(Family Features) While winter weather puts outdoor gardening on pause in most parts of the country, the colder months offer a perfect opportunity to begin preparing for a lush garden come springtime.

With a little creativity, and some extra time spent creating a plan, you can set yourself on a path toward success before the growing season even begins.

Assess Your Space and Research Ideas
Evaluate your current garden, taking note of what worked well last season and where improvements can be made. Use this downtime to sketch an updated layout, research companion plants and decide which fruits, vegetables or flowers you want to grow next based on what did (or didn’t) work last spring.

Build an Updated Blueprint
Winter is the ideal time to upgrade your garden design and make tweaks for efficiency. Use the offseason to consider crop rotation patterns for optimal soil health as well as ways to maximize your space such as raised beds, trellises or containers. You can also make a list of materials needed for any new features you may be adding, such as an irrigation system, and map out their placement so you’re ready to build as soon as the weather allows.

Nourish the Soil
Even if the ground is frozen, you can prepare your garden beds by adding compost, leaves or organic matter in late winter, ensuring nutrients are available when spring arrives. Also remember to test your soil’s pH level now, which can help guide your fertilization plan.

Start Seeds Indoors
If you’re eager to get your hands dirty, consider starting your seeds indoors. Early seed starting gives plants a head start, allowing you to transplant stronger seedlings outdoors when temperatures warm.

Get Organized
Use the slower pace of winter to clean and sharpen your garden tools, sort through leftover seeds and make a supply checklist so you’re ready to dig in when warmer days arrive.

Find more advice to get your garden ready to burst to life in spring at eLivingtoday.com.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

SOURCE:

eLivingtoday.com

(Family Features) You approve a mortgage in minutes, your medical claim is processed without a phone call and an order that left the warehouse this morning lands at your door by dinner. These moments define the rhythm of an economy powered by intelligent cloud infrastructure.

Once seen as remote storage, the cloud has become the operational core where data, AI models and autonomous systems converge to make business faster, safer and more human. In this new reality, the smartest companies aren’t looking up to the cloud; they’re operating within it.

Public cloud spending is projected to reach $723 billion in 2025, according to Gartner research,  reflecting a 21% increase year over year. At the same time, 90% of organizations are expected to adopt hybrid cloud by 2027. As cloud becomes the universal infrastructure for enterprise operations, the systems being built today aren’t just hosted in the cloud, they’re learning from it and adapting to it.

Any cloud strategy that doesn’t account for AI workloads as native risks falling behind, holding the business back from delivering the experiences consumers rely on every day.

After more than a decade of experimentation, most enterprises are still only partway up the curve. Based on Cognizant’s experience, roughly 1 in 5 enterprise workloads has moved to the cloud, while many of the most critical, including core banking, health care claims and enterprise resource planning, remain tied to legacy systems. These older environments were never designed for the scale or intelligence the modern economy demands.

The next wave of progress – AI-driven products, predictive operations and autonomous decision-making – depends on cloud architectures designed to support intelligence natively. This means cloud and AI will advance together or not at all.

The Cognitive Cloud: Cloud and AI as One System

For years, many organizations treated migration as a finish line. Applications were lifted and shifted into the cloud with little redesign, trading one set of constraints for another. The result, in many cases, has been higher costs, fragmented data and limited room for innovation.

“Cognitive cloud” represents a new phase of evolution. Imagine every process, from customer service to supply-chain management, powered by AI models that learn, reason and act within secure cloud environments. These systems store and interpret data, detect patterns, anticipate demand and automate decisions at a scale humans simply cannot match.

In this architecture, AI and cloud operate in concert. The cloud provides computing power, scale and governance while AI adds autonomy, context and insight. Together, they form an integrated platform where cloud foundations and AI intelligence combine to enable collaboration between people and systems.

This marks the rise of the responsive enterprise; one that senses change, adjusts instantly and builds trust through reliability. Cognitive cloud platforms combine data fabric, observability, FinOps and SecOps into an intelligent core that regulates itself in real time. The result is invisible to consumers but felt in every interaction: fewer errors, faster responses and consistent experiences.

Consumer Impact is Growing

The impact of cognitive cloud is already visible.

In health care, 65% of U.S. insurance claims run through modernized, cloud-enabled platforms designed to reduce errors and speed up reimbursement. In the life sciences industry, a pharmaceuticals and diagnostics firm used cloud-native automation to increase clinical trial investigations by 20%, helping get treatments to patients sooner. In food service, intelligent cloud systems have reduced peak staffing needs by 35%, in part through real-time demand forecasting and automated kitchen operation. In insurance, modernization has produced multi-million-dollar savings and faster policy issuance, improving both customer experience and financial performance.

Beneath these outcomes is the same principle: architecture that learns and responds in real time. AI-driven cloud systems process vast volumes of data, identify patterns as they emerge and automate routines so people can focus on innovation, care and service. For businesses, this means fewer bottlenecks and more predictive operations. For consumers, it means smarter, faster, more reliable services, quietly shaping everyday life.

While cloud engineering and AI disciplines remain distinct, their outcomes are increasingly intertwined. The most advanced architectures now treat intelligence and infrastructure as complementary forces, each amplifying the other.

Looking Ahead

This transformation is already underway. Self-correcting systems predict disruptions before they happen, AI models adapt to market shifts in real time and operations learn from every transaction. The organizations mastering this convergence are quietly redefining themselves and the competitive landscape.

Cloud and AI have become interdependent priorities within a shared ecosystem that moves data, decisions and experiences at the speed customers expect. Companies that modernize around this reality and treat intelligence as infrastructure will likely be empowered to reinvent continuously. Those that don’t may spend more time maintaining the systems of yesterday than building the businesses of tomorrow.

Learn more at cognizant.com.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

SOURCE:
Cognizant

(Family Features) While mental health challenges can affect virtually anyone living anywhere, there are certain populations that are at particular disadvantages for a variety of reasons. Rural areas in the United States have an estimated 17.58 million people in nonmetropolitan areas that experienced depression in 2024, according to microdata from the National Health Interview Survey, but these areas may not have enough support and treatment options.

To learn more about rural residents’ experiences with mental health and awareness of additional or alternatives to traditional treatments that may be effective in rural areas, Rural Minds, the only national 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on advocating for rural mental health, conducted a survey among rural Pennsylvania residents. Nearly 7 in 10 participants (69%) indicated in the past year they have either experienced symptoms of depression themselves or been concerned about someone close to them who is dealing with depression.

“While there are many effective depression treatments in use by mental health professionals, common barriers to mental health treatment for residents of rural areas include the lack of confidentiality in small communities, fewer providers and greater distance to access mental health services,” said Jeff Winton, founder and chairman of Rural Minds. “In addition, many rural residents are either uninsured or underinsured.”

The poll also showed 3 in 4 rural residents (76%) are aware of talk therapy as a depression treatment or intervention, and more than two-thirds (68%) are aware of pharmacological treatments. However, significantly less are aware of additional therapies. For example, only 17% indicated being aware of digital therapeutics and 11% reported awareness of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.

“Depression is a significant challenge for people living in rural areas,” said Robert E. Nelson, MD, co-owner of DGR Behavioral Health, LLC, and medical director at Caron Counseling Center. “In some parts of the country, mental health services are nonexistent or very limited in rural communities. Additionally, the factors leading to depression can be different for those living outside urban and suburban communities.”

In areas where access to traditional services is limited, other options may help fill the gaps for individuals experiencing depression. For example, nearly half of survey participants (47%) would be interested in a digital app for depression as part of their treatment plan.

What are prescription digital therapeutics (PDTs)?
Technology is changing the way patients receive treatment in many aspects of medicine. That is also true when it comes to mental health. PDTs are health softwares, delivered using a device such as a smartphone or computer, to treat or alleviate a condition, disorder, disease or injury. This type of treatment may need to be paired with traditional forms of treatment to help address a variety of conditions, including mental health conditions.

Treatment delivered digitally can include brain-training exercises, cognitive behavioral therapy and behavioral reinforcement exercises. Some PDTs can also adapt based on usage.

To be considered a true prescription digital therapeutic, the software must be authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which gives users greater confidence in its usage and outcomes.

Prescription digital therapeutics offer an additional or alternative treatment.
In addition to the potential positive implications for improving access to mental health treatment options among rural residents, there are some other potential advantages to prescription digital therapeutics:

• Less likely to cause side effects. Because there are no additional medications involved, this form of therapy doesn’t carry the same risk of medicine-related side effects or drug interactions with other medications that the user may be taking.
• Studied for safety and effectiveness. In order to qualify for FDA authorization, they are studied in clinical trials to verify their safety and effectiveness.
• Convenient. Since PDTs are provided via a personal device, such as a smartphone or tablet, the patient can access treatment when and where it’s most convenient.
• Private. The nature of a PDT means it’s delivered remotely, and patients can pursue treatment within their own homes or other private locations without the need to make regular visits to a doctor’s office.

Learn more about the mental health challenges facing Americans and find a prescription app at ruraldepressionoptions.com.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

SOURCE:
Rural Minds