Long-term melatonin use may secretly strain the heart—raising the risk of failure, hospitalization, and death. Long-term melatonin use for sleep problems may come with unexpected heart dangers. Researchers found that chronic users were almost twice as likely to die and 3.5 times more likely to be hospitalized for heart failure. Though melatonin is widely regarded as harmless, experts now urge caution with extended use.

Key Research Findings

A large review of health data from more than 130,000 adults with insomnia found that people who took melatonin for a year or longer were more likely to develop heart failure, be hospitalized for the condition, or die from any cause compared to those who didn’t take the supplement.
While the study cannot prove that melatonin directly causes t...

Can an AI persona detect when a human is lying—and should we trust it if it can?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has had many recent advances and continues to evolve in scope and capability. A new Michigan State University-led study is diving deeper into how well AI can understand humans by using it to detect human deception.

In the study, published in the Journal of Communication, researchers from MSU and the University of Oklahoma conducted 12 experiments with over 19,000 AI participants to examine how well AI personas were able to detect deception and truth from human subjects.

“This research aims to understand how well AI can aid in deception detection and simulate human data in social scientific research, as well as caution professional...

Dark energy may be evolving—hinting that the universe’s ultimate destiny could be far stranger than we ever imagined. Astronomers are rethinking one of cosmology’s biggest mysteries: dark energy. New findings show that evolving dark energy models, tied to ultra-light axion particles, may better fit the universe’s expansion history than Einstein’s constant model. The results suggest dark energy’s density could be slowly declining, altering the fate of the cosmos and fueling excitement that we may be witnessing the universe’s next great revelation.

Dark energy, the mysterious force thought to drive the universe’s accelerating expansion, remains one of the deepest puzzles in modern physics...

Around the globe, heart disease remains one of the top causes of death. Once patients begin to suffer from serious heart problems, like heart attacks and heart failure, the heart muscles become damaged and are difficult to treat and repair. Although many therapies have been developed to treat symptoms, full recovery to a pre-disease state has been essentially impossible. This is due to a lack of regeneration ability in adult human heart cells. Studies using stem cells or progenitor cells for repair have demonstrated limited efficacy in clinical trials, thus far.

However, there may be new hope for these patients...