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Category: futurism – Page 7
Bad news isn’t the only news
We often either take the good news for granted or we aren’t exposed to the good news at all. Here’s a reminder that, although a lot of things still suck, an enormous amount of progress has been made (and even more progress is coming soon!) #future #hopepunk
Sometimes when I tell people I’m optimistic about the future, they look at me like I’m crazy. How could I say that when there’s so much violence in the world, the international order seems to be collapsing, and AI may end up doing more harm than good?
I see all these problems too, and I’m deeply concerned about them. (I am working on a long memo about the risks and benefits of AI that I plan to publish later this month.)
But through my work with the Gates Foundation and other organizations, I also get to see signs of progress that help me stay optimistic.
Oldest known giant rock scallop bead suggests California coastal trade began millennia earlier
Archaeologists have discovered two giant rock scallop beads that push back the clock on the first appearance of these high-status ornaments. The discovery shows that these prized marine beads were traded hundreds of miles from the California coast thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
Radiocarbon dating places one of the beads at roughly 8,500 years old, making it the oldest ever discovered. More unusually, they were found more than 42 miles (68 kilometers) from the nearest coast, extending the known range of these ornaments from the Channel Islands to the California interior.
“It’s cool that this is the oldest of its kind identified so far, but cooler still to view it as part of a broader Early Holocene cultural landscape seemingly well-established in this locale as much as 10,000 years ago,” said Barry A. Price, an archaeologist at Applied EarthWorks Inc. and one of the study’s authors, along with Simone Schinsing and Jasmine Kidwell. The study is published in California Archaeology.
A new drug that can potentially overcome cancer therapy resistance
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have developed a drug called CS18 that disrupts cancer cells’ ability to survive therapy. The findings, published in Science Advances, support exploring the possibility of using CS18 to treat human cancer in the future.
“Therapeutic resistance is a main obstacle to achieving effective and durable cancer treatments,” said corresponding author Dr. Weei-Chin Lin, professor of medicine—hematology and oncology—and molecular and cellular biology at Baylor. “While some therapies are effective at the beginning, many patients eventually relapse because cancer cells can activate compensatory and convergent biological pathways that allow them to overcome the toxic effects of therapy, promoting survival.”
In the current study, the researchers’ goal was to develop a drug that would target a “biological switchboard”—topoisomerase IIβ-binding protein 1 (TopBP1)—that controls several cancer-driving pathways at once and to determine whether this strategy could deliver durable responses and overcome resistance.
