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Martin Shkreli, the former drug firm executive found guilty of defrauding investors, has been sentenced to seven years in prison.

He first became notorious in 2015 for hiking the price of a lifesaving drug.His lawyers had asked the judge to impose a sentence of 12 to 18 months, while prosecutors were seeking at least 15 years.

In 2015 the youthful executive made headlines after he founded Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price by 5,000% to $750 (£540) per pill.

Verbal abuse is the tip of the iceberg, according to the report.

They just told me they were supposed to be good for me and help with the progress of the 'treatment'," he explained.

How does family pressure lead to 'treatment'? All of those interviewed told Human Rights Watch that they were forcefully taken to "conversion" therapy. This often occurred within days of coming out to their parents, who felt "ashamed" that their children were gay.

We are learning a lot right now about the neuroscience of emotions. Specifically, we are learning that there is a lot of overlap between the way we process physical pain and the way we process emotional pain.

Understanding emotional pain could be powerful in understanding a lot of the common emotional maladies that are regularly treated with psychotherapy or mood altering medications. Depression, anxiety, trauma, social pain, these are all debilitating disorders that are poorly understood and often poorly treated.

Humans are a unique species in two ways that account for our intense response to social rejection. We are born physically immature because of our enormous heads, and we require a lot of care early on. Because of our immaturity at birth, our species has selected for a deeply innate sense of bonding between individuals. The other unique feature of our species is that we require a lot of calories, probably also due to our oversized brains. Brains are calorie intensive organs and our brains are huge. So, humans burn about 400 more calories per day than other primates when you account for size [2]. Since we burn so much food, we as a species, have an innate drive to share food, which may have allowed us to get through bad hunting or gathering days in early human history. So, humans are naturally drawn to bond with others and to be conscious of aligning with a group of people where food sharing is possible.

how your brain learns

Learning builds on prior knowledge

The human brain consists of special cells called neurons

Smartphones, those digital portals of constant information, have become so integrated into most Americans’ lives, they’re like extra—yet essential—appendages. Some 72 percent of Americans own a smartphone, compared to the global median of 43 percent. But studies have shown that overuse can have a negative impact on your posture, eyesight, and hearing, not to mention distract drivers and pedestrians. More recently, researchers who study the relationship of mobile phone use and mental health have also found that excessive or “maladaptive” use of our phones may be leading to greater incidences of depression and anxiety in users.

Cell phones, and smartphones in particular, have an undeniably addictive quality, earning an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 5th edition. A review of literature on cell phone addiction, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, describes cell phone and technology addiction manifesting in one or more of the following ways: choosing to use your device even in "dangerous or prohibited contexts;" losing interest in other activities; feeling irritable or uneasy if separated from your phone; or feeling anxiety or loneliness when you’re unable to send or receive an immediate message. The researchers also find that adolescents and women may be more susceptible to this behavioral addiction.

So while the research remains inconclusive, it might be worth taking a look at how you feel before and after you spend copious amounts of time on your cell phone. It may be harmless—or it may offer an opportunity to improve your mental health.

In a study published in the journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology, researchers at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey screened the mobile phones of 200 health care workers in hospitals for germs that are known to be dangerous to human health.

The solution to this problem may be decidedly low tech -- disinfectant spray and a paper towel.

Specifically, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studied the brain waves of drivers using cell phones -- and they found that even just listening to a conversation reduced the amount of brain activity devoted to driving by 37 percent

"Cabin fever is not like a psychological disorder, so I wouldn't say there's any sort of official definition of it," said Vaile Wright, a psychologist and director of clinical research and quality at the American Psychological Association.

"It involves a range of negative emotions and distress related to restricted movement: irritability, boredom, some hopelessness and even, behaviorally, restlessness and difficulty concentrating. Those would be the constellation of symptoms one might expect if they were feeling that way."

Your personality and temperament are major factors in how quickly you develop these kinds of emotions, Wright said.

This was the moment Dr. Wermke, a biologist and medical anthropologist who studies babies’ first sounds, had been waiting for. She made a recording for later analysis in her lab, Würzburg University Clinic’s Center for Pre-Speech Development and Developmental Disorders. But even without the aid of computerized tools, Dr. Wermke could make out a distinctive pattern in Joris’s wail.“He really cried in German just now, right?” she said, smiling as she packed up her equipment.

In 2009, Dr. Wermke’s and her colleagues made headlines with a study showing that French and German newborns produce distinctly different “cry melodies,” reflecting the languages they heard in utero: German newborns produce more cries that fall from a higher to a lower pitch, mimicking the falling intonation of the German language, while French infants tend to cry with the rising intonation of French. At this age, babies experiment with a wide variety of sounds, and can learn any language. But they are already influenced by their mother tongue.

After they are born, young babies mimic many different sounds. But they are especially shaped by the prosody they heard in the womb, which becomes a handy guide to the strange sounds coming from the people around them. Through stress, pauses and other cues, prosody cuts up the stream of sound into words and phrases – that is, into speech.

The nature of reality and questions about the existence of God and the order of things are discussed in metaphysics.

Applied psychology promotes the use of psychological principles in order to find solutions to various problems or help people suffering from mental or behavioral disorders.

Psychology uses the scientific method to understand human behavior.

The Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act provides the first federal funds allocated specifically for the homeless population. The act includes provisions for mental health services, and responds, in part, to psychological studies on homelessness and mental disorders.

A study showed that people with generalized anxiety disorder unconsciously label harmless things as threats, which may serve to further their anxiety.

In overgeneralization, the brain lumps both safe and unsafe things together and labels them all unsafe. For this reason, the researchers also call this the “better safe than sorry” approach. Our brains naturally pay more attention to negative or threatening information in our environments. If anxious people perceive more threats in the world around them, it would make a lot of sense for them to be worried.

Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.

Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem.

His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to “regularity structures”, so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.

The term “vagus nerve” is actually shorthand for thousands of fibers. They are organized into two bundles that run from the brain stem down through each side of the neck and into the torso, branching outward to touch our internal organs, said Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, a neurosurgeon and president of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health’s research center in New York.

Scientists first began examining the vagus nerve in the late 1800s to investigate whether stimulating it could be a potential treatment for epilepsy. They later discovered that a side effect of activating the nerve was an improvement in mood. Today, researchers are examining how the nerve can affect psychiatric disorders, among other conditions.

Researchers are now recruiting patients for the largest clinical trial to date examining to what degree vagus nerve stimulation may help patients with depression who have been unable to find relief with other treatments.

In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.

Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.

“What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”

Mermaids, the UK charity for, in their own words, ‘gender variant and transgender children’ is under the spotlight. Following investigations by the Telegraph and Mail newspapers, as well as demands from critics concerned about child safeguarding, the Charity Commission has launched a regulatory compliance case and have said that they have written to the organisation’s trustees

The investigations found that Mermaids has been offering breast binders to girls reportedly as young as 13, and despite children saying their parents opposed the practice. Binding can often cause breathing difficulties, back pain and broken ribs. It was also uncovered that kids have been ‘congratulated’ online for identifying as transgender by staff and volunteers on the charity’s online help centre, with teenagers being advised that puberty blockers are safe and ‘totally reversible’.

Mermaids has been given half a million pounds in total from the National Lottery, and lauded by the likes of Emma Watson, Jameela Jamil and even Harry and Meghan. In other words, the charity has had powerful supporters and been like Teflon for a very long time. Starbucks did a fundraiser for them, more than 40 schools invited them in to educate teachers and kids about ‘gender identity’, and a number of corporates sponsor the charity.

Anxiety, for many people, is like an unwelcome houseguest — a lingering presence that causes tension, clouds the mind with endless “what ifs” and shows up as various physical sensations.

About 12 percent of U.S. adults regularly felt worry, nervousness or anxiety, according to a National Health Interview Survey conducted between October and December 2022.

Anxiety, though, is not the puppeteer pulling the strings in many of our lives. There is a more subtle and insidious marionette, and it’s called psychological avoidance. When we avoid certain situations and decisions, it can lead to heightened anxiety and more problems.

Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”

That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption

“We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”

The experience of young users on Meta’s Instagram—where Bejar had spent the previous two years working as a consultant—was especially acute. In a subsequent email to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, one statistic stood out: One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days.

For Bejar, that finding was hardly a surprise. His daughter and her friends had been receiving unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment on the platform since the age of 14, he wrote, and Meta’s systems generally ignored their reports—or responded by saying that the harassment didn’t violate platform rules.

“I asked her why boys keep doing that,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants. “She said if the only thing that happens is they get blocked, why wouldn’t they?”

An APA survey released in February 2020 found that 56% of U.S. adults said that climate change is the most important issue facing the world today

More than two-thirds (68%) of the adults APA surveyed said they had “at least a little ‘eco-anxiety,’” or anxiety or worry about climate change and its effects.

Nearly half (48%) of young adults ages 18 to 34 said they felt stress over climate change in their daily lives.