There's no need for an expensive retreat to practice meditation. Try it on your lunch break to recharge your mind and body. Launching straight back into work in the New Year can be challenging, but learning how to meditate can help you stay focused. Feel free to roll your eyes right about now, but numerous studies have shown that meditation can boost creativity, improve sleep quality, and manage stress . "Meditation is a practice to calm the brain by recentering our attention, most often on our breath," says Mel Mah, an instructor at the meditation app Calm .

Blake Lemoine poses for a portrait in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Blake Lemoine poses for a portrait in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Can artificial intelligence come alive? That question is at the center of a debate raging in Silicon Valley after a Google computer scientist claimed over the weekend that the company's AI appears to have consciousness. Inside Google, engineer Blake Lemoine was tasked with a tricky job: Figure out if the company's artificial intelligence showed prejudice in how it interacted with humans.

Chatbots are great for customer service, ordering tickets, or just giving you weather updates, but others have nobler goals for their bots. Here are 6 bots, developed using a variety of technologies and APIs, and delivered via different interfaces, that are helping improve the world for everyone. DoNotPay started out as a cheeky service to help drivers get out of parking tickets. Stanford student Joshua Browder became more interested in bots after the online tool automatically challenged over 160,000 of them. People began contacting him asking for help with other legal issues relating to evictions, bankruptcies, and repossessions, so he decided to expand the capabilities of the bot to help homeless people.

It can seem like a Catch-22 is baked into the practice of meditation. It's meant, among other things, to foster patience--but meditation also seems to require considerable patience to work. Or at least "mindfulness meditation" does. When I began to toy with it several years ago--because of the demonstrable health benefits science was showing it could provide--I found that I couldn't stand the "mindfulness" version. In "The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation," a 2015 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Yi-Yuan Tang and colleagues write that mindfulness meditation is often described as "non-judgmental attention to present-moment experiences."

A new study suggests the answer is ... kind of. Researchers from the University of Oregon in Eugene have replicated some of the same brain patterns exhibited by human meditators in the brains of mice -- no tiny meditation cushions or squeaky "oms" required. Still, experiments show that the "meditating mice" were more relaxed and less stressed than those with no rodent meditation training. The authors say the work, published Monday in PNAS, provides a proof of concept that will allow them to learn more about how meditation affects the brain. Previous research has shown that just one month of mindful meditation can have a significant impact on humans both physically and psychologically.

It involves hard work, perseverance as well as a supportive and loving network of friends and family. But another ingredient often goes into the mix: A disciplined existence which fosters an ability to accomplish great things. Take it from these high achievers who share the daily habits which they've stuck to over time which have helped them succeed. "As the head of a collaboration software company, I fully know and understand the benefits of technology in the workplace. However, when I go into meetings--whether over web conferencing or in-person--I like to carry a notebook with me so I can write down the important items. Writing things down keeps me organized and helps me prioritize my daily tasks. It also keeps me engaged and focused on the person in front of me." "Too many people tell me they don't have time to read. Reading inspires, changes the brain in positive ways, delivers new ideas, gives you something to talk about and helps you grow professionally and personally. At my busiest, and I mean 16-hour-days-busy, I will always read two pages a night. It takes no more than six minutes and I will often do it while I brush my teeth and floss. Saying you don't have time to read is like saying there is nothing more you want to learn and there will always be more to learn."