Christa Hagearty

BREAKING NEWS: BOS and NY Tech Week calendars are LIVE! You can now register for events: [tech-week.com/calendar] 2,000+ event submissions across Boston and New York City. 📍BOS: May 26-31 📍NY: June 1-7 Big congrats to the entire Tech Week team for already making this year the most ambitious yet! @roseajohnson @ShrikalaKashyap @andrewchen @TracyMassaro_ @itsthatnoodle @filgran_ @13dominos13 🫶

President Trump’s abuse of America's allies has reached a tipping point. Now countries have started making long-term policy shifts — and those shifts will soon take on a life of their own. My take:

Thank you to Steve Pagluica and the Park-Pagluica Fund for their commitment to finding treatments and a cure for Long Covid. #longcovid

12/ “This is an opportunity to help close one of the biggest gaps in medicine today,” said Steve Pagliuca, Founder and CEO of PagsGroup. “As someone whose family has been personally affected, I’ve seen firsthand how devastating this condition can be.

Professor John DeNero Ph.D. ’10 joined Berkeley in 2014 to focus on undergrad education in computer science and data science. He currently teaches and develops two of the largest courses on campus. Through his leadership as faculty director of the Data Science Undergraduate Studies (DSUS) program, he developed the data science major into the largest on campus and clinched the No. 1 ranking for the major nationally, according to U.S. News & World Report. Professor DeNero’s personal commitment to the power of a Berkeley data science education is an inspiring force. He is this year’s recipient of the Fiat Lux Faculty Award. #AchievementAwards #UCBerkeley

Harvard University is offering a FREE online course on the US Constitution! Understanding our Constitution has rarely been more important. Enroll in a free, short, engaging online course. HarvardX: American Government: Constitutional Foundations | edX edx.org/learn/governme…

Controversial opinion here, but Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome certainly exists and is probably grossly underdiagnosed.

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet. His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard. The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language. Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort. Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in. Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter. She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying. The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it. The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works. Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them. You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank. He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort. Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning. The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely. This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique. The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies. Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words. Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work. His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning. He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about. He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that. The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours. They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

“The world is aesthetically better today than it was 100 years ago. Yes, there are lots of people who are badly dressed. This is fine, as not everyone cares about aesthetics. But if you do care about aesthetics, you enjoy greater freedom today & thus can express yourself through”

A recent study "estimated that 5.8 million young people have Long COVID." (1) Below are the signs and symptoms of pediatric Long COVID. Here is how to track those symptoms...🧵

This @mckaycoppins story is remarkable. I just read it in print and the guy next to me on the plane was clearly trying to follow @TheAtlantic story. I handed it to him after I was done. He finished and said he keeps meaning to delete the gambling apps. “They’ve made me hate sports.”

Hope that more doctors will adopt These guidelines as new standards of care for Long Covid.

Parade: "Getting COVID Again Is More Dangerous Than Most People Realize—Here’s What To Know" 'What makes getting long COVID especially dangerous is that there is currently no cure for it...' 'Certainly, no one wants to suffer from long COVID...' parade.com/health/dangers…

Breaking: PolyBio Research Foundation today announced the launch of VIPER, the first large-scale program designed to rigorously validate diagnostic tests that measure SARS-CoV-2 persistence and other biological drivers of Long COVID: prnewswire.com/news-releases/…

As a physician, Long COVID taught me humility.
As a patient, it showed me how harmful dismissal can be.
 To those living with Long COVID: you are my inspiration to listen better, believe sooner, and advocate harder. #LongCovidAwarenessDay #LongCovid #Physiatry

MIT’s MAESTRO study for Lyme & Long Covid is still recruiting. They need one more patient to finish data collection, specifically a person with Long Covid aged 56-65, who can travel to MIT by early April. #LongCovid talresearchgroup.mit.edu/mitmaestro

dear apple, the iPod needs to come back. not for nostalgia. for the parents who want their kids to love music and audiobooks without a browser, social media, and the whole internet attached to it

Scientists put kids through 100 hours of reading, then scanned their brains. New wiring had physically grown inside the language regions. Communication between brain areas sped up by a factor of 10. Kids who didn't read showed zero change. That was a 2009 Carnegie Mellon study. It gets wilder. In 2013, Emory University scanned 19 students every morning for 19 straight days while they read one novel chapter each night. Mornings after reading, the brain areas responsible for understanding other people's emotions lit up with new connections. So did the region that processes physical sensation. Their brains were simulating what the characters felt, as if it were happening to them. Those changes stuck around for 5 days after they finished the book. Now flip to scrolling. A massive review published in Psychological Bulletin last September pulled together 71 studies covering 98,299 people. Heavy short-form video use (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) showed a clear pattern: worse attention, weaker self-control, and more anxiety. Consistent across teenagers and adults, across every platform tested. Oxford didn't name "brain rot" its 2024 Word of the Year for nothing. A 2024 brain wave study found that people hooked on short-form video had weaker activity in the front of the brain, the part that controls focus and impulse control. Separate brain scans showed the same thing: heavy scrollers had less activation in the exact regions that deep reading strengthens. UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has been studying this for decades. Humans were never born to read. There's no gene for it. Reading is something we invented, and it hijacked neurons that were originally meant for recognizing faces. Over time, it built entirely new brain circuits connecting language, vision, and emotion. But those circuits only survive if you use them. Stop reading, and they fade. Wolf's conclusion is simple: screens built for speed produce a speed-wired brain. Books built for depth produce a depth-wired brain. One honest caveat: most of these studies are snapshots, not long-term tracking. People who already struggle to focus might just prefer short videos. But the same pattern showing up across nearly 100,000 people is hard to shrug off. The tweet repeats the line seven times. The research backs it up with brain scans, EEG data, and white-matter imaging across tens of thousands of people.

Seems like the pharmaceutical companies don’t realize that there are millions of people impacted by long covid! What would make them recognize how large the numbers are?!?! #longcovid #treatments

Remember when @hertz was known for having the best service… no longer based on experience at LAX… their team sits with their back to the line so they don’t look at anyone… and so slow. Looks like 10 mins per person when they already have a reservation.