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Language skills are essential to a child’s ability to communicate and develop. These skills enable children to engage with other people and learn from their surroundings and in the classroom.

Study: One in ten babies regularly falls asleep with a screen

Despite recent government guidelines that parents should avoid screen time for babies under the age of two, a new global study finds that one in ten babies now regularly fall asleep with a screen.

4 May 2026

AI model outperforms doctors in clinical reasoning tests

AI's performance in diagnostic tasks exceeds that of physicians, indicating a shift towards integrating advanced models in real-world medical decision-making.

4 May 2026

Identifying the ages when Alzheimer’s biomarkers sharply change

New research identifies critical ages for Alzheimer's biomarkers, enhancing screening strategies and understanding neurodegeneration across the aging spectrum.

1 May 2026

AgentClinic puts medical AI through a more realistic diagnostic test

AgentClinic is a multimodal benchmark that tests clinical AI agents in simulated, dialogue-driven diagnostic settings rather than static medical question-answer formats. The study found that model performance varied sharply by tool use, language, bias, image handling, and patient-agent interactions, highlighting the need for more realistic AI evaluation before clinical deployment.

30 Apr 2026

Large language model outperforms human doctors in clinical reasoning tasks

A cutting-edge large language model (LLM) outperformed human doctors in common clinical reasoning tasks including emergency room decisions, identifying likely diagnoses, and choosing next steps in management, according to a new study that used real emergency department data.

30 Apr 2026

Brain blips in epilepsy can be predicted before onset

Epilepsy is best known for seizures, but many people with the condition also experience much more frequent and subtler disruptions.

30 Apr 2026

New brain stimulation technique improves social communication in children with autism

A new non-invasive brain stimulation technique known as accelerated continuous theta burst stimulation (a-cTBS) improves social communication at one month follow up and has a favorable safety profile in children with autism, finds a trial from China published by The BMJ today.

29 Apr 2026

Maternal weight before pregnancy may shape toddlers’ development

A nationwide Korean cohort study of 258,367 mother-child pairs found that maternal pre-pregnancy BMI was associated with developmental delay risk in children aged 18 to 36 months. Children of underweight mothers showed modest early risks that later attenuated, while obesity-related risks persisted across developmental domains.

29 Apr 2026

Prenatal air pollution exposure linked to delayed toddler development

Babies exposed to high amounts of air pollution in the womb show slower signs of development at 18 months than those exposed to lower levels.

28 Apr 2026

TikTok chatter could help predict where the opioid crisis is heading next

A large-scale analysis of 569,581 TikTok comments found that opioid-related discussions may help track and forecast synthetic opioid overdose mortality in the US. Recovery, harm reduction, drug use, drug sourcing, and loss-related conversations provided near-real-time signals that improved 6-month forecasting accuracy.

28 Apr 2026

NCCN publishes new patient guide for prostate cancer screening

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®)-an alliance of leading cancer centers-has published a new book explaining the latest evidence and expert recommendations around prostate cancer screening.

28 Apr 2026

UBC researchers develop new way to target previously undruggable proteins

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and BC Cancer have developed a new way to target proteins long considered "undruggable," opening the door to new treatments for prostate cancer and other serious diseases.

28 Apr 2026

New AI chatbot uses medical protocols to guide patient care decisions.

A new type of chatbot could reliably help people decide what to do about their symptoms - and do so based on guidance that is both medically sound and easy to understand.

25 Apr 2026

Improving health literacy reduces health inequalities among university students in Japan

International students face a range of health challenges in their daily lives due to language barriers, different cultural values, and unfamiliar healthcare systems.

25 Apr 2026

AI-assisted doctors perform better in complex clinical decision making

Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots are getting pretty good at diagnosing some diseases, even when they are complex.

24 Apr 2026

Study highlights the fragility of measles elimination in the United States

A new study examined measles vaccination coverage following a large postelimination outbreak, primarily affecting unvaccinated children. Findings from the study will be presented during the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) 2026 Meeting, taking place April 24-27 in Boston.

24 Apr 2026

People judge weight loss more harshly when GLP-1 drugs are involved, study finds

In four pre-registered studies across Belgium, the US, and the UK, people judged anti-obesity medication users as putting in less effort and, in turn, viewed them as less moral, competent, warm, and deserving than non-users. The findings suggest that effort moralization may help drive stigma around GLP-1-based weight-loss treatment, even when medication is used alongside diet and exercise.

23 Apr 2026

Study explores early autism detection using wearable movement sensors

UCLA Health researchers are seeking to develop a new wearable technology to catch one of the earliest but often overlooked signs of autism and other developmental conditions in infants.

23 Apr 2026

APOLLO AI learns from 25 billion medical events to predict future disease

APOLLO is a multimodal temporal foundation model trained on 25.2 billion medical events from 7.2 million patients across 33 years of Mass General Brigham records, integrating 28 medical modalities into unified “virtual patient representations.” Across 322 downstream tasks, the model showed strong performance in disease prediction, treatment-response stratification, hospital operations, and patient retrieval, supporting the idea of more computable, data-driven medicine.

23 Apr 2026

New gene therapy improves hearing in patients with rare genetic deafness

A new international study co-led by investigators from Mass General Brigham and the Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University shows that a gene therapy for a rare form of genetic deafness successfully restored hearing in most participants, with results lasting up to 2.5 years.

23 Apr 2026