Does daytime napping affect your brain health?

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ALBAWABA - by Mayar Alkhatieb -- According to a study by the University of California and the University of the Republic of Uruguay, regular napping may result in better and greater brain health. The research findings suggest a correlation between napping and larger brains, which has been linked to lower risks of dementia and other diseases. The study aimed to investigate if a link exists between napping and brain health. According to the study, a daytime nap can provide an additional bonus to maintain brain health by slowing down the rate of brain shrinkage as we age. Victoria Garfield, the lead researcher at the University of California, suggested that short daytime naps may be essential in maintaining brain health as we grow older. The research aimed to break the "medical myths" surrounding daytime napping and its health benefits.

The study analyzed data from people between the ages of 40 and 69, and it showed that those who take small naps during the day have better and greater brain health than others. Additionally, the study suggests that people who nap for 30 minutes or less benefit the most from napping. The study further suggested that napping earlier in the day may be less likely to disrupt sleep during the night. Research from various other universities like in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom showed that approximately a third of adults aged 65 or over take regular naps. However, taking naps regularly is likely not going to be an option for all people, especially those who have jobs and tasks to attend to, and napping later in the day may affect their sleep schedule, so as good as daytime naps are, the reality would be that not everyone will be able to find time for them.

Today’s AI is ‘alchemy,’ not science — what that means and why that matters |

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The AI Beat by Sharon Goldman ----  A medieval alchemist wearing a gray robe with a long white beard and glasses adjusts a machine made of beakers and vats A New York Times article this morning, titled “How to Tell if Your AI Is Conscious,” says that in a new report, “scientists offer a list of measurable qualities” based on a “brand-new” science of consciousness. The article immediately jumped out at me, as it was published just a few days after I had a long chat with Thomas Krendl Gilbert, a machine ethicist who, among other things, has long studied the intersection of science and politics. Gilbert recently launched a new podcast, called “The Retort,” along with Hugging Face researcher Nathan Lambert, with an inaugural episode that pushes back on the idea of today’s AI as a truly scientific endeavor. Gilbert maintains that much of today’s AI research cannot reasonably be called science at all. Instead, it can be viewed as a new form of alchemy — that is, the medieval forerunner of chemistry, that can also be defined as a “seemingly magical process of transformation.”

Like alchemy, AI is rooted in ‘magical’ metaphors Many critics of deep learning and of large language models, including those who built them, sometimes refer to AI as a form of alchemy, Gilbert told me on a video call. What they mean by that, he explained, is that it’s not scientific, in the sense that it’s not rigorous or experimental. But he added that he actually means something more literal when he says that AI is alchemy. “The people building it actually think that what they’re doing is magical,” he said. “And that’s rooted in a lot of metaphors, ideas that have now filtered into public discourse over the past several months, like AGI and super intelligence.” The prevailing idea, he explained, is that intelligence itself is scalar — depending only on the amount of data thrown at a model and the computational limits of the model itself.

But, he emphasized, like alchemy, much of today’s AI research is not necessarily trying to be what we know as science, either. The practice of alchemy historically had no peer review or public sharing of results, for example. Much of today’s closed AI research does not, either. “It was very secretive, and frankly, that’s how AI works right now,” he said. “It’s largely a matter of assuming magical properties about the amount of intelligence that is implicit in the structure of the internet — and then building computation and structuring it such that you can distill that web of knowledge that we’ve all been building for decades now, and then seeing what comes out.”

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AI can help screen for cancer—but there’s a catch

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by MIT Technology Review by Cassandra Willyard -- Just last week Microsoft announced that it had partnered with a digital pathology company, Paige, in order to build the world’s largest image-based AI model for identifying cancer. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. I just had a birthday, and you know what that means—I’m newly eligible for a screening colonoscopy. (#milestones!). I’ve been thinking about cancer screening a lot recently, because I’ve seen a handful of headlines in the past few months about how AI will revolutionize cancer detection. Just last week Microsoft announced that it had partnered with a digital pathology company, Paige, in order to build the world’s largest image-based AI model for identifying cancer. The training data set for the algorithm contains 4 million images. “This is sort of a groundbreaking, land-on-the-moon kind of moment for cancer care,” Paige CEO Andy Moye told CNBC.

Well, it might be. Last month, results from the first clinical trial of AI-supported breast cancer screening came out. The researchers compared two methods for reading a mammogram: a standard reading by two independent radiologists, and a system that used a single radiologist and an AI to assign patients a numerical cancer risk score from 1 to 10. In the latter group, those who scored a 10—the highest risk—then had their images read by two radiologists. The AI-supported model reduced workload by 44% and detected 20% more cancers. That sounds like a good thing. In theory, catching cancers earlier should make them easier to treat, saving lives. But that’s not always what the data shows. A study published in late August combed the literature for randomized clinical trials that compared mortality (from any cause, not just cancer) in two groups: people who underwent cancer screening and people who did not. For most common types of cancer screening, they found no significant difference. The exception was sigmoidoscopy, a type of colon cancer screening that involves visualizing only the lower portion of the colon.

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17 Doctors Failed to Diagnose This Boy’s Severe Pain. ChatGPT Came Up With the Answer

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by Diane Herbst -- today show -- For three years, her young son suffered from increasing pain and other symptoms – with no answers from 17 doctors. “We saw so many doctors. We ended up in the ER at one point. I kept pushing,” the boy’s mom, Courtney, who did not wish to reveal her last name for privacy concerns, told Today. Earlier in the year, this frustrated mom turned to ChatGPT to input information from her son Alex’s medical records, including notes from his MRI. “I really spent the night on the (computer) … going through all these things,” she told Today. Courtney finally discovered a correct diagnosis from the artificial intelligence technology. When ChatGPT suggested that Alex, whose medical odyssey started at the age of 4, could be suffering from tethered cord syndrome, a rare neurological condition associated with spina bifida, “it made a lot of sense," she told Today.

Her hunch was confirmed by a pediatric neurosurgeon: After viewing Alex’s MRI, “she said point blank, ‘Here’s occula spinal bifida, and here’s where the spine is tethered,”’Courtney recalled to the outlet. With the diagnosis, Courtney felt "every emotion in the book, relief, validated, excitement for his future,” she told Today. Tethered cord syndrome is caused by tissue attachments limiting the movement of the spinal cord within the spinal column, causing abnormal stretching of the cord, according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Dr. Holly Gilmer, a pediatric neurosurgeon at the Michigan Head & Spine Institute who treated Alex, told the outlet that the condition is hard to diagnose in young children “because they can’t speak.” Several weeks ago, Alex underwent surgery to repair his tethered cord syndrome and is still recovering, according to Today.

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Why Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky eliminated the ‘fiefdoms’ in his company—and now likens his role to an ‘orchestra conductor’

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Story by Steve Mollman -- fortune.com -- The pandemic hit Airbnb hard. The company lost 80% of its business in March 2020, and people were questioning its ability to survive. Barely two months into the pandemic, it laid off about 1,900 people, or a quarter of its employees. Fast forward to today and not only did it weather the crisis, but in June Airbnb made its debut on the Fortune 500 list of top U.S. public companies by revenue, coming off its first-ever profitable year. \ The turnaround wasn’t easy. Airbnb had to completely reorganize itself. “We shuttered most of the divisions,” CEO Brian Chesky said on a Wednesday episode of The Social Radars podcast. That move was something Airbnb needed to do anyway, he said—as do many startups that have grown into larger organizations, he believes.

For a startup, he explained, it’s tempting to “divisionalize” in order to move faster, since decision-making can become a bottleneck at the top of the organization. But while that might work at first, he added, in the long run it can slow a company down. The problem that the pandemic forced him to face, he said, was that “we had this culture where everyone could do anything. People could own their own projects.” There were too many divisions, or “fiefdoms,” he said, such as ones focused on luxury, pro hosts, a magazine, transportation, and so on. Airbnb had followed a common line of thinking in Silicon Valley, he said. It goes like this: “Basically you share the values of the company, you democratize data, you hire smart people, and you assume that they’ll make the right decisions for the company.”

But, he added, “that is all wrong. It sounds great, and it’s right for some people, but it was wrong for us.” Chesky studied how Steve Jobs revamped a struggling Apple when he returned to the company he’d cofounded, noting how he “shuttered most of the divisions, and he went from a divisional structure to a functional structure.” Adopting a similar strategy, Chesky got rid of the unnecessary divisions at Airbnb. A few core ones would remain, but from then on, he said, “Everyone’s gonna work on everything together. There are no longer swim lanes. There’s one road map, and no one ships anything unless it’s on the roadmap. And then I’m gonna review every single thing in the company before it ships.”

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State Department diverting $85m in Egyptian military financing towards Taiwan and Lebanon

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by breakingdefense.com -- WASHINGTON — Human rights concerns have prompted the Biden administration to divert $85 million away from a larger foreign military financing (FMF) pot for Egypt and divvy it up between Taiwan and Lebanon, State Department officials announced today. In an email to Breaking Defense, an administration source confirmed that $55 million would be bound for Taiwan and $30 million for Lebanon. In total, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has notified Congress that Washington will provide Cairo with $1.215 billion in FMF from its fiscal 2022 budget, one State Department official told reporters. “Egypt is making specific and ongoing contributions to US national security priorities,” the official said. “Egypt is a strategic partner of the United States with a crucial voice in efforts to advance regional peace and security …. This decision in no way diminishes our commitment to advancing human rights in Egypt and around the world.”

A $1.3 billion FY22 pot included $980 million in funds that were not subject to human rights conditions, and another $320 million that had the conditions attached. From that second coffer, Blinken opted to “waive the certification requirements” due to “US national security interest” for $235 million of that total, the official explained. However, he was not able to do that with the remaining $85 million because it was subject to different statutory certification requirements aimed at ensuring that Egypt is making “clear and consistent progress in releasing political prisoners,” providing detainees with due process and preventing American citizens from being harassed. “That requirement on the $85 million may not be waived [and] the secretary determined that Egypt has not fulfilled those conditions,” the State Department official said. “Therefore, we are reprogramming $85 million [for] other priorities and other countries in consultation with the Congress.” “As we have done for decades, consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act, we will continue to provide defensive articles and services necessary for Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability,” an administration official wrote in a statement to Breaking Defense. “We will support Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities commensurate with the threat it faces.” That $55 million joins a $80 million military transfer to Taiwan that the Biden administration unveiled last month.

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