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More than 1.4 million homes and businesses across New Jersey lost power as of Tuesday afternoon as powerful winds and heavy rains from Tropical Storm Isaias battered the Garden State.

That’s more than 25% of the utility customers in the state and half of JCP&L’s 1.1 million customers in the dark, according to outage maps provided by the three major utility companies in New Jersey.

By Tim Binnall

Residents of a coastal community in England were left scratching their heads and holding their noses after the massive and odorous remains of a mystery creature washed ashore. The creepy carcass was reportedly first discovered last Wednesday on a beach in the town of Ainsdale. Witnesses who dared to venture close enough to the creature to get a good look at it were baffled by the beast and could not identify what it may have been.

When pictures and video of the oddity, which many took to calling the ‘Ainsdale Anomaly,’ all manner of theories were offered for the nature of the creature, including a donkey, a cow, a walrus, and more fantastic ideas such as a woolly mammoth and, yes, even an alien. “It’s like a mishmash of different things in one,” observed one individual, “it’s 15 feet long, it has flippers, it’s furry and it seems to have another creature attached.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned parents and doctors Tuesday that it expects another outbreak this year of a rare but life-threatening condition that mostly affects children.

Outbreaks of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), a serious neurologic condition that can cause paralysis, typically peak every two years between August and November.

The last peak occurred in 2018, when 238 cases were reported to the CDC.

It’s no secret that healthcare costs have risen faster than inflation for decades. Some experts estimate that healthcare will account for over 20% of the US GDP by 2025. Meanwhile, doctors are working harder than ever before to treat patients as the U.S. physician shortage continues to grow. Many medical professionals have their schedules packed so tightly that much of the human element which motivated their pursuit of medicine in the first place is reduced.

In healthcare, artificial intelligence (AI) can seem intimidating. At the birthday party of a radiologist friend, she gently expressed how she felt her job would be threatened by AI in the coming decade. Yet, for most of the medical profession, AI will be an accelerant and enabler, not a threat. It would be good business for AI companies as well to help, rather than attempt to replace, medical professionals.

In a previous article, I expressed three ways in which I consistently see AI adding value: speed, cost and accuracy. In healthcare, it’s no different. Here are three examples of how AI will change healthcare.

Consuming a single dose of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca can result in lasting changes in higher-order cognitive brain networks, according to a new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Ayahuasca, a concoction used for centuries by indigenous Amazon tribes, contains the powerful psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. The brew is typically prepared using leaves from the Psychotria viridis shrub and the bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine.

The new neuroimaging research suggests that ayahuasca may produce long-lasting effects on mood by altering the functional connectivity of the brain’s salience and default mode networks.

To that end, Barry Prentice, who leads the Canadian company Buoyant Aircraft Systems International, hopes to use airships to transport pre-built structures for schools and housing to remote parts of Canada that lack good roads.

And earlier this year, French airship company Flying Whales (I mean, how can you not adore that name?) received $23 million in funding from the government of Quebec to build cargo-carrying Zeppelins.

Given our current pandemic-dominated reality, it’s hard to imagine a future of seamless global travel of any kind, much less on an airship. But that future will, thankfully, arrive (though when is anyone’s guess). As calls for climate action get louder and the costs associated with airships drop—as the cost of any new technology tends to do with time—we may find ourselves going retro and being ferried across the globe by giant helium-filled balloons.