This is an issue that we cannot simply stand back and do nothing. This Social Media Purge is beneath Western Civilization and we have the power to stop it.
Note: I’m now unable to find the list Prop or Not compiled, but suffice to say Anti-Media was on it, and so were multiple others purged today. To be safe, I’ll modify my statement in video from “a lot of the outlets” to “at least some.”
Should there be any ethical or legal boundaries to technologies that enhance humans? I pondered this last week as I read an online article about the recent trials of upper-body “exoskeletons” by production line staff at Volkswagen and at Chrysler-Fiat. These lightweight wearable frames greatly reduce the physical strain of repetitive overhead assembly work, and will be an important industrial enhancement as workforces age.
We tend to think of medical advancement in terms of better cures for diseases and recovery from injury. Enhancement however goes beyond therapy, and extends us in ways that some may argue are unnatural. Some human enhancements are of course also pre-emptive therapeutic interventions. Vaccination is both an enhancement of our immune system, and a therapeutic intervention. However, in cases where there is little preventative justification, what degree of enhancement is acceptable?
We drink coffee expecting our work performance to improve. We accept non-elective operations, breast implants, orthodontic improvements and other interventions which improve our perception of ourselves. We generally accept such enhancements with little question. However devices and drugs that improve athletic performance can lead us to question their legitimacy.
Humans are exterminating animal and plant species so quickly that nature’s built-in defence mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3 to 5 million years to recover.
There have been five upheavals over the past 450 million years when the environment has changed so dramatically that the majority of Earth’s plant and animal species became extinct. After each mass extinction, evolution has slowly filled in the gaps with new species.
The sixth mass extinction is happening now, but this time, the extinctions are not being caused by natural disasters; they are the work of humans. A team of researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Gothenburg has calculated that the extinctions are moving too rapidly for evolution to keep up.
Intervene Immune is a company focused on the age-related decline of the immune system, which is known as immunosenescence. Here, Bobby Brooke, CEO of Intervene Immune, discusses the clinical potential of regenerating the thymus as a means of reversing age-related immune system decline.
Earlier this year, we hosted the Ending Age-Related Diseases 2018 conference at the Cooper Union, New York City. This was a conference designed to bring together the best in the aging research and biotech investment worlds and saw a range of industry experts sharing their insights.
As the human body ages, the thymus begins to shrink, and fewer numbers of T cells are created and trained to fight. The thymus tissue also turns to fat rather than healthy immune cell-producing thymic tissue. Eventually, the thymus wastes away, becoming a useless fatty organ that no longer produces immune cells.
This structural decay of the thymus and the failure of the immune system when we are old opens us up to multiple age-related diseases, particularly cancer, along with infectious diseases, such as pneumonia and flu.
The particle physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute have obtained new results, working with the LHC, replacing the lead-ions, usually used for collisions, with Xenon-ions. Xenon is a “smaller” atom with fewer nucleons in its nucleus. When colliding ions, the scientists create a fireball that recreates the initial conditions of the universe at temperatures in excess of several thousand billion degrees. In contrast to the Universe, the lifetime of the droplets of QGP produced in the laboratory is ultra short, a fraction of a second (In technical terms, only about 10-22 seconds). Under these conditions the density of quarks and gluons is very large and a special state of matter is formed in which quarks and gluons are quasi-free (dubbed the strongly interacting QGP). The experiments reveal that the primordial matter, the instant before atoms formed, behaves like a liquid that can be described in terms of hydrodynamics.
How to approach “the moment of creation”
“One of the challenges we are facing is that, in heavy ion collisions, only the information of the final state of the many particles which are detected by the experiments are directly available – but we want to know what happened in the beginning of the collision and first few moments afterwards”, You Zhou, Postdoc in the research group Experimental Subatomic Physics at the Niels Bohr Institute, explains. “We have developed new and powerful tools to investigate the properties of the small droplet of QGP (early universe) that we create in the experiments”. They rely on studying the spatial distribution of the many thousands of particles that emerge from the collisions when the quarks and gluons have been trapped into the particles that the Universe consists of today. This reflects not only the initial geometry of the collision, but is sensitive to the properties of the QGP. It can be viewed as a hydrodynamical flow.
