Here’s an important story I wrote on #cryonics for Quartz about a recent tragedy of a young girl and society’s reluctance to give people rights after death. I think something like “Danielle’s Law” could be important moving forward:
Cryogenics is facing legal hurdles for people who want their bodies to be frozen for the future.
Shaking a physical system typically heats it up, in the sense that the system continuously absorbs energy. When considering a circular shaking pattern, the amount of energy that is absorbed can potentially depend on the orientation of the circular drive (clockwise/anti-clockwise), a general phenomenon known as circular dichroism.
In 2017, Nathan Goldman (ULB, Brussels), Peter Zoller (IQOQI, Innsbruck) and coworkers predicted that circular dichroism can be quantized in quantum systems (heating is then constrained by strict integers) forming a “topological state.” According to this theoretical prediction, the quantization of energy absorption upon circular driving can be directly related to topology, a fundamental mathematical concept that characterizes these intriguing states of matter.
Writing in Nature Physics, the experimental group of Klaus Sengstock and Christof Weitenberg (Hamburg), in collaboration with the team of Nathan Goldman, reports on the first observation of quantized circular dichroism. Following the theoretical proposal of Goldman, Zoller et al., the experimentalists realized a topological state using an ultracold atomic gas subjected to laser light, and studied its heating properties upon circular shaking of the gas. By finely monitoring the heating rates of their system, for a wide range of driving frequencies, they were able to validate the quantization law predicted by Goldman, Zoller et al. in 2017, in agreement with the underlying topological state realized in the laboratory.
The global population aged 60 or over is growing faster than all younger age groups and faces the tide of chronic diseases threatening their quality of life and posing challenges to healthcare and economy systems. To better understand the underlying biology behind healthspan — the healthy period of life before the first chronic disease manifestation — the scientists from Gero and MIPT collaborated with the researchers from PolyOmica, the University of Edinburgh and other institutes to analyze genetic data and medical histories of over 300,000 people aged 37 to 73 made available by UK Biobank.
The study published today in Communications Biology was lead by Dr. Peter Fedichev and Prof. Yurii Aulchenko. It shows that the most prevalent chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, dementia, and some others apparently share the common underlying mechanism that is aging itself.
«According to Gompertz mortality law, the risk of death from all causes increases exponentially after the age of 40 and doubles approximately every 8 years», explains Peter Fedichev, founder and CSO of Gero. «By analyzing the dynamics of disease incidence in the clinical data available from UKB, we observed that the risks of age-related diseases grow exponentially with age and double at a rate compatible with the Gompertz mortality law. This close relation between the most prevalent chronic diseases and mortality suggests that their risks could be driven by the same process, that is aging. This is why healthspan can be used as a natural proxy for investigation of the genetic factors controlling the rate of aging, the “holy grail” target for anti-aging interventions».
Jack Beard, a professor in the University of Nebraska College of Law’s Space, Cyber and Telecommunications Law Program, told Politico that the Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Operations “will become the definitive document on military and security law as it applies to space.”
The Woomera Manual won’t actually lay out any new guidelines. Instead it will organize and present the laws that are already on the books so that politicians, industry leaders, and others can make better informed decisions regarding activity in space.
Given the fact that the Outer Space Treaty, which banned military actions in outer space, has all but been tossed aside, it’s unclear how much they’ll actually listen.
“For A New Crypto Legal System”
Earlier this week (on Sunday night, in fact), I came across a definition and understanding of “legal systems” that has really cleared up a lot of things that have been weighing heavily on my mind for a long time. Here it is:
Legal systems are protocols for the management of disputes.
This includes protocols for preventing disputes and for managing the whole lifecycle of disputes, from inception to resolution. It captures both descriptions of these protocols (“legal code”) and their execution (“operation of law”). It might need to be refined, but it’s useful enough as given here.
When a company reaches the top of the ladder, they typically kick it away so that others cannot climb up on it. The aim? To prevent competition. When this happens in the pharmaceutical world, in terms of patents, companies quickly apply for broad protection of their products, which can last decades, and, in doing so, they fence off entire research areas for others.
In this video, Tahir Amin an attorney Tahir Amin who specializes in patent law, explains how this “skewed” system hurts everyday people.
Law firms are under tremendous pressure to innovate to provide better value to their clients, who demand more value for their legal dollars. Providing higher-value services in turn boosts firms’ competitiveness.
However, much of the day-to-day work of any legal office – whether it’s in-house counsel, a boutique firm or one of the largest legal power houses – is the tedious, repetitive work of reading and preparing answers to complaints. Larger firms may have armies of junior associates do much of this necessary but mundane case-preparation work. At smaller firms, partners and senior associates are often involved in all stages of litigation. Preparing responses is time-consuming. It can take several hours to a full day to complete. Those are hours that both attorneys and firms would prefer to use tackling more strategic legal work.
We asked ourselves, what if, instead of taking hours, those high-volume, repetitive tasks could take a couple of minutes?
This is the first time that an entry from the Philippines has made it to the global finalists. http://verafiles.org/articles/filipino-it-experts-hope-nasa-…lenge-winn #SpaceApps #SpaceAppsPH
Filipino Information Technology enthusiasts are hoping that the temporary reopening of U.S. government operations after a 35-day shutdown would pave the way for the announcement of the winners in the NASA Space Apps Challenge, where one of the finalists is an app developed by a group of Filipino IT experts.
The announcement of the winners in the global competition was supposed to have been made in mid-January but has suffered a delay due to the federal government shutdown caused by a standoff over border security.
The shutdown, which began last Dec. 21, ended on Friday after U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law a funding measure that will allow the reopening of government operations until Feb. 15.
