The children of the digital technology: a generation of “sick”?

Fears, addictions, confinement, insomnias, diseases: the risks connected to the digital technology are to be seriously taken. The young people are affected by new mental illnesses or described as such. The list is long and does not stop lengthening. The young people found in the digital technology a refuge in front of their ill-being, but it finally seems to aggravate their solitude.

So, in 2015, a new syndrome was born: Fobo (for Fear Of Being Offline). This one is characterized by the fear of being disconnected. Since then, the list stretches out and after the syndrome of the ghost vibrations and the “nomophobia”, which is translated by the anxiety to be separated from its mobile phone, the selfitism has just been described as a mental illness.

The next one on the list of the World Health Organization: the addiction in the video games. Then, why the WHO made such a decision? The answer is maybe near pharmaceutical companies. Indeed, qualifying the disorders of the video game as a disease involves that the people recognized as sick will get a medicinal prescription (to pay!). Yet, labs think they finalized of “the molecules specially targeted at the adolescent depressions with compulsive behavior”, which is obviously the case at the players.

The problem? According to Emilie Danchin, ” give medicine to young people who have a narcissistic fragility entail a risk of making them hooked to medicine. It is necessary to begin with questioning the practice and wondering what makes that we have a dependent personality “.

Read full article in French on “alternativesante”.

January 20, 2018January 20, 2018

AI Super-readers, better than humans!

January the 15^th of year 2018 will be remembered in the history of human beings and robots. This day, two AI outscored human beings at the Stanford Questions Answering Dataset, which is a reading test designed by Stanford researchers where you have to answer more than 100.000 questions using 500 Wikipedia articles.

One of the two concerned AI was created by Alibaba’s researchers (Alibaba is a Chinese big store) and scored 82,44 at this test. The other one was developed by Microsoft’s researchers and scored 82,65. The human contestants scored 82,304.

This result is very significant in the sense that we all already know that computers have supremacy over human kind in the areas of memory (storage) and calculation (and they also can do multiple things simultaneously). From now on, as machines not only remember or access more resources than human beings, not only they read that faster, but they also understand it better!! From now on, human beings won’t ever be competitive against machines again, in many ways.

Click the link to read the original article.

January 10, 2018January 10, 2018

When people sleep more they also eat less sugar…

and 2 other news we found for you.

When people sleep more they also eat less sugar and carbs

Want to eat better? Sleep more. Increasing the amount of sleep a person gets has been linked to eating fewer sugary foods, and making better nutritional choices.
Wendy Hall, at King’s College London, and her team enlisted 42 volunteers to help them investigate the link between sleep and diet. Half the participants were given advice on how to get more sleep – such as avoiding caffeine before bed, establishing a relaxing routine, and trying not to go to bed too full or hungry. This advice was intended to help them boost the amount of sleep they each got by 90 minutes a night. The remaining 21 volunteers received no such advice.
The team found that, of those who were given the advice, 86 per cent spent more time in bed, and around half slept for longer than they used to. These extended sleep patterns were associated with an average reduction in the intake of free sugars of 10 grams a day. People who were getting more sleep also ate fewer carbohydrates. There were no significant changes in diet in the control group.

Read article on newscientist.

A reboot for chronic fatigue syndrome research

Research into this debilitating disease has a rocky past. Now scientists may finally be finding their footing.
After decades of pleading, people with the condition have finally caught the attention of mainstream science — and dozens of exploratory studies are now under way. Scientists entering the field are using the powerful tools of modern molecular biology to search for any genes, proteins, cells and possible infectious agents involved. They hope the work will yield a laboratory test to diagnose ME/CFS — which might have several different causes and manifestations — and they want to identify molecular pathways to target with drugs.
Read article on nature.

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing review

– timely guide Daniel H Pink’s engaging book reveals the best times of day to make optimum décisions.

In 2011, two Cornell researchers, Michael Macy and Scott Golder, began an unusual project. They gathered approximately 500m tweets that had been posted by more than 2 million users in 84 countries over the previous two years. Then they subjected these tweets to careful analysis.
The sociologists’ aim was straightforward. The pair wanted to measure how people’s feelings varied from morning until night and, by using an analysis program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), they attempted to measure the emotional states revealed by individuals in the electronic texts they sent. The patterns that were uncovered were striking.
Macy and Golder found that with remarkable consistency – and regardless of time of year – people’s positive emotions rose in strength as the morning progressed and then fell significantly in the afternoon, before climbing back in the evening. “Whether a tweeter was North American or Asian, Muslim or atheist, black, white or brown, it didn’t matter,” Daniel Pink tells us. “Across continents and time zones was the same daily oscillation – a peak, a trough and a rebound.”

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Read article on theguardian.