SCIENMAG

In classrooms across England's West Midlands, a quiet revolution in early childhood intervention is taking shape, and its name is playfully informal: Tizz Time. A newly published study in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma describes how this trauma-informed, violence prevention programme for children aged just three to six years old is showing promising early signs of success, offering a rare evidence-based option for a developmental window that researchers say has long been neglected.

Every family has its storms, but new research suggests that the arguments parents have with each other may quietly set the stage for the arguments they later have with their teenagers. A longitudinal study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies has traced how conflict between parents spills over into conflict between parents and their adolescent children, and it identifies a specific psychological mechanism-psychological reactance-that helps explain why this transfer happens.

Social communication lies at the heart of autism, and measuring it well in young children has long been a stubborn problem for clinicians and researchers alike. A team at The Ohio State University has now unveiled a new parent-report questionnaire, the Questionnaire for Social Communication in Young Autistic Learners, or Q-SoCiAL, that promises to change how early social communication is tracked in autistic children between the ages of two and six.

Early-life stress may not affect everyone in the same way, and a new study in rats offers some of the most detailed evidence yet that the timing of adversity, the sex of the individual, and a second hit of stress in adolescence can combine to shape the brain and body's long-term response to stress and alcohol.

One of the more provocative ideas in modern evolutionary psychology has just been dismantled in a detailed critical review published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The "male choice hypothesis," first proposed by Menelaos Apostolou and colleagues, argued that same-sex attractions among predominantly heterosexual women evolved because they benefit men-by reducing the risk of cuckoldry, by opening doors to additional mating partners, and by improving relationship quality.

Nigeria's ambitious 2026 progressive tax reform has become one of the most closely watched fiscal experiments in the developing world, and a new study now offers the first structured, quantitative glimpse of what the reform might mean for the country's economy.

Durban, one of Africa's fastest-growing coastal cities, now has the most detailed picture yet of where extreme rainfall will strike hardest. A team of researchers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal has produced a municipal-scale risk map of eThekwini Municipality that pinpoints, suburb by suburb, which communities face the greatest threat from the kind of torrential storms that killed more than 400 people in April 2022.

In the floodplain communities of the Peruvian Amazon, danger rarely announces itself through raw magnitude alone. A new study published in the journal Ambio argues that for people who live along the region's winding rivers, the most disruptive hydrological events are those that arrive at the wrong time-too early, too late, or lasting too long relative to the seasonal rhythms that structure daily life. The research, led by Heidi D.

In a remarkable meeting of physics and history, an international team of researchers has uncovered a hidden code of intent written into the very chemistry of medieval ink.

In a development that could reshape how the world's most delicate heart operations are planned, researchers have shown that fusing three different medical imaging technologies into a single 3D-printed heart model gives pediatric cardiac surgeons a markedly better grasp of complex congenital heart defects than the single-modality models they have relied on until now.