, Harvard and MIT among them, over J-1 visas held by foreign postdocs. The White House did not immediately source Vance's case, a 61% J-1 rate at the schools against a 38% national average.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
Retatrutide's top dose cut body weight by a quarter over 80 weeks in a 2,339-adult trial
Retatrutide's 12 mg dose cut body weight 25% over 80 weeks, versus 3.9% on placebo, in a 2,339-adult phase 3 trial in NEJM. Its near-30% two-year figure comes from 532 completers, and because placebo was the only comparator, the trial cannot rank the drug against Ozempic.
Reality
- Evidence65
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives70
- Confidence60
Black holes wander dwarf galaxies for billions of years in an unpinned cosmological simulation
Yale-led work in The Astrophysical Journal Letters ran the ASTRID simulation without fixing black holes to galactic centres. Mergers left them off-centre for billions of years, most often in the smallest galaxies.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives50
- Confidence55
Counting what happens without lime turns Mississippi Basin liming into a net CO2 sink
A Yale-led team writing in Nature argues that crushed limestone spread on farmland across 41 percent of the contiguous United States removes more CO2 than it releases, because the acid it neutralises would have released CO2 anyway.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption40
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives65
- Confidence50
Iron meteorite chemistry puts the earliest planetesimals at 8 to 17 percent icy dust
Yale researchers read the original makeup of planetesimals that melted so thoroughly their textures vanished, and place the Solar System's preference for heat-formed rock beads inside the first million years.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives70
- Confidence48
Electron diffraction placed a cobalt hydride's hydrogen nearer the neutron reference than X-rays did
Yale chemists checked hydride placements in one open-shell cobalt crystal against a neutron structure, and the microcrystal electron diffractometer came closest. The comparison rests on that single compound.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives62
- Confidence55
Starling's SVB review says private messages, mobile banking accelerated-but didn't cause-2023 run
The first report from the Fed's outside review of its own Silicon Valley Bank supervision backs most of what three earlier audits found, but clears the social media posts blamed in 2023 of creating the condition depositors ran from.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption12
- Hype gap−10
- Incentives60
- Confidence52
Melted meteorites date the sorting of rock over ice to the solar system's first million years
A Yale-led team could not sample planetesimals from the first million years, because every one of them melted, so it reconstructed their make-up from sulfur and iron oxidation in iron meteorites and got 8% to 17% icy dust.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives55
- Confidence58
The hand, the page size and the annotation colour all match, which is how six loose leaves in a Brighton archive were fitted to Takamiya MS 20 at Yale. Sir John Gage's motives are the softer part of the case.
Reality
- Evidence72
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives55
- Confidence66
Hedgehog coronaviruses entered cells through the cat version of aminopeptidase N
A Washington State University-led team could not grow these MERS relatives, so it rebuilt their spike proteins and screened aminopeptidase N from about 30 species, finding the human version unusable and the cat, rat and elephant shrew versions open.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives55
- Confidence58
A plasma upstream of a copper electrode turns CO2 into methanol and butane
A Yale group reports in Nature Catalysis that exciting CO2 in a plasma before it reaches a copper electrode yields methanol and butane, products the team says electrocatalysis alone does not make. The cell runs at room temperature.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives65
- Confidence45
Musk's $1tn award costs Tesla holders a seventh of the market value he must create
Getting Tesla from $1.43tn to $8.5tn means adding $7.07tn. A $1tn option package against that gap works out to 14.1 cents of every new dollar - cheap if it buys a million robotaxis, expensive if it merely buys an executive's attention.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption15
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives80
- Confidence55
Cellphone data puts human presence alongside roads in explaining where wildlife goes
Weekly GPS from thousands of tracked animals, matched against anonymized phone traces from 2019 and 2020, ties human presence to shifts in range and niche for roughly two-thirds of mammal and bird species. That points management toward access as much as acreage.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+26
- Incentives68
- Confidence54
Placing scraps of tortoise DNA on a reference tree recovers two extinct Galapagos lineages
In some specimens fewer than 1% of the genome could be read, coverage most pipelines throw away. The Yale team placed those fragments against a tree of good genomes instead, which is why the museum drawer is the real finding.
Reality
- Evidence61
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+16
- Incentives68
- Confidence47
Yale fieldwork finds each Lac Télé village keeping its own flood calendar
Floods in the Congo Basin's Lac Télé reserve arrive earlier and stay longer, but a year of interviews in six of 27 villages found timing and coping so village-specific that one basin-wide adaptation plan would misfire.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives60
- Confidence42