Sujata Gupta

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

The headlines keep coming: Another federal grant funding medical research terminated. Another lab devoted to mental health losing its funding. Another clinical trial stopped. It’s all part of actions the Trump administration says are needed to make government more efficient or to eliminate funding related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Opponents say the cuts undermine crucial medical research, gut careers and damage U.S. leadership in science.

2 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

Last year, my son joined the middle school chess club and began using me, a total novice, as his sparring partner. In chess, a player can choose from one of 20 opening moves, including moving a knight in the back row to one of four possible spots or any of the pawns in the front row one or two spaces forward. That opening matters a lot, determining how the game unspools and, ultimately, a player’s odds of winning.

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

The rapid pace of change under the current presidential administration has been amping up people’s feelings of uncertainty. That collective unease can take a toll on societal well-being, researchers say.  “Given that unfamiliarity permeates our current ether … uncertainty can be considered a widespread public health problem,” Emily Hauenstein argued earlier this year in the Archives of Pediatric Nursing.

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

Across the world, loneliness tends to increase after midlife. But for reasons that aren’t altogether clear, the United States is an outlier, with loneliness steadily decreasing from the middle to later years of life, researchers report April 22 in Aging and Mental Health. Most attention and policies addressing loneliness in the United States target the elderly or, recently, teens and young adults, whose rates of mental health problems have surged.

4 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

On the eve of Daylight Saving Time, I flew home to Vermont from California. Crossing several time zones, I arrived near midnight. At 2 a.m., the clock jumped ahead an hour, leaving me discombobulated. “How messed up am I?” I asked sleep researcher and evolutionary anthropologist David Samson days later. Jet lag can make people feel moody and hungry at weird times, but my extreme state probably masked chronic sleep dysregulation, he told me.