Posted in futurism
Cybathlon 2016
The very first Cybathlon in the world took place today. The event was completely sold out: some 4,600 visitors packed into the SWISS Arena Kloten to support the 66 teams from various countries. The pilots pitted their skills in six disciplines and demonstrated most impressively how novel technologies can assist people with disabilities in their daily life.
The European Commission is getting ready to propose new legislation to protect machines from cybersecurity breaches, signalling the executive’s growing interest in encouraging traditional European manufacturers to build more devices that are connected to the internet.
A new plan to overhaul EU telecoms law, which digital policy chiefs Günther Oettinger and Andrus Ansip presented three weeks ago, aims to speed up internet connections to meet the needs of big industries like car manufacturing and agriculture as they gradually use more internet functions.
But that transition to more and faster internet connections has caused many companies to worry that new products and industrial tools that rely on the internet will be more vulnerable to attacks from hackers.
““The impact of extreme, often violent weather on crops in a world where the population continues to increase rapidly can only be disastrous,” he warns.”
Researchers at Sapience.org foresee market instability intensifying by the computer trading ‘arms race’
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Last Friday the sterling has experienced a dramatic, ultrafast crash. It lost 10% of its value in minutes after the Asian markets opened — a decline usually reserved to declarations of war, major earthquakes and global catastrophes — and bounced right back. Although the affected exchanges are yet to release the details, computer trading algorithms almost certainly played a key role. Just like the 2010 Flash Crash, yesterday’s event is characteristic to Ultrafast Extreme Events[1]: split-second spikes in trade caused by ever smarter algorithms razor-focused on making ever-quicker profits. But the arms race is only likely to intensify as computing speed accelerates and AI algorithms become more intelligent.
We are living in a world that is global and exponential. Technology is taking things that used to be scarce and making them abundant—and these forces are reshaping the fields of medicine and healthcare in completely novel ways.
Opening this year’s Exponential Medicine conference in San Diego, Daniel Kraft, the curator of the conference, and faculty chair of Medicine and Neuroscience at Singularity University, took the audience on a whirlwind tour of the latest developments in healthcare and medicine.
Lung cancer treatment is moving beyond chemotherapy, with Merck & Co. setting the pace in a new category of therapies that harness the body’s immune system to fight tumors.
The U.S. drugmaker’s drug Keytruda reduced the risk of death or cancer progression by 50 percent, Merck said, unveiling details of a crucial study at a meeting of the European Society for Medical Oncology. The medicine gave patients an average of 10.3 months before their cancer progressed, compared with six months on chemotherapy. Unlike competitor Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., whose similar drug Opdivo failed in an advanced trial and caused its stock to plunge, Merck selected patients who harbored high levels of a protein thought to predict how well the immune-system drugs will work.
The results give Merck a head start — and not just on Bristol-Myers. Roche Holding AG and AstraZeneca Plc are also in the race for the best new immune therapy against lung tumors, the most common cancer in the world. Doctors will probably start testing patients soon after diagnosis to see whether they’re suited to treatment with Keytruda and can forgo the many side effects of chemotherapy, said Stefan Zimmermann, a chief oncologist at the Cantonal Hospital of Fribourg, Switzerland.
