NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

Your Sleep Exposes Hidden Diseases

By the time many people learn something is wrong, their body has already been damaged.

Many serious illnesses don’t announce themselves clearly, and are easy to miss in routine checks.

The cost of that delay is enormous: Heart disease affects more than 500M people worldwide and causes 1 in 3 deaths. For cancer, even a month’s delay in treatment can raise the risk of death by 7%.

The problem is how we look for disease: a blood test here, a quick scan there. But the body isn’t static - it’s a system in constant motion. Subtle warning signs often appear in how organs interact over time.

Now, researchers at Stanford Medicine have found a solution: their new AI model can predict a person’s risk of developing more than 100 diseases using data from just one night of sleep.

“SleepFM” was trained on 600,000 hours of sleep recordings from 65,000 people. These overnight tests capture signals like brain waves, heart rhythms, oxygen levels, and eye movement.

The results are big:

• The model accurately predicted 130 health conditions - including heart disease, cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s, pregnancy complications, and even risk of death.

• For some diseases, it outperformed the tests doctors commonly use today.

• It was especially strong at identifying hard-to-detect illnesses like Parkinson’s, dementia, heart disease, and cancer.

It could be a major next step in healthcare: researchers are pushing to turn this into something people could use at home. That means everyday wearables like smartwatches could one day spot serious diseases while you sleep. 😴

(Source: Anna Desmarais for Euronews)

Classroom Lessons, Podcast Style

Google is trying a new way to keep students engaged… by turning classroom lessons into podcasts. 🎙️

Inside Google Classroom, teachers can now use AI to generate podcast-style audio lessons. They can choose the grade level, set learning goals, decide how many voices are involved, and even pick formats like interviews or roundtable chats - basically shaping the lesson like a show.

The idea is to slip learning into habits students already have. Research shows 35 million Gen Z listeners in the US tune into podcasts every month, and audio lessons can be replayed anytime - whether someone missed class or just needs to hear it again.

(Source: Lauren Forristal for TechCrunch)

Meet Marta Bralic Kerns, founder of Pomelo Care

Celebrating this week’s Woman in Tech 🥳: Meet Marta Bralic Kerns, founder and CEO of Pomelo Care - the company built for the moments when pregnancy feels lonely and overwhelming.

Born in the US, Kerns studied Government and Computer Science at Harvard, then worked in healthcare consulting - looking at costs, policies, and systems. On paper, everything looked organized. In real life, it was very messy.

Later, at Flatiron Health, she saw how powerful care could be when data was used early - catching cancer risks before patients ever felt sick. Tech could change outcomes when done right.

But pregnancy care still felt stuck: Most pregnant people can’t consult a doctor often enough. And once the baby arrives, the support drops off completely - right when exhaustion, fear, and postpartum depression can set in.

Marta built Pomelo Care to sit in that gap: the company gives families 24/7 access to care teams by text, phone, or video - someone to message when something doesn’t feel right, or you just need reassurance.

Behind the scenes, Pomelo watches for early warning signs so problems are caught before they turn into emergencies.

Today, Pomelo supports families across the US, including those on Medicaid (the public insurance program covering nearly half of all births). It’s helped reduce premature births, shorten ICU stays for newborns, and catch postpartum depression earlier. ❤️