Connecting the dots

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: Long-term healthcare cost estimates skyrocket annually; New study links timed eating to better cognitive aging; and here’s what Sammy Haggar thinks about DLR canceling his tour…👀

Let’s get into it!

A study presented this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition suggests “intermittent fasting”—officially referred to as time-restricted eating—can be helpful for maintaining cognition function in older adults.

"Losing weight alone will ward off some of the aging-related cognitive decline, and these data suggest that there may be additional benefits if you stop eating four hours before going to sleep and reduce food intake to 8–9 hours per day, compared with the usual eating window of 12 hours per day," said Sue Shapses, professor at Rutgers University and Rutgers-RWJ Medical Center and the study's principal investigator.

Shapses and team had 47 women between 50 and 79 years old eat 500 fewer calories per day, and had 26 of them restrict their eating window to nine hours during the day, with the rest allowed a 12-hour window.

The experiment lasted six months, after which both groups had lost an average of 15 pounds. However, the group with the smaller eating window also demonstrated much better spatial planning and problem solving, along with fewer errors when tested for memory and learning.

According to a study presented in April at the Agents in the Wild Workshop in Rio De Janeiro, browsers enabled with AI agents pose a major security risk and aren’t ready for public use.

AI web browsers appear like regular browsers, but also have AI agents embedded, allowing the user to communicate with an inline chatbot and prompt it to do things like summarize websites and schedule appointments from reading emails. The agents can even be used to make purchases, with the user simply prompting the bot to browse websites, compare prices, and complete the transaction.

AI browsers pose a security threat because the AI agents must have access to the whole browser, allowing for information to be exchanged between multiple websites open at the same time. On traditional browsers, a security feature called the same-origin policy would prevent sites from interacting with each other.

The threat lies in the fact that a user could hypothetically have two sites open—one that contains their banking information, and one that contains malicious content the user is unaware of. On a traditional browser, this wouldn’t be so problematic; on an AI browser, the banking information on one site could and likely would be exposed to malware.

David Lee Roth announced the cancellation of every date on his upcoming tour except one in Sturgis, South Dakota on Aug. 7. No explanation was provided for the cancellations, but it appears poor ticket sales were the culprit.

Sammy Hagar had something to say about it, and though plenty would likely assume any comment from one singer about the other would be driven by prior hostilities, Hagar actually expressed support for Diamond Dave, and even offered him a spot at his Vegas residency.

“Hey Dave, Sammy here,” he said in a Facebook video. “I just got a call from Michael Anthony…about your tour getting canceled. And I want to say from the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry. I hope you’re well. I hope there’s not a physical problem.”

“Mike and I love the fact that you’ve been out there doing it, supporting the greatest band in the world that we were both part of…supporting what we did in this band to keep this music alive,” he said before really getting down to business.

“Come to Vegas for the residency in September," he said. "Come on, join us. Sing a couple songs, MC the damn show. Come out and just do what the f**k you do—which is pretty damn entertaining!”

Heaven in ’87

We’ll be throwin’ it back to the top of the charts and the top of the box office from this week in 1987, with today’s trivia!