James' World 2

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If you’ve decided to take a break from drinking alcohol, you’re not alone. Breaking the booze habit, whether it’s for 30 days or longer, has its benefits. But for many people, the challenge is getting started.

Here are six strategies and tips to get you on your way.

1. Assess your relationship with alcohol

Think about what’s motivating you to take a break from alcohol. To begin the process, consider starting a journal. Rachel Kazez, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist with All Along, says to begin with some basic questions to get a little perspective.

• How often, and how much am I drinking? What are the reasons I drink? 
• How do I feel before I drink? How do I feel afterward? 

These are all simple questions — but once you start reflecting — your answers may surprise you. “It’s the act of stepping back and looking at one’s relationship with alcohol that we think is where the magic is,” says Aaron White of the National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health. He says here are some more questions to ask yourself:

• How does alcohol affect your social relationships?
• Do you get to work on time?
• Are you hungover a lot?
• Do you find yourself thinking about alcohol? 

There’s no right or wrong answer, and no judgment. Given that alcohol is so ubiquitous in our culture, some people drink out of habit and haven’t taken the time to take note of its effects. A break from drinking will give you this opportunity.

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Fittingly, the CEO of a startup that hopes to take over the AI world appears on screen with what appears to be a robotic limb. 

“I’ve got this piece of metal in me now,” Dmitry Shapiro says of the high-tech brace. “It’s kind of cool, like a cyborg arm.” He ruptured his bicep while helping his family evacuate during floods in San Diego, all of which sounds kind of cool, too. Then Shapiro, 54, admits the cause: Picking up a box in the garage. As he and his wife discovered doing research afterwards, a bicep tendon rupture is most frequently felt by … middle-aged men picking up boxes. 

The problem and the solution were both duller – and more widespread and more helpful, respectively – than they seemed at first blush. Which makes the not-so-cyborg arm an even more fitting visual for Shapiro’s startup, and for where the AI industry is going next. Shapiro, a tech veteran who previously ran Google machine learning teams, co-founded his startup YouAI and launched its product MindStudio last year. MindStudio lets managers build apps using any or all of the major AI services, like OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo or Google’s Gemini. Fresh data can be sprinkled in from all kinds of other non-AI databases or documents. These AI apps can be constructed in minutes, visually, like a flow chart, without the user needing to touch a line of code — the way Windows runs on top of DOS, Shapiro notes. (Left unsaid: putting Windows atop DOS made Microsoft the wealthiest company of the 1980s and 1990s.) 

Less than a year in, MindStudio can boast more than 18,000 user-created AI apps (putting it ahead of Dante AI, a similar brew-your-own chatbot service with 6,000 user-created apps). Its growth was based entirely on word-of-mouth. Again, the 18,000 number sounds awesome and a little terrifying — like a flurry of drones — until Shapiro offers an example that drills home the mundanity of those apps. A friend of his exited the tech world, bought a pool-cleaning business, and used MindStudio to build a “pool-cleaning copilot” in a matter of minutes. Now his employees test the pH of pools and the app tells them what to do with the result. 

“The things you can do with this now would have been seen as science fiction last year,” Shapiro says, suggesting he needs to read more interesting science fiction. Still, his point stands. As it comes into focus, this technology looks less like the Terminator, and more like giving robot arms to people lifting boxes. 

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U.S. Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African-American in the Congress. from Mississippi

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The human brain could be far more powerful than we ever imagined, scientists have discovered.

Researchers have identified cell messaging which have never been uncovered before, which suggests our brains are capable of more than previously realized.

It’s all to do with the outer cortical cells, with the findings suggesting that single human neurons are remarkably powerful.

The research, which was first published in Science in 2020 and undertaken by experts at Germany and Greece institutes.

Their research involved analyzing the brain’s outer cortical cells using fluorescent microscopy and they found that individual cells ‘fired’ using sodium ions (which was to be expected) as well as calcium.

During the research, scientists observed voltage passing through brain cells with a combination of positively charged ions which had never been seen before.

The research also focused on the dendrites, which are found at the end of branches in the brain and are key to neurons sending chemical messages throughout the brain.

“The dendrites are central to understanding the brain because they are at the core of what determines the computational power of single neurons,” said study co-author and Humboldt University neuroscientist Matthew Larkum.

By modeling the unique electrical qualities explored in the study, the researchers discovered that single neurons were able to solve the kinds of computational problems which were previously thought to require more complex networks in the brain.

The study went further than experts had gone before in this area, with most research previously conducted on rodents.

“There was a ‘eureka’ moment when we saw the dendritic action potentials for the first time,” Larkum said. “The experiments were very challenging, so to push the questions past just repeating what has been done in rodents already was very satisfying.”

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When I first started my dating coaching practice in 2016, it was common for clients to come to me with several active dating profiles and be utterly overwhelmed by app-based dating. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed more and more clients, particularly in their 20s, who have never had a dating profile or are not active on any dating apps they used in the past. I don’t exclusively recommend dating apps to my clients, but it has been interesting to see how something that was so common a few years ago is losing steam with certain daters, especially those who are of a younger demographic.

Gen-Z is the first generation to have internet connectivity from birth. Where other generations have a clear memory of a “before” and “after” smartphones, tech-enabled devices have been seamlessly woven into each and every aspect of Gen-Z’s lives. Given that Gen-Z currently includes 18 to 27 year olds, one would assume they would be prime candidates for the swipe-and-match of dating apps. But that’s not the case. Despite the growing trend of dating apps being where people go to find partners in the U.S., Gen-Z seems to be opting out.

According to a 2023 Statista survey, daters in the U.S. between the ages of 30 and 49, who are mostly millennial, make up 61% of dating app users, whereas Gen-Z comes in at only 26%. This may be in part due to unique challenges Gen-Z faces on the apps. In Hinge’s 2024 D.A.T.E. (Data, Advice, Trends, and Expertise) report, many Gen-Z daters cite fear of rejection and being cringe amongst their top concerns. Older generations of daters may have more experience with the discomfort of dating rejection. They may also rebound more easily after an awkward encounter, rather than internalizing it as “cringe” that can’t be overcome. Of course, most of us fear rejection, but in a tech-mediated world where ideas and people are liked, upvoted, attacked, or labeled, things can feel simultaneously impersonal and very personal. Gen-Z daters may have a harder time putting themselves in the vulnerable position online of seeking partnership only to get passed over or ghosted. This struggle to make connections using dating apps could explain why some of my Gen-Z clients are deleting their dating apps or, after hearing stories from peers about how hard dating apps are to engage with, choose not to try dating at all.

Generally speaking, dating apps are losing their appeal with daters of all ages. There’s an increasing feeling that the algorithms aren’t helping them find what they want—or that dating app companies are only there to upsell their customers by hiding helpful features and users behind paywalls. The disenchantment grows still when daters, specifically women, minorities, fat people, and people with disabilities have negative experiences like harassment on the apps. It makes sense that most apps get deleted within the first month. Having grown up seeing generations before them struggle with what was the latest and greatest technology for meeting potential partners, Gen-Z is more critical of what apps have to offer. This generation has more of a focus on self-care and authenticity in dating than previous generations, and dating apps fall short of the types of genuine, easy connections they’re trying to make.

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Real love

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When Kaia Roman’s epigenetics business failed in 2014, she spiraled into a depression.

“What would come out of my mouth first was a complaint,” Roman told NBC News. “I wasn’t being a very positive person.”

Roman, who lives in Santa Cruz, California, says she would vent to anyone who would listen — about the traffic, the weather, or anything that inconvenienced her.

A friend recommended she give up complaining for a month, advising that it would help reframe her mind.

Roman, 43, chronicled the experience in her book “The Joy Plan: How I Took 30 Days to Stop Worrying, Quit Complaining, and Find Ridiculous Happiness.”

Now a successful author and school teacher, she says forgoing gripes changed her life in “miraculous” ways.

But she says complaining does have an important purpose — it tells us that something in our lives needs to change.

“But I think we can get stuck there by focusing on what we don’t want instead of on what we do want,” she says.

Why we complain

We complain when we feel there is a significant gap between an expectation and reality, according to Dr. Guy Winch, author of the book “The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships, and Enhance Self-Esteem.”

Complaining is also a bonding mechanism, according to the New York City psychologist.

“Complaints can make us feel like we connect with someone because we have a mutual dissatisfaction about something,” he says.

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We complain when we feel there is a significant gap between an expectation and reality. Alva Skog / for NBC News

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