| (Nanowerk News) Three stakeholder groups agree that regulators are not adequately prepared to manage the risks posed by nanotechnology, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One (“Expert Views on Regulatory Preparedness for Managing the Risks of Nanotechnologies”). | |
| In a survey of nanoscientists and engineers, nano-environmental health and safety scientists, and regulators, researchers at the UCSB Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) and at the University of British Columbia found that those who perceive the risks posed by nanotechnology as “novel” are more likely to believe that regulators are unprepared. Representatives of regulatory bodies themselves felt most strongly that this was the case. “The people responsible for regulation are the most skeptical about their ability to regulate,” said CNS Director and co-author Barbara Herr Harthorn. | |
| “The message is essentially,” said first author Christian Beaudrie of the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, “the more that risks are seen as new, the less trust survey respondents have in regulatory mechanisms. That is, regulators don’t have the tools to do the job adequately.” |
Kimberly Grimms
In post-apocalyptic North America, the Capitol composed of the elite and the rich, controls 12 Districts of Panem. Every year, two representatives from each district are chosen, one boy and one girl, to compete for food supply, thrown in the arena created by the Capitol to fight. Only can be the winner. They called it – Hunger Games
.
Based on Suzanne Collins’ trilogy novel, “The Hunger Games” has created immense popularity among movie and novel enthusiasts. But for some, it has drawn fears and futuristic theories. They fear that Hunger Games can be our future predictive scenario. Who wouldn’t blink at an idea like this?
World hunger, in its basic definition, is the want and scarcity of food aggregated to the world level. Evidently, a disparity between human and food resources can cause unparalleled precondition – hunger revolution. Now, with a place ravaged by war, greed, statuses, and human right abuses, ask yourselves, “Are you the next Katniss and Peeta? Or are you part of the Capitol using food hoarding and killing as form of entertainment?”
US scientists have performed a dramatic reversal of the ageing process in animal studies.
They used a chemical to rejuvenate muscle in mice and said it was the equivalent of transforming a 60-year-old’s muscle to that of a 20-year-old — but muscle strength did not improve.
Their study, in the journal Cell, identified an entirely new mechanism of ageing and then reversed it.
Other researchers said it was an “exciting finding”.
PEÑITAS — It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … no, it’s a Border Patrol blimp. Mobile, unmanned, aerial security surveillance has arrived in the Rio Grande Valley.
A so-called aerostat surveillance blimp was unveiled to media Thursday afternoon in a field south of Interstate 2/Expressway 83. Standing behind a U.S. Department of Homeland Security dais, local and national officials introduced the big, white airship and fielded questions about its upcoming use.
Noting how border fencing ends near Peñitas, Rosendo Hinojosa, chief patrol agent of the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, said that the aerostat will provide Valley authorities with means previously unavailable to them.
“This is good technology,” he said of the camera-bearing aircraft, which will roam 1,000 feet above the ground. “It’s proven technology.”
He knows this because when he had his genetic code read, he found out that he was likely to get age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
The disease leaves the sufferer with a very narrow field of vision.
As head of bio-technology at the world’s most futuristic learning institution, Singularity University, he found the news “burdensome” at first.
“I had never heard of AMD, I had no family history of it and in many ways it was the worst story you can get in genetic diagnosis, ‘Here’s something that you didn’t know about which we can’t do anything about,’” he says.
When Newport Beach City Council candidate Michael Glenn thinks of freedom, that includes the freedom to choose how to donate — be it with dollar, peso or bitcoin.
When Newport Beach City Council candidate Michael Glenn thinks of freedom, that includes the freedom to choose how to donate — be it with dollar, peso or Glenn claims to be the first local politician to accept campaign donations in the esoteric digital currency. He is running against businesswoman Diane Dixon and Harbor Commissioner Joe Stapleton for the Balboa Peninsula’s 1st District council seat.
Glenn’s announcement comes just weeks after customers used bitcoins to pay for a Tesla, and then a Lamborghini, from a Costa Mesa dealership.
Peter Jansen wants us, especially kids, to make little discoveries everywhere and at any time. He developed the tricorder to give people a tool for scientific learning and visualization.
Online retail outlet Overstock.com will start accepting Bitcoins as early as the end of Q2 2014, according to CEO Patrick Byrne.
They will be the first major online retailer to do so. The news was first reported on newsBTC.
Byrne told us by phone this afternoon that he considers himself a believer in the Austrian economics school, which says fiat currency, like the U.S. dollar, is fundamentally flawed since it is prone to inflation and manipulation. Bitcoin, like gold, is immune to this, since there is a fixed supply.
“Philosophically, we support Bitcion,” he said.
Transcendence
Posted in entertainment, futurism, human trajectories, singularity
Two leading computer scientists work toward their goal of Technological Singularity, as a radical anti-technology organization fights to prevent them from creating a world where computers can transcend the abilities of the human brain.
Some people become incredibly confused about the effort to eliminate aging, which they see as a nebulous, ill-defined process. I refer to the concept of radical life extension, when aging as a process has been abolished. I am not referring to simple healthy longevity (the effort to live a healthy life until the current maximum lifespan of 110–120). Here are some common misconceptions:
1. The Fallacy of words
Eliminating aging will make us ‘immortal’ and we will live forever.
No, it won’t. If we eliminate aging as a cause of death, we may be able to live for an indefinite (not infinite) period, until something else kills us. Even in a world without aging, death can happen at any time (at age 10, 65 or 1003) and for any reason (a shot in the head, malaria, drowning). If we manage to eliminate aging as a cause of death, the only certain thing would be that we will not necessarily die when we reach the currently maximum lifespan limit of around 110–120 years. We would certainly NOT live for ever, because something else will kill us sooner or later. Our organs cannot be repaired if we perish in a nuclear explosion for example, or in a fire. Some statisticians have mentioned that, without aging, we may be able to live to 1700–2000 years on average before death happens due to some other catastrophic damage. This is a long time, but it is not ‘forever’.
2. The Fallacy of numbers
Eliminating aging will result in overpopulation.
No, it won’t. This is based on spurious, even naïve, thinking. Aging happens because we need to reproduce. Or, we need to reproduce because we age. If aging is eliminated, the need to reproduce will also be broadly eliminated. It is a cyclical, reciprocal argument.
3. The Fallacy of loneliness
“I don’t want to live dramatically longer because I will have to witness the deaths of all my family and friends”.
No, you won’t. If you live longer because aging has been eliminated, then your family and friends will too. In any case, this counteracts fallacy number 2: if everybody else dies, how come we would have overpopulation? And fallacy number 2 counteracts this one: if we do have overpopulation, then it is likely that your friends and relatives will be alive too.
4. The Fallacy of the pill
Aging will be eliminated by taking a pill (or a combination of pills, injections, something physical).
No, it won’t. It will be eliminated through a change in the direction of human evolution, when billions of humans continue to engage with technology (or via other, abstract global technologically-dependent means). As the general direction of evolution is towards a more complex state which makes us better adapted to our environment, there would come a point when our hyper-technological environment would select individual longevity instead of aging and degeneration, as a more thermodynamically efficient situation.
5. The Fallacy of money
Research into the elimination of aging is not progressing fast due to lack of appropriate funding.
No, funding is not the main bottleneck. The main problem is the widespread adoption of the wrong approach. The idea that aging can be eliminate through pharmacological intervention dates back to the time of the Alchemists. It has no place in a modern, highly technological and intellectually sophisticated society, and certainly not with respect to defying such a fundamental process as aging. It is reductionist instead of integrative.
Aging may be eliminated when the cause for its presence is removed. Aging happens because within a tendency to progress from simple to complex, evolution has selected reproduction (and thus aging) as a mechanism for maximising the use of thermodynamical resources, and so to ensure the survival of the species
6. The Fallacy of the rich elite
Only a few rich people will have access to the treatment.
This is a combination of fallacies number 4 and 5, a fallacy based on fallacies. People who adapt and fit within an upwards moving technological environment will be more likely to survive. Money is irrelevant. What is relevant is intellectual effort and aggressive engagement with our environment (hyperconnectivity is an example). If a large number of humans (in the order of hundreds of millions) actively engage with their increasingly technological environment, there would be no reason to age/reproduce at the current rates, as survival can be assured through the individual rather than the species. Therefore, there could be no secrets about the process, due to the very fact that a significant section of humanity must necessarily participate.
7. The fallacy of frailty
Living dramatically longer will mean a long life with debilitating illnesses.
No, it won’t. The two concepts are mutually exclusive. A life without aging necessarily means a life without age-related degeneration. You cannot have one without the other.