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This week, researchers uncovered the negative pressure mechanisms plants use to communicate stress. Linguists found that the melody of spoken language in English functions as its own, distinct language. And there was also depressing news! Like the Trump administration slashing NASA's budget, which could scrap the James Webb Space Telescope right at the beginning of its operational life (they're also pushing to scrap the completed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope before its launch).

Additionally, researchers found that the video game Dark Souls has positive psychological effects on players; a physicist made a new contribution to the theory that the universe is a computational process; and scientists in Spain mapped the brain connectivity patterns of psychosis patients:

Game, like life, difficult

Researchers at Aalto University found that Dark Souls, a famously difficult dark fantasy action game by Japanese developer From Software, . In the game, set in the fictional world of Lordran, the player's character engages in extraordinarily difficult melee fights against armored knights, mythical beasts and supernatural figures, collecting souls, which act as experience points and are used primarily to level the player character's stats. Accumulated, unspent souls are lost on character death but recoverable if the player returns to the point where they died.

The researchers conducted an in-depth thematic analysis of player discussions on Reddit, focusing on personal narratives relating to mental health. Many players expressed that the structure of the Dark Souls games helped with acceptance of failures as part of the process of life.

Researcher Jaakko Väkevä says, "Dark Souls, through its ruthless difficulty and powerful narrative themes, seemed to empower many players to confront their real-life struggles with perseverance and hope." The researchers emphasize that while gaming is not a replacement for therapeutic approaches, thoughtful game structure can have positive impacts on mental health.

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Information theory was formulated in the 1940s and deals with the quantification and storage of information and its communication. It turns out that the physics principle of entropy is a fundamental concept in information theory, and over the decades, the precepts of information theory have found application in neurobiology, molecular dynamics and theoretical physics—including the nature of black holes. The theory has become so far-reaching that physicists have explored whether the universe itself comprises a massive computational process.

A physicist from the University of Portsmouth has presented findings suggesting that gravity is the result of a computational process within the universe. His paper proposes that gravity might be a process that organizes matter in the universe; matter and objects in space could be pulled together to keep the information of the universe orderly.

The author, Dr. Melvin Vopson, says, "Put simply, it is far more computationally effective to track and compute the location and momentum of a single object in space than numerous objects. Therefore, it appears that the gravitational attraction is just another optimizing mechanism in a computational process that has the role to compress information."

Neural connectivity patterns of psychosis

Researchers in Barcelona, Spain, conducted a and reported on which neural mechanisms allow psychosis to remit in patients. Psychosis is a serious mental health disorder that results in difficulty distinguishing what is and is not real; its symptoms include delusions and hallucinations, and it can cause sleep problems and social withdrawal.

In the study, the researchers compared the neural connectivity patterns of patients who recovered from psychosis with those of patients who did not. The group included 88 patients in the early stages of psychosis and 128 healthy individuals. They used computational models to identify the differences in neural connectivity and identify the patterns that facilitate remission of psychosis. They found that brain network connectivity of patients with persistent symptoms of psychosis decreased; in those patients recovering, they increased.

The differences in connectivity were profound; the researchers describe them as nearly opposite of each other. Both recovered patients and psychotic patients had lower overall stability of neuronal connections than healthy patients. But among those patients who were recovering, the increase in connectivity contributed broadly toward remission.

The researchers believe the findings can contribute to predictions of patient outcomes as well as the assessment of individual therapies, including pharmacological and electromagnetic treatments.

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