Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 3,127

Stopping the Spread of Ebola through Augmented Reality

The headlines pound away at us day after day with ominous news. Ebola has the potential to spread around the globe through rapid transport on airplanes, trains and automobiles. The United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other health experts do not recommend shutting down air travel from West Africa. “If you try to shut down air travel and sea travel, you risk affecting to a huge extent the economy, people’s livelihoods and their ability to get around without stopping the virus from traveling,” said Greg Hartl, a World Health Organization spokesperson.

In a recent poll, a majority of Americans believe air travel restrictions are a necessity to stop the spread of Ebola in the United States. In fact, 56 percent said the federal government should bar those who have “recently” been in Ebola nations from entering the U.S. It is obvious we must find better ways to use technology to our advantage to detect people who are showing symptoms of the virus. This is where augmented reality and wearable technology can improve our detection rate of sick people stricken with Ebola.

Currently Ebola screening is taking place at five United States airports: Newark, Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Washington. US government officials claim that 95% of travels from West Africa would go through those airports to enter the United States. Once a traveller passed a screener check-point, they would be free to enter the US without being monitored after that point.

Recent promising technology developments show that thermal imaging devices can be attached to smartphones for use. Common sense would dictate that if we can leverage thermal imaging devices on smartphones that we can also use Augmented Reality (AR) wearable glasses for the same use. Meta Space Glasses, Vuzix, Epson, Google Glass and a host of other new wearable AR glasses could create an incredible opportunity to detect people with fevers that may be contagious with the Ebola virus just by looking at them with this promising technology.

FLIR One has an attachable device for the iPhone 5S that can turn it into a thermal imagine device for $349.99. That alone is impressive. This is a tangible use that is already on the market. Redesigning an Augmented Reality use would not be an impossible feat. A key feature, according to some online reviews of the FLIR One, is that the device can determine the temperature of a person or object in view.

I am not an expert in thermal imaging, but current technology should be able to develop an alert of a temperature on a person that exceeds 99 degrees Fahrenheit. If my Augmented Reality thermal imaging glasses detect a person with a heat signature of over 99 degrees Fahrenheit, a digital overlay alert pop-up could appear in front of my eyes. Border Patrol agents, police officers, medical professionals, school officials, and other vital stakeholders could easily monitor areas all over the country and world to be quickly alerted to someone who has a high fever. Many civilians would buy the device just to protect their own family! Medical teams could quickly identify someone who may be infected with the Ebola virus.

This is an incredible opportunity to finally show how Augmented Reality, coupled with other cutting-edge technologies can save countless lives. This solution can permeate throughout the United States and the world. If we look at computer security, a firewall alone is not the best defense to prevent a computer virus. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) , along with a firewall, can detect suspicious traffic within a computer network and thwart a serious breach of security. AR thermal imaging glasses tweaked with accurate temperature alerts can be our Ebola IDS system which we desperately need.

The clock is ticking and we need to think outside the box to protect our communities and our families. The Augmented Reality community is an international group that has been pushing AR in a positive direction. It is our moment to shine and step up in this challenging time in history. The future of humanity may depend on it.

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[Update 10/18/14] — Augmented Legality Expert Brian Wassom responded to this article and discussed some of the legal ramifications of scanning someone with a thermal imaging device. Click HERE for his legal insight.

Brian Wassom also alerted me to a new thermal imaging device that rivals the FLIR One called the Seek Thermal Infared camera for smartphones for $199. Thanks to Twitter user @seeingwithsound. Wired.com reviews the device. What is interesting is that you can set the device to scan for skin temperatures of humans.

AR expert Frank Maggiore also advised me of the IR-Blue DM which also “connects using Bluetooth to your iPhone or Android device to show the temperature readings as colors on the screen” for $195. This clearly shows there are new options of devices on both Android and iOS to potentially use to stop Ebola.

Image Credit: Flickr By spcbrass

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Joseph Rampolla is a police Captain who has been teaching in the realm of cyber-crime, counter-terrorism, and emerging technologies. His passion is to teach about the positive uses of emerging technologies while raising awareness to the potential downside of innovation. He has dedicated his life to teaming up with eWarriors and Lifeboat supporters around the globe to protect the innocent in this lifelong mission. ” The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.” by William James is one of his favorite quotes.

Joseph currently is the host of a global podcast called Augmented Reality Dirt. AR Dirt explores how augmented reality influences society, cyber-crime, and our legal system. AR Dirt has listeners in over 99 countries and can be heard free via iOS, Android, and Window devices. Go to href=“www.ARdirt.com/ourapp” target=“_blank”>www.ARdirt.com/ourapp to find out how to download it for free on your smartphone or tablet.

Alchemy vs Networks: The cure for ageing will come — but it will not be something physical

Since ancient times people have been searching for the secret of immortality. Their quest has always been, without exception, about a physical item: a fountain, an elixir, an Alchemist’s remedy, a chalice, a pill, an injection of stem cells or a vial containing gene-repairing material. It has never been about an abstract concept.

Our inability to find a physical cure for ageing is explained by a simple fact: We cannot find it because it does not exist. It will never exist.

Those who believe that someday some guy is going to discover a pill or a remedy and give it to people so that we will all live forever are, regrettably, deluded.

I should highlight here that I refer to a cure for the ageing process in general, and not a cure for a specific medical disease. Biotechnology and other physical therapies are useful in alleviating many diseases and ailments, but these therapies will not be the answer to the basic biological process of ageing.

In a paper I published in the journal Rejuvenation Research I outline some of the reasons why I think biotechnology will not solve the ageing problem. I criticise projects such as SENS (which are based upon physical repairs of our ageing tissues) as being essentially useless against ageing. The editor’s rebuttal (being weak and mostly irrelevant) proved and strengthened my point. There are insurmountable basic psychological, anatomical, biological and evolutionary reasons why physical therapies against ageing will not work and will be unusable by the general public. Some of these reasons include pleiotropy, non-compliance, topological properties of cellular networks, non-linearity, strategic logistics, polypharmacy and tolerance, etc. etc.

So, am I claiming that we are doomed to live a life of age-related pathology and degeneration, and never be able to shake off the aging curse? No, far from it. I am claiming that it is quite possible, even inevitable, that ageing will be eliminated but this will not be achieved through a physical intervention based on bio-medicine or bio-technology. Ageing will be eliminated through fundamental evolutionary and adaptation mechanisms, and this process will take place independently of whether we want it or not.

It works like this: We now age and die because we become unable to repair random background damage to our tissues. Resources necessary for this have been allocated by the evolutionary process to our germ cell DNA (in order to assure the survival of the species) and have been taken away from our bodily cells. Until now, our environment was so full of dangers that it was more thermodynamically advantageous for nature to maintain us up to a certain age, until we have progeny and then die, allowing our progeny to continue life.

However, this is now changing. Our environment is becoming increasingly more secure and protective. Our technology protects us against dangers such as infections, famine and accidents. We become increasingly embedded into the network of a global techno-cultural society which depends upon our intelligence in order to survive. There will come a time when biological resources spent to bring up children would be better spent in protecting us instead, because it would be more economical for nature to maintain an existing, well-embedded human, rather than allow it to die and create a new one who would then need more resources in order to re-engage with the techno-cultural network. Disturbing the network by taking away its constituents and trying to re-engage new inexperienced ones is not an ideal action and therefore it will not be selected by evolution.

The message is clear: You have more chances of defying ageing if, instead of waiting for someone to discover a pill to make you live longer, you become a useful part of a wider network and engage with a technological society. The evolutionary process will then ensure that you live longer-as long as you are useful to the whole.

Further reading
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/kyriazis20121031

The Seven Fallacies of Aging

The Life Extension Hubris: Why biotechnology is unlikely to be the answer to ageing


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25072550
http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.6910

2014 Longevity and Genetics Conference – Keynote Aubrey de Grey

Western Canada’s most futurist-oriented longevity organization, the Lifespan Society of British Columbia, has organized a first-class life extension conference, which will take place later this fall in the heart of downtown Vancouver. The Longevity and Genetics Conference 2014 offers a full-day of expert presentations, made accessible to a general audience, with keynote on the latest developments in biorejuvination by Aubrey de Grey of SENS Research Foundation. The conference will be interactive, with a panel session for audience questions, and VIP options for further interaction with speakers.

Aubrey de Grey

Who will be there? In addition to Aubrey de Grey, there are four other speakers confirmed thus far: Dr. Angela Brooks-Wilson, Head of Cancer Genetics at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre at the BC Cancer Agency, Dr. S. Jay Olshansky, Board of Directors of the American Federation of Aging Research, and co-author of The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging, Dr. Clinton Mielke, former Mayo Clinic researcher and founder of the quantified self platform “infino.me”, and lastly, one of futurism’s most experienced and dedicated radical longevity advocates, Benjamin Best, who is currently Director of Research Oversight at the Life Extension Foundation. This conference is a multi-disciplinary event, engaging several points of interest and relevance in the longevity space, from the cellular, genetic science of aging, to the latest epidemiological and even demographic research. You can also expect discussion on personalized medicine and quantified self technologies, as well as big picture, sociological and philosophical, longevity-specific topics.

All around, the 2014 Longevity and Genetics conference, set to take place Saturday November 15, has a lot to offer, as does the host city of Vancouver. A recent study has indicated that a majority of Canadians, 59%, are in favor of life extension technology, with 47% expecting that science and technology will enable living until 120 by 2050. The Lifespan Society of British Columbia is keeping that momentum and enthusiasm alive and growing, and I’m glad they have organized such a high-calliber event. Tickets are currently still available. Learn more about the event and purchase tickets here.

ImageofVancouver
Vancouver B.C.

Dying Twice

Dying Twice

Of course, Ebola can be stopped: By rigorously restricting locomotion for the population. But this presupposes heavy support networks. At the present moment in time, this strategy is still feasible. However, since the disease is spreading exponentially in both number and area, very soon the resources of aid-giving nations will be overtaxed. Then the Big Dying from Ebola will be accompanied by the Big Dying from hunger and thirst due to restricted locomotion without the necessary support services.

There exist institutions that could help. But they all do not know what “dying twice” means:
FIRST: from having become untouchable and unapproachable;
SECOND: from thirst, hunger and the pangs of the disease which are intolerably ugly and stenching.
Mothers do not mind. But where are all the mothers for the dying? Even Jesus’ mother was there at the cross.

Since the disease is doubling every 3 weeks (only at some places the rate is slowed due to restricted locomotion), someone must make a “war plan.” I am sure some wonderful organizations have already done so, but they must join forces, resources and above all: information.
One joint plan must be negotiated, maybe under the auspices of the Vatican?, or the CDC?, or Castroland? It need not be the money-stripped United Nations. Only: SOON!

I have a deep respect for the aid worker who coined the phrase “dying twice”: You are an angel.
Without you, we – the world – would still be blind.

Organs-on-Chips emulate human organs, could replace animals in tests

By — GizMag

The search for more efficient tests of pharmaceuticals without animal models is taking a stride forward, with a new technology being developed in the US called Organs-on-Chips. The new miniature platform and software, which mimic the mechanical and molecular characteristics of human organs, were developed by bioengineers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

The device, about the size of a small computer memory stick, is created using microchip-manufacturing techniques. It features a porous flexible membrane that separates two channels at the center of the device. The channels are filled with living human cells and tissues cultured in a fluid that mimics the environment inside the human body. Micro-engineering and automated instrumentation allows the system to perform real-time analysis of biochemical, genetic and metabolic functions within single cells.

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Synthetic molecule uses salt to trigger self-destruction of cancer cells

By — GizMag

A team of international researchers has developed a molecule capable of triggering cancer cell death by carrying chloride into cancer cell membranes. The molecule flushes the cells with salt and causes them to self-destruct, potentially paving the way for new types of anti-cancer drugs.

The international effort involves researchers from the UK, Texas and South Korea who have collaborated to develop a synthetic ion transporter with a chloride payload. Once it reaches the cancer cells, the chloride interacts with the sodium in the cell membranes and leads to its demise.

“This work shows how chloride transporters can work with sodium channels in cell membranes to cause an influx of salt into a cell,” says the University of Southampton’s Professor Phillip Gale, one of the study’s co-authors. “We found we can trigger cell death with salt.”

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The Abolition of Medicine as a Goal for Humanity 2.0

What follows is my position piece for London’s FutureFest 2013, the website for which no longer exists.

Medicine is a very ancient practice. In fact, it is so ancient that it may have become obsolete. Medicine aims to restore the mind and body to their natural state relative to an individual’s stage in the life cycle. The idea has been to live as well as possible but also die well when the time came. The sense of what is ‘natural’ was tied to statistically normal ways of living in particular cultures. Past conceptions of health dictated future medical practice. In this respect, medical practitioners may have been wise but they certainly were not progressive.

However, this began to change in the mid-19th century when the great medical experimenter, Claude Bernard, began to champion the idea that medicine should be about the indefinite delaying, if not outright overcoming, of death. Bernard saw organisms as perpetual motion machines in an endless struggle to bring order to an environment that always threatens to consume them. That ‘order’ consists in sustaining the conditions needed to maintain an organism’s indefinite existence. Toward this end, Bernard enthusiastically used animals as living laboratories for testing his various hypotheses.

Historians identify Bernard’s sensibility with the advent of ‘modern medicine’, an increasingly high-tech and aspirational enterprise, dedicated to extending the full panoply of human capacities indefinitely. On this view, scientific training trumps practitioner experience, radically invasive and reconstructive procedures become the norm, and death on a physician’s watch is taken to be the ultimate failure. Humanity 2.0 takes this way of thinking to the next level, which involves the abolition of medicine itself. But what exactly would that mean – and what would replace it?

The short answer is bioengineering, the leading edge of which is ‘synthetic biology’. The molecular revolution in the life sciences, which began in earnest with the discovery of DNA’s function in 1953, came about when scientists trained in physics and chemistry entered biology. What is sometimes called ‘genomic medicine’ now promises to bring an engineer’s eye to improving the human condition without presuming any limits to what might count as optimal performance. In that case, ‘standards’ do not refer to some natural norm of health, but to features of an organism’s design that enable its parts to be ‘interoperable’ in service of its life processes.

In this brave new ‘post-medical’ world, there is always room for improvement and, in that sense, everyone may be seen as ‘underperforming’ if not outright disabled. The prospect suggests a series of questions for both the individual and society: (1) Which dimensions of the human condition are worth extending – and how far should we go? (2) Can we afford to allow everyone a free choice in the matter, given the likely skew of the risky decisions that people might take? (3) How shall these improvements be implemented? While bioengineering is popularly associated with nano-interventions inside the body, of course similarly targeted interventions can be made outside the body, or indeed many bodies, to produce ‘smart habitats’ that channel and reinforce desirable emergent traits and behaviours that may even leave long-term genetic traces.

However these questions are answered, it is clear that people will be encouraged, if not legally required, to learn more about how their minds and bodies work. At the same time, there will no longer be any pressure to place one’s fate in the hands of a physician, who instead will function as a paid consultant on a need-to-know and take-it-or-leave-it basis. People will take greater responsibility for the regular maintenance and upgrading of their minds and bodies – and society will learn to tolerate the diversity of human conditions that will result from this newfound sense of autonomy.

One Doctor’s Quest to Save People by Injecting Them With Scorpion Venom

By - Wired

Because it’s so late on a Monday afternoon, there is a listless vibe inside the University of Washington lecture hall where Jim Olson is about to speak. The audience consists of a few dozen grad students struggling with end-of-day fatigue. They scarf down free chocolate-chunk cookies as they prepare to take notes, but sugar can sharpen mental alertness only so much. The talk they’ve come to hear, part of a biweekly series on current topics in neuroscience, doesn’t exactly seem like edge-of-your-seat material.

Olson’s first slide wakes them up. It is a pixelated photograph of an adorable 6-year-old boy named Hayden Strum, who sports a white Quiksilver T-shirt and a pirate-style eye patch. Hayden, who suffered from a pernicious brain tumor, came to Olson in 1995, back when Olson was just starting his career as a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher. For four years, the doctor treated Hayden with successive rounds of chemotherapy and major surgeries, but nothing could save the boy’s life. Olson tells the audience that while sitting in the back row at Hayden’s memorial service, listening to the speakers express their pain, he had an epiphany about his scientific priorities.

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Dr. Ken Hayworth: What is the Future of your Mind?

We live in world, where technological advances continually allow new and provocative opportunities to deeply explore every aspect of our existence. Understanding the human brain remains one of our most important challenges– but with 100 billion neurons to contend with, the painstakingly slow progress can give the impression that we may never succeed. Brain mapping research unlocks secrets to our mental, social and physical wellness.

In our upcoming releases for the Galactic Public Archives, noted American PhD Neuroscientist and Futurist, Ken Hayworth outlines why he feels that mapping the brain will not be a quixotic task. Through this, he reveals his unconventional plan to ensure humanity’s place in the universe—forever.

We admit to teasing you with the below link in preparation for the main events.