Vivian Le's reads

How being kind to yourself can improve your health. Although it can be easy to be kind and generous to family and friends, many people find it more difficult to be kind to themselves. Writing for the Washington Post, Tara Parker-Pope explains the health benefits of practicing self-compassion, including less stress, stronger immune function, and a lower risk of heart disease, and offers simple tips on how to start being kinder to yourself.

A new AI battlefield: science fiction magazines. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a staple in the science fiction genre, but now it is making more of a real world (and negative) impact. In recent weeks, several science fiction magazines, including "Clarkesworld," "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction", and "Asimov's Science Fiction," have faced a deluge of chatbot-generated stories, making it harder to field legitimate submissions. Writing for the New York Times, Michael Levenson explains why so many AI-written stories have cropped up lately and how it's unlikely machines will replace the creativity of human writers anytime soon.

Lex Ashcroft's reads

What's the smallest amount of therapy that's still effective? Cultural messaging strongly suggests therapy should be considered by everyone, especially amid the mental health strain stemming from the pandemic. Despite changing generational attitudes about therapy, and the highly publicized emphasis on its importance, the most common number of talk therapy sessions an individual will attend in their lifetime is still just one.  Writing for The Atlantic, Maggie Mertens makes the case for targeted short-term therapy, and why skeptics should utilize it as a "temporary skill building opportunity."

This software tries to spot lung cancer years earlier. Can it? Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer, making early detection crucial for patients to survive. With this in mind, researchers have developed an AI tool that can predict whether a person will get the disease up to six years in advance. The tool, named Sybil, is "fed" piles of medical scans, analyzes it, and uses the information to train computers to identify tumors and other abnormalities. Writing for the Washington Post, Pranshu Verma explains how the tool can help break down barriers to early screening and outlines next steps for researchers.