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These 12 Superbugs Could Wipe Out Humanity

Antibiotic resistance continues to rise, and new drugs made to battle these increasingly formidable Most-Dangerous-Super-Bugs-D2microbes could take more than a decade to develop. In an effort to stress the urgency of this rising resistance, the World Health Organization (WHO) created a list of the twelve deadliest superbugs with which we are currently dealing.

The list is broken into three categories based on the severity of the threat (medium, high, or critical) that a given superbug poses. The three critical bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacteriaceae, are all already resistant to multiple drugs. One of these (Pseudomonas aeruginosa) actually explodes when they die, making them even more deadly.

Pathogens that cause more common diseases like food poisoning or gonorrhea round out the rest of the list. Some big hitters include MRSA and salmonella.

Becoming Borg: What Is a Hive Mind in Science and Could Humanity Get There?

In Brief

  • Through the hive mind, everyone would be connected to everyone else telepathically, and we could all share our thoughts, memories, and even dreams with one another.
  • Though a global hive mind would be susceptible to things like hacking or thought control, it could also lead to almost unimaginable levels of innovation.

Communication technology tends to develop in a particular direction: more people communicating across larger distances using less effort to do so. Taken to its logical extreme, perfect communication would be anyone being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, using no effort at all.

The closest concept we have to this form of communication is something called the hive mind. Everyone would be connected to everyone telepathically, and we could all share our thoughts, memories, and even dreams with one another. Such a system of communication would not only have far-reaching consequences, it would also be hugely controversial.

Exponential Growth Will Transform Humanity in the Next 30 Years

Today’s extraordinary rate of exponential growth may do much more than just disrupt industries. It may actually give birth to a new species, reinventing humanity over the next 30 years.

I believe we’re rapidly heading towards a human-scale transformation, the next evolutionary step into what I call a “Meta-Intelligence,” a future in which we are all highly connected—brain to brain via the cloud—sharing thoughts, knowledge and actions. In this post, I’m investigating the driving forces behind such an evolutionary step, the historical pattern we are about to repeat, and the implications thereof. Again, I acknowledge that this topic seems far-out, but the forces at play are huge and the implications are vast. Let’s dive in…

A New Alliance Could Give Humanity the World’s First Cancer Vaccine

The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy has partnered with dozens of organizations to develop a cancer vaccine to prevent the disease which is expected to grow by an additional 21.7 million through 2030. The plan is to target genetic markers specific to tumors to allow the body to generate an immune response to combat the cancer before it ever takes hold.