Things are rocky in the UK — ripple effects are already being felt.
Sir John Vickers says UK banks are still at risk, with Beijing prepared to spend billions propping up Shanghai market as fears grow of new crash.
Well, Tech has Ray Kurzweil as the industry’s favorite futurist; and Economists have William White as their goto futurist.
As financial markets reeled last week and fears of a fresh recession or even banking crisis sparked panic, White was more than willing to issue yet another prophecy of doom.
ABSTRACT
While General Relativity (GR) ranks undoubtedly among the best physics theories ever developed, it is also among those with the most striking implications. In particular, GR admits solutions which allow faster than light motion and consequently time travel. Here we shall consider a “pre-emptive” chronology protection mechanism that destabilises superluminal warp drives via quantum matter back-reaction and hence forbids even the conceptual possibility to use these solutions for building a time machine. This result will be considered both in standard quantum field theory in curved spacetime as well as in the case of a quantum field theory with Lorentz invariance breakdown at high energies. Some lessons and future perspectives will be finally discussed.
This story crosses into the realm of satellite launchers and commercial space, but has troubling implications for international security. I personally am a bit more worried about North Korea’s ability to secure ballistic sub-launched weapons of mass destruction since I think that they offer more stealth than an ICBM silo, which we can fairly easily detect.
North Korea’s potential intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) threat may be stealing headlines, but the rogue state’s interest in submarine-launched nuclear weapons is arguably even more worrisome.
WIKIPEDIA, AYACOP Boosting levels of ghrelin, a hormone involved in hunger, keeps aging-related declines at bay in mice, according to a study published yesterday (February 2) in Molecular Psychiatry.
The authors gave mice a traditional Japanese medicine called rikkunshito or an extract from rikkunshito to stimulate hormone production. In three different mouse lines—two with shortened lifespans and another with a normal lifespan—the treatment resulted in the animals living longer.
“These findings suggest that the elevated endogenous ghrelin signaling has an important role in preventing aging-related premature death,” Akio Inui of Kagoshima University Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences and colleagues wrote in their report.
However, one also must look at the past for insights and guidance on things that were done wrong to ensure bad history is not repeated.
Therefore, let me share with you a part of history that we need to be aware of and protect our future from ever repeating again.
Many folks have never heard of Poor Farms in the South and Poor Houses in some parts of the Midwest. Before soc. Security and Welfare we had poor farms/ houses. They date from the late 1800s until 1930s.
Poor farms/ houses were often filled with the elderly and others that had no money or anyone to take care them. People often worked the land for 16+ hours days, dressed in rags, and had very little to eat. Once you were there you could not leave ever until you died.
My grandfather always taught us that if Social Security and Welfare were ever eliminated, that a model of Poor Farms/ houses would return.
Press Release From: Ames Research Center Posted: Friday, February 12, 2016.
Reporters are invited to a media day on Friday, Feb. 19, at 10 a.m. PST at Made In Space, Inc. (MIS), located at NASA’s Research Park, at Moffett Field, California, to learn about the startup company’s recent proposal award as part of NASA’s “Utilizing Public-Private Partnerships to Advance Tipping Point Technologies” solicitation, issued through NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).
Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for STMD, will share the importance of the solicitation and give remarks, followed by a tour of the MIS facilities. The two-hour event will include informal briefings with MIS leadership as they discuss their winning proposal.
The pace at which robots and intelligent machines are able to take over the jobs traditionally performed by humans will result in more than half the population being unemployed within 30 years, an expert in computing has predicted.
While some may look forward to a life of leisure, many others face the dismal prospect of long-term unemployment as a result of the rise of smart machines, from self-driving cars and intelligent drones to smart financial-trading machines, said Moshe Vardi, professor of computational engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
A group of scientists are calling on the WHO to classify aging as a disease, asserting that we need to create a better classification for what happens to our bodies as we get older.
A new controversy is brewing, as one group of scientists is recommending that aging be considered a disease.
Scientists from Insilico Medicine are highlighting the need to create a more granular and applied classification for what happens to our bodies when we age. Their work is outlined in a recent paper published in Frontiers in Genetics. The classification that they argue for is based on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11), which is expected to be finalized in 2018.
Cotton Candy’s new inspiration.
Scientists are now able to spin a three-dimensional slab of gelatin that contains a microvascular network, something very like our capillaries, using a cotton candy-esque machine.
What do cotton candy and artificial organs have in common? More than you might think.
Leon Bellan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, is using a cotton candy machine to spin out networks of tiny threads comparable in size, density, and complexity to the patterns formed by capillaries.