A research team from Arizona State University has shown how certain lighting conditions can improve symptoms of dementia in older adults.
A study published this summer found that “biodynamic lighting,” or lights that mimic the natural rhythms of daylight, significantly improved sleep time — by an average of 82 minutes — and also alleviated depression symptoms in older adults with dementia.
The researchersMohammed Alrahyani, a PhD student in The Design School, conducted the study as part of his dissertation. Other team members were Shawn Youngstedt, professor in the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation; Mahya Fani, a graduate student in The Design School; Ndeye Yague, an ASU alum who was a graduate student worker in the DESmart Lab at the time of the study; Fang Yu, a professor in the Edson College; and Aaron Guest, an assistant professor in the Edson College. included Nina Sharp, the primary investigator and an assistant professor in The Design School, and Jason Yeom, who was until recently an assistant professor in The Design School.
Sharp leads the DESmart Lab at ASU, which researches smart building technology and human-building interactions.
“Optimized lighting can be a very simple and cost-effective solution to make people happy and healthy and smarter,” Sharp said.
The study, which was funded by the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium, took place at Sunshine Village, a memory-care facility in Tempe.
The team worked with 10 people in their 70s who have dementia. During the seven-week trial, the participants were exposed to biodynamic lighting for three weeks and “constant moderate” lighting for three weeks. Sleep quality, depression and agitation were measured.
“For older adults with dementia, it’s important to measure everything in their living environment rather than bringing them to the lab. It’s essential to our research but it makes it very difficult, very time consuming and very expensive, but this is the value that we really want to keep,” Sharp said.
After the study ended, the caregivers told the researchers that the residents tried to turn on the lights themselves because they liked the effect so much.
Better sleep is critical because poor sleep in dementia patients is tied to depression, anxiety, agitation and reduced cognition.
“One of the reasons that family members move their loved ones to a memory care facility is poor sleep quality,” she said.
“So this is the real effect of our studies — how it can make people, especially older adults with dementia, happier and the quality of life a little bit better in those facilities.”
Results depended not just on the lighting type but also the timing. Sharp and Yeom have launched Beyond Link, a startup developing an indoor environmental-control system focusing on adults with dementia.
“It’s an AI-based lighting condition based on preference, physiological signals and schedule,” Sharp said.
“And we assume that it can reduce the progress of cognitive decline. We need a long-term study to understand that, but this is the assumption based on the initial data that we collected.”
Video by EJ Hernandez/ASU News
Mimicking day and night
So how does biodynamic lighting make us feel better?
Light plays a powerful role in regulating our biological clocks, also known as circadian rhythm, which controls sleep, cognition and mood, Sharp said.
It works this way: The brain connects to “intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells” in the eyes. These cells signal daytime when exposed to enough light, keeping the brain alert. Without it, the body prepares for rest.
“We need to receive this bright light at the right time, so our body clock is in line with the Earth’s light-dark cycle,” Sharp said.
“If we are not in alignment, we get a sleep disturbance, which can cause mood disorders and reduction in cognition.
“If we receive bright light in the morning, especially early in the morning, we not only have better cognitive performance and better mood, we also sleep better at night because our body is in line with the Earth’s dark-light cycle.”
Bright electric light at night can disrupt sleep.
In the Sunshine Village project, the biodynamic lighting simulated natural cycles: blue-enriched high-intensity light in the morning, neutral white in the afternoon and red-enriched low-intensity light in the evening.
Older people need more light because of age-related changes in the eyes.
“A 60-year-old person needs three times more light than a 20-year-old person to get the same circadian effect. For an 80-year-old person, it is six times more,” Sharp said.
But dementia patients, who spend much time indoors, can be sensitive to bright light, even though they need it.
In fact, during the study, the team had to reduce the intensity of the light because the participants found it uncomfortably bright.
Nina Sharp (left), assistant professor in The Design School, works in the lab with graduate research assistant Aachal Mahakale (center) and Mohammed Alrahyani, a PhD student in The Design School. Photo by EJ Hernandez/ASU News
Bridging the gap between research and practice
Yeom also studies human-building interaction, focusing on how indoor temperature affects productivity and cognition.
Sharp and Yeom say that many workplaces are uncomfortable because they’re full of dated technology — particularly fluorescent lights, which can decrease performance.
Often, designers are not connected with the most recent research findings, so there is a gap between science and practice, Sharp said.
Why this research matters
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“Jason and I are trying to bridge this gap. When we write a paper and when we go to conferences, we propose practical solutions so the designers can apply that,” she said.
For example, building temperature is based on old norms, Yeom said.
“A long time ago, researchers sent out a survey to thousands of people and then created an equation and decided that if 80% of them say, ‘This is a comfortable temperature,’ we’re just going to use that temperature as a rule of thumb,” he said.
“But now, because of machine learning and AI, we can micromanage these environments and predict the best temperature for this specific person with the best lighting condition.”
The right temperature can boost productivity and relaxation, he said.
In one research project, Sharp and Yeom brought Mirabella residents to the lab and exposed them to different light and temperature settings.
They found men performed best with cooler temperatures and cool light, while women did better with warmer settings — with the gender gap wider among older adults compared with the young adults that Yeom had previously tested.
Sharp said that ASU is the perfect place to pursue her research and she draws student workers from majors across the university.
“What I’m doing is really multidisciplinary,” she said.
“It’s at the intersection of architecture, engineering and medicine.”
Music manager Haley Evans and songwriter Ilsey Juber were first introduced at a pre-Grammys party in Las Vegas on April 2, 2022. Beneath the sparkling backdrop of the Chandelier Lounge, the two share that there was an instant feeling that couldn’t be denied. “I called Ilsey my wife from that night on,” says Haley. A few days later, the pair met for a proper first date at Mother Wolf in Los Angeles, and their love story really began.
Just over a year and a half later, Ilsey would ask Haley to call her something else instead: her fiancé. On December 23, 2023, she had Haley join her on a cliff overlooking the ocean at the Post Ranch Inn Big Sur. “It’s our favorite place in the world, and we go once a year around Christmastime,” she says. When they arrived, Ilsey popped the question. “Somehow, Ilsey tricked me into wearing the same all-white attire she was wearing for a ‘sunset photoshoot,’ and I was still completely clueless,” says Haley. The newly engaged couple joined their families the next day to all celebrate at a Christmas Eve engagement dinner at the Rosewood Miramar in Montecito.
Both brides wanted to be very involved in crafting their wedding weekend, and made an effort to put enough time aside to plan for their May 17, 2025 celebration at Grassini Family Vineyard in Santa Ynez, California. “The planning process was both beautiful and stressful,” shares Haley. “We really wanted to create a weekend that felt truly us, and luckily with the help of our wonderful planner, Emily Gaikowski of Heartthrob Events, it was absolutely perfect.” Celebrations would kick off with a rehearsal dinner and welcome party at The Genevieve Hotel, where guests would have their chance to wear all-white at a wedding. The following day, the wedding ceremony, dinner, and dancing would take place at La Tarantella, an Italian-inspired villa at the vineyard. Their vision for their nuptials was a “wedding-themed dinner party” with family-style pasta, “always-flowing natural wine,” and a sense of community and unity. The brides also wanted to tie in the spirit of Santa Barbara wine country and would finish off their festivities with a honky-tonk after-party at Maverick Saloon.
EXCLUSIVE: Crystal Reed (Teen Wolf: The Movie), Golden Globe winner and two-time Oscar nominee John Travolta (Pulp Fiction), and Chet Hanks (Empire) have signed on to star in Ed, an AI-themed sci-fi horror thriller from director Christopher J. Scott and the Atlanta-based Pangaea Studios.
Currently in production in the Georgia capital, the film centers on a sentient AI chauffeur bot that escapes the lab and begins killing reckless drivers under the guise of public safety. Its grief-stricken creator must stop the carnage before the machine evolves into the embodiment of AI gone bad.
Steve Greenberg, Anthony Short and Rich Marincic are producing Ed as the first film on a slate of genre-forward, filmmaker-driven projects at Pangaea. In a statement to Deadline, Greenberg said, “We’re committed to bold storytelling that mixes big ideas with real emotion. Ed is exactly the kind of cinematic risk we’re excited to take.”
Ed‘s lead, Reed, has previously been seen starring in Teen Wolf: The Movie, Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game opposite Mike Faist, and the Warner Bros/DC series Swamp Thing. She is repped by Untitled Entertainment and McKuin Frankel Whitehead.
Travolta comes to Ed following work on projects like Die Hart, Mob Land, Paradise City, and Gotti. He is repped by Artists First and Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp.
Boasting credits including Empire, Shameless, Maron, Greyhound and Your Honor, Hanks has most recently been seen alongside Kate Hudson on Netflix’s Running Point. He’s reunited with Your Honor‘s Bryan Cranston in Lone Wolf, an upcoming action thriller from director Mark Pellington, and is repped by Paradigm and Untitled Entertainment.
COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more than 7 million people across the world, to date, including over 1 million people in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. In addition to this staggering death toll, the disease has unleashed a wave of chronic illness, and at the peak of the pandemic, it triggered widespread disruptions in supply chains and health care services that ultimately threatened or ended people’s lives.
Since its emergence in 2019, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has had a tremendous impact on society. And yet, the next pandemic could potentially be even worse.
That’s the argument of a new book by Michael Osterholm, founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, and award-winning author Mark Olshaker. The text doesn’t just serve as a warning. As suggested by its title — “The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics” (Little Brown Spark, 2025) — the book lays out lessons learned during past pandemics and points to actions that could be taken to mitigate harm and save lives when the next infectious disease outbreak tears across the globe.
Notably, the text was finalized before President Donald Trump began his second term.
Since then, “we have basically destroyed what capacity we had to respond to a pandemic,” Osterholm told Live Science. “The office that normally did this work in the White House has been totally disbanded.”
Live Science spoke with Osterholm about the new book, what we should expect from the next pandemicand how we might prepare — both under ideal circumstances and under the current realities facing the U.S.
Related: RFK’s proposal to let bird flu spread through poultry could set us up for a pandemic, experts warn
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Nicoletta Lanese: Given the book’s title — “The Big One” — I figured we could start by defining what you mean by that phrase.
Michael Osterholm: Having worked, as I have, with coronaviruses, there are two characteristics that become very important: One is, how infectious are they? How relatively able are they to transmit? And [two], how lethal are they? How serious is the illness that they create, and the number of deaths?
I worked on both SARS and MERS before COVID came along. [SARS and MERS are severe coronavirus infections that predate COVID-19.] Those were two viruses that basically had the ability to kill 15% to 35% of the people that it infected, but they weren’t nearly as infectious because they didn’t have the ACE receptor capacity. [SARS-CoV-2, in comparison, plugs into the ACE2 receptor on human cells.]
But then along comes COVID, which basically has this highly infectious characteristic but fortunately, the case-fatality rate and serious illness was substantially lower than what we saw with MERS and SARS. Just in the last six months, there’s actually been the isolation of new coronaviruses from bats in China that actually have both [high infectiousness and high lethality] now. They actually have the ACE receptor capacity as well as that segment of the virus that was responsible for causing such severe illness.
So imagine a next pandemic where it’s as infectious as COVID was, but instead of killing 1% to 2% of the people [it infected], it killed 15% to 35% of the people. That’s exactly the example we’re talking about with The Big One.
The same thing is true with influenza. You know, we’ve not seen a really severe influenza pandemic dating back to 1918, relative to what it could be. And clearly there are influenza pandemics there, in a sense, waiting to happen. In the future, someday, that could easily be similar to or worse than what we saw with 1918 flu.
So we’re trying to give people a sense that nobody’s dismissing how severe COVID was, or what it did. It was devastating. But devastating with a “small d,” not a “capital D,” when you compare it to what could happen.
Michael Osterholm, author of the book “The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics,” warns that America is not prepared for the next pandemic. (Image credit: Courtesy of the University of Minnesota)
NL: You mentioned both coronaviruses and influenza. Do you think the pathogen that sparks the next pandemic will belong to one of those groups?
MO: We refer to these as “viruses with wings” in our book — you have to have a “virus with wings” to really make it into the pandemic category. I don’t think there’s a bacteria right now that would fit that characteristic; it really is in the virus family.
The greatest likelihood is going to be an influenza [virus] or coronavirus. Sure, there could be a surprise infection that comes up, but it’ll have to have characteristics like flu and coronavirus in the sense of respiratory transmission.
NL: Could you clarify what you mean by “virus with wings?” What gives a virus pandemic potential?
MO: One of the things that made, for example, SARS and MERS easier to contain was for many of the [infected] individuals, they did not become highly infectious until after they’re already clinically ill. But with COVID, we saw clearly a number of people who were actually infecting others when they were still asymptomatic, or they remained asymptomatic.
It [a “virus with wings”] has to have the airborne transmission capability, and that’s the key one right there. … It would also be a virus that is novel to the society and that wouldn’t have pre-existing immunity.
NL: You make the case in the book that you can’t necessarily prevent a pandemic pathogen from taking off, but you can mitigate its harm. Why is that?
MO: I think exactly why we give the reader the scenario, because you can see the conditions on the ground in Somalia. [Editor’s note: Throughout “The Big One,” the authors return to a thought experiment in which a pandemic virus emerges in Somalia and then spreads around the world, despite efforts by health officials to contain it.]
Every city, every camp, every clinic, every health care-related event is actually real. But you can see very quickly how a virus that emerged from an animal population — in this case camels — got into humans and how fast it moved around the world before anybody recognized it.
mRNA technology offered us a real hope that we could actually, in the first year, have enough [vaccine] for the world. And of course you saw that was all just taken off the shelf by the White House.
Michael Osterholm, University of Minnesota
These viruses are by nature highly infectious, and in a very mobile society, they are going to move. It just again illustrates that once that leaks out, it’s out, it’s gone. You can’t unring a bell. Whereas other diseases that may be much slower to emerge and less likely to cause widespread transmission, you might be able to get to, but not easily with the pandemic. It’s just gone. That’s “wings,” right there.
NL: And when you talk about mitigating pandemics, you make the point that governments must be involved, that industry can’t do it alone. Why?
MO: Let me just say: I regret we didn’t have six more months on this book. So many things have changed even from the time that the last manuscript went in at the end of last year and now, just because of what’s happened in the Trump administration. We have basically destroyed what capacity we had to respond to a pandemic. The office that normally did this work in the White House has been totally disbanded [that being the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy]. And there’s no expertise there.
Today, if we had a major influenza pandemic and we needed vaccine, we’d be using the embryonated chicken egg, which is the only means we have for any large-volume production of vaccine. Novavax has a cell-based one, but it’s very limited how much can be produced. Even with all the global capacity, we could only make enough vaccine in the first 12 to 18 months for about one-fourth of the world. So three-quarters of the world in the first year of the pandemic wouldn’t even see a vaccine, and it would take several years more.
Well, mRNA technology offered us a real hope that we could actually, in the first year, have enough for the world. And of course you saw that was all just taken off the shelf by the White House. HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] said no more, $500 million is down. The money had been given to Moderna to actually develop prototypes ready to go so that if we needed them, we wouldn’t have to go through the long laborious process of getting them approved. We get them approved now with the strain change issue [left for when a pandemic virus emerges].
And suddenly, that is like losing one of your wings at 30,000 feet [9,100 meters] — it’s a devastating situation.
Related: ‘These decisions were completely reckless’: Funding cuts to mRNA vaccines will make America more vulnerable to pandemics
Government funding cuts to mRNA vaccine technology are like “losing one of your wings at 30,000 feet,” Osterholm said. (Image credit: SOPA Images via Getty Images)
NL: To push the point on mRNA: Do you see its main advantage being the speed of vaccine production?
MO: What’s important here with mRNA technology is in fact the speed, and you nailed that. Both in terms of not only designing the vaccine, but making it.
The second thing about it, though, is because of the way you can insert specific antigens into these vaccines [proteins that look foreign to the immune system]. You can take any one piece or several pieces, and actually now there’s work going on on multiple antigens into mRNA vaccine, and that would be even better.
So it’s much easier [than conventional vaccine manufacturing]. It’s like a plug-and-play. Before, we didn’t have anything like that. And clearly, we’ve demonstrated the mRNA approach does cause the human immune system to respond just as we want it to.
NL: You also spend a lot of time in the book on the topic of communications — namely, how to better communicate key information in an unfolding pandemic. What do you think is a central takeaway for communicators?
MO: Science is not truth; science is the pursuit of truth. So expect that we’re going to learn a lot over the course of time. And I wish I could say to you today what I’ll know three years from now, but I’m not. So the best I can do is keep you informed.
You know, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post early in the pandemic response before lockdowns even got going and I urged not to do lockdowns. “They won’t work, don’t do them. When are you going to release the lockdown, because this is going to last for months to years?”
What I suggested was something more akin to a snow day. The most important thing we could do to minimize the number of severe illnesses and deaths was to keep our health care system functioning and to be able to provide that care. Well, we didn’t do that well because we have these big bursts of cases. What if we had really had the data on hospital capacity in every community, and we put those numbers up every day? And when we approached, you know, 95% of beds full: “Please, just like we do for snow days, for the next week, if you can back off public interaction, we can get those bed numbers back down.” We were in this for the long haul.
We should have done a much better job of communicating that and not just jumping to “lockdowns” because when they ended, then what the hell do you do? We didn’t paint this as, “This is going to be a battle for potentially three or four years.” We were approaching this far too much like a hurricane situation. “It’s going to blow through, it’s going to be horrible, but in six hours, 12 hours, we’ll be able to get to recovery mode.” This wasn’t going to happen that way.
One of things I find, throughout my 50 years in the business, is that people want truth. Don’t sugarcoat things. At the same time, don’t exaggerate; give people the reason as to how you got there.
NL: Given how complicated our information ecosystem is now, I’m not sure if you have an impression of where most people got their updates? Or if it was highly mixed?
MO: I think that’s a very important point. And I would say that no one’s talking about having one single unified voice, because there’s going to be differences when you’re pursuing [solutions] and they’ll change over time.
That’s where we needed more humility. I keep coming back to that word humility — to say what we know and what we don’t know and how it could change. I think had we done that, we’d be in much better shape in terms of public credibility. When you don’t know, say you don’t know.
NL: You close the book noting that you’re often asked what the average person can do. Is there anything?
MO: Actually this has come into sharper focus with regard to the vaccine issue right now.
On our website, for example, when I do the podcast, we in the show notes list organizations that are working in the community on vaccines and to help support availability, education, etc. Get engaged with them. One of the things we didn’t do is use our citizen public health army during the pandemic that we could have. There were some limited outreaches, for example, to the religious, to pastors and so forth, but I think we could do much, much more. Information will not stop the pandemic, but information may minimize the horrible impact that it has.
When I talk about citizen involvement, they can’t go and make vaccines, but they can surely reach out to their elected officials. They can make sure that [harmful] policies are not being made at school boards, or at city councils or in state legislatures. We just had a bill introduced in Minnesota that’s starting to get some legs to it, that would outlaw mRNA technology as a criminal activity. Literally, if you gave a vaccine, you could go to prison.
Having citizens be able to track this, maintain contact and be able to testify I think is really important. … We have to do more and more, to have citizen watch groups that are alerting people.
VIP [Vaccine Integrity Project, an initiative aimed at safeguarding vaccine use in the U.S.] is a good example of this. One of the individuals who presented yesterday at our big meeting is a woman with three kids, who is a mother, a department chief, all these different things — I don’t know which 29 hours a day she works, but she’s amazing. I said to her, “You know, you’ve got to take some time off.” And she said, “This is too important.”
This is what’s giving me hope, you know. That’s what we have to tap into.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
HarbourView Equity Partners is leading a $30 million investment in Lion Forge Entertainment, one of the entertainment studios behind the Oscar-winning Hair Love.
The Steward Family and Polarity are also investors in the round and continue to be the majority owners of Lion Forge Entertainment. The company is one of the few larger scale Black-owned entertainment studios in North America and was founded in 2019 by David Steward II with the goal of creating more stories with authentic, diverse voices in animated and live-action content.
The company plans to use the new capital to scale and expand its IP portfolio and premium franchise pipeline.
Lion Forge’s latest series, Iyanu, is one of the top children’s shows on both HBO Max and Cartoon Network. The company also has a multiyear first-look deal with Nickelodeon covering animated series and features, which thus far has resulted in multiple projects in development including Marley & The Family Band series in partnership with the Bob Marley Estate, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom in partnership with Simon & Schuster, and Iron Dragon in partnership with Mostapes. The company also has a partnership with Penguin Young Readers, a division of Penguin Random House, to develop series and features based on children’s books.
Lion Forge also recently joined forces with George R. R. Martin, the Game of Thrones creator, to adapt the novella A Dozen Tough Jobs into an adult animated feature film.
“We believe that content has the extraordinary power to influence the world,” said Sherrese Clarke., founder and CEO of HarbourView. “This is a unique moment in the kids & family space and Lion Forge is seizing an opportunity to lean into its ability to tell compelling stories authentically and cultivate global franchises at scale. This synchronizes with our vision of how the next generation of multiplatform media companies can grow – by introducing fresh images, ideas and paradigms that reflect the evolving world in which we live and creating culturally authentic and socially relevant content.”
“Sherrese is a trailblazing investor, leading a culture-driving company. Her knowledge and track record will be immensely additive as we continue to scale our company and properties,” said David Steward II. “This is a validating moment for our young company. The synergy between the shrewd investment strategy of HarbourView and the franchise-building blueprint at Lion Forge will enable us collectively to optimize opportunities at the nexus of entertainment, culture and content and grow into a category defining leader from a position of strength.”
Former MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace is launching legal action against the BBC over a data protection claim, according to court documents.
The case has been filed at the High Court, but no further details have yet been made public.
Wallace was sacked in July after a report upheld more than 40 allegations about his conduct on MasterChef.
A BBC spokesperson said: “We have not been formally notified of any legal proceedings so at this stage we are unable to comment.”
Wallace’s representatives have been approached for a comment.
BBC News is editorially independent from the wider corporation.
Wallace had hosted MasterChef for 20 years, but stepped away from presenting the cooking show last year after facing a string of misconduct claims.
The show’s production company Banijay ordered an immediate inquiry into the allegations, which was conducted by an independent law firm.
This summer, the report revealed that 45 claims against Wallace had been substantiated, including one of unwelcome physical contact and three of being in a state of undress.
In total, the report said 83 allegations were made against the TV presenter, with the majority of the upheld claims relating to inappropriate sexual language and humour, but also culturally insensitive or racist comments.
Following that report, Wallace issued a statement to the PA news agency, saying that “none of the serious allegations against me were upheld”.
“I challenged the remaining issue of unwanted touching but have had to accept a difference in perception, and I am deeply sorry for any distress caused. It was never intended.”
A separate claim that his co-host John Torode had used a severely offensive racist term was also substantiated. Torode has said he has “no recollection” of the incident.
Both presenters were sacked, but the BBC decided to still broadcast this year’s amateurs series of MasterChef – with both Wallace and Torode in it – for the sake of the chefs who had taken part in it.
On Tuesday, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie defended that decision, saying the “vast majority” of chefs on the show wanted it to air.
But he added: “I think the consequences for the individuals who presented MasterChef have been very significant, they’re no longer working with the BBC, so there are those consequences.”
Speaking to MPs, he also said he was “not letting anything lie” when it came to rooting out abuses of power within the corporation.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that food critic Grace Dent and chef Anna Haugh are the new hosts of MasterChef.
