Mind & body, in brief

Eight US states sued OpenAI, the company that makes the chatbot ChatGPT, on Wednesday, each in its own state court. [1][2]

The states are Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia. [2][3]

It is the first time several US states have taken coordinated legal action against an AI company. [1]

They say ChatGPT gave dangerous medical advice and coached some users towards suicide, while OpenAI told the public it was safe. [1][2]

Arizona's complaint says OpenAI won users' trust through 'excessive agreement and simulated compassion', then collected their personal data. [3]

The states want fines, age checks and parental controls, and West Virginia wants night-time limits for children. [3]

Iowa wants OpenAI to delete all the data it holds on Iowans, and to pay fines of up to $40,000 for each violation. [3]

Several states also want OpenAI barred from testing its most advanced AI models outside secure, independently checked settings. [1][3]

OpenAI says it built age protections that 'many other AI products lack', and wants rules that apply to the whole industry. [1][2]

The suits follow Florida's in June, the first by a US state over ChatGPT's design, and a criminal investigation Florida opened in April. [4][5]

A Canadian mother also sued in June, saying ChatGPT agreed with her daughter's suicidal thoughts and kept her talking. [8]

In a Science study in March, 11 leading chatbots sided with users whom people had judged to be in the wrong in 51% of cases. [10]

A review of reported cases says chatbots are trained in a way that rewards answers users like, which pushes them to agree. [11]

Researchers have described how a chatbot that mirrors a user's words and avoids contradicting them could deepen a false belief, but that idea is still untested. [12][13]

Why it matters. Each state filed in its own court, so watch whether any judge orders age checks, time limits or data deletion before a trial, and whether more states file. [1][3]

About 20.5 million Americans held health insurance they bought themselves in June 2026, down from 25.2 million a year earlier, KFF, a US health research group, estimated. [15] That 18% fall is steeper than earlier counts showed. [15] Most of these people buy plans on marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law often called Obamacare. [15] Extra federal help with premiums ended in 2025, and the average subsidised buyer's cost to keep the same plan rose about 114%. [16]

Why it matters. Insurers have proposed a median 15% price rise for 2027, partly expecting healthier customers to leave. [15] In a KFF survey, 9% of last year's marketplace buyers said they now had no insurance at all. [15]

From January 2027, adults covered by Medicaid's expansion in 44 US states must work, study or volunteer 80 hours a month, or prove they are exempt. [18] Medicaid is the US public health insurance for people on low incomes. [18] KFF says people waiting to get SSI, a US disability payment, may struggle to prove they are 'medically frail', one of the exemptions. [18] In 2023, over 100,000 new SSI recipients had been on expansion Medicaid first. [18]

Why it matters. These applicants could face two separate tests of whether they can work, one for SSI and a faster one for Medicaid. [18] People waiting the two years before disability benefits bring Medicare, the US cover for older and disabled people, face the same risk. [19]

If clocks stop changing, permanent standard time is better for health than permanent summer time, says an analysis in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. [20] Its authors, psychiatrist Raymond Lam and sleep researcher Ralph Mistlberger, say morning light is what resets the body's internal clock each day. [20] In Toronto, the latest winter sunrise would be 7:51am under standard time and 8:51am under summer time. [20] Manitoba this year joined British Columbia, Alberta and the Northwest Territories in keeping summer time all year. [21]

Why it matters. Canadian teenagers already sleep about an hour less on school days than at weekends, and nurses who study their sleep warn that darker mornings will add to it. [22] Manitoba will not turn its clocks back on 1 November. [21]

Saul Newman, a researcher at University College London and Oxford, told Scientific American that the data behind the Blue Zones is deeply flawed. [23] Blue Zones are a few places said to have unusually many people living past 100, first named for villages in Sardinia, an Italian island. [24] Newman says that in Japan in 2010, about 236,000 people listed as centenarians, roughly 82% of them, turned out to be long dead. [23] His book, Morbid, came out this year. [25]

Why it matters. The idea has sold best-selling books, a Netflix series and diet plans. [23] If the oldest records are wrong, the habits credited with long life in those places have less behind them than readers were told.

Compass Pathways, a British company, said it will finish asking the US Food and Drug Administration to approve COMP360 this quarter, and aims to launch early next year. [26] COMP360 is a lab-made form of psilocybin, the drug in magic mushrooms, for depression that other treatments have not helped. [26] In its large trials about a quarter of patients had a clear response after one dose, and about 40% after a second. [26] Chief executive Kabir Nath said the company would 'go slow before we go fast'. [26]

Why it matters. Steven Hyman, a former head of the US National Institute of Mental Health, said patients can usually tell they got the drug, which makes fair trials hard. [26] Nobody yet knows how much of the benefit comes from the drug and how much from the experience. [26]

Scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK traced how a rare cancer passed from one twin to the other before birth. [27] The twins, Amelia and Amaya, were born at 34 weeks with tumours in many organs and died soon after. [27] Two genes fused by mistake in one twin near the end of the first trimester, and her cancer cells later crossed to her sister, probably through their shared blood vessels. [27] The DNA also showed that one twin grew from a single early cell. [27]

Why it matters. Identical twins were long thought to come from an embryo splitting in half, and this case shows it does not always happen that way. [27] The twins' mother asked for the study so that something could be learned from their deaths. [27]

Microbiologists led by Danny Ionescu at the Technical University of Berlin found DNA from Epulopiscium, one of the largest known bacteria, in thousands of human gut samples. [28] Most bacteria are about 2 micrometres long, while these can reach 600 micrometres, about 300 times longer. [28] The team searched DNA from more than 600,000 microbiomes, the mixed communities of microbes living in a body. [28] The bacteria showed up most in babies' first year and in people with inflamed guts. [28]

Why it matters. Ionescu thinks they move in when the gut is already out of balance, which could make them an early warning sign. [28] Nicola Segata of the University of Trento says the DNA could belong to some other, ordinary-sized microbe, and only microscope pictures will settle it. [28]

Researchers at Northwestern University and the Buck Institute studied the proteins in healthy ovaries from 28 women past menopause, aged from their 50s to over 70. [29] Ovaries stop releasing eggs at menopause, and many scientists assumed they then did little. [29] The mix of proteins shifted with age: younger ovaries had more for keeping tissue in repair, older ones more linked to fat use, the immune system and inflammation. [29] The study is in the journal Aging Cell. [29]

Why it matters. Ovarian cancer is far more common after menopause, and the authors think the scarred, inflamed older ovary may be easier ground for cancer cells. [29] They now want to test whether that ageing can be slowed or used as an early warning. [29]

A study of 114 adults with long-lasting low back pain found that a leg lift that worsened their pain switched on the brain's default mode network. [30] That network is a group of brain areas that is busy when people think about themselves or let their minds wander. [30] Short pain, like heat on the skin, normally quiets it, and heat on the calf did so in this study too. [30] The work, from the University of California, San Diego, appeared on 5 October in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. [30]

Why it matters. The team thinks long-term pain may become part of how a person experiences themselves, and that treatment could aim at how people relate to their pain. [30] A Duke University scientist cautions that the scans cannot show whether these brain changes cause the pain or follow it. [30]

A study in Nature mapped microexons, very short pieces of genes, 3 to 27 genetic letters long, that brain cells add in when they read a gene. [31] The team found hundreds of new ones and built a computer model of the signals that tell brain cells to include them. [31] It then found rare DNA changes in autistic people that are predicted to upset this step. [31] Most were in people whose autism has no known genetic cause, which is about 85% of autistic people. [31]

Why it matters. Most of these changes sit in stretches of DNA that do not themselves make proteins, where the effect of a change is hard to predict. [31] Earlier work had already found this cutting-and-joining step often goes wrong in autistic brains. [31]

Psychologists in Beirut compared three groups of Lebanese adults: one tested before the 2024 war, and two tested after it, with and without having fled their homes. [32] Lebanon had already lived through years of crises before that war. [32] The groups tested after the war did not show more post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression than the group tested before. [32] Resilience scores were lowest among people who had not been displaced. [32]

Why it matters. A computer reading of their life stories found flatter emotion rather than more distress, a change that symptom checklists did not pick up. [32] The authors argue such checklists can miss how a war changes people.

A study of 85,162 strokes and mini-strokes in Israel from 2014 to 2018 linked them to nitrogen dioxide, a gas in polluted air, in the days before. [33] A mini-stroke is a short blockage of blood to the brain that passes on its own. Researchers matched daily levels of the gas to each patient's home address. [33] Higher exposure raised the odds of a stroke by about 6%, with the strongest link three to five days before, and more in cities than suburbs. [33]

Why it matters. Most pollution research looks at fine soot particles, and this study allowed for those and for temperature. [33] It suggests that a few bad days of air can matter, not only years of breathing it.

A review in a Nature journal pulled together 25 studies of surgery in Sudan since war broke out in April 2023 between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group. [34] Within months, about 58.5% of public hospitals in Khartoum State, around the capital, had closed. [34] In combat zones, 70% to 80% of hospitals stopped working in the first year. [34] One study of 1,457 patients found complications after surgery in 57.6% in combat zones and 26.4% in safer areas. [34]

Why it matters. Specialist surgery had been concentrated in Khartoum, so the fighting there took it away from the whole country. [34] Even before the war, over half of Sudan's licensed doctors worked abroad. [34]

Ulf Kallweit, a neurologist at the European Academy of Neurology, said strokes caused by heat are about 1% of strokes today and could be 5 to 8% in 20 to 30 years. [35] He spoke to Euronews at the European Health Forum Gastein, a health policy meeting in Austria. [35] Stroke cases rise once temperatures pass 30C, he said, and nights above 20C disturb the deep sleep the body needs. [35]

Why it matters. Children, pregnant women, older people and those in poorer homes without air conditioning carry the most risk, he said. [35] His figures are an expert's estimate given in an interview, not a new study.

Researchers counted $3.2 billion in US National Institutes of Health money for basic research on cystic fibrosis from 1985 to 2012, plus about $940 million for drug research. [36] Cystic fibrosis is an inherited disease in which thick mucus blocks the lungs. [36] That work came before Vertex's drug Kalydeco in 2012 and the medicines that followed. [36] In 1979 the median age of death from it was 15. [36] Half of the children born with it in the US today are expected to live past 66. [36]

Why it matters. The authors warn that Trump administration plans for more political control over research grants could slow the next such drugs. [36] The US Congress has blocked those plans for now, but several agencies are still pursuing parts of them, they write. [36]

A study led by University College London read 29,745 lung scans from 12,478 people in a lung cancer screening trial. [37] A computer model measured bone loss, fat in muscle, hardened arteries and belly fat on each scan, and from those estimated each person's biological age. [37] Every decade a body looked older than its real age doubled the risk of dying of something other than lung cancer. [37]

Why it matters. Screening for lung cancer helps most when a person lives long enough to benefit from finding it early. [37] The same scan could help doctors judge who that is.

A study of India's 2018 National Sample Survey found people with intellectual and developmental disabilities had a 71.3% chance of no formal education. [38] For people with a mental illness the figure was 48.3%. [38] Among people with a mental illness, women were 18.7 percentage points more likely than men to have had no schooling. [38] Richer households narrowed that gap between women and men but did not close it. [38]

Why it matters. The authors say more money alone will not fix it, and call for mental health and school policies built with girls and women in mind. [38] About one in eight people in the world lives with a mental illness, they note. [38]

Researchers studied children with severe malnutrition in Jamaica and Malawi. [39] One form, which includes kwashiorkor, makes the body swell and harms many organs, and 10-20% of children in hospital with it and other complications die. [39] The team found six places in the DNA linked to that form, four of them tied to how the body handles folate, a B vitamin. [39] Severe acute malnutrition affects 16.9 million children worldwide. [39]

Why it matters. It may help explain why some starving children swell while others waste away. [39] The genetic differences were linked to a shared East African ancestry. [39]

Long-lasting stress made brain cells in male mice trap iron in a circuit that links two areas involved in emotion and decisions, a study in a Nature journal found. [40] The trapped iron made those cells fire more easily, and the mice behaved more anxiously. [40] A nasal spray that blocked two signalling proteins let the iron flow again and eased the anxious behaviour. [40] The authors write that anxiety disorders affect more than a quarter of people worldwide. [40]

Why it matters. This was in mice, and only male ones, so it points to a possible new kind of drug rather than a treatment. [40] Today's anxiety medicines often take weeks to work, the authors note. [40]