In a lab experiment with 201 students, pairs who did a 45-minute closeness exercise in a cold, cluttered office felt as close and as romantically interested as pairs in a cozy lounge with lamps, art and a couch.

A meta-analysis of 154 studies with 10,189 participants found meditation, mindfulness, relaxation and yoga cut anger and aggression (g = -0.63), while arousing activities like punching bags or running had no overall effect and jogging increased anger.

Students who just missed Indiana’s third-grade reading cutoff and repeated the year scored over half a standard deviation higher in reading and math in fourth grade, with a reading gain of about 0.2 SD still visible in seventh grade and no sign of extra discipline or absences.

Studying 220,992 forecasts by 1,392 U.S. analysts, researchers found that those near company headquarters, peers and investors lost accuracy after COVID lockdowns forced remote work, especially star analysts; the edge returned once offices reopened.

In three experiments with 1,880 Germans and Americans, left-leaning people judged a report claiming liberals out-think conservatives as more valid than the identical report about White and Black people. White US conservatives showed the mirror image; Black conservatives showed no preference.

In two US studies, Republicans rated meat as tastier and ate it more often, while Democrats rated plant protein foods higher. Plant-based endorsements from a participant’s own party leaders barely helped and even made a beef and pork meatball taste worse.

A global simulation finds tropical seaweed farms could be scaled up to the equivalent of 45% of human food demand in 9 to 14 months after a nuclear war, and growth increases with the severity of the war as cooling stirs up ocean nutrients.

Using US survey data from 1972 to 2021, researchers found that rising polarization comes from people within each generation sorting by party, while Millennials are among the least polarized cohorts and Boomers the most sorted.