Endocrine Disruptors
Posted in chemistry, food, health, neuroscience
Endocrine disrupting chemicals cause adverse effects in animals. But limited scientific information exists on potential health problems in humans. Because people are typically exposed to multiple at the same time, assessing public health effects is difficult.
Many chemicals, both natural and man-made, may mimic or interfere with the body’s hormones, known as the endocrine system. Called endocrine disruptors, these chemicals are linked with developmental, reproductive, brain, immune, and other problems.
Endocrine disruptors are found in many everyday products, including some plastic bottles and containers, liners of metal food cans, detergents, flame retardants, food, toys, cosmetics, and pesticides.
As well as high-tech greenhouses, vertical farms, where food is grown indoors in vertically stacked beds without soil or natural light, are growing in popularity. NextOn operates a vertical farm in an abandoned tunnel beneath a mountain in South Korea. US company AeroFarms plans to build a 90,000-square-foot indoor vertical farm in Abu Dhabi, and Berlin-based Infarm has brought modular vertical farms directly to grocery stores, growing fresh produce in Tokyo stores.
AppHarvest says its greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky, uses robotics and artificial intelligence to grow millions of tons of tomatoes, using 90% less water than in open fields.
This week, The European Parliament, the body responsible for adopting European Union (EU) legislation, passed a non-binding resolution calling for a ban on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology in public places. The resolution, which also proposes a moratorium on the deployment of predictive policing software, would restrict the use of remote biometric identification unless it’s to fight “serious” crime, such as kidnapping and terrorism.
The approach stands in contrast to that of U.S. agencies, which continue to embrace facial recognition even in light of studies showing the potential for ethnic, racial, and gender bias. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 10 branches including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security plan to expand their use of facial recognition between 2020 and 2023 as they implement as many as 17 different facial recognition systems.
Commercial face-analyzing systems have been critiqued by scholars and activists alike throughout the past decade, if not longer. The technology and techniques — everything from sepia-tinged film to low-contrast digital cameras — often favor lighter skin, encoding racial bias in algorithms. Indeed, independent benchmarks of vendors’ systems by the Gender Shades project and others have revealed that facial recognition technologies are susceptible to a range of prejudices exacerbated by misuse in the field. For example, a report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology details how police feed facial recognition software flawed data, including composite sketches and pictures of celebrities who share physical features with suspects.
Lmao 😆
Half of the chain’s office employees will be frying chicken fingers, working cash registers, and, of course, helping with recruiting.
However, it’s unclear if Raising Cane’s is also planning to raise its wages as well — something more and more US employers are resorting to as they face the reality that minimum wage just isn’t enough to survive in America.
The company, based out of Louisiana, has 530 locations. It’s facing a massive uphill battle, with plans to hire 10,000 new restaurant workers within the next 50 days, according to Bloomberg.
In January 2,020 at the event where General Motors automated driving division Cruise took the wraps off the Origin robotaxi, a slide briefly appeared in the presentation showing a version of the vehicle for package deliveries. Today during the General Motors investor day, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann provided more details about the company’s business model and revenue opportunities and showed both a delivery module and a wheelchair accessible version.
Cruise has been providing automated deliveries in partnership with Walmart WMT +0.7% in the Phoenix area since late 2020. Throughout much of last year during the worst early phases of the pandemic in the San Francisco area, Cruise vehicles were used to provide more than 50,000 food deliveries to medical personnel and those in need. Those efforts have all utilized the current test fleet of Chevrolet Bolts which are not optimized for goods delivery.
Driving this revolution has been a new breed and wave of founders and startups that merge the worlds of technology and bio — importantly, not just the old world of biotech (or a narrow definition of tech in bio as only “digital health”), but something much broader, bigger, and blending both worlds. In short, biology — enabled by technology — is eating the world. This has not only changed how we diagnose, treat, and manage disease, but has been changing the way we access, pay for, and deliver care in the healthcare system. It is now entering into manufacturing, food, and several other industries as well. Bio is becoming a part of everything.
This new era of industrialized bio — enabled by AI as well as an ongoing, foundational shift in biology from empirical science to more engineered approaches — will be the next industrial revolution in human history. And propelling it forward is an enormous new driving force, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, its ever-evolving strains, and the resulting COVID-19 disease pandemic and response — which I believe is analogous to our generation’s World War II (WW2). In other words: a massive global upheaval, but that later led to unprecedented innovation and significant new players.
As a result, we will now see the emergence of bio’s version of GAFA — playing off the “Google Amazon Facebook Apple” of the leading companies in computing, social, mobile — but for bio. And with it, a post-WW2/ post-Covid “Industrial Bio Complex”.