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According to futurist and author Daniel Jeffries, there are five key factors missing for crypto to fully succeed as a technology. Will Libra be the end of the traditional financial order as we know it? Does it pose an existential threat to people’s freedom?
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Introducing the SBOL Industrial Consortium
To this end, a group of companies are now launching a pre-competitive consortium to support the industrial application of these technologies. The SBOL Industrial Consortium is a non-profit organization supporting innovation, dissemination, and integration of SBOL standards, tools and practices for practical applications in an industrial environment. The six founding companies of the consortium are Raytheon BBN Technologies, Amyris, Doulix, IDT, Shipyard Toolchains, TeselaGen, and Zymergen, representing a diverse set of interests and business models across the synthetic biology community.
The SBOL Industrial Consortium will facilitate industry-focused development of representational technologies in several ways. The consortium will help coordinate development of standards and tools, both with the academic community and from member to member, in order to ensure that the SBOL standards are well-tuned to support the specific industrial needs of the members of the consortium. Financial support will also be provided by the consortium for selected projects and activities, and for key pieces of community infrastructure.
When they aren’t investing in space shuttles and sprawling tech campuses, the super-rich are looking at mind-blowing methods to increase their lifespan.
Analysis by commercial finance experts ABC Finance has revealed some of the strangest and most extravagant approaches billionaires have turned to in their quest for immortality.
With its growing aging population, Singapore has a looming crisis, but could also be primed to become a major player in the rejuvenation biotechnology industry.
Singapore has one of the fastest-aging populations in the world. Senior citizens 65 years old or older are expected to make up almost half of Singapore’s population by 2050. Unfortunately, this swelling population is spending more time living with sickness, even though they live longer. While average lifespans have been extended, healthspans have not. [1] Singaporeans have an impressive average life expectancy of 84.8 years, but an average Singaporean born in 2017 is predicted to spend the last ten and a half years in sickness, compared to how a Singaporean born in 1999 is likely to spend only nine twilight years in deteriorating health.
This is becoming a massive concern for the Singaporean government because of the financial strain that this is imposing on Singapore’s budget. Having the world’s second-lowest birth rate coupled with a rapidly aging population means that the ratio of working adults to senior citizens is quickly shrinking. In 2007, there were 6.9 working adults for every senior citizen. By 2030, there will be 2.3 working adults per senior citizen.
Just a few months ago, Augustín Carstens, the general manager for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the so-called central bank for central banks, said his organization saw no value in the potential of central-bank-issued digital currencies. Well, he’s apparently had a change of heart, and the entrance of Facebook and other “big techs” into financial services appears to be the reason.
The news: Carstens told the Financial Times that the BIS is supporting the “many” central banks currently developing or researching digital currencies. “And it might be that it is sooner than we think that there is a market and we need to be able to provide central bank digital currencies,” he said.
The context: Many other central bankers have dismissed cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which tend to be volatile and whose most popular use has been speculation. But Facebook’s proposed digital currency, Libra, will be backed by fiat money and designed to maintain a stable value.
The oldest plant ever to be regenerated has been grown from 32,000-year-old seeds—beating the previous recordholder by some 30,000 years. (Related: “‘Methuselah’ Tree Grew From 2,000-Year-Old Seed.”)
A Russian team discovered a seed cache of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant native to Siberia, that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel near the banks of the Kolyma River (map). Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the seeds were 32,000 years old.
The mature and immature seeds, which had been entirely encased in ice, were unearthed from 124 feet (38 meters) below the permafrost, surrounded by layers that included mammoth, bison, and woolly rhinoceros bones.
A new study by researchers from the Dexeus Women’s Health research network in Barcelona found that frozen sperm samples survived when exposed to microgravity.
That could mean that sperm banks in space are possible, providing future space travelers with the ability to reproduce in space with sperm samples brought up from Earth.
“Some studies suggest a significant decrease in the motility of a human, fresh sperm sample,” Montserrat Boada who presented the research yesterday at an annual meeting in Vienna, Austria, said, as quoted by The Guardian. “But nothing has been reported on the possible effects of gravitational differences on frozen human gametes, in which state they could be transported from Earth to space.”
Cryonicists are banking on the idea that future technology will allow preserved bodies to be brought back to life.
Today, Facebook is coming together with 27 organizations around the world to start the non-profit Libra Association and create a new currency called Libra.
Libra is a global cryptocurrency built on blockchain to promote financial inclusion. Libra is digital, mobile, stable, fast, cheap and secure. Read the Libra White Paper.
When they aren’t investing in space shuttles and sprawling tech campuses, the super-rich are looking at mind-blowing methods to increase their lifespan.
