Lifeboat Foundation

This is true. I’ve been missing photography and books. Too much YouTube even can give you a bit of depression and anxiety. I’m a YouTube addict I’ll admit.

Reducing social media usage by as little as 15 minutes per day can increase health and well-being, claims a new study published in the Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science. The findings indicate that a 15-minute reduction in social media usage has positive consequences for one’s social life, vitality, and health.

Research has shown that excessive social media use can lead to a range of negative outcomes, including increased feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Social media use has also been linked to poor sleep quality, decreased physical activity, and decreased face-to-face social interaction. These negative outcomes are particularly concerning given that young adults are among the heaviest social media users, with many spending several hours daily on social media platforms.

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Using artificial intelligence (AI) to combine data from full-body x-ray images and associated genomic data from more than 30,000 UK Biobank participants, a study by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and New York Genome Center has helped to illuminate the genetic basis of human skeletal proportions, from shoulder width to leg length.

The findings also provide new insights into the evolution of the human skeletal form and its role in musculoskeletal disease, providing a window into our evolutionary past, and potentially allowing doctors to one day better predict patients’ risks of developing conditions such as back pain or arthritis in later life. The study also demonstrates the utility of using population-scale imaging data from biobanks to understand both disease-related and normal physical variation among humans.

“Our research is a powerful demonstration of the impact of AI in medicine, particularly when it comes to analyzing and quantifying imaging data, as well as integrating this information with health records and genetics rapidly and at large scale,” said Vagheesh Narasimhan, PhD, an assistant professor of integrative biology as well as statistics and data science, who led the multidisciplinary team of researchers, to provide the genetic map of skeletal proportions.

Using cannabis may cause changes in the human body’s epigenome, a study of over 1,000 adults suggests. The epigenome functions like a set of switches, activating or deactivating genes to change how our bodies function.

“We observed associations between cumulative marijuana use and multiple epigenetic markers across time,” says Lifang Hou, a preventative medical doctor and epidemiologist from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Cannabis is a commonly used substance in the United States, with 49 percent of people trying it at least once, Hou and a team of US researchers report in their published paper. Some US states and other countries have made it legal, but we still don’t fully understand its effects on our health.

In March 2020, an experiment in science philanthropy was hatched in the span of a five-minute call.

Patrick Collison, the now 34-year-old billionaire CEO of the online payments company Stripe, and economist Tyler Cowen were chewing over a shared concern: Scientific progress seemed to be slowing down. As the first pandemic lockdowns went into effect, researchers were in a holding pattern, waiting to hear if they could redirect their federal grants to COVID-related work. Collison and Cowen worried that the National Institutes of Health wasn’t moving quickly enough, so they launched Fast Grants to get emergency research dollars to virologists, coronavirus experts, and other scientists rapidly.

“We thought: Let’s just do this,” Cowen recalls. “It was a bit like put up or shut up.”

If you’re fighting cancer, a healthy lifestyle can help you stay well during and after treatment. Research suggests that good nutrition, exercise and other healthy behaviors may improve your quality of life during treatment.

“Taking charge of your health by developing healthy habits empowers you to cope better with your treatment and any side effects you may have,” says Lonny Yarmus, D.O., a board certified interventional pulmonologist at the Lung Cancer Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Patients who come to any Northwestern Medicine location for colonoscopies now have access to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which is improving the way gastroenterologists detect colon polyps and prevent colorectal cancer. According to new research by Northwestern Medicine, physicians who performed colonoscopies assisted by AI achieved a 13% increase in the detection and removal of colorectal polyps.

Computer-aided colonoscopies could reduce future colon cancer diagnoses by up to 39%.

“Most polyps do not become cancerous, but nearly all colorectal cancers begin as polyps,” says Rajesh N. Keswani, MD, MS, director of Endoscopy for Northwestern Memorial Hospital and director of quality for the Northwestern Medicine Digestive Health Center. “We want to detect them in their earliest stages and remove them to prevent future diagnoses of cancer. There’s nothing better than telling a patient that their decision to have a screening colonoscopy may have saved their life.”

To understand the main determinants behind worldwide antibiotic resistance dynamics, scientists from the Institut Pasteur, Inserm, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and Université Paris-Saclay developed a statistical model based on a large-scale spatial-temporal analysis. Using the ATLAS antimicrobial resistance surveillance database, the model revealed significant differences in trends and associated factors depending on bacterial species and resistance to certain antibiotics.

For example, countries with high quality health systems were associated with low levels of antibiotic resistance among all the gram-negative bacteria investigated, while high temperatures were associated with high levels of antibiotic resistance in Enterobacteriaceae. Surprisingly, national antibiotic consumption levels were not correlated with resistance for the majority of the bacteria tested. The results suggest that antibiotic resistance control measures need to be adapted to the local context and to targeted bacteria-antibiotic combinations.

The results of the study were published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health.

The digital devices that we rely on so heavily in our day-to-day and professional lives today—smartphones, tablets, laptops, fitness trackers, etc.—use traditional computational technology. Traditional computers rely on a series of mathematical equations that use electrical impulses to encode information in a binary system of 1s and 0s. This information is transmitted through quantitative measurements called “bits.”

Unlike traditional computing, quantum computing relies on the principles of quantum theory, which address principles of matter and energy on an atomic and subatomic scale. With quantum computing, equations are no longer limited to 1s and 0s, but instead can transmit information in which particles exist in both states, the 1 and the 0, at the same time.

Quantum computing measures electrons or photons. These subatomic particles are known as quantum bits, or ” qubits.” The more qubits are used in a computational exercise, the more exponentially powerful the scope of the computation can be. Quantum computing has the potential to solve equations in a matter of minutes that would take traditional computers tens of thousands of years to work out.

The story of a young science-writer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who risked everything by blowing the whistle on a massive cover-up involving a promising cancer therapy.

Cover-Up Of Promising Cancer Treatment (2014)
Director: Eric Merola.
Writers: Eric Merola.
Stars: Robert Good, Ben Moss, Martha Moss.
Genre: Documentary, Biography, Drama.
Country: United States.
Language: English.
Also Known As: Second Opinion — The Lie of America’s War on Cancer.
Release Date: March 1, 2014 (United States)

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