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London (PA Media/dpa) – Taking “exercise snacks” throughout the day can boost people’s health and make them fitter, researchers say. Bursts of activity, lasting just a few minutes, increase respiratory fitness and could be ideal for people who lack time and or suffer low motivation, according to experts. Engaging in as little as 10 to 59 minutes of activity per week has also been associated with an 18% reduction in premature death from any cause. Most adults do not meet recommended exercise guidelines of 150 to 300 minutes per week of moderate activity, or 75 to 150 minutes a week of vigorous activity. Now, researchers writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, say there is collective evidence that exercise spread throughout the day has health benefits. “Exercise snacks are intentionally structured, short duration bouts of physical activity, such as stair climbing or body weight exercises, that are deliberately incorporated into daily routines,” said the team, including from the University of Oviedo, Spain, and the Danish Centre for Motivation and Behaviour Science. “Snacktivity encourages the accumulation of short physical activity bouts (two to five minutes) to achieve recommended weekly activity targets.” The researchers assessed 11 randomised controlled trials involving 414 inactive people, 69% of whom were women. Exercise snacks were defined as structured bouts lasting less than five minutes, performed at least twice daily and for at least three days every week. Pooling the results showed that exercise snacks significantly improved cardiorespiratory fitness in adults and there was limited evidence they improved muscular endurance in older adults. While the snacks were not shown to alter body composition, blood pressure or cholesterol levels, they were still regarded as beneficial. The team said people were also very likely to stick with short bursts of activity rather than starting longer training sessions and then giving up. They added: “Achieving even half of the recommended weekly physical activity volume (150–300min/week of moderate or 75–150min/week of vigorous intensity activity) confers significant mental health benefits, including an 18% lower risk of depression. “These findings highlight the potential of low volume, accessible physical activity strategies to produce significant health benefits, particularly among physically inactive adults.” The researchers said the “time efficient nature of exercise snacks” may help people who think they are too busy to exercise. “Exercise snacks may enhance adherence to regular physical activity by providing short, flexible exercise bouts that are easier to integrate into daily routines.” Known examples of moderate activity include very brisk walking, heavy cleaning such as washing windows or mopping, cycling or badminton. Vigorous activity includes hiking, jogging, shovelling, fast cycling, basketball or tennis. The following information is not intended for publication pa dpa coh

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By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Cisco Systems launched on Wednesday a new networking chip designed to connect artificial intelligence data centers, with the cloud computing units of Microsoft and Alibaba enrolling as the chip's customers. The P200 chip, as Cisco calls it, will compete against rival offerings from Broadcom. It will sit at the heart of a new routing device that the company also rolled out on Wednesday and is designed to connect the sprawling data centers that are located over vast distances and which train AI systems. Inside those data centers, companies such as Nvidia are connecting tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of powerful computing chips together to act as one brain to handle AI tasks. The purpose of the new Cisco chip and router is to connect multiple data centers together to act as one massive computer. "Now we're saying, 'the training job is so large, I need multiple data centers to connect together,'" Martin Lund, executive vice president of Cisco's common hardware group, told Reuters in an interview. "And they can be 1,000 miles apart." The reason for those big distances is that data centers consume huge amounts of electricity, which has driven firms such as Oracle and OpenAI to Texas and Meta Platforms to Louisiana in search of gigawatts. AI firms are putting data centers "wherever you can get power," Lund said. He did not disclose Cisco's investment in building the chip and router or sales expectations from them. Cisco said the P200 chip replaces what used to take 92 separate chips with just one, and the resulting router uses 65% less power than comparable ones. One of the key challenges is keeping data in sync across multiple data centers without losing any, which requires a technology called buffering that Cisco has worked on for decades. “The increasing scale of the cloud and AI requires faster networks with more buffering to absorb bursts" of data, Dave Maltz, corporate vice president of Azure Networking at Microsoft, said in a statement. "We’re pleased to see the P200 providing innovation and more options in this space." (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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Vienna (dpa) – The Fountain of Youth appears in writings going back to the time of Herodotus, the 5th century BC Greek historian. And while a mythical spring and its time-reversing water has never been found, the wish to remain forever young – or at least delay the effects of ageing – lives on. Thanks to artificial intelligence, there is now at least a growing chance that we will be able to keep tabs not just on our age, but also on the mysterious process by which some people physically age faster than others. An Austrian-Chinese team of scientists has come up with a way they say can track the process by using AI as part of a blood test aimed at uncovering the molecular processes underlying ageing. The test is based on measuring aspartate, an amino acid that the University of Vienna and Nankai University researchers described as "a dominant biomarker of physical fitness." "Physical activity does more than building up muscle mass," said Wolfram Weckwerth of the University of Vienna. "It rewires our metabolism at the molecular level. By decoding those changes, we can track – and even guide—how well someone is ageing." "The precise molecular processes that translate physical activity into healthier ageing remained poorly understood," the team said, outlining why they carried out the work, which was published in npj Systems Biology and Applications, a Nature journal. The study was undertaken in five retirement homes in Vienna and aimed to "assess the impact of resistance training and protein-vitamin supplementation or a cognitive training on physical performance," the team explained in the paper. The following information is not intended for publication dpa spr

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By Milana Vinn (Reuters) -Confluent is exploring a sale after attracting acquisition interest, according to three people familiar with the matter, the latest data infrastructure company to draw suitors for its potential in supporting artificial intelligence development. The software provider is working with an investment bank on the sale process, which is in its early stages and was instigated after both private equity firms and other technology companies expressed their interest to the company in buying it, the sources said. Confluent's stock jumped 11% in the opening minutes of Wednesday trading following the Reuters report, giving the company a market value of around $7.9 billion. The gains help reverse some of the company's stock fall this year. It had slumped 26% in the year to October 7. Some of the sources had told Reuters while Confluent's technology is highly sought-after, it became vulnerable to takeover approaches when its stock price dived in July, when it reported losing business from a large customer. The sources cautioned that no deal is guaranteed and Confluent could ultimately remain independent. They also spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are confidential. Confluent did not immediately respond to a comment request. Mountain View, California-based Confluent provides technology needed to manage massive, real-time data streams for artificial intelligence models. The company was founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka, a popular open-source technology that helps companies process huge torrents of data in real time, from bank transactions to website clicks. Confluent commercializes Kafka, providing enterprise-grade features, services, and support to major corporations worldwide. The interest in Confluent highlights a surge in demand for data infrastructure companies, fueled by the corporate race to develop generative artificial intelligence. In May, Salesforce agreed to acquire software maker Informatica for approximately $8 billion to bolster its AI capabilities by integrating Informatica's data management, integration, and governance tools into the Salesforce platform. (Reporting by Milana Vinn in New York; Editing by David French, Christopher Cushing and Nick Zieminski)

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By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Cisco Systems launched on Wednesday a new networking chip designed to connect artificial intelligence data centers, with the cloud computing units of Microsoft and Alibaba enrolling as the chip's customers. The P200 chip, as Cisco calls it, will compete against rival offerings from Broadcom. It will sit at the heart of a new routing device that the company also rolled out on Wednesday and is designed to connect the sprawling data centers that are located over vast distances and which train AI systems. Inside those data centers, companies such as Nvidia are connecting tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of powerful computing chips together to act as one brain to handle AI tasks. The purpose of the new Cisco chip and router is to connect multiple data centers together to act as one massive computer. "Now we're saying, 'the training job is so large, I need multiple data centers to connect together,'" Martin Lund, executive vice president of Cisco's common hardware group, told Reuters in an interview. "And they can be 1,000 miles apart." The reason for those big distances is that data centers consume huge amounts of electricity, which has driven firms such as Oracle and OpenAI to Texas and Meta Platforms to Louisiana in search of gigawatts. AI firms are putting data centers "wherever you can get power," Lund said. He did not disclose Cisco's investment in building the chip and router or sales expectations from them. Cisco said the P200 chip replaces what used to take 92 separate chips with just one, and the resulting router uses 65% less power than comparable ones. One of the key challenges is keeping data in sync across multiple data centers without losing any, which requires a technology called buffering that Cisco has worked on for decades. “The increasing scale of the cloud and AI requires faster networks with more buffering to absorb bursts" of data, Dave Maltz, corporate vice president of Azure Networking at Microsoft, said in a statement. "We’re pleased to see the P200 providing innovation and more options in this space." (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Cisco Systems launched on Wednesday a new networking chip designed to connect artificial intelligence data centers, with the cloud computing units of Microsoft and Alibaba enrolling as the chip's customers. The P200 chip, as Cisco calls it, will compete against rival offerings from Broadcom. It will sit at the heart of a new routing device that the company also rolled out on Wednesday and is designed to connect the sprawling data centers that are located over vast distances and which train AI systems. Inside those data centers, companies such as Nvidia are connecting tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of powerful computing chips together to act as one brain to handle AI tasks. The purpose of the new Cisco chip and router is to connect multiple data centers together to act as one massive computer. "Now we're saying, 'the training job is so large, I need multiple data centers to connect together,'" Martin Lund, executive vice president of Cisco's common hardware group, told Reuters in an interview. "And they can be 1,000 miles apart." The reason for those big distances is that data centers consume huge amounts of electricity, which has driven firms such as Oracle and OpenAI to Texas and Meta Platforms to Louisiana in search of gigawatts. AI firms are putting data centers "wherever you can get power," Lund said. He did not disclose Cisco's investment in building the chip and router or sales expectations from them. Cisco said the P200 chip replaces what used to take 92 separate chips with just one, and the resulting router uses 65% less power than comparable ones. One of the key challenges is keeping data in sync across multiple data centers without losing any, which requires a technology called buffering that Cisco has worked on for decades. “The increasing scale of the cloud and AI requires faster networks with more buffering to absorb bursts" of data, Dave Maltz, corporate vice president of Azure Networking at Microsoft, said in a statement. "We’re pleased to see the P200 providing innovation and more options in this space." (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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(Reuters) -OpenAI and Anthropic are exploring the use of investor funds to settle potential multibillion-dollar lawsuits, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Copyright owners have launched a series of high-stakes lawsuits against tech firms, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms, alleging unauthorized use of their material to train AI systems. OpenAI, which has tapped Aon, has secured coverage of up to $300 million for emerging AI risks, the report said, citing people familiar with the company's policy. However, another person disputed this figure, claiming it was significantly lower, the newspaper said, adding that all agreed the coverage falls far short of what is needed to protect against potential losses from a series of multibillion-dollar legal claims. Kevin Kalinich, head of cyber risk at Aon, told the newspaper that the insurance sector broadly lacks "enough capacity for (model) providers." OpenAI has considered "self-insurance" by setting aside investor funding, with discussions about establishing a "captive," a ringfenced insurance vehicle used by large companies to manage emerging risks, the report said. OpenAI, Anthropic and Aon did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment. Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Last month, a federal judge in California preliminarily approved a landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a copyright class action brought by a group of authors against Anthropic. Anthropic is partly using its own funds to cover potential settlements, the FT report said, citing a person with knowledge of the matter. (Reporting by Bipasha Dey in Bengaluru; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala)

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By Arpan Chaturvedi and Aditya Kalra NEW DELHI (Reuters) -Hollywood and Bollywood groups are lobbying an Indian panel for stricter copyright protection that will prevent artificial intelligence firms from using their intellectual property to train AI models, letters show. AI companies remain at loggerheads with content owners globally and governments are fast developing regulations that lay down rules for the new technology. While Japan gives broad exemptions to AI firms in using copyrighted content, the European Union has stricter rules that allow content owners to opt-out of such use. The movie industry is particularly concerned that AI tools could scrape their copyrighted videos, images and clips online – like trailers and promos – and more critically ingest pirated content onto their platforms. India's current copyright law does not account for use by AI. The government formed a panel this year consisting of lawyers, government officials and industry executives to review if existing copyright law is sufficient to tackle AI-related disputes, and make recommendations. WORRIED FILM STUDIOS LOBBYING HARD Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents Warner Bros, Paramount and Netflix, and the Producers Guild of India have argued India should not tinker with its copyright law and instead promote a licencing regime.  In response to the panel's private inquiry on why India should not allow blanket training exceptions to bolster AI innovation, MPA India Managing Director Uday Singh said in an August 2 letter the move could "undermine the incentive to create new works and erode copyright protection in India." The Indian guild's CEO Nitin Tej Ahuja told the panel in his letter "licensing copyrighted works is essential for creators' revenue and business sustainability." MPA declined to comment, while the guild did not respond to Reuters queries on the letters, which are not public.  India's commerce ministry official Himani Pande, who chairs the panel, did not respond to Reuters queries. The panel is finalising its recommendations which it will present to senior officials in coming weeks, a source with direct knowledge said. INDIA'S VIBRANT MOVIE MARKET     India has one of the world's most vibrant film industries. A Deloitte-MPA study in May said India's film, TV and online content industry generated $13.1 billion in revenues last year, growing 18% each year since 2019.      The deliberations come just when a Bollywood couple has gone to court to challenge YouTube's AI policies after their manipulated videos started spreading online.  The film studios' position is in contrast to the Business Software Alliance, which represents AI firms like OpenAI, and which argued in  public submissions in July that New Delhi should ensure exceptions to permit lawful AI use. MPA members however remain concerned. The association has said India should not consider allowing use of content in AI models with an opt-out system as it will put the burden of responsibility on the movie studios, a move that could force them to individually track and block sharing of their work on scores of AI platforms. Such exceptions "would hinder future investments, development of high-quality local content," MPA India said. In September, Warner sued AI service Midjourney in Los Angeles by saying it brazenly stole the studio's works to generate images and videos of Batman, Superman, Bugs Bunny and other copyrighted characters. Midjourney maintains the way it trains its AI model amounts to fair use. (Reporting by Arpan Chaturvedi and Aditya Kalra; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

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By Sneha S K (Reuters) -Telehealth company HealthTap said on Wednesday it is joining Eli Lilly's digital healthcare platform, LillyDirect, to offer virtual diabetes management services. Diabetic patients across the U.S. would have access to HealthTap's primary care physicians through the platform. The company said its clinicians support medication management, lab review and preventive care tailored to each patient's condition, as the company's model focuses on maintaining a long-term relationship with one doctor to provide holistic care. WHY IT MATTERS Telehealth firms, along with weight-loss drug makers Lilly and Novo Nordisk, pharmacies, and related entities, have launched several direct-to-consumer offerings to tap into the extraordinary demand for GLP-1 drugs used to treat diabetes and obesity. CONTEXT In April, another primary care provider, knownwell, said it will provide health and weight-management services through LillyDirect. Lilly has also expanded its LillyDirect platform to include telehealth providers that diagnose and care for patients with Alzheimer's disease. KEY QUOTE "As Lilly markets its website as a destination for consumers and grows their traffic base, we get to tap into it in a very relevant way, because essentially, they're doing the marketing to attract consumers seeking primary care and we're being presented as an option for them," HealthTap co-founder and CEO Sean Mehra told Reuters. (Reporting by Sneha S K in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)

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By Abhirup Roy and Harshita Mary Varghese (Reuters) -Tesla rolled out "affordable" versions of its best-selling Model Y SUV and its Model 3 sedan, but the starting prices of $39,990 and $36,990 were too high, some said, to attract a new class of buyers to the electric vehicle brand. CEO Elon Musk has touted the car as a way to tap a wider swath of buyers, saying last year that a price below $30,000, after incentives, was the key. Tesla is trying to reverse falling sales of its aging lineup amid rising competition in Europe and China, and the loss of a $7,500 U.S. tax credit. The new cars drop some premium finishes and features but offer driving ranges above 300 miles (480 km). Tesla's stock closed down 4.5% and Tesla bull Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, said he was disappointed the cars were only about $5,000 cheaper than the next-level trims of the models. The new Standard versions cost more than the cheapest U.S. models in September, when the now-expired tax credit was included. Musk has for years promised mass-market vehicles, though last year he canceled plans for an all-new $25,000 EV, Reuters first reported. Instead, he chose to build lower-priced versions based on Tesla's current models, sparking concerns among investors and analysts that the cheaper cars would cannibalize sales of existing vehicles and limit growth. "It's basically a pricing lever and not much of a product catalyst," said Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at research firm Futurum Equities. "I don't see it as unlocking new demand at scale." Fearing a drop in demand after losing the tax credits, some automakers in the U.S. have already cut prices while some others have figured out mechanisms to effectively extend the benefit of the incentives. Investors and analysts said dropping the price below $40,000 will help drive sales as the latest offerings compete next year with Chevrolet's Equinox, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia's EV4. Some, though, expected a bigger slash by Tesla to below $30,000. "I just don't know that this is enough," said Shawn Campbell, an advisor at Camelthorn Investments. "Longer term, this news doesn't solve the problem posed by lower cost Chinese competitors in global markets. In my opinion, Tesla needs a sub-30k EV." In Europe, where Musk's far-right political views have undermined brand loyalty, the new entries will be up against more than a dozen electric and plug-in-hybrid models with price tags below $30,000. Sales in the September-ending quarter rose to a record as consumers rushed to take advantage of the EV tax credit before its expiration on September 30, but expectations are that they will slow down for the rest of the year, unless the affordable car comes to the rescue. "The desire to buy the car is very high. (It's) just (that) people don't have enough money in the bank account to buy it," Musk said in July during Tesla's second-quarter earnings call. "So the more affordable we can make the car, the better." 'A WALMART HOODIE' FOR TESLA Both Standard versions offer 321 miles (516 km) of range and less powerful acceleration than the current higher trims, called Premium. Tesla has reduced the size of the battery on both cars, according to its website and some influencers who got a preview. Both cars can be ordered immediately, with deliveries set to start between December 2025 and January 2026 for many locations, Tesla's website showed.  The Standard versions do not come with Autosteer, Tesla's driver assistance system, touchscreens and seat heating for rear passengers. Tesla has also removed the LED lightbar in the cheaper Model Y. Both come with manually adjusted side-view mirrors and textile seats, with vegan leather available for the Model 3.  Musk has been pivoting the company toward artificial intelligence, focusing on robotaxis and humanoid robots, but the new cars are key to hopes of near-term revenue growth. "For the market, this is Tesla dropping its Steve Jobs turtleneck and slipping into a Walmart hoodie," said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point. "It's no longer the cool rebel at the edge of innovation – it's the establishment trying to play both Tesla and Toyota at once." (Reporting by Abhirup Roy in San Francisco and Akash Sriram and Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Henderson, Richard Chang, Sriraj Kalluvila, Alan Barona and Lincoln Feast.)

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