Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 9910

Five years ago, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos predicted that by now we would all be getting packages delivered by drones. Despite numerous trials and pilots around the globe, we’re still waiting. Meanwhile other companies have been nipping at Amazon’s heels, including Google’s parent company Alphabet. Its Project X drones started delivering burritos to customers in Australia’s Capital Territory last year, and has now announced that folks in Finland can look forward to package deliveries by air from early 2019.

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Who isn’t interested in new ways to apply stem cell therapy these days?

Speaking of, have you heard about the scientists in Philadelphia, PA, who have been injecting stem cells directly into the spinal cords of medically brain-dead people in order to revive them?

In a page taken from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the idea of “bringing people back from the dead” is a little too much like “playing God” for some critics to appreciate.

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Analyst Salveen Richter and colleagues laid it out:

The potential to deliver “one shot cures” is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically engineered cell therapy, and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies… While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year.

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By 2020, China plans to assign each of its 1.4 billion citizens a “social credit score” that will determine what people are allowed to do, and where they rank in society.

It’s part of a broad effort in China to build a so-called reputation system that will measure, in theory, the credibility of government officials and businesses, in addition to citizens. The Chinese government says the system will boost “trust” nationwide and build a culture of “sincerity.”

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Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), Haptics and Holographics, are all in gradual market diffusion stage as of 2018, after having long been the stuff of science fiction content. Even so, even as of 2018, the misconceptions remains overwhelmingly widespread and strong, that these are for gaming, entertainment, leisure and recreation. None of these technologies or interface methods, however, were ever meant to be for just that alone.

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A merican girls are now going through puberty significantly earlier than in decades prior, a trend that’s been linked to physiological and psychological risks. The various factors thought to drive early puberty include obesity, toxic stress, and environmental elements. A landmark study published Monday looks at one particular type of environmental element — the chemicals in household items.

A long-running study on mothers and children published in Human Reproduction determined that the onset of female puberty is associated with exposure to chemicals like phthalates, parabens, and the antibacterial agent triclosan. These products in personal care products, like some brands of perfumes, cosmetics, and toothpaste. The same result was not found in populations of boys, whose timing of puberty was also examined in this study.

“We have known for the past 15 to 20 years that girls are entering puberty at an earlier age than they used to in the past,” lead author and University of California, Berkeley associate professor Kim Harley, Ph.D. tells Inverse. “We certainly know that obesity plays a role in that but now we also know that the hormone-disrupting chemicals that are in our homes and in our environment could be an additional factor that’s contributing to this.”

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