More than 9 hours of sleep? Science says your memory may suffer
The study analyzed data from nearly 2,000 dementia-free adults aged 27 to 85, focusing on sleep duration and cognitive function. The findings indicated that participants who slept longer than nine hours exhibited decreased memory, visuospatial abilities, and executive functions.
If you've ever felt proud of clocking in over nine hours of sleep, thinking it's the ultimate health hack, recent research suggests you should reconsider. A study from the University of Texas Health Science Center reveals that excessive sleep, specifically more than nine hours per night, may be linked to poorer cognitive performance, especially in individuals experiencing symptoms of depression.
The study analyzed data from nearly 2,000 dementia-free adults aged 27 to 85, focusing on sleep duration and cognitive function. Dementia is a term for several diseases that affect memory, thinking, and the ability to perform daily activities.
Also Read: War of the Worlds? AI is growing a mind of its own, soon it will make decisions for youThe findings indicated that participants who slept longer than nine hours exhibited decreased memory, visuospatial abilities, and executive functions. These effects were more pronounced in individuals with depressive symptoms, regardless of whether they were on antidepressant medication. Vanessa Young, a clinical research project manager at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer's and Neurodegenerative Diseases, stated that sleep could be a modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline in individuals with depression.
This research suggests that those with mental health conditions should be more serious about their sleep; they might need personalized sleep recommendations. While sleep is essential for brain health, both insufficient and excessive sleep can have detrimental effects. The Global Council on Brain Health recommends 7 to 8 hours of nightly sleep for adults to preserve cognitive function.
Also Read: 300 years after alchemy failed, CERN scientists finally turn lead into gold
It's crucial to pay attention to your sleep patterns and consult healthcare professionals if you experience persistent changes in sleep duration or quality, especially if accompanied by depressive symptoms. People who work shifts might be more vulnerable, as their sleeping cycle is often disrupted by work. Balancing sleep duration could be a key factor in maintaining cognitive health and overall well-being.
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Economic Times
14-07-2025
- Economic Times
The future of weather prediction is here. Maybe.
Synopsis WindBorne, a startup, leverages AI and weather balloons to enhance forecast accuracy, potentially outperforming traditional methods. This innovation arrives amidst concerns over Trump administration cuts to NOAA, threatening the public-private data exchange crucial for AI-driven weather models. NYT News Service An assembly technician makes the envelope for a weather ballon at Windborne headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., April 29, 2025. Thanks to Aritificial Intelligence, companies like WindBorne hope to usher in a golden age of forecasting -- but they rely in part on government data and the agency that provides it is in turmoil. Weather forecasts, believe it or not, have come a long way. A five-day forecast today is as accurate as a three-day forecast four decades ago. But the 10-day forecast? That's still a coin flip -- or an opportunity if you're in the weather prediction business. There are two ways to better predict the weather: Measure it more accurately, or describe how it works in more excruciating scientific WindBorne, a startup in Palo Alto, California. When its CEO, John Dean, was driving a battered Subaru around the San Francisco Bay Area a few years ago, using tanks of helium to launch weather balloons in front of potential investors, the company's plan was to do the first thing. Its balloons fly longer than most, collecting more measurements of temperature, humidity and other indicators in the upper atmosphere to create a more precise intelligence has allowed WindBorne to do the second thing, too. Thanks to leaps in deep learning, the observations picked up by WindBorne's far-flung balloons can be turned into a more robust picture of the future. The combination could finally make longer-term forecasts as useful as a look at tomorrow's weather. A little extra notice is a big deal. The recent flash floods in Texas underscore that lives are at risk from extreme weather events that climate change has made more common. And researchers have found that shorter forecast lead times since 2009 have prevented hundreds of millions of dollars in hurricane damage -- per beyond headline-making events, the weather next week has economic implications. Businesses of all stripes make or lose money based on the forecast: retailers with far-flung supply chains, energy companies moving fuels around the country, even baseball teams watching for a good news is that we may be poised to enter a new golden age of AI-enabled weather prediction. That heat wave that scorched the East Coast last month? WindBorne says its software first flagged that 15 days out, two to four days before competing forecasts. There's a catch, though. These new deep learning forecasts are built on data provided for free by public science agencies. In the United States, that relationship is threatened by the Trump administration's heavy cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which houses the National Weather Service. The Public-Private Symbiosis Every day, at more than 100 weather stations across the United States, a weather service worker fills a latex balloon with helium and launches it to collect atmospheric measurements -- until it flies too high and pops. These flights, which began in the 1930s, have been reduced because of staff cuts during the chaotic first months of the second Trump the government, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to the Pentagon, the Trump administration's appointees have aimed to push the government's technical capacity into the private sector. Some in the weather industry -- and free-market Republicans -- see NOAA's forecasting work as a prime candidate for outsourcing and have called for the agency to be "dismantled." NOAA is also a target of the fossil fuel industry because its scientists contribute important climate change research. The White House has proposed $2 billion in cuts to the agency, or 28% of its entrepreneurs and meteorologists say this binary view of public and private threatens to upset the mutually beneficial symbiosis between them and the government."I would love to see a version of NOAA where there are more public-private partnerships," Dean said. "And then those benefits, some of them become public good and some of them are commercialized."As meteorology evolved, governments were often best positioned to assemble local data into a national and then global picture, with an emphasis on coordination and public safety. Now the weather service's key job is maintaining and operating physics-based models of the atmosphere -- software that describes the weather in precise mathematical detail -- to generate private sector, meanwhile, tailors forecast services for specific customers. Companies like AccuWeather and the Weather Company combine public data with their own models and third-party data to provide forecast products for local news stations or the weather app on your phone. Other firms sell data to the weather service itself -- some monitor with buoys, others with satellites. The agency even buys readings collected by passenger falling costs of computer chips and cloud computing have made companies less reliant on the government in recent years, but the expense of operating physics-based models on powerful supercomputers means government agencies still do most weather prediction. Some of the missing data from the recent NOAA cuts is being replaced by WindBorne's fleet of weather balloons, from which the National Weather Service buys sensor readings each month. Dean said they collected as much data as the weather service balloons, for a fraction of the budget. But the bulk of the weather service's raw data comes from sensors that the private sector can't quite match, notably a network of weather radar and a constellation of satellites. And the private innovation at WindBorne is still seeded by NOAA's observations and forecasts. A Student Project Goes BigWindBorne's story began in 2016 when members of Stanford's student space club took on a novel engineering project. They built a long-lasting weather balloon by taking advantage of newly cheap satellite communications that could talk to it wherever it flew over the globe. Moving the balloon up and down with prevailing winds allowed it to make observations in several locations of interest, like a tropical cyclone or the poorly observed environment over the middle of the Pacific student club broke records for the longest flight time of a latex balloon, keeping one aloft for 70 to 80 hours. (The company has since smashed that record, recently keeping a balloon in the air for 57 days.)Venture investors hanging around campus encouraged their club's efforts, and five members -- Dean, Paige Brocidiacono, Joan Creus-Costa, Kai Marshland and Andrey Sushko -- founded WindBorne in 2019. They set out to capture a comprehensive set of global data, a real-time picture of the atmosphere, including places not currently company builds and launches 300 balloons a month at those 10 sites around the world, flying them on average for 12 days, with about 100 aloft at any given time. (Its ultimate goal is 10,000 balloons flying at once.) But the founders knew when they started the company that it would be more lucrative to produce forecasts rather than sell their data to someone else who could. "The big hole in the plan," Dean said, "was 'How do you actually go do global weather forecasting?'" The cost seemed prohibitive. "You need $100 million to do this," he said. (WindBorne has raised $25 million in venture funding.) That was about to change. New data sets released by public weather agencies were ideal for training deep learning software, and researchers using it upended the weather ecosystem. In 2022, teams at chipmaker Nvidia and Chinese tech giant Huawei demonstrated that machine learning could forecast accurately. Ryan Keisler, a physicist working alone during a sabbatical, drew attention not just for the influential weather prediction model he published but for the cost of training it: $ and Creus-Costa, the company's head of AI, bought a bunch of powerful gaming computers -- picking them up at a McDonald's from a Craigslist vendor -- and got to work feeding their balloon data into this new approach to as these AI forecasts begin to outperform traditional methods, their developers don't fully understand how they work. The software could be learning physics, simply matching patterns or using some effective combination of the two."When you do a physics-based model, you're being smart," Creus-Costa said. "When you do a deep learning model, you don't have to be smart. We're not writing down the physics. We're just having it learn."Using artificial intelligence modelling, WindBorne says, its day-ahead temperature forecasts are 37% better than those performed by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, an organization that supports the European equivalents of the National Weather Service. (WindBorne releases the data so others can validate it.)In addition to NOAA, the startup sells its weather insights to investment funds and is working with arms of the U.S. military, which has a vital interest in the weather. The Limits of Deep LearningFor all the excitement about these new techniques -- Microsoft and Google also have AI weather models, as does the Air Force -- they have their Chantry, a mathematician who leads the operational AI weather forecasting project at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said the field of meteorology was still figuring out what the relationship between physics-based and AI models would be. The weather service, whose forecasts have fallen behind those at the European center, does not operate its own AI forecasting model, but teams up with private companies to support their learning models have proved uniquely useful for complex events that are tricky for physics-based models, like the paths of hurricanes or cold fronts over the Midwest, a notably tricky place to forecast because of the Rocky models tend to be better at analyzing fine details. AI forecasts typically cover areas of 25 to 50 square miles. Most people need to know the weather in a much smaller area; government-run physics models analyze areas of around 6 square miles or less. WindBorne spotted heavy rains before the Texas floods, but not with the kind of granularity to deliver evacuation warnings. The company's goal is to reach a much smaller resolution in the years ahead, said Todd Hutchinson, WindBorne's chief the influential weather-model creator, said WindBorne "is one of a few companies trying to do both data acquisition and also do the modelling." He added, "They also seem to be quite good at both."The Trump administration's cuts have imposed another limit, too. For now, weather forecasting models based on deep learning remain dependent on data releases from the physics-based models at the public weather agencies. Those paint a wide-ranging universe of observations onto a 3D grid as often as four times a day, from which the AI models can learn. Keisler cofounded Brightband, a company that is developing software that can ingest observation data directly into AI models, but its work is in its early President Donald Trump's inauguration, NOAA employees have been pushed to resign, resulting in nearly 2,000 departures. While the White House budget doesn't reduce forecasting spending directly, it cuts spending on satellite and radar systems, and Trump's recently enacted domestic policy bill cut millions of dollars in leftover Biden administration funding for improved forecasts. Some changes seem ideological -- the removal of a data set about extreme weather events -- while others baffle meteorologists: NOAA will no longer distribute data from a U.S. military weather satellite program that is seen as vital to hurricane nominee to lead NOAA, Neil Jacobs, who was cited for violating the agency's code of scientific ethics during the president's first term, endorsed the White House's cuts at his confirmation hearing last week, but also promised to restore the extreme weather data set and invest in computing. He told lawmakers that "even if artificial intelligence can't do something better, if it can do it faster and more efficiently, I think it's worth using."Congress could still reverse some or all of these cuts through the budget process in the months ahead, but current and former members of the weather service's staff say the loss of data and human expertise will degrade the accuracy of forecasts and potentially endanger lives."We will continue to fulill our core mission of providing lifesaving forecasts, warnings and decision support services," a NOAA spokesperson said in a the fast changes happening in U.S. weather research put WindBorne in a complicated spot. The company needs NOAA's data, wants its business and hopes to do a better job of forecasting weather than the government currently can -- but the team of balloon-flying, AI-training techies are regular people, too."I have my personal philosophies that are not aligned with, like, what's best for our private weather company," Dean told me. "You don't want to live in this capitalist nightmare of like, 'Pay 10 bucks for today's weather.' That's too far."
Time of India
03-06-2025
- Time of India
Donald Trump's USA may witness massive exodus of scientists, biggest beneficiary will be China, warns report
Scientists in the USA have warned that Donald Trump administration's move to cut spending on science will set off a brain drain. Scientific leaders say that's risking the way American science has been done for years and the preeminence of the United States in their fields, as per a report. China and Europe are on hiring sprees. An analysis by the journal Nature captured the reversal: Applications from China and Europe for graduate student or postdoctoral positions in the United States have dropped sharply or dried up entirely since President Donald Trump took office. The number of postdocs and graduate students in the United States applying for jobs abroad has spiked, NYT News Service reported. A university in France that created new positions for scientists with canceled federal grants capped applications after overwhelming interest. A scientific institute in Portugal said job inquiries from junior faculty members in the United States are up tenfold over the past two months, as per the report. Play Video Play Skip Backward Skip Forward Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration 30:33 Loaded : 0.27% 00:00 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 30:33 1x Playback Rate Chapters Chapters Descriptions descriptions off , selected Captions captions settings , opens captions settings dialog captions off , selected Audio Track default , selected Picture-in-Picture Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Travel-Ready Steaming with Philips Steamer Philips Garment Steamers Learn More Undo American science finds itself fighting on several fronts as the Trump administration seeks to cut budgets and seal borders, to punish universities for their liberalism and federal health agencies for their responses to COVID, according to NYT News Service report. Federal science budgets have been slashed. Stricter immigration policies have spread fear among international scientists working in the United States and those who had hoped to. Graduate and postdoctoral students have had their visas canceled or worry they will. The administration cut off funding for international students at Harvard University -- a judge blocked the move, but other universities worry about being next, the NYT News Service reported. Live Events FAQs Q1. Who is President of USA? A1. President of USA is Donald Trump. Q2. Are there any challenge before American science? A2. American science finds itself fighting on several fronts as the Trump administration seeks to cut budgets and seal borders, to punish universities for their liberalism and federal health agencies for their responses to COVID, according to NYT News Service report.
Time of India
01-06-2025
- Time of India
Donald Trump's proposed budget cuts 90 per cent funding. Shocking details here
The Trump administration's proposed budget for 2026 slashes about 90 per cent of the funding for one of the country's cornerstone biological and ecological research programs. Known as the Ecosystems Mission Area, the program is part of the U.S. Geological Survey and studies nearly every aspect of the ecology and biology of natural and human-altered landscapes and waters around the country, as per a report. The 2026 proposed budget allocates $29 million for the project, a cut from its current funding level of $293 million. The budget proposal also reduces funds for other programs in the USGS, as well as other federal science agencies, NYT News Service reported. The budget still needs to be approved by Congress and scientists are seizing the opportunity to save the EMA. In early May, more than 70 scientific societies and universities signed a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, urging him not to eliminate the program. Abolishing the EMA was an explicit goal of Project 2025, the blueprint for shrinking the federal government produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation. That work cited decades-long struggles over the Interior Department's land management in the West, where protections for endangered species have at times prevented development, drilling and mining. The EMA is also a core part of federal climate research. The Trump administration has sharply reduced or eliminated funds for climate science across federal agencies, calling the study of climate change part of "social agenda" research in an earlier version of the budget proposal. Live Events "It's appalling," said Peter Groffman, an ecosystems ecologist at the City University of New York and a leader of the Ecological Society of America. "This is a division that does very important work, and does it very well," Groffman said. Universities and other institutions are unlikely to be able to carry on the work, he said. There are no immediately apparent plans from the administration to transfer EMA research to other federal agencies. The EMA runs dozens of biology and climate science centers, cooperates with universities in 41 states to identify and carry out pressing ecology and environmental health research, and more. Here is a snapshot of its work. FAQs Q1. What does proposed US Budget 2026 state? A1. The 2026 proposed budget allocates $29 million for the project, a cut from its current funding level of $293 million. Q2. What is full form of USGS? A2. The full form of USGS is United States Geological Survey.
