JERSEY CITY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Ceremony to host Bonnie Bassler, molecular biologist and microbe fighter; Robert J. Hariri, stem cell and human longevity expert; and David Rosenberg, world leader in urban vertical farming

Plus a special honoree from California whom LSC is feting because hes a tech badass: AI giant Sebastian Thrun, the godfather of the self-driving car

New Jersey is home to some of the worlds most accomplished innovators in applied science. Three of them who are pioneering research and solutions in antibacterial therapies, genetics, human life extension, and food production are being honored by Liberty Science Center at its inaugural The Genius of NJ celebration on Monday, December 2.

The celebration starts at 5:30 pm with cocktails and unique technology demonstrations: a full-body 3D scanner from Lenscloud that can scan a person in half a second with 120 cameras and create a realistic 3D avatar; bomb-disposing robots and an autonomous fighting robot from Picatinny Arsenal; and Flyer, a personal aerial vehicle from Kitty Hawk, headquartered in Mountain View, CA.

The New Jersey honorees are Bonnie Bassler, Chair of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, who is developing novel antimicrobial therapies to render pathogenic bacteria harmless; Dr. Robert J. Hariri, Chairman, Founder & CEO of Celularity, Inc. who is pioneering the use of stem cells to cure disease and slow aging; and David Rosenberg, CEO and Co-Founder of AeroFarms, the worlds leader in mass-scale vertical indoor farming.

Our inaugural Genius of NJ Award Winners represent the best this state and the world have to offer in harnessing science for the betterment of humanity, said Liberty Science Center President and CEO Paul Hoffman. Each is using his or her exceptional intellect and creative abilities to disrupt and innovate both in their respective fields and in their commitment to making the world healthier and safer.

Bonnie Bassler is the Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology and Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Professor Bassler deciphered the chemical language bacteria cells use to communicate by studying a harmless marine bacterium called Vibrio fischeri, known to bioluminesce, or make light, like fireflies do. She is a winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant and is now developing therapies that disrupt communication among harmful bacteria and strengthen communication among helpful bacteria. At a time when an increasing number of bacteria are resistant to traditional kinds of antibiotics, Dr. Bassler offers a promising new approach to antimicrobial therapy.

The Chairman, Founder and CEO of Celularity, Inc., in Warren, NJ, and Co-Founder and Vice Chairman of Human Longevity, Inc., Dr. Robert Hariri is the quintessential renaissance man. Hes a neurosurgeon, a medical researcher, and a serial entrepreneur in two technology sectors: aerospace and biomedicine. Dr. Hariri has advised the Vatican on genetics, and in 2018, Pope Francis bestowed on him the Pontifical Key Award for Innovation. Dr. Hariris path to discovering that the placenta, a temporary organ discarded after birth, was a potent source of stem cells began in the 80s when he viewed a first trimester ultrasound of his oldest daughter and wondered why the placenta was so large. Today Dr. Hariri is working to use placental stem cells to cure disease, slow aging, and augment healthy human lifespan.

Prominent entrepreneur David Rosenberg, CEO and Co-Founder of AeroFarms, set out to reinvent one of the most basic aspects of food production, farming. AeroFarms has grown 800 species of plants indoors and can grow them 365 days a year without sun or soil, achieving yields 130 times greater than conventional farming. His system uses 95 percent less water than field farming and no pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. Rosenbergs adoption of cutting-edge technology has been a cornerstone of AeroFarms, which set up its first indoor vertical farms in abandoned warehouses in Newark. He employs plant biologists, microbiologists, geneticists, systems engineers, and data scientists. AeroFarms innovations in indoor vertical farming have improved not just plant yields but also taste, texture, nutritional density, and shelf life.

Story continues

Additionally, LSC will honor non-New Jersian Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Kitty Hawk, a company spun off from a Google moonshot effort to free the world from traffic. Kitty Hawk is developing all-electric, vertical take-off flying machines for everyday use. Known as the godfather of self-driving cars, as a Stanford professor in 2005, Thrun led a team that won the $2-million Defense Department Grand Challenge to build an autonomous vehicle which drove itself unassisted on a 132-mile course across the Mojave Desert. His winning entry, Stanley, is now on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. While at Stanford, in 2011 he and colleague Peter Norvig offered their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course online to anyone, for free. Over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled! The MOOC (which stands for Massive Open Online Course) was born, and Thrun founded the online education company Udacity, with the goal of democratizing education. Thrun relinquished his tenured Stanford professorship to join Google and founded the companys semi-secret R&D division called Google X (now called simply X) to develop breakthrough technologies, such as self-driving cars, that make the world a radically better place.

Ticket prices for The Genius of NJ start at $750 per guest with options for table sponsorship from $12,500 to $50,000. For more details, please visit The Genius of NJ online. All proceeds from this event will support LSCs mission to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

About Liberty Science Center

Liberty Science Center (LSC.org) is a 300,000-square-foot nonprofit learning center located in Liberty State Park on the Jersey City bank of the Hudson near the Statue of Liberty. Dedicated to inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers and bringing the power, promise, and pure fun of science and technology to learners of all ages, Liberty Science Center houses the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, 12 museum exhibition halls, a live animal collection with 110 species, giant aquariums, a 3D theater, live simulcast surgeries, a tornado-force wind simulator, K-12 classrooms and labs, and teacher-development programs. More than 250,000 students visit the Science Center each year, and tens of thousands more participate in the Centers off-site and online programs. Welcoming more than 750,000 visitors annually, LSC is the largest interactive science center in the NYC-NJ metropolitan area.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191125005713/en/

Read more from the original source:

Liberty Science Centers Inaugural Genius of New Jersey to Honor Innovators Who Make the State a World Leader in Cutting-Edge Applied Science - Yahoo...

November21, 201910 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

If you ask Dwayne Clark, founder and CEO of the senior care company Aegis Living, what he is most thankful for in life, he will unabashedly tell you growing up poor.

For Clark, a childhood spent in poverty instilled a compassion-first mentality and a burning desire to help others lead lives of dignity.

Today, Clark is seen as a change-maker in his industry. Aegis opened its 32nd location this year and has eight more facilities in development. The company is on track to have operating revenues of over $300 million in 2020, with real estate holdings approaching $3 billion.

Clark is the youngest of four children raised by a single mother in Walla Walla, Washington. When he was 16, his mother told him they were completely broke and had no money for food.

The youngest of four children, Clark was raised by a single mother who struggled to feed her family.

Image credit: Dwayne Clark

To feed her family, she made potato soup from a bag of potatoes shed stolen from the restaurant where she worked as a line cook. She vowed to replace the potatoes when she had money again. While Clark felt powerless to help his mother, he remembers being in awe of her strength and resilience.

My background truly is a gift to me, he says. It helps me relate to the dishwasher and has given me an affinity for struggling immigrants, for the poor kid, whoever needs help. If I hadnt grown up knowing what being hungry is really like, I would not have created the business I run today.

By the time he was 26 years old, Clark had worked his way up from a correctional officer to shift commander at Washington States Department of Corrections. He was good at it, but he hated the job. He wanted to go back to college (hed dropped out in his junior year) and then to law school, but his sister interrupted these plans with a call out of the blue. She insisted he read a new study about aging in America.

This was before we had the internet and I could just pull it up on a computer; so I went to the library to look up the study, says Clark. It was around 400 pages. I didnt particularly want to read it, but it seemed important to her. So I read the whole thing and realized there was a silver tsunami coming fast.

He learned that life expectancy was on the rise and the elderly population was expected to double. His takeaway: eldercare was going to be a booming industry. Clarks sister was on the advisory board of one of Leisure Cares communities, so he asked her to help get him an interview.

I didn't want this to be a courtesy 10- to 15-minute interview. So when they asked if I could come in for an interview that next week, I said I could come in 30 days, says Dwayne. I wanted to do my research on the company, their competitors, and the industry. I wanted to be the best interview theyd had in 10 years.

Thirty days later, Dwayne went in for the interview, and, as expected, they asked a few cursory questions, spent no more than 10 minutes with him, and thanked him for coming in. Before they could shoo him out the door, Dwayne reached into his backpack and pulled out a three-ring binder and dropped it on the desk in front of him.

Id like to talk to you about where I think the aging industry is going and how I think I could contribute, he told them. Clark says they spent the next 90 minutes going over his manual, and they made him a job offer within the week.

Leisure Care hired Clark as the marketing director in Colorado. Forty-five days later he was put in a manager training program, and two years later he was named VP of Operations.

At age 33, Clark was recruited by Sunrise Senior Living, which would the biggest senior housing company in the world. In less than five years he helped grow Sunrise from an $18 million company to a company with a $3 billion market cap.

Despite his seemingly overnight success in the eldercare industry, Clark wasnt satisfied working for a public company. He decided to quit and make his own way.

It wasnt in my personality, and I didnt like what Wall Street did to the culture of the companies, says Dwayne. I thought I needed to just do it on my own.

You need a significant amount of money to do well in the senior care industry, and I dont mean $10 million; I mean tens of millions of dollars, he says. Today you would need $150 million to start a company like Aegis.

Dwayne spent much of 1996 looking for partners and capital sources and eventually found the right person: a developer in California named Bill Gallaher, whom Clark had built a relationship with during his time at Sunrise.

Together they founded Aegis, were able to raise $10 million, and built their first property in Pleasant Hill, California, in 1998. But it wasnt all smooth sailing.

I underestimated just how capital intensive the process was, says Clark. We burned through that first $10 million in six to nine months.

After two more rounds of capital financing, which yielded another $12.5 million, Gallaher called and told him they were out of money. By this point, Clark had exhausted all his resources except his sons college fund.

My son had just committed to UCLA, his dream school, says Clark. I needed the college money to cover payroll or Aegis could not stay afloat. I had to go to my son and have a tough conversation. I said, You know, that in-state tuition at the University of Washington looks really good.

Thankfully, his son understood and never felt bitter about the decision to abandon UCLA. Clark credits the college fund for saving the company.

In 2007, Clark says he bought out Gallaher due to a difference in philosophies. He took full control of Aegis and set out to grow it into the premier assisted living community on the West Coast.

As the company expanded, Clark became an expert on how to care for people with Alzheimers and dementia. He believed hed learned everything there was to know about how to manage this type of care facility until the day he received a massive blow that challenged him as a CEO and son: his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimers.

Image credit: Dwayne Clark

Imagine the feeling of being the guy leading the industry in this type of care but I couldnt help my own mother, admits Dwayne.

She moved into one of his memory-care communities, and Clark began to have a major shift in perspective. It was a game changer, he says.

His mother loved music; so Clark read studies on the positive effects of music on patients with dementia and Alzheimers and expanded the music programs in his Alzheimers wing.

She also loved doing her hair and make-up, which became harder as her illness worsened. As a result, Clark brought traveling salons to his senior health communities to give all the residents makeovers. This started a long list of improvements throughout his facilities that werent always good for his companys bottom line but he believes improved the lives of the residents. Clark says he created hundreds of longevity aids, including aromatherapy to improve mental clarity, spring-loaded chairs to allow seniors to stand without assistance, and shorter hallways to facilitate walking.

Clark also took action to create a culture where employees feel genuinely invested in and cared about.

I want to be an employee-first company because I truly believe culture is everything, says Clark. We are a service-oriented company that aims to do our part in treating the Alzheimers epidemic by serving the high-risk communities of senior health.

Clark created a program called E.P.I.C. (Empowering People Inspiring Consciousness) to transform Aegis Livings annual meeting from a traditional year-end review to a three-day celebration of the human spirit. It is a seminar for self-improvement with the primary agenda to ignite personal development among the employees. E.P.I.C. attracts celebrities like Michael J. Fox, Carlos Santana, and Dr. Deepak Chopra to teach and inspire his employees.

Clark says one of his lifelong obsessions has been the pursuit of health understanding it and attaining it. As a young adult, he lost sight of that passion and burned the proverbial candle at both ends. He worked long hours, lived on a junk-food diet, partied late into the night, and slept very little.

Everything came to a head one Labor Day weekend with his wife, when he began to experience the most acute abdominal pain of his life. It was so bad that he ended up in the hospital where he was diagnosed with severe gastritis.

Clark says the experience was a wake-up call. Hed learned so much caring for people well into their 100s, but ironically, hed never consciously applied those lessons to himself.

My health crisis inspired me to seek out longevity, study it, achieve more of it, and share my findings with a broader audience, says Clark. While Id been living and breathing questions about the health and longevity of my Aegis residents, Id separated myself from what Id learned. Overnight, my commitment changed.

Dwayne became a longevity explorer, traveling to over 80 countries to interview hundreds of people on what it means to age well into their 80s, 90s and 100s. His obsession with health and longevity led him on a journey of research into finding every conceivable way to live a more vibrant, healthier, and more fulfilled life.

In his latest book, 30 Summers More, Dwayne takes what he has learned about longevity by caring for more than 60,000 residents and writes a new plan for aging in America. He challenges the status quo for people over age 60, using the wisdom of Aegis residents.

Clark, far right, with former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, and Clarks wife, Terese, after a lunch where the couples discussed politics, business, and longevity.

Image credit: Dwayne Clark

Hes also taken an interest in exploring what makes successful people tick, and Clarks recently launched podcast, Walk This Way, discusses the journey of CEOs, athletes, and celebrities and how they made their way to hit mega-success by not following the traditional path.

Clarks own path was no doubt untraditional.

I have never had a woe is me mentality or seen my background as a drawback, says Clark. Entrepreneurs share one thing: theyre trying to run as fast as they can away from poverty. It creates rocket fuel for them to be successful.

Follow Dwayne Clark on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or visit his website.

Go here to see the original:

The New Face of Longevity: Dwayne Clark's Solution to America's Silver Tsunami Crisis and How Living on Stolen Potatoes Made It All Possible -...

It has been more than 50 years since the ancient dry lake bed of Mungo revealed human remains which corroborated a truth Indigenous Australians already knew. When a geologist found the remains of Mungo Lady in 1968 and then Mungo Man in 1974, the findings showed that people had been living on the continent for more than 40,000 years.

If you want to walk in the footsteps of an ancient culture at the very spot where proof of their longevity was found, then Mungo national park is the place to do it.

The lake bed is still giving up its mysteries. A walk across the white sand to spot an artefact is the highlight of our trip to the Willandra Lakes region world heritage area in south-west New South Wales.

Once a month, you can take a Full Moon tour of Mungo national park to experience the thrill of watching a full moon rising over the Walls of China, a 17km stretch of sand and silt deposited over tens of thousands of years. These layers have been eroded by wind and rain to form a crescent-shaped lunette on the eastern shore of the lake.

Once in the restricted area of the lunette, our tour guide points out a midden with scattered shells and animal bones recently uncovered by the shiftings sands. The find indicates the inhabitants had cooked abundant seafood from the once-thriving lake before it dried up some 20,000 years ago.

When the lake was full it was a haven for wildlife and vegetation. Megafauna such as the diprotodon, a hippopotamus-sized relative of wombats and koalas, strolled the foreshore. As the lake dried up due to extreme climate change, much of the fauna and flora became extinct.

To stand in that vast, eerie landscape at sunset is to gain a tiny window into the ancient history of the continent.

The artefacts in this area are unique. They have been exposed not by archaeologists but by erosion, making it one of the best places on Earth to study ancient human life.

The areas three tribal groups, Mutthi Mutthi, Paakantji and Ngyiampaa, have given permission for guided tours of some restricted areas. Our guide advises us to look, not touch, and certainly not to remove anything.

Not everyone heeds this warning. In the museum at the Mungo visitor centre, which houses a life-sized model of a diprotodon, there are letters from apologetic travellers who decided to send back the sand, leaves, shells or bones theyd collected.

Aside the visitors centre sits the Mungo Woolshed, an extraordinary 200-year-old building which documents the regions pastoral history.

The highlight of the visitors centre is a collection of human footprints said to be 20,000 years old. They were uncovered in 2003 during a routine survey of archaeological sites and carefully transported to where they now stand, preserved as they were found. They are the oldest footprints ever found in Australia and afford scientists rich clues as to how people lived at the time.

Flora and fauna youll meet: Red kangaroos, emus, wedge-tailed eagles, pink cockatoos and the stunning green-and-gold mallee ringneck parrot all inhabit the park. The arid landscape is speckled with saltbush, providing nourishment for the animals with its spear-shaped, succulent leaves.

Dont miss: The star of this region is the lunette, or Walls of China. Outback Geo Adventures offer a monthly full moon tour of the area, starting at sunset. In February and March of 2020, the moon will be at its closest distance to Earth called a super moon. The eight-hour tour includes meals, and is priced at $160 per adult.

If you cant time your visit with a moon rise, the National Parks and Wildlife Service offers several guided tours of the Walls of China, including sunset tours, with prices starting from $50 per adult.

Where to sleep: Mungo Lodge is a comfortable ecolodge and restaurant on the edge of the park, with its own landing strip for those who want to fly straight in. It offers a range of accomodation from deluxe cabins to a budget bunkhouse, caravan and camping sites. Prices start from $45 per person per night for budget accomodation, and from $295 per night for self-contained twin cabins. Inside the main building, which was constructed from local materials in 1992, you can relax in front of the fire or enjoy a meal in the large dining room and bar. The lodge also organises scenic flights and tours.

The main camp in Mungo national park has 30 spots for caravans, trailers and tents, but you must come prepared with drinking water, cooking water and firewood because it is a remote site with scarce mobile coverage and no power. It costs $8.50 per adult on top of the park entry fees.

Nearest hot meal: The Mungo Lodge bar and bistro is open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Good pub meals can also be had en route to the national park, at the Crown Hotel, some 130km away in Wentworth. The charming old pub opened in 1861, and the historic photographs on the walls tell some of the story of the town.

When to go: The best time to visit Mungo is during the cooler months as the temperature climbs well over 30C in the summer. The perfect time would be autumn or spring. Mungo Lodge closes over the Christmas period, from the 22 to 27 December.

Logistics: Mungo national park is a 9.5 hour drive from Melbourne, a 13 hour drive from Sydney, or an 8.5 hour drive from Adelaide.

The nearest airport, Mildura, is a 90-minute drive from the park on unsealed roads (although your sat nav or maps app will tell you it takes four hours). Mildura has direct flights from Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Broken Hill, and there are car rental options at the airport.

Bring a topographic map and a compass if youre camping or exploring on foot or bicycle. If self-driving, a four-wheel drive is recommended.

Take your best camera for unforgettable landscapes. A quick drive to Mungo lookout is a must as it offers the best views across the lake bed.

Read this article:

Mungo national park: where alien landscapes reveal ancient culture - The Guardian

Know a startup we should feature on Startup of the Week ? Email us at editors@motherboard.tv

The pitch

In 2154, the Earth is an uninhabitable shitworld, and ultra-rich people live on a utopian space colony. This is the movie Elysium.

In 2020, you can mail in a spit sample and in return see how fast your cells are aging, then get prompted to buy some pills in the hopes of slowing down the process. This is the pitch for the company Elysium Health, which offers its co-called Index test for $500.

The Index test purports to provide customers with a cumulative rate of aging and biological agethe age at which their body is expected to perform. The report also includes general recommendations for healthy living and lifestyle factors that have been shown in clinical research to impact the clock, although theres no guarantee that these changes will impact your biological age, a company spokesperson said to Motherboard.

If you do take the $500 test regularly, the spokesperson said, you can determine how your rate of aging changes over time and to see if lifestyle and other changes made can impact how you age in the future.

Terrific! And what do you do with that information? As the bottom of Elysium Healths website disclaims, Index should not be used to determine or alter any age-related health or medical treatments based on your chronological age, unless directed otherwise by a doctor.

Elysium Healths main business is selling Basis, a nicotinamide riboside (NR) supplement that increases nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), which is involved in many of the bodys day-to-day cellular processes. Basis costs $60 for a months supply, or $50 per month as a subscription.

What problem does it solve?

Elysium Health seeks to address the age-old problem of old age. Elysium Health claims that clinical trials in humans, including our own trial, demonstrate that supplementing NR can increase the body's supply of NAD+.

Whether this actually slows aging in humans is not yet proven. NAD+ has shown to be an effective anti-aging component in mice and yeast. But as New York comedian Sheng Wang noted, we don't really care about rat news. Especially if it's positive. We don't want to hear about how their population can thrive further. I'd rather read about rat plight." Elysium Healths short human trial shows the NAD+ increase, but not the metabolic or overall health improvements. Another human study from Elysium Healths main competitor, ChromaDex, indicated NRs ability to raise NAD+, but doesnt mention any anti-aging effects.

In short, though NAD+ has anti-aging effects for mice, mouse studies are often overhyped. Just because something works in a mouse does not mean itll work in humans. In fact, cancer researchers are interested in NAD+ as a possible suspect for fueling cancer growth in humans, as a May 2019 article from Scientific American notes.

Despite the lack of evidence or FDA approval, Elysium Health has millions in funding and genuinely impressive resumes in its orbit.

The leadership team at Elysium Health has five PhDs, and touts a Scientific Advisory Board with more than 25 world-renowned researchers and clinicians, including eight Nobel Prize-winning scientists, who are tasked with guiding the scientific direction of the company.

Are you confused, and thinking, these people clearly know more than I do, given their academic credentials, Nobel Prizes, and lab coats?

That might be part of the plan. They are part of a marketing scheme where their names and reputations are being used, former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier told the MIT Technology Review in 2017.

Several of Elysiums scientific advisory board members said their involvement should not be seen as an endorsement of the company or its pills, the Review story goes on to say.

In the same way companies sometimes greenwash their image to appear more environmentally-friendly, perhaps a company attaching itself to as many PhDs and Nobel Laureates as possible could be trying to brainwash its image.

Who is giving them money?

Elysium Health has raised $31.2 million since its founding in 2015. Investors include Silicon Valley Bank, which led its last $5 million round of debt financing in 2017, and Cambridge, Mass-based VC fund General Catalyst, which led its $20 million Series B round in 2016. Robert Nelsen, who Forbes once described as Biotechs Top Venture Capitalist, has also personally invested in Elysium Health.

What are The Experts saying?

The companys first product is Basis, a supplement that combines compounds designed to increase NAD levels and activate sirtuins, boosting cellular health and longevity." -TechCrunch

Researchers are still working to prove that NR can actually improve human healtha sticking point for critics and an issue acknowledged by the companies themselves. -Scientific American

A Fountain Of Youth Pill? Sure, If Youre A Mouse. -Kaiser Health News

If I had paid $500, I would likely be disappointed -FastCompany

Theres no guarantee that Elysiums first product, a blue pill called Basis that is going on sale this week, will actually keep you young. -MIT Technology Review

I take that Elysium stuff...I take that stuff every day. I like it. Um, but-I guess. I dont really know. I take a lot of things. I dont really know. -Joe Rogan

Should you buy it?

If you have $500 laying around that you might end up spending on things that will hyper-age you, like tanning sessions or a cigarette and cocaine smoothie, this is a foolproof way of ridding yourself of that harmful money.

If regular $500 saliva tests and $50 per month pills for a chance at longevity seem appealing, then this is your chance to make it to 2154. If you join their affiliate program, you can also make 12 percent commission on sales.

Should we even want to live longer, if we dont address the biological age of our planet first? If you flush a bunch of these pills down the toilet, will they help heal the Earth? Like Basiss efficacy with humans, the results here are currently inconclusive.

If youre simply interested in your chronological age, there are some very exciting and affordable products on the market. Elysium Health links to one cloud-based chronological age calculator, no spit required.

View post:

Startup of the Week: A Subscription for Anti-Aging Pills... for Mice - Free

In 2011, the Los Angles County Museum of Art announced the acquisition of Cranes, a breathtaking pair of six-panel painted screens by Maruyama kyo (1733-1795), Japans leading 18th century artist. Robert T. Singer, curator of Japanese art at the museum, had spent years negotiating an export license for the exceptional work, which certainly seems worthy of national treasure designation by the Japanese government, and philanthropist and museum trustee Camilla Chandler Frost stepped forward to make the incredible purchase possible.

The immaculately preserved screens display 17 life-size, hyper-real gray and red-crowned cranes arrayed across nearly 23 feet of abstract background in shimmering gold leaf. The crane paintings, publicly shown only twice in the previous 239 years, were instrumental in inspiring a large survey exhibition. Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art is on view through Dec. 8 in LACMAs Resnick Pavilion.

Three years after the stunning acquisition, a colleague at The Times reported some startling and related news, unleashing global pandemonium. Despite common assumptions among legions of fans, the hugely popular fictional character Hello Kitty, drawn by Japanese illustrator Yuko Shimizu, turns out not to be a cat.

Hello Kitty, a blank-faced licensing bonanza conceived by Shintaro Tsuji, founder of the Sanrio Co., certainly exhibits some feline features. Soft and pointy ears, brisk whiskers, button eyes and nose.

But wearing a jumper or a skirt and with a jaunty bow in her hair, shes actually a plush and gentle kitty who has been reimagined as a little girl. The character is a transformation known in Japanese as Gijinka the humanization of a nonhuman object or entity.

The exquisite LACMA screen-paintings of elegant cranes stand near the top of a broad cultural spectrums high-art end, while Hello Kitty takes her place at the pinnacle of the popular-art end. Cats are one ancient symbol for good fortune in Japanese art; cranes are another, overlapping with longevity, since folklore has it that a crane can live for 1,000 years. Its no surprise that Hello Kitty doesnt turn up among the nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and other high art objects in Every Living Thing, but cats certainly do.

Maruyama kyo, Cranes, 1772, pair of six-panel screens in ink, color and gold leaf on paper.

(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)

One place is in Cat Amid Spring Flowers, an Edo period hanging scroll by Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799). A languid black-and-white cat is shown intently licking the fur of an extended paw.

Rosetsu has placed the animal in the lower third of a tall, vertical length of silk, which is just over 3 feet high and a foot wide. At the panels left edge, entwined stems of garden flowers rise along the cats back. Rather than a defined landscape, the scene is marked by pale, horizontal washes of gray that create a dreamy, atmospheric space, like a cloudy sky.

This otherwise closely observed bit of naturalism also features something peculiar namely, the cats contour or profile. Stretched out, its body curves around to suggest the form of a sphere. Against the hazy, atmospheric background, the cats black and white patterning dissolves into cloud-like shapes. Its as if we are seeing a sun or moon silhouetted in the sky or perhaps reflected below in water.

The cat becomes a mysterious presence, an animal that occupies an ephemeral space somewhere between heaven and earth. Much Japanese art is infused with Shinto and Buddhist spiritual values, imported to the island through China and Korea, where nature spirits are a focus of worship. Belief in sacred power is often assigned to animals.

Coincidentally and significantly Rosetsu was a student of kyo, painter of the magnificent cranes.

The birds are rendered with keen and perceptive realism. They parade proudly across the flat, horizontal expanse like avian surrogates for the leisurely people strolling a century later in Georges Seurats A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

Direct observation of nature, partly informed by the artists interest in Western painting, merges with deep Japanese traditions of symbolic subject matter and graceful stylization. Rosetsu does the same, except he trades kyos dramatic sense of grandeur for a quieter, more lyrical mood. Its instructive to see the two, a generation apart in age, in the same show.

Creatures large and small turn up in Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art.

(LACMA)

One other notable feature of these two works of art is that both are in LACMAs own collection as are many of the shows greatest examples. Around half of the exhibition is from the museums impressive holdings, normally housed in the Pavilion for Japanese Art, which is closed for renovation.

In addition to kyos Cranes, theres a 12th century pair of sacred monkeys from a Shinto shrine, hunched and curious in a disconcerting fusion of human and animal instinct, installed next to a rare screen painting that shows monkeys cavorting on a shrines roof; a 10th century pair of carved-wood lions, their expressive, almost human faces mouthing the Sanskrit equivalents for alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, life and death; and a 6th century earthenware horse, a large funerary animal equipped for use in the afterlife by a long-gone noble. The exhibition provides welcome context for some of the museums most powerful and important works.

Negotiations have been underway for possible acquisition of one of the most dynamic objects, which commands the shows entrance. A monumental carved statue of Bishamonten: Guardian King of the North blankets the Buddhist warrior-god in ferocious animals, real and imaginary.

Dragons wrap his arms, a lions head growls at his waist, a tiger drapes down his back and an undefinable, mythic creature with fierce fangs crowns his head. These are beasts chosen simply (and effectively) to crank up a power image. Eight and a half feet tall, the magnificent, larger-than-life sculpture is a rare example of an exactly dated work, its hollow interior identifying its dedication for an event known to have taken place in 1124.

Spanning more than a thousand years, the show also includes some contemporary works, including playful dog sculptures by Yoshitomo Nara and Yayoi Kusama. Polyester never looked better than it does in three white, pleated dresses designed in 1990 by Issey Miyake, held together by grommets and leather straps but inspired by the fluttering of doves.

Pair of Sacred Monkeys, Japan, Heian period, 11th century; wood with traces of pigment.

(photo Museum Associates/LACMA)

To give such a wide-open roster of works some shape, the show is divided into a dozen sections. It starts with the animals of the Japanese zodiac, based on Chinas, and includes sections on religion and philosophy: Buddhism, Shinto, Daoism, Zen. Animals of earth, air and water get sorted out, as do those of myth and foreign origin creatures of the faraway.

The exhibition was jointly organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it was seen over the summer, the Japan Foundation in Tokyo and LACMA, with Singer and scholar Kawai Masatomo as co-curators. It ranges far and wide, featuring marvelous loans from scores of public and private collections in the U.S. and Japan.

If theres a shortcoming, its only that the exhibition was trimmed by nearly a third for presentation here, perhaps a casualty of the museums truncated gallery space as LACMAs planned building program gets underway. Thats a shame, given the surprisingly unprecedented subject, but there is still plenty to see. Youll leave wondering: Do animals play such a pervasive role in the art of any other culture?

'Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art'

When: Through Dec. 8; closed Wednesdays and Thanksgiving Day

Admission: $10-$25 (see website for discounts and free periods)

Info: (323) 857-6000, http://www.lacma.org

Read the original post:

Beyond Hello Kitty: The beauty of 'Animals in Japanese Art' - Los Angeles Times

Ecclesiastes was not accurate when he stated that there is nothing new under the sun. In about a billion years the sun will brighten up so much that it will boil off Earths oceans. This raises concerns for people who think long-term, such as the BBC radio reporter who asked me recently for my thoughts on how to mitigate this risk for the future of humanity.

The simplest solution that came to my mind is to spray a blanket of particles into the stratosphere that would reflect sunlight and cool the Earth, in a way similar to the effects of a natural volcanic eruption, a nuclear war or an asteroid impact (the same technique has been proposed to limit anthropogenic global warming). Blocking sunlight this way serves the same purpose as using sunglasses to moderate the impact of harmful UV radiation on our eyes.

Billions of years later, however, when the sun will brighten even more and eventually inflate to become a red giant star that will engulf the Earth, there would be no option left for our civilization but to relocate further out in the solar system. Since the natural real estate of planets and moons is available only at specific locations, however, and because the sun will change its brightness continuously, it would be prudent to manufacture a gigantic structure that will be able maneuver to the optimal orbital distance at any given time.

Being able to adjust our distance from the furnace based on its changing brightness would be most helpful towards the end, when the sun will reverse course and dim considerably, turning into a white dwarf. The solar systems habitable zone will shrink by a factor of a hundred relative to the current Earth-sun separation, down to a scale that is comparable to the size of the sun today.

Needless to say, the movable industrial complex of metal rods and equipment that would make up our future habitat would represent a very major upgrade to the International Space Station. This artificial world might not look as beautiful as the pale blue dot we now live on, with its green forests and blue oceans. But since modern humans needed merely 100,000 years to adapt from living in the savannahs and forests of Africa to squeezing into a tiny apartment in Manhattan one can reasonably expect them to transition from Manhattan to living in space over a time span that is ten thousand times longer.

Ultimately, we should contemplate space travel out of the solar system. The longer-term solution to our existential threats is not to keep all of our eggs in one basket. We should make genetically identical copies of the flora and fauna we hold dear and spread these copies to other stars in order to avoid the risk of annihilation from a single-point catastrophe. Our destinations could be habitable planets around nearby stars, such as Proxima b, or other desirable environments. The Breakthrough Starshot project represents the first well-funded initiative to traverse interstellar distances over a short time.

The transition to spreading multiple copies of our genetic material would resemble the revolution brought about by the printing press, when Gutenberg mass-produced copies of the Bible and distributed them throughout Europe. As soon as many copies of the book were made, any single copy lost its unique value as a precious entity. In the same way, as soon as we learn how to produce synthetic life in our laboratories, Gutenberg-DNA printers could be distributed to make copies of the human genome out of the raw materials on the surface of other planets so that any one copy would not be essential for preserving the information.

The BBC reporter did not let me easily off the hook, however: But what about our personal lives as individuals? Most people care about themselves. Your solution will not secure their personal safety so as to give them a peace of mind.

My reply was simple. In our daily life, we worry about protecting our own skin because we are focused on timescales much shorter than our lives. But when dealing with timescales that are far longer than a century, it is not the individual that counts but rather the genetic information of the human species as a whole. Despite what some insist, people we know right now will not be around within a century in any case, so there is no reason to focus on preserving them individually when strategizing our future over a billion years.

On such a long timescale, we better stay focused on preserving our species. The instinct of any parent is to care for the offspring and secure longevity this way; nature enabled us to extend the lifetime of our genome well beyond our own life span in this way. As an extension, modern science might enable us to construct printers that are capable of mass-producing copies of ourselves on other planets by merely exporting our genetic blueprint without requiring that our bodies will physically travel the distance. We should be satisfied with this renewed sense of security and retire happily when our mission is accomplished.

The reporter insisted: But would we truly be satisfied if we will not be around to see it happening? To which I replied: Frankly, this may not matter. Perhaps we already are one copy out of many in existence, so it is not essential for this copy to survive. But after reading this mornings newspaper, I am inclined to believe that our civilization will disappear as a result of self-inflicted wounds long before the sun will pose its predictable threat. Why do I believe that? Because the dead silence we hear so far from the numerous habitable exoplanets weve discovered may indicate that advanced civilizations have much shorter lives than their host stars.

Read more:

What Will We Do When the Sun Gets Too Hot for Earth's Survival? - Scientific American

Antony Gormley's Iron Baby at the Royal Academy

Forty-six countries around the world have shrinking populations, and this number is set to rise to 67 by 2040. Some 60 years after the invention of the contraceptive pill, women are voting powerfully but silently with their wombs.Peter Drucker wrote that the impact of technological innovations often doesnt appear until decades after their invention. This is certainly true of the Pill. A long, heart-wrenching article in the New York Times titled The End of Babies asks whether late capitalism has killed our reproductive instincts. Id argue instead that the revolution of womens rapid rise demands more adaptation from countries, companies and men if we want the human race to continue.

The past half century has seen women flood into education and labour forces around the globe. Women now represent more than 60% of global university graduates from Brazil and Iceland to the United Arab Emirates. Government and corporate policies have struggled to keep pace with the revolution that women (and the men they marry, birth, or work with) have wrought on all our lives. A generation ago, in countries and companies where conciliating work and family was difficult (eg. Japan or Germany), women opted to prioritize family. Now, they prioritize work. And financial independence, freedom and marital choice.

Nowhere is this more glaring than in Asia, where men and the systems that hold them hostage to inflexibly workaholic cultures seem particularly resistant to change. Thats why so many Japanese and South Korean women are refusing to marry, and so many men find themselves involuntarily single. This trend is sweeping through much of Asia. Japanese Prime Minister Abe has made encouraging women to work a top macroeconomic priority. Hes managed to fuel an impressive rise in the labour force participation rate of women (now surpassing the U.S.). But he probably hadnt predicted that the professional emancipation of women would lead them to reject marriage and children. Today a quarter of women between 35 and 40 remain single and the birth rate is at all-time lows. That wasnt the goal.

You may say this is good news if you agree that children are the number one climate change impact on the world. But is it? Fifty years ago, the average woman had five children, a number that has now been halved. In the United States, writes Anna Louie Sussman, the gap between how many children people want and how many they have has widened to a 40-year high. U.S. birth rates just hit a 32-year low, while the percentage of the population over 60 continues to rise. Are we ready for the aging populations, shrinking labour forces and pressures on pensions that are emerging? Surely there is a more human-friendly way to manage the overlapping disruptions of gender shifts, climate change and longevity? One that doesnt leave us childless and increasingly loveless.

Demography is destiny, and the world is looking increasingly unbalanced. Speaking recently at the Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna on the Power of Ecosystems, I suggested the health of our human ecosystem depends on a more strategic prioritization of gender issues. A sustainable birthrate, one that keeps national populations stable, is 2.1 children per woman. Few countries are anywhere near that level anymore. The richest countries are well below it, reflecting the lag in adapting to dual income parents and modern womens priorities. While the poorest countries (mostly in Africa) are too far above it, reflecting the lack of education and accessibility to birth control women need to have a real choice. In China, the one-child policy (recently abandoned) has decapitated countless families, created a frightening surplus of men who will never marry, and created a country that will grow old before it grows rich. Our continual underestimation of the revolutionary impact of the rise of women on countries and companies means we arent profiting from the potential miracle of having educated and employed the other half of the human race.

Not to mention our lack of attention on how the rise of women has landed on men both at home and at work. The obvious gusto with which women have entered almost every sphere of professional life has not always been matched by their mates or their bosses reactions. While the 20th century saw the rise of women around the world, the 21st century has seen a growing focus on the impact of that rise on men and masculinity. The male backlash Susan Faludi presciently wrote about 30 years ago, is now being played out politically around the globe as men fear a related loss of power and status and elect macho strongmen defending traditional gender roles. Unless we are able to create a win/ win narrative for both men and women, we are likely to see the sexes separate further. More strategic support for happy unions and families would help.

Some countries have tried to keep pace with the parallel pressures of two good-news trends: more gender-balanced parents and increasing longevity. But they will need to deploy far more care - both childcare and eldercare. While recognizing that men are carers and parents too and increasingly intent on actually investing the role.

Its coming slowly. The spread of shared parental leave is the next big generational adaptation. Sweden led the way, although they had to force initially reluctant men to take parental leave by introducing a use it or lose it system for fathers. The U.K. introduced shared parental leave a couple of years ago, but fewer than 2% of men take it. All OECD countries (with the bizarre exception of the U.S.) offer paid maternity leave, and now half of them also offer significant paternity leave (over two months).

Public policy is a key driver of birth rates. Germany under Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Ursula Van Der Leyden (who has seven children and is the new President-elect of a gender balanced European Commission), has managed to increase its birthrate over the past few years with a range of policies aimed at recognising the changing roles of women. Italys remains rock bottom by ignoring them. Leadership of countries is key both to gender balancing labour forces and empowering parents to conciliate work and family. Doing one without the other takes its toll on demographic sustainability.

Its not all up to national policy. As work becomes more central to both men and womens lives and identities, balancing two jobs, let alone two babies, becomes increasingly complex. That doesnt stop people wanting them. In the MBA classes I taught at HEC business school, 80% of every class of multinational students said they dream of dual career marriages with two children.Their ability to fulfill those dreams will depend, far more than they realize, on the country in which they live and the company for which they work. Young men and women are increasingly attracted to employers with good parental benefits, which is why leading companies, from Goldman Sachs to Google, are announcing shared parental leave policies, to compensate for lagging national systems.

Countries and companies that dont support parents will find they dont have many. When men and women, (as well as a rainbow of non-binary parents and care-givers) are supported in balancing work and families by both countries and companies, expect birth rates to rise (and fall) to near the magic 2.1 number. And economies to be healthier, happier and more sustainable. That doesnt require the end of capitalism, but the true beginning of gender balance at country, company and couple level.

The rest is here:

The Cost Of Underestimating The Rise Of Women: No Babies - Forbes

MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt said sharing the risk among several institutions will not only make possible work that would be difficult for a single institution to tackle, it will also encourage collaboration that accelerates the process of moving discoveries from lab to patient.

MIT researchers are developing innovative approaches to cell and gene therapy, designing new concepts for such biopharmaceutical medicines as well as new processes to manufacture these products and qualify them for clinical use, Schmidt said. A shared facility to de-risk this innovation, including production, will facilitate even stronger collaborations among local universities, hospitals, and companies and ultimately, such a facility can help speed impact and access for patients. MIT appreciates Harvards lead in convening exploration of this opportunity for the Commonwealth.

Richard McCullough, Harvards vice provost for research and professor of materials science and engineering, who also helped lead the project, said although the centers activity will revolve around science and manufacturing, its true focus will be on patients.

The centers overarching goal will be improving patient care, McCullough said. This would occur both by speeding access to the essential, modified cells that patients in clinical trials await, and by fostering discoveries through collaborations within the centers innovation space. The aim is that discoveries result in whole new treatments or improved application of existing treatments to provide relief to a wider universe of patients.

Organized as a private nonprofit, the center will be supported by more than $50 million pledged by its partners. It will be staffed by a team of at least 40, experienced in the latest cell-manufacturing techniques and trained in the use of the latest equipment. Among its goals is disseminating badly needed skills into the Boston life-sciences workforce.

We have to be sure that we are constantly feeding the industry with talented people who know the right things, so personally, I am very excited about education programs, Ligner said. Initiatives like [this center] are essential to advancing the industry because they help organizations build on one anothers advances. For example, the full potential of cell and gene therapies will only be realized if we collaborate to address challenges, such as manufacturing, improving access, accelerating innovation, tackling cost issues, and then sharing our learnings.

The new center emerged from conversations with state officials, including Gov. Charlie Baker and Attorney General Maura Healey, and industry sector leaders about ways to bolster Massachusetts preeminence in life science research and medical innovation. Those conversations sparked a two-year consultation process at the invitation of Garber and Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Bill Lee, that was coordinated with state officials and included representatives from industry, academia, venture capital, area hospitals, and government.

Cell and gene therapies have the potential to revolutionize the global health system. Recently, in Sweden, the first patient received cell therapy outside of a clinical trial. Its the start of an incredible time in the industry and in human health.

Emmanuel Ligner, president and chief executive of GE Healthcare Life Sciences

Called the Massachusetts Life Sciences Strategies Group, members reached out to regional experts beginning in 2017to discover what fields they considered most important and how best to support them. Cell and gene therapy rose to the top because of the considerable excitement generated by activity already going on, its potential to help patients, and its high potential for future growth and innovation. Also important were the opportunities to spread the high cost of these technologies across multiple institutions and, while so doing, capture the collaborative power of housing each player in the development chain within a single facility.

The centers board of directors will be comprised of Harvard, MIT, and industry partners Fujifilm, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, and GE Healthcare Life Sciences. Other members will include Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Childrens Hospital, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; as well as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and life-sciences company MilliporeSigma.

When you look at the constellation of players coming together, you really have the best universities and the best teaching hospitals and the best corporate players all supporting it, McGuire said, which I think is a great opportunity.

The facility intends to provide researchers and emerging companies outside the consortium with access to excess material, though organizers said they expect it to be in high demand by center partners.

The centers boost to the areas cell and gene therapy endeavors comes early enough that it should help maintain leadership over places like California and China, which have made clear their interest in life-science research, McGuire said.

I think getting this early mover advantage is going to be huge [in] developing the technology and the know-how and, ultimately, the intellectual property around it, McGuire said.

For Sharpe, the ultimate payoff will come from using cancer immunotherapys checkpoint blockade and other cell and gene therapies to save and improve lives.

We are seeing long-term benefits in some patients whove received checkpoint blockade, Sharpe said. There are patients who are more than a decade out and are melanoma-free. I think that it really has transformed patient care, quality of life, and longevity. So Im optimistic that the more we learn, the more were going to be able to do to help patients.

Sign up for daily emails to get the latest Harvardnews.

Read more:

Partnership aims to accelerate cell and gene therapy - Harvard Gazette

Leverate announced today the launch of its Success Task Force: a unique package that aims to help Leverates clients grow and maximize their benefits.

Originally named Proactive, Leverates Success Task Force is a one-of-a-kind brokerage solution that helps clients both in the technological and business aspects of opening and running their brokerage.

Discover iFX EXPO Asia 2020 in Macao The Largest Financial B2B Expo

It is an elite unit within Leverate that is dedicated to helping clients realize their companys full potential.The Task Force will consist of two arms an automatic Business Intelligence unit, and a dedicated human agent.

The BI element was designed by Leverates developers to monitor the function and operation of the clients brokerage and automatically identify and repair any malfunctions or problems that arise, before the client spots and reports them.

This back office solution will also notify and alert Leverates agents to alarming changes in the brokerages overall performance, like a sudden decrease in deposits or a string of deposits declined by the PSP.

This will allow the broker to react on time and if needed change his marketing or sales strategy.

The human arm of Leverates Success Task Force consists of a personal success agent which takes a proactive approach in his relationship with the client.

His primary goal is to make sure his clients business keeps growing and meets his revenue expectations.

The agent will advise and guide the broker in all business and financial aspects of operating their brokerage, and provide a broad array of business support services for the client.

In many ways, the task force will function much like a business consulting firm. At first, the success manager will analyze the current state of the brokerage, point out existing vulnerabilities and help the client form and optimize a growth plan, including quarterly and yearly KPIs for the company, as well as for each team member.

Later on, they will inspect whether or not their designated goals are being met.

Task Force agents will regularly monitor and assess a wide range of brokerage functions: marketing campaigns, lead conversion rates, retention rates, leads stage progression in the CRM, number of calls, length of calls, performance of each team member, communication between sales and retention teams, language support, and much more.

The gathered knowledge will provide the agent and the broker with actionable insights for strategy planning. The critical mission of each agent is to accompany his clients business in the face of growing obstacles.

This becomes even more important for brokers moving to a regulated environment, which requires a different set of KPIs and objectives.

Maoz Tenenbaum, Leverates VP of Sales, explains the reasoning behind this new service: The Forex market is becoming more and more competitive, with small brokerages opening and closing at an alarming rate. This is what our Success Task Force is focused on preventing. Brokers today need a solution that can assure their longevity and allow them to succeed and grow over time. With this new Task Force, our brokers now have a wingman to help guide their growth.

In many cases, brokers are not mindful to minor changes in their performance that can have a significant effect on their business in the future. Some brokers do not track their performance adequately at all.

For example: a small decrease in the number of first time deposits in a certain week can indicate a growing trend which requires strategic planning.

On the other hand, deposits being declined by the PSP can point at a minor problem that should be addressed in time, like a spam number.

In both cases, our combined automated BI tool and human support team will detect issues in advance, respond on time, and build a future plan in coordination with the broker himself.

In conclusion, what were giving brokers with this new service is much more than a tech solution or a service. Were effectively taking the broker hand in hand towards the full achievement of his goals.

Its a kind of special business coaching unit for aspiring brokers, that will help them not only survive, but also thrive in this demanding industry.

Disclaimer: The content of this article was provided by the company, and does not represent the opinions of Finance Magnates.

Here is the original post:

Leverates Success Task Force Scheduled to Launch Before the End of 2019 - Finance Magnates

The growth and popularity of C continues. The most recent TIOBE index of most popular programming languages saw C in a virtual dead heat with Java, knocking the latter off its perch for the first time in five years.

In his new book, Extreme C(left), Kamran Amini outlines the essential features of the language before moving onto encapsulation and composition, synchronisation, as well as advanced programming with code samples and integration with other languages, including C++, Java, and Python.

This extract, exclusive to Developer, explores structures within C, as well as touching on the reasons behind the almost 50-year-old languages continued longevity.

---

From the design perspective, structures are one of the most fundamental concepts in C. Nowadays, they are not unique to C, and you can find their twin concepts nearly in every modern programming language.

But we should discuss them in the history of computation when there were no other programming languages offering such a concept. Among many efforts to move away from machine-level programming languages, introducing structures was a great step toward having encapsulation in a programming language. For thousands of years, the way we think hasnt changed a lot, and encapsulation has been a centric means for our logical reasoning.

But it was just after C that we finally had some tool in this case, a programming language which was able to understand the way we think and could store and process the building blocks of our reasoning. Finally, we got a language that resembles our thoughts and ideas, and all of this happened when we got structures. C structures werent perfect in comparison to the encapsulation mechanisms found in modern languages, but they were enough for us to build a platform upon which to create our finest tools.

You know that every programming language has some Primitive Data Types (PDTs). Using these PDTs, you can design your data structures and write your algorithms around them. These PDTs are part of the programming language, and they cannot be changed or removed. As an example, you cannot have C without the primitive types int and double.

Structures come into play when you need to have your own defined data types, and the data types in the language are not enough. User-Defined Types (UDTs) are those types which are created by the user and they are not part of the language.

Note that UDTs are different from the types you could define using typedef. The keyword typedef doesnt really create a new type, but rather it defines an alias or synonym for an already defined type. But structures allow you to introduce totally new UDTs into your program.

Structures have twin concepts in other programming languages, for example, classes in C++ and Java or packages in Perl. They are considered to be the typemakers in these languages.

So, why do we need to create new types in a program? The answer to this question reveals the principles behind software design and the methods we use for our daily software development. We create new types because we do it every day using our brains in a routine analysis.

We dont look at our surroundings as integers, doubles, or characters. We have learned to group related attributes under the same object. But as an answer to our starting question, we need new types because we use them to analyse our problems as a higher level of logic, close enough to our human logic.

Here, you need to become familiar with the term business logic. Business logic is a set of all entities and regulations found in a business. For example, in the business logic of a banking system, you face concepts such as client, account, balance, money, cash, payment, and many more, which are there to make operations such as money withdrawal possible and meaningful.

Suppose that you had to explain some banking logic in pure integers, floats, or characters. It is almost impossible. If it is possible for programmers, it is almost meaningless to business analysts. In a real software development environment that has a well-defined business logic, programmers and business analysts cooperate closely. Therefore, they need to have a shared set of terminology, glossary, types, operations, regulations, logic, and so on.

Today, a programming language that does not support new types in its type system can be considered as a dead language. Maybe thats why most people see C as a dead programming language, mainly because they cannot easily define their new types in C, and they prefer to move to a higher-level language such as C++ or Java. Yes, its not that easy to create a nice type system in C< but everything you need is present there.

Even today, there can be many reasons behind choosing C as the projects main language and accepting the efforts of creating and maintaining a nice type system in a C project and even today many companies do that.

Despite the fact that we need new types in our daily software analysis, CPUs do not understand these new types. CPUs try to stick to the PDTs and fast calculations because they are designed to do that. So, if you have a program written in your high-level language, it should be translated to CPU level instructions, and this may cost you more time and resources.

In this sense, fortunately, C is not very far away from the CPU-level logic, and it has a type system which can be easily translated. You may have heard that C is a low-level or hardware-level programming language. This is one of the reasons why some companies and organisations try to write and maintain their core frameworks in C, even today.

This extract is taken from Extreme C, by Kamran Amini, published by Packt. You can find out more and buy your copy by visiting here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located5G Expo,IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, andCyber Security & Cloud ExpoWorld Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

The rest is here:

Extreme C book extract: Exploring structures and user-defined types in C - Developer Tech

Scientists at Harvard have reportedly been studying human anatomyfor years. From researching about how to eat healthy to studying what goes on inside our body, they know it all. Recently, they came up with research which discovered the 5 rules an individual should follow to lead a healthy life. The study done by Havard is 30-year long study which gives 5 rules one should compulsorily follow:

Also Read:Healthy Diet: Benefits Of Protein And Fiber In Your Diet

The Lancet stated that 1 in every 5 death globally is associated with a p[oor diet. It is believed that we consume double the recommended amount of processed meat which affects our body causing obesity and other body-related diseases. The Havard T.H Chan School of Public healths study found out that adding enough fruits, nuts, whole grains, fruits and vegetables can lower the risk of heart attack stroke by 20 per cent.

Exercising regularly is something every dietician or nutritionist might suggest. According to the World Health Organization, People who are not active enough have 20-30 per centincreased their risk of death. Experts in this field have advised that a healthy adult should exercise for 150 minutes every week.

Also Read:Eye Health And Eyesight: 5 Best Foods To Include In Your Diet

A good diet and exercising regularly helps you maintain a healthy weight. The United Nations study has found out that around 800 million people around the world are obese and the number has tripled since 2016.

It is recommended to not intake too much of alcohol. The taste of wine has been found to engage the brain than any other human behaviour. The Scripps research institute found that an ingredient in red wine can also help to reduce stress but it should be consumed in moderation, preferably justa glass or two. Nature claimed that a moderate amount of wine can be beneficial and too much alcohol is a health risk.

Also Read:Food Combinations That May Sound Weird And Gross But Taste Delicious

Smoking is injurious to health and every individual is aware of it. If a person quits smoking, within a year of quitting smoking, your risk of heart disease drops by half. After 10 years, the risk of lung cancer falls by 50 per cent, as claimed by the World Health Organization. Giving up smoking also reduces the chance of impotence and infertility among people who wish to be parents. WHO also found that maintaining these healthy habits add 12 years of life for men and 14 for women.

Also Read:Fitness Tips: Indoor Exercises That You Can Do To Stay Healthy And Fit

Visit link:

30-year-old Harvard study on longevity: Five daily habits to follow for a healthy living - Republic World - Republic World