In just over two months, athletes from hundreds of countries

will descend on Paris for the highly anticipated 2024 Summer

Olympics.

Athletes had a shortened window of time to prepare to compete at this year's Olympic Games
due to the COVID-delayed 2020 Summer Olympics. Competition in Tokyo began in July 2021
instead of 2020. As the competitors gear up for their chance to earn a highly coveted medal this
year, those who have been tasked with overseeing the more than two-week event continue to
prepare a defense against cybersecurity threats.

The focus on cybersecurity has seemingly increased in recent years as "bad actors" have
employed more sophisticated methods. But the responsible use of artificial intelligence presents
an opportunity to counter some of those threats.

Blackbird.AI created an AI-based narrative intelligence platform called Constellation, which

efficiently identifies narratives that were derived from some type of disinformation. The
platform then initiates a process in which the technology analyzes the narrative, measures the
level of risk and adds context. All of these steps are done to provide clarity, which in turn
allows organizations or anyone leveraging the platform to have the best information at their
disposal when it comes to critical decision-making.

"We have a platform called Constellation, our intelligence platform, where we can discover,
analyze, investigate online conversations on any platform and [help determine] the risk that it
poses. We look at the visibility of the narrative," Sarah Boutboul, an intelligence analyst at
Blackbird.AI, told Fox News Digital.

A narrative attack is defined as any assertion that has the potential to impose serious harm by
"shaping perceptions about a person, place, or thing in the information ecosystem," according
to Blackbird.AI. These attacks can lead to significant financial loss and can also harm
reputations, especially if a specific narrative was driven by misinformation.

The Constellation Dashboard has the unique ability to provide a "real-time view of narrative
attacks as they scale and become harmful," according to Blackbird.AI.
The company's website describes Constellation as a "multimodal, assessing text, images, and
memes; multi-platform, spanning dark web, social media, news, and more; and multilingual,
supporting over 25 languages."International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach
recently voiced the need to responsibly embrace AI within sports. Last month, the IOC shared
its AI plan, including identifying talent, personalizing training and improving judging fairness.
"Today, we are making another step to ensure the uniqueness of the Olympic Games and the
relevance of sport. To do this, we have to be leaders of change," Bach said during a press event
at the former London Olympic Park at the time. "We are determined to exploit the vast
potential of AI in a responsible way."

The IOC's AI plans include using the technology to protect athletes from online harassment and
to help broadcasters improve the viewing experience for people watching from home. The IOC
earns billions of dollars through the sale of broadcast rights for the games.
"The report focuses on the June and July 2023 time frames, and it's analyzing all kinds of
online harmful conversation. The ones that would pose a high risk to the French government, to
France in general, but also to the International Olympic Committee," Boutboul added. "We did
focus on this specific time frame for a reason. Viginum is the operational arm of the French
government that is focused on digital foreign interference. [Viginum] found a foreign network
of online actors propagating with full disinformation campaigns, which (took aim) at France's
ability to [host] the Olympics."

President Emmanuel Macron spearheaded Viginum in 2021 to counteract a series of

destabilizing operations and to have a defense in place for any potential future occurrences. The
office formerly initiated operations in October 2021.
The Summer Olympics begins on July 26 and concludes on Aug. 11.

China unveils its first full-size electric running humanoid

robot
Like it or not, soon our world is going to be filled with robots that walk among us, not as
clunky machines of sci-fi films, but with the grace and agility of humans.

Take Tiangong, for example, a full-size humanoid robot capable of running on electric power,
which was recently unveiled by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.

Standing as tall as an average human and powered by a symphony of sensors and processors,
Tiangong has the ability to jog at a steady pace, navigate complex terrain and perform tasks
with precision. Tiangong represents a future where robots could possibly become our
companions, helpers and perhaps even our friends.

Tiangong by the numbers

This full-size humanoid robot, standing at 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighing 95 pounds, is
capable of running on electric power at a steady pace of about 3.7 mph. Tiangong is outfitted
with cutting-edge sensors, including vision perception sensors and a high-precision inertial
measurement unit that performs an impressive 550 trillion operations per second. These
features, along with its 3D vision and six-axis force sensors, ensure that Tiangong moves with a
smoothness that rivals human motion.

The global race in humanoid robotics

Tiangong’s unveiling is a significant milestone, yet it’s not the only contender in the quest to
expand the horizons of humanoid robotics. Boston Dynamics recently revealed their all-
electric Atlas robot, which features a wider range of motion and improved agility over its
predecessor, signaling a robust competition in the field.
Open-source collaboration and commercial applications
Both Tiangong and Atlas are designed for compatibility with open-source software, fostering a
spirit of collaboration and innovation. This strategy is anticipated to pave the way for
widespread commercial use of humanoid robots in various sectors, including home services and
industrial manufacturing.

China’s technological leap at the Zhongguancun Forum

The 2024 Zhongguancun Forum was a showcase of artificial intelligence breakthroughs,
underscoring China’s swift progress in state-of-the-art innovations. The Economic and
Technological Development Area in Beijing has become a hub for over a hundred robotics
businesses, creating an extensive industrial ecosystem.

Kurt's key takeaway

In the dance of innovation, robots like Tiangong are leading the waltz into the future. They
challenge our preconceived notions of robotics and invite us to consider the roles they will play
in our lives. As some people admire their capabilities, we must also acknowledge the
reservations some may feel about their integration into our society. Will they remain our dutiful
servants, or will they evolve into something more? The answers to these questions are as
complex as the technology itself, but one thing is certain: The future is here, and these
humanoid robots are ready to run alongside us.

First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of

orphan stars
The first scientific pictures from the Euclid satellite mission have revealed more than 1,500
billion orphan stars scattered throughout the Perseus cluster of galaxies.
Led by astronomers from the University of Nottingham, this discovery sheds light on the
origins of these celestial wanderers.

The Perseus cluster, located 240 million light-years away from Earth, is one of the Universe's
most massive structures, boasting thousands of galaxies. However, amidst this cosmic
ensemble, the Euclid satellite captured faint ghostly light -- the orphan stars -- drifting between
the cluster's galaxies.

Stars naturally form within galaxies, so the presence of orphan stars outside these structures
raised intriguing questions about their origins.

Professor Nina Hatch, who led the project team, said, "We were surprised by our ability to see
so far into the outer regions of the cluster and discern the subtle colours of this light. This light
can help us map dark matter if we understand where the intracluster stars came from. By
studying their colours, luminosity, and configurations, we found they originated from small
galaxies."
The orphan stars are characterised by their bluish hue and clustered arrangement. Based on
these distinctive features the astronomers involved in the study suggest that the stars were torn
from the outskirts of galaxies and from the complete disruption of smaller cluster galaxies,
known as dwarfs.
After being torn from their parent galaxies, the orphaned stars were expected to orbit around the
largest galaxy within the cluster. However, this study revealed a surprising finding: the orphan
stars instead circled a point between the two most luminous galaxies in the cluster.

Dr Jesse Golden-Marx, a Nottingham astronomer involved in the study, commented, "This

novel observation suggests that the massive Perseus cluster may have recently undergone a
merger with another group of galaxies. This recent merger could have induced a gravitational
disturbance, causing either the most massive galaxy or the orphan stars to deviate from their
expected orbits, thus resulting in the observed misalignment."
Dr Matthias Kluge, first author on the study, from the Max-Planck institute for Extraterrestrial
Physics in Munich, Germany, stated: "This diffuse light is more than 100,000 times fainter than
the darkest night sky on Earth. But it is spread over such a large volume that when we add it all
up, it accounts for about 20% of the luminosity of the entire cluster."

ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark
Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the
Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years,
across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and
how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the
nature of dark energy and dark matter.

Dr Mireia Montes, an astronomer from the Institute of Astrophysics on the Canary Islands
involved in the study said, "This work was only possible thanks to Euclid's sensitivity and
sharpness." Euclid's revolutionary design means that it can take images with similar sharpness
as the Hubble Space Telescope, but covering an area that is 175 times larger.

Scientists map networks regulating gene function in the

human brain
A consortium of researchers has produced the largest and most advanced multidimensional
maps of gene regulation networks in the brains of people with and without mental disorders.
These maps detail the many regulatory elements that coordinate the brain's biological pathways
and cellular functions. The research used postmortem brain tissue from over 2,500 donors to
map gene regulation networks across different stages of brain development and multiple brain-
related disorders.

"These groundbreaking findings advance our understanding of where, how, and when genetic
risk contributes to mental disorders such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and
depression," said Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of NIH's National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH). "Moreover, the critical resources, shared freely,willhelp researchers pinpoint
genetic variants that are likely to play a causal role in mental illnesses and identify potential
molecular targets for new therapeutics."

The research is published across 15 papers in Science, Science Advances,

and Scientific Reports. The papers report findings along several key themes:
Population-level analyses that link genetic variants, regulatory elements, and different
molecular forms of expressed genes to regulatory networks at the cellular level, in both the
developing brain and adult brain

Single-cell-level maps of the prefrontal cortex from individuals diagnosed with mental
disorders and neurodevelopmental disorders

Experimental analyses validating the function of regulatory elements and genetic variants
associated with quantitative trait loci (segments of DNA that are linked with observable traits)
The analyses expand on previous findings, exploring multiple cortical and subcortical regions
of the human brain. These brain areas play key roles in a range of essential processes, including
decision-making, memory, learning, emotion, reward processing, and motor control.

Approximately 2% of the human genome is composed of genes that code for proteins. The
remaining 98% includes DNA segments that help regulate the activity of those genes. To better
understand how brain structure and function contribute to mental disorders, researchers in the
NIMH-funded PsychENCODE Consortium are using standardized methods and data analysis
approaches to build a comprehensive picture of these regulatory elements in the human brain.
In addition to these discoveries, the papers also highlight new methods and tools to help
researchers analyze and explore the wealth of data produced by this effort. These resources
include a web-based platform offering interactive visualization data from diverse brain cell
types in individuals with and without mental disorders, known as PsychSCREEN. Together,
these methods and tools provide a comprehensive, integrated data resource for the broader
research community.
The papers focus on the second phase of findings from the PsychENCODE Consortium. This
effort aims to advance our understanding of how gene regulation impacts brain function and
dysfunction.

"These PsychENCODE Consortium findings shed new light on how gene risk maps onto brain
function across developmental stages, brain regions, and disorders," said Jonathan Pevsner,
Ph.D., chief of the NIMH Genomics Research Branch. "The work lays a strong foundation for
ongoing efforts to characterize regulatory pathways across disorders, elucidate the role of
epigenetic mechanisms, and increase the ancestral diversity represented in studies."
The PsychENCODE papers published in Science and Science Advances are presented as a
collection on the Science website.

Em Mệt!
Susan Charles loves figuring out what keeps people happy. Throughout her career studying
emotional processes across the adult life span, the professor of psychological science at
University of California, Irvine has returned to this research focus again and again. Most
emotions are experienced in a social context, so “what keeps us happy is often what keeps us
safe,” she says. “What keeps us enjoying the people … that add meaning to our lives.” And
quantifying daily stressors is part of unlocking the key to that happiness.

Much of her data come from a treasure trove of information known as the Midlife in the United
States (MIDUS) series, a groundbreaking longitudinal study based at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison that tracks participants’ health and well-being through daily diaries and
surveys conducted over the phone. There have been three major waves of data collection every
10 years—in 1995, 2005, and 2015—with a special fourth survey in 2012 to capture the effects
of the Great Recession, a collective stressor. The researchers are now also collecting special
data tracking the effects of the pandemic.

For eight days in a row, participants at each wave of the midlife study spoke to a researcher
over the phone about their day. Respondents shared whether or not they experienced any
stressors, such as getting into an argument with a friend or having a problem at work—the
kinds of stressors that aren’t life-threatening but can be disruptive. Charles dug into these
surveys, wanting to learn from the answers how different people react to and handle stress. But
she kept having to throw out a small portion of the data.
Throughout every wave of the MIDUS study, 10 percent of respondents answered “no” to every
question researchers asked about whether they experienced stress in some form that day. In
other words, for eight days straight, these participants did not experience one iota of everyday,
normal life stress. At first these outliers were meaningless to Charles, because a person who
didn’t perceive or experience stress couldn’t help her figure out how people manage under
stress. But then she thought, Wait a minute, who are these people?

The human brain needs some level of stress—such as taking tests—to keep it functioning
optimally, research finds.
Mixed blessing
A life devoid of stress, and stressors, might sound idyllic, but don’t be fooled. There’s a reason
Charles decided to call her 2021 study of these miraculously unbothered outliers “The Mixed
Benefits of a Stressor-Free Life.”

Charles and her colleagues found that without stress, a person would report higher levels of
happiness than the general population and lower levels of other chronic health issues, but they
also displayed signs of cognitive decline, such as lowered attention and concentration, worse
short- and long-term memory, worse problem-solving, and a lowered ability to focus or inhibit
unwanted behavior.

The message of this type of work isn’t that we should all learn to cherish every stressor we
encounter. Not all moments of stress response are created equal. When researchers talk about
the ones that do benefit people, “we’re not talking about really negative things like trauma-type
stressors, we’re talking about things that are very normative in people’s lives,” says Jeremy
Jamieson, a stress researcher at the University of Rochester.

He wasn’t involved in Charles’s study, but he, like Charles, studies the benefits of certain types
of stress, an experience that usually gets a bad rap across the board. “Doing a hard assignment
or taking on a difficult task at work—these are things that we all do all the time, and they’re not
necessarily negative, but oftentimes they’re presented as such,” says Jamieson.

As with pain, the general experience of stress is universal, but what sets off this system is
highly subjective. Two people, both capable of experiencing stress, can face the same relative
stressor, say performing in the school play, and each handle it differently. One person may clam
up under the spotlight, and the other may feel totally at home on the stage.

Also like pain, not experiencing stress may help a person avoid one problem, but it can
summon others. While people who don’t feel pain may avoid one of life’s more unpleasant
sensations, they are also prone to injury, since pain triggers a reflex that keeps us safe—it’s
what tells us to take our hand off a hot stove. Someone who doesn’t feel pain could end up
burning off their skin.

Cortisol is the main steroid hormone secreted by the adrenal cortex in the brain. Cortisol, seen
here magnified, plays a role in the body's response to physical and emotional stress.

For its part, the stress response allows us to experience the full spectrum of life and facilitates
learning. The hippocampus—the part of the brain that helps promote learning through memory
—loves novelty. Successfully overcoming a small daily life stressor presents novelty in droves,
and the opportunity for growth. Without these non-life-threatening challenges, the brain starts
to suffer. This is likely what’s behind the lower memory and problem-solving skills Charles
noted in the unstressed participants of the MIDUS cohort.

“When people feel the first sense of being overwhelmed, the response is to disengage, to back
off and go away, but you don’t need to do that all the time,” says Jamieson. “To actually learn
to be resilient, and persevere through challenges or difficulties, that’s an important skill set.
That’s not just something that we either do or don’t do, it’s something that we can learn how to
do.”
Charles will never fully be able to answer the question of who these stress-free people are. The
identities of the survey takers are closely guarded by Carol Ryff, a psychologist at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison who runs the MIDUS study.

But Charles does know the general profile of a stress-free person: They tend to be older,
unmarried men with lower levels of education than those who reported at least one daily
stressor during the eight days of surveys. The unstressed also reported many fewer daily
activities than the rest of the cohort, except for watching TV, which they did with higher
frequency than those who reported experiencing daily stressors.

For Charles, the most interesting tidbit is that it would seem on the surface that having fewer
social interactions lowers a person’s daily stress—but that likely isn’t the whole story. Of the
daily activities the MIDUS data capture, the unstressed reported spending fewer hours than the
stressed on only the activities that typically include interacting with other people—working,
volunteering, and both providing and receiving emotional support.

But Charles notes the paradox here: Having more social support is also an effective buffer
against stress. “We know that people are our source of stress often in life,” Charles says with a
warm laugh, but adds: “They’re absolutely necessary for us; we’re social creatures.”

There seems to be a sweet spot, an ideal amount of social support that keeps us thriving
cognitively before too much time with other people becomes its own source of stress. The role
of social networks, like so many aspects of the stress experience, is something researchers are
continually exploring.

Breakthrough discovery uses engineered surfaces to shed

heat

Splash a few drops of water on a hot pan and if the pan is hot enough, the water will
sizzle and the droplets of water seem to roll and float, hovering above the surface.

The temperature at which this phenomenon, called the Leidenfrost effect, occurs is predictable,
usually happening above 230 degrees Celsius. The team of Jiangtao Cheng, associate professor
in the Virginia Tech Department of Mechanical Engineering, has discovered a method to create
the aquatic levitation at a much lower temperature, and the results have been published in
Nature Physics. Alongside first author and Ph.D. student Wenge Huang, Cheng's team
collaborated with Oak Ridge National Lab and Dalian University of Technology for sections of
the research.
The discovery has great potential in heat transfer applications such as the cooling of industrial
machines and surface fouling cleaning for heat exchangers. It also could help prevent damage
and even disaster to nuclear machinery.

Currently, there are more than 90 licensed operable nuclear reactors in the U.S. that power tens
of millions of homes, anchor local communities, and actually account for half of the country's
clean energy electricity production. It requires resources to stabilize and cool those reactors,
and heat transfer is crucial for normal operations.

The physics of hovering water

For three centuries, the Leidenfrost effect has been a well-known phenomenon among
physicists that establishes the temperature at which water droplets hover on a bed of their own
vapor. While it has been widely documented to start at 230 degrees Celsius, Cheng and his
team have pushed that limit much lower.

The effect occurs because there are two different states of water living together. If we could see
the water at the droplet level, we would observe that all of a droplet doesn't boil at the surface,
only part of it. The heat vaporizes the bottom, but the energy doesn't travel through the entire
droplet. The liquid portion above the vapor is receiving less energy because much of it is used
to boil the bottom. That liquid portion remains intact, and this is what we see floating on its
own layer of vapor. This has been referred to since its discover in the 18th century as the
Leidenfrost effect, named for German physician Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost.

That hot temperature is well above the 100 degree Celsius boiling point of water because the
heat must be high enough to instantly form a vapor layer. Too low, and the droplets don't hover.
Too high, and the heat will vaporize the entire droplet.
New work at the surface
The traditional measurement of the Leidenfrost effect assumes that the heated surface is flat,
which causes the heat to hit the water droplets uniformly. Working in the Virginia Tech Fluid
Physics Lab, Cheng's team has found a way to lower the starting point of the effect by
producing a surface covered with micropillars.

"Like the papillae on a lotus leaf, micropillars do more than decorate the surface, said Cheng.
"They give the surface new properties."
The micropillars designed by Cheng's team are 0.08 millimeters tall, roughly the same as the
width of a human hair. They are arranged in a regular pattern of 0.12 millimeters apart. A
droplet of water encompasses 100 or more of them. These tiny pillars press into a water droplet,
releasing heat into the interior of the droplet and making it boil more quickly.

Compared to the traditional view that the Leidenfrost effect triggers at 230 degrees Celsius, the
fin-array-like micropillars press more heat into the water than a flat surface. This causes
microdroplets to levitate and jump off the surface within milliseconds at lower temperatures
because the speed of boiling can be controlled by changing the height of the pillars.
Lowering the limits of Leidenfrost
When the textured surface was heated, the team discovered that the temperature at which the
floating effect was achieved was significantly lower than that of a flat surface, starting at 130
degrees Celsius.

Not only is this a novel discovery for the understanding of the Leidenfrost effect, it is a twist on
the limits previously imagined. A 2021 study from Emory University found that the properties
of water actually caused the Leidenfrost effect to fail when the temperature of the heated
surface lowers to 140 degrees. Using the micropillars created by Cheng's team, the effect is
sustainable even 10 degrees below that.

"We thought the micropillars would change the behaviors of this well-known phenomenon, but
our results defied even our own imaginations," said Cheng. "The observed bubble-droplet
interactions are a big discovery for boiling heat transfer."

The Leidenfrost effect is more than an intriguing phenomenon to watch, it is also a critical point
in heat transfer. When water boils, it is most efficiently removing heat from a surface. In
applications such as machine cooling, this means that adapting a hot surface to the textured
approach presented by Cheng's team gets heat out more quickly, lowering the possibility of
damages caused when a machine gets too hot.

"Our research can prevent disasters such as vapor explosions, which pose significant threats to
industrial heat transfer equipment," said Huang. "Vapor explosions occur when vapor bubbles
within a liquid rapidly expand due to the present of intense heat source nearby. One example of
where this risk is particularly pertinent is in nuclear plants, where the surface structure of heat
exchangers can influence vapor bubble growth and potentially trigger such explosions. Through
our theoretical exploration in the paper, we investigate how surface structure affects the growth
mode of vapor bubbles, providing valuable insights into controlling and mitigating the risk of
vapor explosions."

Another challenge addressed by the team is the impurities fluids leave behind in the textures of
rough surfaces, posing challenges for self-cleaning. Under spray cleaning or rinsing conditions,
neither conventional Leidenfrost nor cold droplets at room temperature can fully eliminate
deposited particulates from surface roughness. Using Cheng's strategy, the generation of vapor
bubbles is able to dislodge those particles from surface roughness and suspend them in the
droplet. This means that the boiling bubbles can both move heat and impurities away from the
surface.

Being organized can actually improve mental health.

This is why.
A slew of studies demonstrate the perils of clutter, and how organizing your environment can
boost your mood and productivity and reduce stress and anxiety. So why is it so hard?

"You'll feel less exhaustion, enhance your productivity at the office, and greatly improve the
quality of your life if you can learn how to declutter and become organized," says Joseph
Ferrari, a distinguished professor of psychology at DePaul University and one of the most
recognized scholars on clutter and disorganization research
Improved mental health is on the agenda for many people in 2024 and decluttering and
organizing is the preferred method of accomplishing it for a lot of them.

One reason disorganization is so often tied to mental health is because it can have a negative
impact on the way we see ourselves and the lives we lead. The studied downsides of living in a
disorganized or cluttered environment include memory impediment, poor eating habits, an
increased chance of developing mood disorders, and decreased impulse control. There's also
a link between the stress hormone cortisol and living in a cluttered space and a likelihood that
"clutter and disorganization can lead to chronic anxiety disorders in some people," says Daniel
Levitin, a behavioral neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

A Journal of Environmental Psychology study also shows that "clutter can lower feelings of
well-being, happiness, and the safety and security that a person derives from being in their
personal spaces," says Catherine Roster, a co-author of the study and a professor at the
Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Part of the reason for this is that many of us recognize that "our homes may be messy and
cluttered because we feel overwhelmed and unorganized mentally," says Natalie Christine
Dattilo, a Boston-based clinical psychologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School.

Disorganization can also decrease one's ability to focus and make decisions. Other research that
Roster also co-authored, shows that working in a disorganized environment can quickly lead to
feelings of exhaustion.

"Clutter and disorganization brings a loss of productivity that is difficult to quantify," says
Levitin. He points to the amount of time people lose looking for lost items, missing
appointments, or falling behind at work or school because of disordered living. "The average
person likely loses 5 percent of their time due to disorganization," he says. "Take your annual
salary, multiply that by 5 percent, and you can measure what disorganization may be costing
you."

While some purported mental health benefits related to removing clutter and becoming
organized may be overstated (contrary to popular opinion, organization probably won't help
with diagnosed depression, for instance), science still supports several advantages of
maintaining a tidy space.
Mental (and physical) benefits of getting organized

Joseph Ferrari, a distinguished professor of psychology at DePaul University and one of the
most recognized scholars on clutter and disorganization research, says that nearly every mental
health downside that comes from disorganization and clutter can be improved by getting
organized. "You'll feel less exhaustion, enhance your productivity at the office, and greatly
improve the quality of your life if you can learn how to declutter and become organized," he
says.
Neha Khorana, an Atlanta-based board-certified clinical psychologist who specializes in mental
health benefits related to cleaning and organizing, agrees. She adds that getting organized can
also improve anxiety-related symptoms, “as being disorganized is associated with higher levels
of anxiety.”
Tidy homes have been found to be a predictor of physical health as well. "Those whose houses
are cleaner are more active and generally have better physical health," says Libby Sander, an
assistant professor of organizational behavior at Bond University in Australia. Part of this is due
to organized people being better at managing their time, but it's also
because research demonstrates that a lack of clutter can help improve one's diet. "Studies
show an association between excess clutter and excess weight," says Dattilo.

Getting organized has also been shown to decrease one's stress levels, increase personal
efficiency, and even improve sleep.

Another studied advantage of getting organized may be improving the quality of one’s
relationships. Dattilo explains that relationships can be negatively impacted when too much
clutter affects communication or distracts one's brain from filtering important cues from their
partner. Research shows this can cause others to feel ignored, misunderstood, or unimportant.
Where and how to begin

Though many people recognize and desire the mental and physical health benefits that come
from becoming more organized, some don't know where to begin.
"I advise starting small," says Dattilo. "It’s easy to become overwhelmed if you try to tackle an
entire room or even a closet, so you can set yourself up for success by starting with a single
drawer, bookshelf, or the kitchen pantry." She also suggests making organization more
enjoyable by listening to music or an audiobook while you're at it and to "spend time in your
newly organized space after to let yourself enjoy it."

Khorana recommends setting aside specific amounts of time to declutter and organize, and
Roster suggests imagining how good it will feel to have an organized space as motivation to get
started. "Think about how you could utilize the space for another purpose that would make your
life better or help you be more productive," she says. She also recommends enlisting support, if
needed. "A family member, friend, or professional organizer can help if you don’t know where
to begin," she says.

When it comes to the process of organizing, Julie Morgenstern, a professional organizer and
author of Organizing from the Inside Out, advises sorting items into categories such as keep,
toss, and relocate. She suggests having a place for every item you want to keep, purging items
you won't use, and storing elsewhere sentimental or seasonal items or décor you don’t need to
access often. "Also consider off-site storage if you have items you can’t bear to part with such
as archival tax records, college papers, memorabilia, and extra furniture," she says. "It will get
the items out of the house without the trauma of permanently purging them."

When making such sorting decisions, Ferrari recommends against the popular advice of first
feeling an item in one's hand to see whether it brings joy. "Studies show that touching
something actually makes you feel more attached to it, which is why retailers try to get
shoppers to hold shelved items to induce purchasing," he explains. Instead, he says it's better to
logically assess whether to keep something or not without the added emotion that comes from
holding it.
Sander says it's also important to remember that becoming organized includes digital
decluttering as well. "Unsubscribe from things you don’t read, delete emails, make a new folder
and move just a few emails or documents a day," she advises. "Just giving yourself five minutes
a day to get organized will get a lot done over the course of a few weeks and will help build
habits to stay organized."

Dattilo says that organization and decluttering "require decision-making, emotion regulation,
prioritization, and patience," but that the process can be learned and improved with practice.
"When we take care of our home in an intentional and loving way," she says, "we send an
important message to ourselves that we are worth the time and effort it takes."