A recent study tracked hundreds of soccer fans until their favorite team reached the final of a tournament. Their stress levels skyrocketed, and their heart rates jumped too. You might think you are, but your body is going to have to be prepared to put in some work--especially if your favorite team makes it. Research shows that watching high-pressure matches can raise your heart rate, increase your stress levels, and put extra strain on your cardiovascular system. According to a recent study from researchers at Bielefeld University in Germany, fans' physiological stress increases by about 41 percent during a soccer final compared to a normal day.

How healthy is your brain? In our efforts to keep our brains healthy, how do we know what is working? It shouldn't have been difficult: 72 x 72. From the back seat, my daughter, newly confident in mental maths, wanted to check her answer. Whether it was because it was the end of the day, I was trying to park or something else, I stalled, cognitively speaking. Lately, though, I have had the sense that my brain isn't firing on all cylinders.

Some features are more clinically useful than others. Smartwatches and other wearables have moved far beyond just tracking your steps and heart rate. Many of today's versions can monitor everything from sleep and skin temperature to respiratory rate, blood oxygen, heart rate variability and even alert you to possible signs of sleep apnea . If you took Big Tech's marketing at face value, you might conclude that your smartwatch is on the verge of becoming a real-life Star Trek Tricorder. But how reliable are wearables for spotting early signs of illnesses or other medical conditions?

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Get many of the features, but without having to reach for a charger quite as much. The Apple Watch is the most popular smartwatch globally for a reason. Not only do they look great and offer comprehensive health-tracking and safety features, but they're also extremely well-integrated with iPhones, making them helpful companion devices. The battery life kind of sucks. The Apple Watch 11 finally hit the 24 hour threshold, but real-world results will absolutely vary.

Detection of occult hemorrhage (i.e., internal bleeding) in patients in intensive care units (ICUs) can pose significant challenges for critical care workers. Because blood loss may not always be clinically apparent, clinicians rely on monitoring vital signs for specific trends indicative of a hemorrhage event. The inherent difficulties of diagnosing such an event can lead to late intervention by clinicians which has catastrophic consequences. Therefore, a methodology for early detection of hemorrhage has wide utility. We develop a Bayesian regime switching model (RSM) that analyzes trends in patients' vitals and labs to provide a probabilistic assessment of the underlying physiological state that a patient is in at any given time. This article is motivated by a comprehensive dataset we curated from Mayo Clinic of 33,924 real ICU patient encounters. Longitudinal response measurements are modeled as a vector autoregressive process conditional on all latent states up to the current time point, and the latent states follow a Markov process. We present a novel Bayesian sampling routine to learn the posterior probability distribution of the latent physiological states, as well as develop an approach to account for pre-ICU-admission physiological changes. A simulation and real case study illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.

WIRED put the latest consumer exoskeletons from Dnsys and Hypershell in a head-to-head test on a pro athletic track. Personal exoskeletons were everywhere at CES 2026 . There were ambitious designs from newcomers WiRobotics, Sumbu, Ascentiz, and Dephy, while Skip Mo/Go was back promoting its long-overdue tech trousers. Dnsys (pronounced Deen-sis), a comparatively well established name, had some new launches to tease, Hypershell was back with its top model, and Ascentiz had us sprinting across the show floor . An exoskeleton is a relatively new class of wearable device designed to enhance, support, or assist human movement, strength, posture, or even physical activity.

Day-to-day variables can also affect results. Sleep, nutrition, hydration, recovery, and even equipment can influence how well someone performs on test day. "The thing about endurance sports is that what you put in is what you get out," says McQuality. In lab testing, his team found that carbon-plated running shoes slightly improve VO2-related performance by increasing efficiency, allowing runners to sustain higher workloads before fatigue sets in. Taken together, these factors help explain why VO2 max is best viewed as a context-dependent snapshot, not a fixed measure of physical fitness. It's most useful when tracked over time, under similar conditions, and alongside other markers of performance and health.

If you find it hard to focus after a wakeful night, it's because your brain is busy trying to catch up on crucial housekeeping. Nearly everyone has experienced it--after a night of poor sleep, your brain might seem foggy, and your mind drifts off when you should be paying attention. A new MIT study reveals what happens biologically as these momentary lapses occur: Your brain is performing essential maintenance that it usually takes care of while you sleep. During a normal night of sleep, the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that cushions the brain helps flush away metabolic waste that has built up during the day. In a 2019 study, MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor Laura Lewis, PhD '14, and colleagues showed that the CSF flows rhythmically in and out in a way that's linked to changes in brain waves. To explore what might happen to this CSF flow in a sleep-deprived brain, Lewis, who is also a member of MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and her colleagues tested 26 volunteers on several cognitive tasks after they'd been kept awake in the lab and when they were well-rested.