All posts tagged: ability

Ultraprocessed foods hurt your ability to focus – even if you eat a largely healthy diet

Ultraprocessed foods hurt your ability to focus – even if you eat a largely healthy diet

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the Well Enough newsletter with Harry Bullmore for tips on living a healthier, happier and longer life Get the Well Enough email with Harry Bullmore Get the Well Enough email with Harry Bullmore Ultraprocessed foods can hurt your ability to focus and raise your risk of dementia – even if your diet is healthy for the most part, a new study has found. The findings have major implications for Americans since 60 percent of the U.S. diet is ultraprocessed. The study, conducted by researchers in Australia and Brazil, found that eating a single bag of chips a day is enough to shorten attention span. The average attention span for U.S. adults is now just eight seconds, according to separate research last year by Ohio State University. “There are many different things that can lead to why we’re having a hard time focusing or having trouble with attention,” Dr. Evita Singh, a psychiatrist with Ohio State’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, explained in a statement. A customer shops for potato chips in a grocery …

The Boys star Erin Moriarty says she lost ‘ability to walk’ while filming show

The Boys star Erin Moriarty says she lost ‘ability to walk’ while filming show

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter The Boys star Erin Moriarty said she hurt herself several times while filming the latest season as the shoot coincided with her Graves’ disease symptoms peaking. Moriarty, who plays Annie January aka Starlight in the Prime Video series, shared the details on her social media shortly after the release of the fourth episode of the fifth and final season. “Okay, so: season 5, episode 4 of The Boys is one of the most important episodes I’ve ever shot,” she wrote on Instagram, over a picture of her bandaged leg. “Unfortunately, that part of the season coincided with my health issues peaking before my diagnosis. I am saving you the gnarly part of this picture but not long after this episode, I started to lose the ability to walk.” “The numbness in my feet led to a lot of falling,” she continued. …

‘I got everything I dreamed of – when I had no ability to handle it’: Lena Dunham on toxic fame, broken friendships and her ‘lost decade’ | Lena Dunham

‘I got everything I dreamed of – when I had no ability to handle it’: Lena Dunham on toxic fame, broken friendships and her ‘lost decade’ | Lena Dunham

Published by Sam Flores

If there is something to be learned from the words people pick for their passwords and proxies, then Lena Dunham’s choice of aliases – pseudonyms that, as a public person, she has used over the years to conceal her identity when checking into rehab or ordering room service – give us a tiny glimpse into the writer and director’s self-image. Among her staples, “Lauri Reynolds” (after her mum, Laurie, with whom she is strikingly close); “Rose O’Neill” (after the American millionaire illustrator, who lost her fortune to burnout and hangers-on); and my favourite, “Renata Halpern”, an alias Dunham shares with readers of her delicious new memoir, Famesick, without explaining the name’s origin. “Has anyone else clocked the Renata Halpern reference?” I ask Dunham, who is in her apartment in New York, talking fast via video call while waiting for an egg-and-cheese bagel to be run up from the deli. On the brink of 40, she is in her dark-haired era – very Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – which, this morning, is set against a …

College Students Losing Ability to Participate in Class Discussions Since They Offloaded Their Thinking to AI

College Students Losing Ability to Participate in Class Discussions Since They Offloaded Their Thinking to AI

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech It’s well known that students from grade schools to the big universities are increasingly outsourcing their thinking to large language models (LLMs). The consequences are already measurable: elementary students are losing cognitive skills, leading them to tank their exams. Harder to quantify — but impossible to miss if you’ve spent any time in school lately — is the situation unfolding across classrooms, where students from all layers of society have become empty vessels that parrot the outputs of AI without critically engaging with the subject matter at hand. One student at Yale University, identified as Amanda, told CNN that the monotonous prose of ChatGPT is even seeping into Ivy-league seminars. As the student and her classmates have observed, in-class conversations among peers are becoming increasingly flat and predictable, a symptom of students leaning on AI to think through discussions for them. During one memorable awkward silence in class, Amanda told CNN she saw “someone typing ferociously on their …

Anthropic cuts off the ability to use Claude subscriptions with OpenClaw and third-party AI agents

Anthropic cuts off the ability to use Claude subscriptions with OpenClaw and third-party AI agents

Published by skeptic

Are you a subscriber to Anthropic’s Claude Pro ($20 monthly) or Max ($100-$200 monthly) plans and use its Claude AI models and products to power third-party AI agents like OpenClaw? If so, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Anthropic announced a few hours ago that starting tomorrow, Saturday, April 4, 2026, at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET, it will no longer be possible for those Claude subscribers to use their subscriptions to hook Anthropic’s Claude models up to third-party agentic tools, citing the strain such usage was placing on Anthropic’s compute and engineering resources, and desire to serve a wide number of users reliably. “We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools,” wrote Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, in a post on X. “Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API.” The company also reportedly sent out an email to this effect to some subscribers. …

Electrical stimulation can restore ability to move limbs after spinal cord injury

Electrical stimulation can restore ability to move limbs after spinal cord injury

Published by Jenni Sidey

One participant pointed to her chest. That, she explained, is where she felt her foot hit the treadmill. Not the foot itself, not the ground beneath it, but a sensation somewhere above the injury that her brain had learned to translate into something useful. “It wasn’t like I could feel my foot hit the treadmill or anything like that,” she said, “but it was close.” Close is a word that carries real weight in spinal cord injury research. For people who have lost all sensation and movement below the waist, close to normal is not a consolation. It is a clinical milestone. A team from Brown University, Rhode Island Hospital, and VA Providence Healthcare has now reported results from a small but significant clinical trial, the first to demonstrate simultaneous motor control and sensory feedback in people with complete spinal cord injuries. The findings were published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. David Borton (left), an asociate professor of engineering and brain science at Brown, and Jonathan Calvert (right), an assistant professor at UC Davis who led …

Professors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students’ Ability to Think

Professors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students’ Ability to Think

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Professors are fighting an uphill battle against the intrusion of AI into education, and it’s forcing them to rethink how they instruct their students, many of whom have already become hopelessly dependent on the tech. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one told The Guardian in a new piece that interviewed more than a dozen professors in the humanities. “I now talk about AI with my students not under the framework of cheating or academic honesty but in terms that are frankly existential,” Dora Zhang, a literature professor at UC Berkeley said. “What is it doing to us as a species?” Alas, students looking for an easy “A” may not be interested in philosophical inquiries on how AI is fundamentally changing how we interact with the world and with each other — and indeed, according to a burgeoning body of research, how our brains work. One canary in the coal mine comes from a Carnegie Mellon …

Genetic factors drive the link between cognitive ability and socioeconomic status

Genetic factors drive the link between cognitive ability and socioeconomic status

Published by José Betancourt

A new study published in Scientific Reports suggests that the connection between a young adult’s cognitive ability and their future socioeconomic status is largely driven by their genes. The findings provide evidence that genetic factors play a larger role in educational and occupational success than environmental conditions. This underlying biology may help explain why some social interventions aimed at reducing inequality tend to fall short over the long term. Social scientists have spent decades trying to understand the psychological mechanisms that drive socioeconomic status. Getting an education and securing a job are the primary ways young adults begin earning a living and establishing their place in society. Past research reliably shows that general cognitive ability, often measured as an intelligence quotient, is the strongest predictor of a person’s future socioeconomic position. However, it has remained unclear whether this relationship is primarily driven by a person’s unique genetics or by their personal life experiences. Such experiences might include the social networks a person builds in college or the specific opportunities they encounter in the job market. …