Thursday, June 04, 2026

Youth-led book on social media and mental health highlights a complex mix of harms and supports

Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

A new book titled SocialsVoice shines a light on the relationship between social media content and mental health from the perspective of Latino youth—a group that engages with social media across multiple languages and cultural perspectives. Through concrete examples, the book presents a complex portrait of their experiences online, including both the mental health risks posed by certain content and the presence of supportive, anti-stigmatizing voices.

The book project was led by Melissa DuPont-Reyes, assistant professor of epidemiology and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, working in partnership with research collaborators and participants. The book draws on findings from a research study focused on 41 participating Latino youths ages 13 to 24, and 28 of their parents, all recruited from community-based organizations across the United States. Unlike previous research that relied on surveys or app data, the book is based on participatory research. Youth didn’t just answer survey questions; they also shared social media clips they encountered and analyzed how those clips helped or harmed their mental health. (Download a copy of the book here.)

Through dozens of richly illustrated examples and reflections throughout the book, youth identify rampant stigmatizing content, including posts claiming mental illness isn’t “real,” minimizing depression, reinforcing stereotypes, and promoting toxic masculinity. At the same time, they point to evidence of a powerful, youth-led anti-stigma movement, featuring mental health education, symptom management, suicide awareness, and self-care strategies. The book also shows how Latino youth use social media to discuss stigma and social issues occurring in real life, like racism, immigration, vaccine hesitancy, school shootings, poverty, sexual assault, and LGBTQIA+ support.

“We hope that this book helps elevate youth voices to inform policies, practices, and programs concerning social media. Too often, youth voices are misunderstood or ignored altogether. The SocialsVoice project also exemplifies how participatory research approaches are a powerful, community-generated response to concerns about the safety and utility of social media,” says DuPont-Reyes.

Example of a Negative Social Media Post

A 22-year-old female study participant reacts to a video clip featuring a man speaking to the camera about depression who says, “That’s some made-up sh*it.”:
“In this clip, he states that depression isn’t real. It is self-preservation, but only being able to self-preserve and survive day after day instead of living makes a depressed person.”

Example of a Positive Social Media Post

A 17-year-old male participant reacts to a TikTok video of a woman speaking about how she gives herself time to process and act on her feelings:

“This clip can educate others on how important it is to allow ourselves time to deal with our problems and not just set them to the side or ignore them.”

“Mindfulness Behind the Screen”

The book also highlights how young people are learning to set boundaries, curate positive content, and use “mindfulness behind the screen.” In the words of one 16-year-old female participant: “Social media is both good and bad, because you could be randomly using it and a bad video pops up, and then it makes your mental health worse, and then it keeps happening. However, you could also use social media to look for better videos and be like ‘Oh, okay, it’s actually not as toxic as initially shown’ because then you’re actively making changes to your algorithm and making sure that it’s better for your mental health.”

About the SocialsVoice Study

SocialsVoice began with youth participants defining what they considered to be positive and negative mental health content. Then, the youth were randomly assigned to groups of either the positive or negative mental health–themed content and invited to share social media clips depicting their assigned theme. Throughout seven video-chat sessions, the youth discussed their thematic social media clips in their groups. The study concluded with youth co-creating their own videos about their research findings that their peers and parents would find relevant and useful. Youth and parent participants were invited to watch the co-created videos together during a virtual film screening event. Links to the videos are available in the book.

Co-Authors, Funding, and Disclosures

Additional book co-authors include Victoria Mello, Columbia Mailman School; Alice P. Villatoro, Santa Clara University Department of Public Health; and Lu Tang, Texas A&M University Department of Communication and Journalism. Illustrations and layout are by Lauren West.

Research support was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (MH135489) and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (79700). Additional support was provided by the Columbia University Social Psychiatry Innovation in Research, Implementation, and Training

(SPIRIT) Initiative Pilot Award; the Columbia University Irving Medical Center Intervention and Implementation Science Award; and the Columbia Mailman School Calderone Award. Crucial bridge- funding support was also provided by the Research Response Fund, generously supported by Columbia Mailman School donors, alumni, and friends.

Social contact gives young fish larger brains

Stockholm University

WhatsApp Email

image:
Fish that only saw other fish on a screen, as well as fish with minimal social exposure, developed smaller brains compared with fish that had contact with live fish.
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Credit: Arezo Shamsgovara

Young guppies who were able to see and interact with live fish developed larger brains than guppies who only saw other fish on a screen. This is shown in a new study from Stockholm University, published in Biology Letters. The findings suggest that live social interaction in real time may be important for brain development.
“Our results suggest that it is not enough to simply see social cues. The interaction itself, the fact that another individual responds to you in real time, appears to be important for normal brain development,” says Olivia Carmstedt, first author of the study, who carried out the project as part of her master’s thesis.
The research group at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, investigated how different types of social experience affect brain development in young guppies. Over a period of 20 days, the fish were raised under one of three conditions: with visual contact with live fish, with video recordings of fish on a screen, or with very limited social contact.
The fishes who had contact with live fish developed brains that were almost six percent larger than those of fish who only saw other fish on a screen. They also had relatively larger olfactory bulbs, a brain region important for instance in social information processing. The brains of fish who had only seen other fish on a screen were more similar to the brains of fish with minimal social exposure than to those of fish who had experienced live social contact.

An experimental model for a larger question

The study was conducted on guppies, but was partly inspired by growing concerns about how increasing amounts of passive screen usage may affect brain development in humans, especially children. A large number of studies on humans show associations between screen use and brain development, but they cannot reliably establish what causes what. By using fish, the researchers were able to experimentally control the social environment and compare the effects of interactive and non-interactive social exposure.
“Fish are excellent models for studying brain plasticity because their brains continue to develop throughout life. While humans and fish are obviously very different, the basic principle that social interaction can influence brain development appears to be deeply shared across vertebrates,” says Niclas Kolm, senior author of the study and professor at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University.

No difference in cognitive test

After the treatment period, the fish were tested in an object permanence task, that is, the ability to track an object that temporarily disappears from view. The researchers found no difference between the groups. The result suggests that some aspects of brain development may be more sensitive to social experience than others.
“We want to emphasize that the findings do not show that all screen use is harmful. Instead, the study highlights the importance of interactive social experiences during development,” says Olivia Carmstedt.
About the study
The article “Streaming for fish? Screen-based social exposure disrupts brain development” is published in Biology Letters.
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2025.0830

Journal

Biology Letters

DOI

10.1098/rsbl.2025.0830

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Streaming for fish? Screen-based social exposure disrupts brain development

Article Publication Date

3-Jun-2026

The hidden roughness of sapphire surface

Sometimes geometry determines what is chemically possible: As TU Wien has now shown, tiny irregularities can completely change the chemical behavior of a surface

Vienna University of Technology

The team — image:
Jan Balajka, Andrea Conti, Ulrike Diebold, Johanna Irina Hütner, Michael Schmid, David Kugler (left to right)
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Credit: TU Wien

Why do certain surfaces behave very differently from what theoretical calculations suggest? Scientists long assumed that the aluminum oxide surface should be highly reactive and capable of splitting water molecules. In experiments, however, this behavior is barely observed.

At TU Wien, researchers have found an answer that may also help explain the behavior of many other materials: At the atomic scale, the surface looks completely different from what had been assumed. Instead of a smooth and regularly ordered surface, the outermost atoms are arranged in an irregular way, which dramatically changes chemical properties of the surface.

A Surprisingly Unreactive Surface

“For decades, researchers assumed that cutting aluminum oxide along its basal plane would create a surface terminated by a regular layer of aluminum atoms,” says Jan Balajka, corresponding author of the study. Such a surface should be highly reactive and catalyze chemical reactions, for example the dissociation of water molecules into hydrogen atoms and OH groups. But experiments proved disappointing: The observed reactivity fell far short of theoretical predictions.

Imaging the Surface with Atomic Resolution

Researchers in the surface physics group of Prof. Ulrike Diebold at the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Wien investigated the surface using a combination of density functional theory calculations and noncontact atomic force microscopy. This precise imaging technique can resolve the surface atom by atom.

The results were surprising. “The surface is not smooth and regularly ordered,” says Ulrike Diebold. “Instead, we found that it is remarkably irregular and rough at the atomic scale.”

Only tiny regions of the surface consist of the ordered aluminum atoms previously expected to cover the entire surface. After just a few nanometers, this regular structure breaks down and the surface becomes rough, with local height variations spanning several atomic layers.

Geometry Determines Chemistry

“This atomic-scale disorder has a decisive effect on the chemical behavior of the surface,” explains Jan Balajka. “The previously accepted theory may be correct for the small regular regions, but most of the surface is rough and inhomogeneous, and therefore behaves very differently.”

The results show that atomic-scale structure must be taken into account when considering chemical reactions on surfaces – not only for aluminum oxide, but for many other materials used in catalysis, thin-film growth and other technological applications.

The study shows that the chemical behavior of a material cannot be understood solely from its chemical composition. The atomic-scale structure of the surface is equally important. Even surfaces that appear perfectly smooth under an ordinary microscope may, on the scale of individual atoms, consist of a highly irregular landscape with very different local chemical properties.

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-73690-0

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

AFM imaging reveals the unreconstructed α‑Al2O3(0001) surface to be inhomogeneous and rough

Arctic river deltas at risk from mounting pressures

Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research

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Kobuk Delta in Alaska. The deltas of rivers in the Arctic store a lot of carbon, which is bound there in frozen soils and sediments.
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Credit: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / Guido Grosse

For the first time, AWI researchers have performed a detailed calculation of the amount of carbon stored in permafrost in Arctic river deltas. In a new study in the journal Nature Communications, they point out the risks endangering the storage function of these highly sensitive landscapes due to rapid climate change.

Many rivers flow into the Arctic Ocean north of the Arctic Circle - including the Lena in Siberia and the Mackenzie River in Canada. The deltas of these large and small rivers store large amounts of carbon, which is bound there in frozen soils and sediments. Climate change, however, is destabilising the deltas from the ocean and land side and also from the air. For the first time, an international team led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) has now provided figures demonstrating the significance of this long neglected and highly vulnerable permafrost region between land and sea. According to the study, Arctic river deltas store 57.5 gigatonnes of carbon on only one per cent of the global permafrost surface. This equals around 5 per cent of the permafrost soil carbon stored in that region. A better understanding of this region, which is so vitally important for the Arctic carbon cycle, is therefore urgently needed.

The permafrost region covers around a quarter of the land area in the northern hemisphere and stores vast amounts of organic carbon in the form of dead plant remains. While this Arctic freezer remained largely stable for many millennia, rising global temperatures are causing the permafrost to thaw. Soil microorganisms then become active over large areas, decompose the organic material and release more carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 and methane.

"Consequently, thawing permafrost could potentially intensify climate change. That's why researchers around the world have been working for years to understand the permafrost system in detail, to precisely quantify the carbon it contains and the relevant degradation processes, in order to ultimately create reliable future forecasts using numerical models," explains Guido Grosse, Head of the Permafrost Research Section at the Alfred Wegener Institute. "There is one area, however, that has been somewhat neglected so far: namely the deltas of the many small and large Arctic rivers. It is precisely in these river mouths where traditionally a great deal of carbon supplied by the rivers draining the northern permafrost region is being deposited in soils and sediments that become permafrost over the long term – however, it is this border area between ocean and land that is now under massive pressure from several sides. The sea ice is retreating, the sea level is rising, the land is sinking, while the permafrost is thawing, the thawing season is lengthening, and the river waters and soils are getting warmer. All these factors come together in the already very dynamic Arctic deltas and destabilise a balance that was maintained for millennia."

The international research team led by first author of the study and AWI postdoc Matthias Fuchs, who is now continuing his research at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA, has now compiled all available data on the carbon content of Arctic deltas for the first time and calculated the size of the reservoir. "Up to now, the number of studies on Arctic deltas has been very limited," as Matthias Fuchs reports. "The few publications focussed mainly on a few sampling locations in the mega-deltas of the large rivers Lena in Siberia and Mackenzie in Canada. We have now compiled a wealth of newly published and partly unpublished data from more than 1,600 soil samples from 17 Arctic deltas. Compared to the previously published studies, the number of soil cores analysed has almost tripled."

As a result, the huge significance of the Arctic river deltas as a carbon storage hotspot under increasing pressures becomes clear. According to the study team's calculations, the deltas store 57.5 gigatonnes of carbon over an area of almost 100,000 km2 (the size of South Korea and twice the size of Lower Saxony). By comparison: The annual increase in carbon in the atmosphere due to human activity stands at around 4.5 gigatonnes – meaning that around 5 per cent of global permafrost carbon is bound in the deltas on "only" 1 per cent of their surface area. "The tremendous importance becomes even clearer if you factor in all of the Earth's soils," explains Guido Grosse. "Then the Arctic deltas bind around 2 per cent of all soil carbon on just 0.08 per cent of the global land area. This makes it clear that the Arctic deltas are currently a particularly critical element in the global carbon cycle. They store a comparatively large amount of carbon in a small area and are overly exposed to the consequences of climate change in several ways. In order to make precise forecasts, we will therefore have to focus more strongly on the estuaries of the large and small Arctic rivers in future research."

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-73092-2

Article Title

Large stocks of permafrost soil organic carbon and nitrogen in Arctic river deltas

Ice Age mystery: Taimering mammoth was likely butchered by hunters and gatherers

Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns

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The mammoth’s tusk at the excavation site in Taimering. (Photo: BLfD)
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Credit: BLfD

Six years ago, during construction work in Taimering near Regensburg (Bavaria, Germany), employees of the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments (BLfD) discovered a nearly 2.5-meter-long, spirally twisted tusk that belonged to a woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius. Nearby, the archaeologists also found over 70 additional bones and bone fragments, primarily from the ribcage as well as hand and foot bones. Most of the long bones of the large mammal are missing. “The mammoth’s tusk and bones were exceptionally well-preserved due to their millennia-long conservation in the wet soil environment,” says Dr. Christoph Steinmann, deputy head of the Department of Archaeological Heritage Preservation for Lower Bavaria/Upper Palatinate at the BLfD. After its recovery, the find was prepared at the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB), and further scientific investigations were coordinated from there.

The palaeontological assessment revealed that all the bones, as well as the tusk, belong to a single, very large but not yet fully grown individual with a shoulder height of about three meters. The Taimering woolly mammoth likely died directly at or at least near its discovery site. The bone surfaces, which have been preserved intact down to the finest detail, rule out both prolonged transport by water and disarticulation by predators. According to the researchers, the animal was buried in the sediments of a pond or a slow-flowing tributary of the prehistoric Danube River during the Ice Age. Radiocarbon dating indicates a geological age of the bones between 27,000 and 25,000 years ago.

Unusual markings on the surface turned out to be cut marks and provide clear evidence of human activity. Numerous such indentations are found exclusively on the ribs—made by Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers who butchered the animal. One of the broad rib bones was even used as a cutting board. Whether the mammoth was killed by humans or had already been dead when people processed the carcass remains unclear, according to lead author Kerstin Pasda from the Institute of Prehistory and Early History at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), who conducted the osteoarchaeological analyses of the anthropogenic modifications.

Pollen analyses conducted by Dr. Philipp Stojakowits at the University of Augsburg reveal a great deal to the researchers about the habitat in which the mammoth lived and died. They indicate a herbaceous, tundra-like steppe vegetation with scattered dwarf shrubs. The so-called Mammoth Steppe was a vast treeless ecosystem in Eurasia that, during the peak of the last glacial period from 30,000 to 20,000 years ago, stretched across Europe between the Scandinavian ice sheet and the southern glaciers of the Alps. Its nutrient-rich grasses and dwarf shrubs provided food for a variety of large mammals, including the Taimering mammoth.

The discovery is exceptional in many respects. “First of all, mammoth skeletal remains are extremely rare in our latitudes. We are familiar with finds mainly from regions of Eurasia further to the east,” says PD Dr. Gertrud Rößner, a palaeontologist at the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History. “On the other hand, there is virtually no evidence of human activity in this region from that peak period of the Ice Age. Due to climate change, hunter-gatherer communities in Europe retreated southward and eastward,” add archaeology professors Andreas Maier of the University of Cologne and Thorsten Uthmeier of FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Participating Institutions
Overall, 14 scientists from various disciplines participated in the mammoth study, including researchers from the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History, the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments, the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums and the Curt Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry in Mannheim and the University of Augsburg, LMU Munich, and the Universities of Cologne and Bremen, as well as the Museum of Prehistory and Local History in Bottrop.

A staff member of the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments (BLfD) recovering the mammoth’s tusk.

Recovery of the first left rib from the mammoth’s ribcage.

View of the excavation site; the mammoth’s bones and tusk are marked in yellow.

Parallel cut marks on a mammoth rib provide clear evidence of human activity.

Credit

FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

The mammoth’s tusk in the paleontological preparation laboratory of the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History.

Credit

K. Hagemann, SNSB

Journal

Journal of Archaeological Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105839

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

A cold case from the last Glacial Maximum: A partial mammoth skeleton from southern Germany (Danube Valley, Germany) – Part 1: Traces of human activity and archaeological context

Article Publication Date

3-Jun-2026