https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsNNUEx5OkU&t=0s
A fairly recent video where Aubrey de Grey talks about the future of regenerative medicine and how we will treat age related diseases.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation gives a lecture and answers questions in Spain, April 2016.
Norway has hatched ambitious plans to install the world’s first floating underwater tunnels to help travelers easily cross the nation’s many fjords. At present, the only way to travel across the bodies of water involves taking a series of ferries – an inconvenient and time-consuming process. The “submerged floating bridges” would consist of large tubes suspended under 100 feet of water, and each one will be wide enough for two lanes of traffic.
Telomerase, an enzyme naturally found in the human organism, is the closest of all known substances to a “cellular elixir of youth.” In a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Brazilian and US researchers show that sex hormones can stimulate production of this enzyme.
The strategy was tested in patients with genetic diseases associated with mutations in the gene that codes for telomerase, such as aplastic anemia and pulmonary fibrosis.
A lot of things are becoming “smart” these days, but bricks might not be something you’d expect to be added to the list. On the way to buildings that act like “large-scale living organisms,” scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) are developing smart bricks that would make use of microbes to recycle wastewater, generate electricity and produce oxygen.
Microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which will be embedded in the bricks to give them their “smart” capabilities, have proven handy in the past, with researchers demonstrating how they can be used to generate electricity from human urine, dead flies or just plain old mud.
“Microbial fuel cells are energy transducers that exploit the metabolic activity of the constituent microbes to break down organic waste and generate electricity,” says Ioannis Ieropoulos, professor at UWE Bristol’s Robotics Laboratory. “This is a novel application for MFC modules to be made into actuating building blocks as part of wall structures. This will allow us to explore the possibility of treating household waste, generating useful levels of electricity, and have ‘active programmable’ walls within our living environments.”
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced today that it will build an “innovation train” for Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, the largest railway operator in Europe. The train will not be a super-fast hyperloop, in which pods are propelled through aluminum tubes at speeds of up to 760 mph, but a conventional train that includes some of the futuristic technologies the startup has been showcasing at tech conferences around the world.
As a startup that relies on crowdsourcing and volunteer engineers, the collaboration with Deutsche Bahn may allow HTT to start generating revenue while it works toward the larger goal of building passenger-ready hyperloop systems. Indeed, HTT’s CEO Dirk Ahlborn said in a statement that the partnership will help create “new monetization strategies and business models” for his company.
People are concerned about how AI and robotics are taking jobs and destroying livelihoods… reducing our earning capacity, and subsequently destroying the economy.
In anticipation, countries like Canada, India and Finland are running experiments to pilot the idea of “universal basic income” — the unconditional provision of a regular sum of money from the government to support livelihood independent of employment.
But what people aren’t talking about, and what’s getting my attention, is a forthcoming rapid demonetization of the cost of living.
