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The researchers asked study participants to take a week-long break from social media.Results of a study that asked participants to take a week-long break from social media find positive effects for wellbeing, depression and anxiety.According to the authors of a new study, asking individuals to cease using social media for one week might result in substantial improvements in their well-being, depression, and anxiety, and could be recommended as a way to help people manage their mental health in the future.A team of…

Over 120 million laboratory rats and mice are used worldwide each year. Many are used to study distressing conditions like cancer, arthritis and chronic pain, and nearly all spend their lives in small, empty box-like cages: a kind of permanent lockdown.  Our new analysis shows that this restrictive, artificial housing causes rats and mice to be chronically stressed, changing their biology. This raises worrying questions about their welfare – and about how well they represent typical human patients.We identified this…

At Google I/O 2022, Google announced a host of new features that will improve how efficiently third-party apps such as Snapchat, Instagram, and others use the camera and video functions on Android smartphones. The tech giant is also making significant changes to the camera functionality on Android 13 to ensure the output images replicate the preview you see before capturing that image. Google has a significant edge over competitors when it comes to computational photography. Besides leading with its Pixel line of…

School of Business. Credit: Aalto University / Mikko Raskinen Women and men in coworking couples are disproportionately more likely to have similar earnings, new research finds. Existing research believed that the reason for an apparently excessive number of couples where women earn just a bit less than their partners is the existence of gender norms according to which women should avoid earning more than their partners.…

When people get into their 40s and beyond, their close-up vision starts to worsen. For many people, cranking up the font size on a phone or maxing out the brightness on a computer is the only way to be able to read some text.  This condition is known as presbyopia, and it affects around 128 million people in the US and more than a billion people worldwide.In late 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a new eye drop medication to treat presbyopia. As an optometrist, I was initially skeptical.Prior to the…

Pandemic-specific factors and welbeing over time. The associations between (A) self-vulnerability and well-being, (B) loved ones’ vulnerability and well-being, and (C) adherence to physical distancing guidelines and well-being. Dots show the group mean and bars show the standard error of the mean. Credit: BMC Public Health (2022). DOI: 10.1186/s12889-022-13130-y Actions thought to be isolating and potentially detrimental for…

The amount of data generated by people and machines has increased exponentially and this requires a steady increase of datacenter compute performance. To meet the requirements of next-generation datacenters, AMD last year set itself a goal to increase efficiency of its accelerated datacenter platforms used for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads by 30 times by 2025 when compared to its 2020 platforms.  This week the company shared its progress, and it appears that AMD is advancing…

A new study reports efforts to evaluate the accuracy of computational simulations of earthquakes and slower fault movements, such as the gradual fault creep that is deforming the walls of this stadium at the University of California, Berkeley. Credit: David Monniaux/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 Movement along faults in Earth's crust can be sudden and jarring, as felt during an earthquake, or it can occur more gradually over…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A laser-textured friction disk could reduce maintenance costs and downtime for the biggest ships sailing on the oceans. Man Energy Solutions tested laser-textured friction disks on its two-stroke engines on two ships sailing from Europe to Asia. Friction disks…