Smarter Faster™ Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content — with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Subscribe to learn from top minds like these daily. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
Other Frequent contributors include Michio Kaku & Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Join Big Think Edge, to gain access to a world-class learning platform focused on building the soft skills essential to 21st century success. It features insight from many of the most celebrated and intelligent individuals in the world today. Topics on the platform are focused on: emotional intelligence, digital fluency, health and wellness, critical thinking, creativity, communication, career development, lifelong learning, management, problem solving & self-motivation.
Smarter Faster™ Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content — with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Subscribe to learn from top minds like these daily. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
Other Frequent contributors include Michio Kaku & Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Join Big Think Edge, to gain access to a world-class learning platform focused on building the soft skills essential to 21st century success. It features insight from many of the most celebrated and intelligent individuals in the world today. Topics on the platform are focused on: emotional intelligence, digital fluency, health and wellness, critical thinking, creativity, communication, career development, lifelong learning, management, problem solving & self-motivation.
Safed’s Ziv Medical Center has sent a letter to Health Ministry director Nachman Ash requesting he grant emergency authorization for the anti-COVID drug Amor 18 developed by the Israeli company Amorphical in order to treat patients in moderate to serious condition due to the coronavirus, Channel 2 reported Friday.
In letter to Health Ministry director, Ziv Medical Center points to promising results from Amor 18’s clinical trial, where all patients who received drug went on to recover (drug uses Amorphous Calcium Carbonate: ACC).
Israeli biotech company Amorphical recently published what it says are promising results from the second stage of its Amor 18 clinical study.
-please note: Regeneron helped end the ebola pandemic by ending clinical trials early and getting treatments to patients ASAP.
Innovating Life-Saving Therapeutic Devices — Dr. Amy Throckmorton, PhD — BioCirc Research Laboratory, Drexel University School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.
Dr. Amy Throckmorton, Ph.D. (https://drexel.edu/biomed/faculty/core/ThrockmortonAmy/) is Associate Professor and Director of the BioCirc Research Laboratory, in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, at Drexel University.
The BioCirc Research Laboratory seeks to improve the treatment strategies and therapeutic options for pediatric and adult patients suffering from acquired or congenital heart disease by developing unique features for inclusion in the design of blood pumps and to develop entirely new designs of blood pumps for patients with single ventricle or biventricular circulations as a bridge-to-transplant, bridge-to-recovery, or destination therapy.
Prior to this position, in the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Dr. Throckmorton served as Associate Professor and previously held the chaired Qimonda Assistant Professorship.
Dr. Throckmorton received her PhD and MS in Biomedical Engineering, as well as a BS in Chemical Engineering, from the University of Virginia.
Snoring not only can cause a restless night for bedfellows, but it can also disturb the processes that affect brain health. Researchers found that reducing snoring may improve cognitive function in individuals with mild impairment.
Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas and their colleagues have discovered that breathing rates while sleeping can be used to distinguish cognitively normal people from those who have mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease.
For the past decade, AI has been quietly seeping into daily life, from facial recognition to digital assistants like Siri or Alexa. These largely unregulated uses of AI are highly lucrative for those who control them but are already causing real-world harms to those who are subjected to them: false arrests; health care discrimination; and a rise in pervasive surveillance that, in the case of policing, can disproportionately affect Black people and disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.
Gebru is a leading figure in a constellation of scholars, activists, regulators, and technologists collaborating to reshape ideas about what AI is and what it should be. Some of her fellow travelers remain in Big Tech, mobilizing those insights to push companies toward AI that is more ethical. Others, making policy on both sides of the Atlantic, are preparing new rules to set clearer limits on the companies benefiting most from automated abuses of power. Gebru herself is seeking to push the AI world beyond the binary of asking whether systems are biased and to instead focus on power: who’s building AI, who benefits from it, and who gets to decide what its future looks like.
Full Story:
The day after our Zoom call, on the anniversary of her departure from Google, Gebru launched the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute, an independent research group she hopes will grapple with how to make AI work for everyone. “We need to let people who are harmed by technology imagine the future that they want,” she says.
When Gebru was a teenager, war broke out between Ethiopia, where she had lived all her life, and Eritrea, where both of her parents were born. It became unsafe for her to remain in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. After a “miserable” experience with the U.S. asylum system, Gebru finally made it to Massachusetts as a refugee. Immediately, she began experiencing racism in the American school system, where even as a high-achieving teenager she says some teachers discriminated against her, trying to prevent her taking certain AP classes. Years later, it was a pivotal experience with the police that put her on the path toward ethical technology. She recalls calling the cops after her friend, a Black woman, was assaulted in a bar. When they arrived, the police handcuffed Gebru’s friend and later put her in a cell. The assault was never filed, she says. “It was a blatant example of systemic racism.”
Ms. Fanny Sie is the One Roche Head of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Health, at F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. (https://www.roche.com/), a multinational healthcare company that operates in both the Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics segments, and in 2021 was the world’s largest pharma company by revenue.
With her BS and MS from the University of Toronto, Ms. Sie is very focused on applications of Digital Health, and innovative techniques such as Artificial Intelligence, to generate actionable insights that may breed exponential improvements in both patient outcomes and economic development (https://www.roche.com/strongertogether/data-science-coalition.htm).
Ms. Sie has over 15 years of experience bringing new products and services to the healthcare market, including extensive experience as a clinician, researcher and business development professional in the area of medical devices, AI and analytics, and digital health assets.
Ms. Sie specializes in building meaningful and impactful health system transformations that leverage innovation and achieve fast and sustained growth for entrepreneurs and multinationals in the public and private sector.
Viruses can be wily adapters, changing their identities to find new hosts and thwart efforts to stop them. That’s why University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and their collaborators are making progress toward developing universal vaccines against some the planet’s most harmful pathogens, including the virus family responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last fall, the National Institutes of Health announced it was investing in three teams working to develop a vaccine that would simultaneously work against a broad range of coronaviruses. Among them is a research collaboration, the Pan-Coronavirus Vaccine consortium, led by UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine Professor of Pathobiological Sciences Yoshihiro Kawaoka.
“This pan-coronavirus vaccine is basically preparing for the future,” Kawaoka says.
If the world already had a pan-coronavirus vaccine in March 2020, it could have served as a mitigation tool until vaccines specific to SARS-CoV-2 could be developed.
Athletes headed to the Beijing Olympic Winter Games are making final travel preparations, including keeping in line with China’s health measures on the “My 2022″ smartphone app. However, inadequate encryption measures within the app can leave Olympians, journalists and sports officials vulnerable to hackers, privacy breaches, and surveillance, according to a cybersecurity report by the Citizen Lab obtained exclusively by DW. Additionally, the IT forensic specialists found that the app includes a censorship keyword list. The findings come as international concern over digital safety at the Games mounts. Germany, Australia, UK and US have urged their athletes and National Olympic Committees to leave their personal phones and laptops behind and to travel with special devices over fears of digital espionage. The Dutch Olympic Committee outright banned its athletes from bringing personal phones and laptops due to surveillance concerns.
In the Olympic Playbook for athletes and team officials, the International Olympic Committee states that the “My 2022″ app is “in accordance with international standards and Chinese law.” But based on its findings, Citizen Lab concludes that the insecure transmission of personal information “may constitute a direct violation of China’s privacy laws.” This is because China’s data protection laws require that a person’s health and medical records held digitally be transmitted and stored in an encrypted manner. Citizen Lab’s findings also raise questions concerning two Western tech giants that carry the “My 2022″ app: Apple and Google. “Both Apple’s and Google’s policies forbid apps to transmit sensitive data without proper encryption, so Apple and Google will need to determine whether the app’s unresolved vulnerabilities warrant delisting,” Citizen Lab’s Knockel told DW. The Beijing Organizing Committee has stood by its app, however, saying it “passed the examination” of international mobile application markets such as Google, Apple and Samsung.“We have taken measures such as personal information encryption in the app to ensure privacy security,” the committee said Monday to Xinhua News Agency.
The Winter Games, which kicks off on February 4, marks the second Olympic Games during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just as at the Tokyo Summer Games, tracking athletes’ health is required. According to the official Playbook of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), athletes, coaches, reporters and sports officials, as well as thousands of local staff, are required to put their information into either the “My 2022″ smartphone app or website. The app, which was developed in China, is designed to monitor the health of all attendees and staff as well as trace possible COVID-19 infections. Passport data and flight information must be entered into the app. Sensitive medical information related to possible COVID-19 symptoms are also required, such as whether a person had a fever, fatigue, headaches, a dry cough, diarrhea or a sore throat. Those coming from abroad must start entering health data 14 days before arriving in the country. Many countries use a contact tracing app to help combat the pandemic. But “My 2022″ combines contact tracing with other services: It regulates access to events, acts as a visitor’s guide with information on sporting venues and tourist services, as well as providing chat functions (text and audio), news feeds and file transfers.
The idea that our genes are our fate” is dead. Exciting new discoveries in the field of epigenetics have proven that our lifestyle and environment can turn off and on many of the genes that control our health and wellbeing. Simple things like where we live, what we eat, pollution, stress, and exercise all impact which genes are silenced and expressed throughout our lives.
Research has shown that that the current dramatic rise in obesity, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s all have epigenetic mechanisms at play. Not only that but many epigenetic changes are actually passed to future generations: your grandmother’s dietary deficits may have caused your diabetes. Your father’s smoking may have turned on your marker for obesity or ADHD. Three generations later the descendants of holocaust survivors are still suffering stress disorders.
The recognition that environment, not genetics, is the primary driver of human health and disease carries with it a strong message of personal empowerment and responsibility. We are no longer powerless in the high stakes game of our own health. We can now play an active role in our genetic destiny.
Decoding Life: The Epigenetics Revolution is a one-hour documentary that uncovers the latest findings in the game-changing field of epigenetics. We meet the world’s top epigenetic experts, uncover the latest research into how epigenetics can be used to treat some of society’s most dire health crises such as cancer, heart disease, obesity, and dementia.
