Lifeboat Foundation

Robert Sapolsky is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, with a focus on the physiological effects of stress. (For years, he spent his summers in Kenya, alone except for the baboons he was observing.) Steve asks Robert why we value human life over animals, why he’s lost faith in the criminal justice system, and how to look casual when you’re about to blow-dart a very large and potentially unhappy primate.\
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This episode was originally published March 5, 2021.\
For a full transcript, resources, and more, visit: https://freak.ws/3WQAjmF\
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ABOUT PEOPLE I (MOSTLY) ADMIRE:\
People I (Mostly) Admire is hosted by Steven Levitt, the unorthodox University of Chicago economist and co-author of the Freakonomics book series, who tracks down other high achievers and asks questions that only he would think to ask. Guests include all-time Jeopardy! champion (and now host) Ken Jennings, YouTube C.E.O. Susan Wojcicki, W.N.B.A. champion Sue Bird, Operation Warp Speed chief Moncef Slaoui, and neuroscientist/actress (also now Jeopardy! host) Mayim Bialik. Winner of Adweek‘s 2021 Best Interview Podcast of the Year.\
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SUBSCRIBE TO PEOPLE I (MOSTLY) ADMIRE:\
YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl\
Stitcher: https://freak.ws/3ENOP8v\
Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3ELfGST\
Spotify: https://freak.ws/3D6uqKV\
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ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK:\
Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions (est. 2020), People I (Mostly) Admire (2020), and Freakonomics, M.D. (2021). \
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FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS:\
Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freak…\
No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/\
People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/peopl…\
Freakonomics, M.D.: https://freakonomics.com/series/bapu/\
Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/\
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00:00 Robert Sapolsky bio\
01:37 Baboon research in Kenya\
3:03 Baboon social rank and health\
4:14 Blow-dart sedation challenges\
7:40 Why human and animal stress are similar\
11:09 Why Sapolsky only studied male baboons\
12:42 Affiliation vs. rank in baboons\
14:08 Tragic end of research with first baboon troop\
17:38 Why humans prioritize human lives\
19:25 How humans prioritize pets\
19:47 Prioritization of tigers in India\
21:00 Harambe the gorilla\
22:19 Chronic stress research\
25:08 Ways to respond to stress\
26:00 Genetic influence on stress\
26:45 ACE score to quantify stress\
28:49 Addressing PTSD to reduce crime\
29:35 Behave-Sapolsky book on violence\
29:56 Free will and violence\
30:35 Abolishment of criminal justice system\
30:54 The frontal cortex and impulse control\
31:31 Frontal cortex trauma in death row inmates\
32:29 Purposes of punishment\
32:46 Retribution\
32:59 Incapacitation and deterrence\
33:35 Quarantine model of punishment\
34:10 “Biological luck” in blame and reward\
34:51 Epilepsy, schizophrenia, and dyslexia misunderstood\
37:06 How to be a better storyteller.

For most adults, the majority of waking daily life is spent at work. That offers employers an opportunity to influence their employees’ physical, mental, social, and spiritual health.

To support the move to better health, the McKinsey Health Institute (MHI), along with other organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), are highlighting a more modern way to view health beyond illness and its absence.¹ Adding years to life and life to years, McKinsey, March 29, 2022; A 2022 MHI survey on global health perspectives found that more than 40 percent of respondents who reported having a disease still perceived their health as good or very good, while more than 20 percent of those who reported no disease said they were in fair, poor, or very poor health. Embracing the concept of holistic health—an integrated view of an individual’s mental, physical, spiritual, and social functioning² Previous work from MHI has defined each dimension of health in detail. For more details, see Adding years to life and life to years. Using this definition means that we emphasize “functioning.

Amid a rise in the innovation of wearable technology, researchers are looking for ways to harness the adaptive sensing ability of the human body.

A recent University of Melbourne panel discussion covered the future of wearable sensors. Professor Graham Kerr, Bill Dimopoulos, Galen Gan and Professor Peter Lee considered the management of information generated from such technology and its interpretation for improving health.

Regulatory efforts to protect data are making strides globally. Patient data is protected by law in the United States and elsewhere. In Europe the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guards personal data and recently led to a US $1.3 billion fine for Meta. You can even think of Apple’s App Store policies against data sharing as a kind of data-protection regulation.

“These are good constraints. These are constraints society wants,” says Michael Gao, founder and CEO of Fabric Cryptography, one of the startups developing FHE-accelerating chips. But privacy and confidentiality come at a cost: They can make it more difficult to track disease and do medical research, they potentially let some bad guys bank, and they can prevent the use of data needed to improve AI.

“Fully homomorphic encryption is an automated solution to get around legal and regulatory issues while still protecting privacy,” says Kurt Rohloff, CEO of Duality Technologies, in Hoboken, N.J., one of the companies developing FHE accelerator chips. His company’s FHE software is already helping financial firms check for fraud and preserving patient privacy in health care research.

Ocean bays that pinch West Antarctica are home to two distinct populations of Turquet’s octopus (Pareledone turqueti). The shared secrets of their ancestors do not bode well for the future health of our planet.

A new DNA analysis of the two geographically separated octopus populations indicates they were once part of one big family.

This direct historical connection suggests that around 125,000 years ago, the massive 2.2 million cubic kilometer (530,000 cubic mile) West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) that separates the two bays had fully collapsed into the sea.

Researchers have created an artificial intelligence tool that uses sequences of life events—such as health history, education, job and income—to predict everything from a person’s personality…

A multi-university team of researchers, supported by federal funding, is developing a highly efficient bacterial therapeutic to target cancer more precisely to make treatment safer through a single $1 dose.

Traditionally, cancer therapies have been limited in their efficacy in treating patients. Some, like radiation and chemotherapy, cause harmful side effects, while others tend to result in low patient responsiveness, not to mention the cost it takes to receive treatment. Findings from the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network recorded that 73% of cancer survivors and patients were worried about how they were going to pay the cost of their cancer care, and 51% said they were in medical debt from treatment. For example, state-of-the-art cancer therapy can cost up to $1,000,000.

Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri are leading the effort to develop a low-cost, safe, and controlled cancer treatment. Researchers received a $20 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to fight cancer. The four-year project is part of the current administration’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, an effort to advance and increase funding for cancer research. It is one of the first projects funded by the newly established agency that aims to accelerate better health outcomes for everyone by supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society’s most challenging health problems.

Horizons _ SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY + HEALTH

Abstract Here we represent human lives in a way that shares structural similarity to language, and we exploit this similarity to adapt natural language processing techniques to examine the evolution and predictability of human lives based on detailed event sequences.

Using registry data from Denmark, Lehmann et al. create individual-level trajectories of events related to health, education, occupation, income and address, and also apply transformer models to build rich embeddings of life-events and to predict outcomes ranging from time of death to personality.