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Poverty rates have fallen faster in the past 30 years than at any other time on record. The UN wants extreme poverty to disappear by 2030. We assess the data to see if this is achievable.

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It is estimated that somebody escapes extreme poverty every 1.2 seconds. According to the World Bank, anyone on less than $1.90 per day is living in extreme poverty unable to afford basic food, clothing, healthcare and shelter.

Absolute poverty rates have fallen faster in the past 30 years than in any other time on record. This is a remarkable achievement but the task of taking people put of the worst poverty remains a huge challenge. The impressive fall is the result of changes in just two countries, China and India.

Continue reading “Can extreme poverty ever be eradicated?” | >

There weren’t too many historical events on December 3, 1992, but the date is an important one for mobile fans: 25 years ago today, the very first text message was sent. It simply read, “Merry Christmas”

On the same day that Whitney Houston’s I will always love you was the number 1 song in the US and Home Alone 2 topped the box office, 22-year-old Sema Group software architect Neil Papworth sent the first SMS (Short Message Service).

It was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the UK, though back then handsets could only receive messages, not send them. Papworth sent it to an Orbitel 901 handset belonging to the then-director of Vodafone, Richard Jarvis, using a computer.

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Just need 400 billion and 1.2% of the land area.

Desertec continues in a smaller form; they’re still building power plants in Morocco to supply the local energy needs of that country. Perhaps a ground-up approach, where MENA countries increase their own solar production in the desert before becoming net exporters, will provide the solution. This project is not the first wildly ambitious scheme to provide for the world’s energy needs that has stalled; historians remember Atlantropa, a scheme to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and use it for hydroelectric power that had some interest in the 1920s.

Yet the prospect remains tantalizing. Surely, when only a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface need be devoted to energy production to provide us with more power than we could ever dream of consuming, we won’t wreck the planet by getting that energy through dirty and dangerous means. To starry-eyed idealists, it must seem equivalent to being on a raft in a lake full of drinking water—and choosing instead to swig from a bottle of seawater in your backpack. Solar power in the world’s deserts is one of the few feasible, renewable ways of providing energy on the scale we currently demand as humans. Someday, we will make better use of the abundant energy from the sun. We’ll have to.

Image Credit: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/egypt-surrou...-444689929”">Harvepino / https://www.shutterstock.com/”">Shutterstock.com

Continue reading “The Tantalizing Dream of Blanketing the Sahara in Solar Panels” | >

Summary: Microbiome study of centenarians shows that ‘ridiculously healthy’ elderly have the same gut bacteria composition as healthy 30 year-olds. Can a more robust microbiome lead to the longer healthier life enjoyed by centenarians, or is it the other way around? [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts, follow us on Google+ | Facebook | Reddit. Author: Brady Hartman. This article was updated Dec. 2, 2017]

A recent study found that centenarians have the same microbiome as 30-year-olds.

In one of the most extensive studies of the human microbiome to date, an international group of researchers linked a healthy gut with “ridiculously healthy” elderly known as centenarians. This important study was conducted by the China-Canada Institute (CCI), a collaboration of geroscientists from the Lawson Health Research Institute, Western University, and Tianyi Health Science Institute in China. The researchers published their study titled “The Gut Microbiota of Healthy Aged Chinese Is Similar to That of the Healthy Young,” in the journal mSphere.

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[scroll down to view the video.] The animation house of Kurzsegat provides us with an 8-minute video on how the microbiome influences our health and mood and even encourages us to eat junk food. Scientists have linked the human microbiome to a variety of health conditions such as cancer, autism, weight gain, Parkinson’s Disease and even our mental health.

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Three new reports combine to suggest these answers: It can probably do less right now than you think. But it will eventually do more than you probably think, in more places than you probably think, and will probably evolve faster than powerful technologies have in the past.

Three new reports suggest that artificial intelligence can probably do less right now than you think. But by one estimation, up to a third of American workers will have to switch jobs by 2030 largely because of it.

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