That "Research" About How Smartphones Are Causing Deformed Human Bodies Is SEO Spam, You Idiots

That

You know that "research" going around saying humans are going to evolve to have hunchbacks and claws because of the way we use our smartphones? Though our posture could certainly use some work, you'll be glad to know that it's just lazy spam intended to juice search engine results.

Let's back up. Today the Daily Mail published a viral story about "how humans may look in the year 3000." Among its predictions: hunched backs, clawed hands, a second eyelid, a thicker skull and a smaller brain.

Sure, that's fascinating! The only problem? The Mail's only source is a post published a year ago by the renowned scientists at... uh... TollFreeForwarding.com, a site that sells, as its name suggests, virtual phone numbers.

If the idea that phone salespeople are purporting to be making predictions about human evolution didn't tip you off, this "research" doesn't seem very scientific at all. Instead, it more closely resembles what it actually is — a blog post written by some poor grunt, intended to get backlinks from sites like the Mail that'll juice TollFreeForwarding's position in search engine results.

To get those delicious backlinks, the top minds at TollFreeForwarding leveraged renders of a "future human" by a 3D model artist. The result of these efforts is "Mindy," a creepy-looking hunchback in black skinny jeans (which is how you can tell she's from a different era).

Grotesque model reveals what humans could look like in the year 3000 due to our reliance on technology

Full story: https://t.co/vQzyMZPNBv pic.twitter.com/vqBuYOBrcg

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) November 3, 2022

"To fully realize the impact everyday tech has on us, we sourced scientific research and expert opinion on the subject," the TollFreeForwarding post reads, "before working with a 3D designer to create a future human whose body has physically changed due to consistent use of smartphones, laptops, and other tech."

Its sources, though, are dubious. Its authority on spinal development, for instance, is a "health and wellness expert" at a site that sells massage lotion. His highest academic achievement? A business degree.

We could go on and on about TollFreeForwarding's dismal sourcing — some of which looks suspiciously like even more SEO spam for entirely different clients — but you get the idea.

It's probably not surprising that the this gambit for clicks took off among dingbats on Twitter. What is somewhat disappointing is that it ended up on StudyFinds, a generally reliable blog about academic research. This time, though, for inscrutable reasons it treated this egregious SEO spam as a legitimate scientific study.

The site's readers, though, were quick to call it out, leading to a comically enormous editor's note appended to the story.

"Our content is intended to stir debate and conversation, and we always encourage our readers to discuss why or why not they agree with the findings," it reads in part. "If you heavily disagree with a report — please debunk to your delight in the comments below."

You heard them! Get debunking, people.

More conspiracy theories: If You Think Joe Rogan Is Credible, This Bizarre Clip of Him Yelling at a Scientist Will Probably Change Your Mind

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That "Research" About How Smartphones Are Causing Deformed Human Bodies Is SEO Spam, You Idiots

Jeff Bezos’ Housekeeper Says She Had to Climb Out the Window to Use the Bathroom

Jeff Bezos' ex- housekeeper is suing him for discrimination that led to her allegedly having to literally sneak out out of his house to use the bathroom.

Jeff Bezos' former housekeeper is suing the Amazon founder for workplace discrimination that she says forced her to literally climb out out the window of his house to use the bathroom.

In the suit, filed this week in a Washington state court, the former housekeeper claimed that she and Bezos' other household staff were not provided with legally-mandated eating or restroom breaks, and that because there was no "readily accessible bathroom" for them to use, they had to clamber out a laundry room window to get to one.

In the complaint, lawyers for the ex-housekeeper, who is described as having worked for wealthy families for nearly 20 years, wrote that household staff were initially allowed to use a small bathroom in the security room of Bezos' main house, but "this soon stopped... because it was decided that housekeepers using the bathroom was a breach of security protocol."

The suit also alleges that housekeepers in the billionaire's employ "frequently developed Urinary Tract Infections" that they believed was related to not being able to use the bathroom when they needed to at work.

"There was no breakroom for the housekeepers," the complaint adds. "Even though Plaintiff worked 10, 12, and sometimes 14 hours a day, there was no designated area for her to sit down and rest."

The housekeeper — who, like almost all of her coworkers, is Latino — was allegedly not aware that she was entitled to breaks for lunch or rest, and was only able to have a lunch break when Bezos or his family were not on the premises, the lawsuit alleges.

The Washington Post owner has denied his former housekeeper's claims of discrimination through an attorney.

"We have investigated the claims, and they lack merit," Harry Korrell, a Bezos attorney, told Insider of the suit. "[The former employee] made over six figures annually and was the lead housekeeper."

He added that the former housekeeper "was responsible for her own break and meal times, and there were several bathrooms and breakrooms available to her and other staff."

"The evidence will show that [the former housekeeper] was terminated for performance reasons," he continued. "She initially demanded over $9M, and when the company refused, she decided to file this suit."

As the suit was just filed and may well end in a settlement, it'll likely be a long time, if ever, before we find out what really happened at Bezos' house — but if we do, it'll be a fascinating peek behind the curtain at the home life of one of the world's most powerful and wealthy men.

More on billionaires: Tesla Morale Low As Workers Still Don't Have Desks, Face Increased Attendance Surveillance

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Jeff Bezos' Housekeeper Says She Had to Climb Out the Window to Use the Bathroom

Nikolas Badminton | Futurist Speaker | Futurist Keynotes | Futurist.com

Glen Hiemstra is the founder andFuturist Emeritusof Futurist.com.

Glen is dedicated to disseminating information about the future to assist individuals, organizations, and industries in effective strategic planning. An internationally respected expert on future trends, long-range planning and creating the preferred future, Glen has advised professional, business, and governmental organizations for three decades and has served as a technical advisor for futuristic television programs. Audience members for Glens keynote speeches and clients for his long-range planning say things like, Once you hear Glen Hiemstra speak, the future will never look the same.

A writer as well as a speaker and consultant, Glen is the author of Millennial City: How a New Generation Can Save the Future,Turning the Future into Revenue: What Businesses and Individuals Need to Know to Shape Their Future. Previously he co-authoredStrategic Leadership: Achieving Your Preferred Future.

Glen has worked with many leading companies, government agencies and organizations across a wide variety of domains. These include Microsoft, The Home Depot, Boeing, Adobe, Ernst & Young, PaineWebber, ShareBuilder, Ambrosetti (Italy), Club of Amsterdam, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Savannah District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pacific Ocean Division, Northern Telecom, REI, Weyerhaeuser, Hewlett Packard, Novo Nordisk, U.S./Mexico JWC, APAX Partners, Costa Rica Hotel Association, Atlanta 2060, Tulsa 2025, Idaho Transportation 2030, Michigan DOT 2030, Federal Highway Administration Advanced Research, Eddie Bauer, Procter & Gamble, ACE Hardware, IHOP, John Deere, Weitz Construction, Lexis Nexus, Land O Lakes, GHD Engineering (Australia), SONAE (Portugal), and others.

As a recognized expert in preferred future planning, Glen is a popular keynote speaker who can zero in on emerging trends in economics, demographics, energy, the environment, Internet and communications, science, technology, housing, and transportation. Glen goes beyond simple trend analysis to discuss the opportunities that we all have to shape the preferred future. In his consulting, Glen utilizes tools such as environmental scanning, scenario development, whole systems perspectives, paradigm shifts, and analysis of organizational culture for managing change to assist enterprises to achieve high performance.

A skilled communicator, Glen also offers a variety of informational resources for those interested in exploring the future. Each month visitors from 120 nations come to Futurist.com and the blog for provocative snapshots of emerging ideas, trends, and technologies.

As a media technical advisor Glen has worked on several television productions, including with Steven Bochco Productions (creator of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue), among others. He has oft beencited in publicationssuch as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, US News & World Report, Newsweek, The Futurist, USA Today, Business Week, the Economist, Puget Sound Business Journal, and the Los Angeles Times.

In a first career, Glen was an award-winning educator; he also served as a Visiting Scholar at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington, which worked on virtual and augmented reality technology.

Glen was educated at Whitworth College, the University of Oregon, and the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Contact us to discuss your event.

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Nikolas Badminton | Futurist Speaker | Futurist Keynotes | Futurist.com

10 of the Worlds Most Groundbreaking Futurists – HowStuffWorks

In 1900, Smithsonian Institution curator John Elfreth Watkins wrote an article for The Ladies' Home Journal, entitled "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years," filled with predictions that many of his readers probably scoffed at as ridiculously improbable. Indeed, Watkins was pretty far off about some things. He predicted, for example, that the letters 'C,' 'X' and 'Q' would vanish from the alphabet, streets would be relocated underground, and farms would grow strawberries as large as apples. But what's more impressive is the extent to which Watkins' vision of the future actually has come to pass -- wireless phone networks on which a person in New York could talk to another in China, live TV images being transmitted around the globe, MRI machines, aerial warfare, and high-speed trains traveling between cities at 150 miles per hour. Watkins even predicted the food trucks that have become a fad in cities throughout America [source: Watkins].

Today's futurists -- who aim to forecast trends, inventions and events that will appear in the decades ahead -- would love to be that prescient. But unlike Watkins, who mostly seems to have relied upon his own imagination and wishful thinking, modern forecasters have developed more sophisticated methods for divining what may lie ahead. As Timothy Mack, president of the World Future Society, explains on the organization's Web site, futurists systematically scan the news media and published results of scientific studies, and conduct carefully structured surveys called "Delphi polls" in which they probe the minds of experts in various fields. Many also now create computer simulations and even conduct role-playing games in an effort to foresee what events and trends might result from certain changes, such as worsening environmental problems, the development of new energy sources or changes in the tax system [source: Mack].

Futurists -- whose work often is underwritten by companies and governments trying to prepare for future problems or gain a competitive edge from foresight -- also know that their predictions actually may shape the world ahead. "The main purpose of studying the future is to look at what may happen if present trends continue, decide if this is desirable, and, if not, work to change it," Mack explains [source: Mack].

Here are 10 futurists who've greatly influenced modern society with their predictions of what may lie ahead.

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10 of the Worlds Most Groundbreaking Futurists - HowStuffWorks

Five benefits of hiring a chief futurist officer

As leaders, we can all be better about being more prepared for the future, but its something Ive seen many struggle with. Its much easier to analyze the data from today and know what strategies need to occur within the next one to three years. But what about five years from now? How about 10 years? If you find yourself struggling to clearly see what the pathway is for your company to move ahead, differentiate, and be better prepared for trying times, a CFOchief futurist officercan help.

In my opinion, the pandemic will not be the last great accelerator. The rapid adoption of new technology and ever-shifting underlying cultures within the workforce will create future hurdles that can be overcome if you are willing to do the deep thinking or have someone on your leadership team that can think ahead and spot an area you want to either work toward or avoid.

What a certified futurist does is study the patterns from a historical perspective, identify innovations and cultural movements from today, and perform ethnographic research to hear the anecdotal stories around the topic of study. A futurist is then able to translate that data into forecasts that lead to innovative insights and strategies that can help make companies more future prepared and better able to outperform their competitors.

Here are five benefits of hiring a chief futurist officer.

1. BETTER STRATEGIC PLANNING

Futurism is the step needed before strategic planning. A chief futurist officer can guide you to better and more far-reaching, innovative ideas than just solving the problems of today. By working with your chief futurist officer, you can instill new innovative ideas into your strategic plan to be better prepared for the future.

2. DIFFERENTIATION

When I ask most leaders if they want to differentiate themselves in the market in the next five years, almost everyone raises their hand. When I then ask them if they know how to do it, only about half of their hands remain in the air. A chief futurist officer can be your guiding light. With their study of your market, they can identify opportunities for innovations that can scale and be assimilated into your practice, as well as analyze how your competitors might shift over the next decade too.

3. DAILY FORESIGHT

One of the main responsibilities of a chief futurist officer is to scan the horizon for what is happening now in order to know what will come next. This is a daily activity they need to perform themselves and then instill in the company so that it becomes a common and shared practice. This prepares your entire company to be on the lookout for changes that could cause opportunities or weaknesses in the future of the company.

4. STAKEHOLDER INSIGHTS

The two biggest questions I get from leaders center around What do my future clients want? and How can I attract and retain better talent? Working in concert with your human capital resource manager, your chief futurist officer will be able to identify the right people who will not only have culture fit today but culture adaptability for tomorrow. With this same lens, they can analyze what the needs of your clients are today and 10 years from now to help you understand how your product and offerings can pivot.

5. CULTURE ANALYSIS AND TALENT ATTRACTION

The biggest opportunity is to use a chief futurist officer to understand the divide between your perceived culture and the actual lived culture of your workplace and then forecast what a truly successful culture could be. As talent looks for new jobs, culture and experience are likely high on their lists. If you can state what your culture will be in the next 10 years and all the opportunities between now and then, that can serve as a great attractor for the talent you want to hire and retain.

Looking ahead is hard. Your brain is geared to think about your future self as a stranger, but with futurism and a chief futurist officer, they can turn that uncertainty into innovative strategic planning to follow and act on.

Certified FuturistMark Bryan, Director of Innovation & Research at M+A Architects, creates data-driven solutions & future-driven forecasts

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Five benefits of hiring a chief futurist officer

Futurist predicts Covid and what’s coming in a decade – Fast Company

In January 2020, when the coronavirus started making headlines around the world, Jane McGonigals inbox was flooded with emails from Silicon Valley execs, government officials, and nonprofit leaders. They all had the same question: Jane, didnt you run a simulation of a respiratory pandemic?

Yes, she had. All the way back in 2010.

McGonigal is a game designer. She builds simulations that help players imagine the unimaginable. And in 2010, she invited nearly 20,000 people to immerse themselves in a future world besieged by a global pandemic. How would you change your habits? she asked. What social interactions would you avoid? Can you work from home?

A decade later, when COVID-19 went from nascent threat to full-blown crisis, McGonigal started hearing from folks who had participated in the simulation. Im not freaking out, one of them said with relief. I already worked through the panic and anxiety when we imagined it 10 years ago.

According to the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, we can all learn to make the shift from panic to poise by training our brains to think about the unthinkable. But what does that training look like? In her new book,Imaginableand on todays episode of The Next Big Idea podcastMcGonigal shares evidence-based techniques you can use to see the future coming. Listen to the full episode below, or read a few key highlights. And follow host Rufus Griscom on LinkedInfor behind-the-scenes looks into the show.

Rufus Griscom:Your path from studying and designing video games to working as a futuristsome would see that as counterintuitive. I think you see this as a logical progression. Why does that sequencing make sense?

Jane McGonigal: What first really fascinated me about the gaming community was this trend that I was observing in gamers: They were developing real skills, real abilities, collective intelligence, and collective imagination that they wanted to apply in a bigger contextmaybe help solve some real-world challenges.

This was back in 2001 when I was starting my PhD work. And I thought, This is amazing! It would be really good for humanity if we could channel these new skills that are coming out of online gaming into real-world problem-solving. But at that time, there were not a lot of games to play that actually connected this community with real-world challenges.

After studying it for six years, writing my dissertation on this topic, I rolled right into, Im going to be the one to make games that help gamers apply those strengths to real-world contexts. And the context that I wound up working in was trying to anticipate hard-to-predict futures, or apply that collective imagination to seeing future scenarios from massively many points of viewthe same way that we see a game worldso that we might discover the outlier risks or unexpected opportunities. And thats what Ive been doing for 15 years now.

This mission to take our interest in gaming and collective imagining exercises and use them to help us better understand possible future outcomesyou and your team have been engaged in this for a while, and you have an astoundingly impressive track record at anticipating possible future outcomes. Can you share some of the details of what you all have done?

2020 was a really strange year to be a future forecaster, in that I had an experience of living through a very difficult future that we had been forecasting for a decade or more. My work at the Institute for the Future involved creating these social simulations way back in 2008, 2010, where we were inviting thousands of people to spend weeks in a private social network. It would look like Twitter, Facebook, or Discord, but everything being posted and shared was about a hypothetical future.

Futurists love to look 10 years ahead because that gives us enough mental distance to think creatively. And if were imagining problems that might not happen for 10 years, it gives us enough time to prepare for them or prevent them. So we were looking at the years 2019 and 2020; and back then, our simulation centered around, How would we survive and adapt to a respiratory pandemic that started in China that was also complicated by cascading crises?One of the things that I specialize in is figuring out how different crises and disruptions intersect. So were not just looking at it from a public health perspective or an epidemiology perspective. We were also thinking about how we would survive and adapt when we have the supply-chain disruptions, when there is misinformation and conspiracy theories about the pandemic being spread on social media, when there are historic wildfires and extreme heat waves due to climate change. And thats just what we lived through in 2020.

What made me sort of crazy for a little while, and made me want to write the bookImaginable, is that there was this incredible proliferation of news stories and headlines using the word unimaginable to describe the pandemic and its consequences. But itwasntunimaginable. We just didnt have a critical mass of people imagining it. We had 20,000 people in one of our simulations, and 8,000 in another. My goal is to have 20millionI think that would really help us prepare for the future.

McGonigal:When we give ourselves these long, luxurious deadlines, we feel time rich. And when we feel time rich, we think, I have all this time! I can do what I want. I can do what matters to me.

When we have urgent deadlines or too many tasks on our to-do list for today, we feel time poor, time deprivedand then we just dont use our time because even though we still have the same amount of time, it feels scarce.

Another thing that researchers have found is that when we imagine 10 years out, we tend to think about things that are more relevant to our most important valuesthe kinds of goals that would help us live a life that we would consider really authentic, really true to our dreams or what we find meaningful and purposeful.

I give people this challenge. Its not, Where would you like to be in 10 years or what would you like to be different? The challenge is to try to vividly imagine waking up on a specific day. So, pick a day of the week; is it a Monday? Is it a Saturday? A Sunday? You imagine yourself waking up, and you try to picture every detail. Where are you? Are you in the same room that you woke up in today, or is it a different room? Where is it? Is there somebody with you? Is it a person? Is it a pet? Is it a different person or pet than you might wake up with today? And then imagine what mood you are in. What mood would you like to wake up in? What would put you in that mood? What might be on your calendar for that day that would put you in that mood?

And then I tell people, Go put it on your calendar. If youve just imagined yourself doing this amazing thing that makes you feel a certain way, go ahead and open up your Google or Apple calendarthey do go 10, 20, 30, 40 years in the futureand put it on your calendar. Even better, invite somebody. Invite a loved one.

It can spark some really interesting conversations about our real hopes and dreams. What is it going to take to get there? Because weve given ourselves 10 years, it allows us to dream bigger and also enjoy that sense of time spaciousness to really make some changes or explore possibilities that we would dismiss as impossible today.

Griscom:Are there any other future scenarios that you think our listeners should consider?

Things to pay attention to: government-mandated internet shutdowns is a huge future force that is spreading globally. If youre not aware of this phenomenon and not potentially prepared to live through weeks or months of the government turning off the internet, thats something to think about.

Another one is climate migration. Weve got to be willing to think about the risks where we live. Are we in a climate-secure, climate-resilient place that will probably be welcoming others who are migrating out of climate-unsafe regions? If so, we should be prepared to see a higher density of living, to be welcoming to people who have been forcibly displaced. Are we emotionally ready for that? Are we economically ready for that? Also think about our pathways to move if we need to. That is something that every serious futurist that I know is thinking aboutpathways of human movement within countries, and across borders. How can we support people economically, socially, mentally, psychologically? How can we make a home? Thats a problem space that warrants so much imagination and innovation and creativity. If I could get all of the smartest minds on the planet to work on something, it would be thinking about movement. That is the biggest future scenario that would benefit from our imagination, and also our innovation.

This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.

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Futurist predicts Covid and what's coming in a decade - Fast Company

Visionary Futurist Neal Stephenson and Crypto Pioneer Peter Vessenes Announce Lamina1, the Layer-1 Blockchain for the Open Metaverse – Business Wire

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--For the Metaverse to achieve its promise, it requires a base-level blockchain protocol equal to the technical, economic, and philosophical origins of the Metaverse idea itself an open and expansive virtual universe. To fulfill that promise, cryptocurrency pioneer Peter Vessenes and renowned futurist Neal Stephenson are announcing Lamina1, a new Layer-1 blockchain technology designed for the Metaverse with Web3 principles in mind.

Co-founders Vessenes and Stephenson serve as Lamina1s chief executive officer and chairman, respectively. Later this year, the company will launch a testnet and a subsequent betanet. Beyond 2022, the co-founders plan to seed a new immersive environment inspired by Stephenson's million-selling novel Snow Crash, building infrastructure and releasing tools to support the work of third-party creators who want to build Open Metaverse experiences at scale.

Lessons Learned from Web 2.0

As titans of the technology industry implement their vision of the Metaverse - a sector projected to grow to $1T in the coming decade - Lamina1 is working to ensure it does not repeat the missteps of the past by continuing to perpetuate existing structures of centralized ownership and inequality.

Lamina1 proposes an alternative a more modern and integrated Web3 community and ecosystem as the first building block for a truly Open Metaverse. The provably carbon negative Lamina1 chain will offer high transaction volume and an economic design with new incentive mechanisms to help create thriving, vibrant economies for creators and entrepreneurs.

Lamina1 Co-founders Bridge Visionary Science Fiction to Imminent Metaverse Reality

The concept of the Metaverse, an immersive version of the internet was first brought to life in 1992 with the publication of Snow Crash. Now, 30 years later, Stephenson is for the first time founding a company to create the digital world he envisioned.

The 30th anniversary of Snow Crash, and recent interest in actually building the Metaverse, has got me thinking about how to do it in a way thats true to the original concept, said Stephenson. That means creative ferment rooted in a strong base layer of open source tech that provides key services to creators while making sure that they get paid. The purpose of Lamina1 is to provide that, using the best and most up-to-date ideas from the industry. Well build first-and second-party experiences just to make sure it all works. But well know weve succeeded when Lamina1 is adopted by third-party creators.

This vision will be brought to life by the considerable engineering and business acumen of Lamina1s co-founder, Peter Vessenes. Vessenes is known in the cryptocurrency industry for a series of firsts, namely launching the first VC-backed Bitcoin company (2011) and forming the Bitcoin Foundation (2012) - today a blueprint for the way the now $1T+ blockchain industry engages communities and manages and creates cryptocurrencies.

Lamina1s Founding Team Brings Together Experts in Virtual Worlds

Joining the Lamina1 team is Metaverse pioneer Tony Parisi, former head of AR/VR at Unity. He was also an early leader in Web3D and virtual reality, the inventor of VRML (the original standard for 3D graphics on the web) and co-creator of glTF, the open file format that today powers millions of 3D objects. Rounding out the Lamina1 leadership team is advisor Rony Abovitz, founder of Sun and Thunder, Magic Leap, and MAKO Surgical.

I am incredibly excited about Lamina1, said Abovitz. When Neal and Peter told me what they wanted to do (and if I would join their quest), it felt right and good. Neal brings wisdom, empathy, creativity, and a moral framework to his work- attributes deeply needed in creating a good future and a Metaverse that works for humanity. There is no one better to lead the way to build a more Open Metaverse. It is also the right time in human history for there to be a connection between the decentralized open innovations we see in the crypto world and Neal's innate vision and deep insights. I also loved the meshing of Peters genius in crypto with Neals visionary imagination.

I dont know how to describe this other than a true meeting of the minds, said Vessenes. "As an active investor and cryptographer, I have a list of the technology, economic and social innovations I'd like to see in a Layer-1 chain, so being able to team up with Neal and his personality, wisdom, and vision was compelling enough that it brought me out of retirement, so to speak. Seeing some of the earliest Bitcoin and Ethereum investors in the world back the project personally feels like a super special moment for all of us. I can think of no better way to honor Snow Crash's 30th anniversary than by co-founding Lamina1 with Neal.

Initial Investors in Lamina1 include Rony Abovitz, Geoff Entress, Jeremy Giffon, Bing Gordon, James Haft, Reid Hoffman, David Johnston, Joseph Lubin, Patrick Murck, Matthew Roszak, Tihan Seale, Peter Vessenes and Wu Ying.

Lamina1 will be formally introduced at Consensus 2022 presented by CoinDesk. For more information, visit lamina1.com.

About Lamina1

The brainchild of Neal Stephenson (Chairman), who first conceptualized the Metaverse in his 1992 million-selling book Snow Crash, and Peter Vessenes (CEO), a foundational leader from the early days of Bitcoin, Lamina1 is a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built to empower the Open Metaverse. Lamina1s chain technology, cryptographic model and extensive intellectual property partnerships (to be announced throughout 2022) will establish it as the preferred destination for this generations most creative minds those who are crafting the digital societies of the future. It is the first provably carbon-negative blockchain in the world.

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Visionary Futurist Neal Stephenson and Crypto Pioneer Peter Vessenes Announce Lamina1, the Layer-1 Blockchain for the Open Metaverse - Business Wire

In the future, will you own your digital self? This futurist thinks so – CBC.ca

Technological change has already had a massive impact on how we approach our personal identity online and off. As our digital presence continues to evolve, we can expect more change to come.

Tracey Follows is a futurist who's thought a lot about this.

"I think people have come to the conclusion that as more and more public services are delivered digitally, and as more governments are kind of trying to morph themselves into technology platforms themselves, there are lots of meetings with nations saying they want to become digital nations," said Follows,author of The Future of You.

"If those public services have become digital, we can't just be analog people in a digitally serviced world. We need an access point to those services. And that really is going to rely on a digitization of the self. We have a digital identity, a personal identity in the physical, analogworld. We need to convert that into layers of information that can be machine readable."

Follows spoke with Spark host Nora Young about what possible future identity trends might mean down the road.

Here is part of their conversation.

This is already underway, right? I believe it's called Aadhaar, that's India's 12-digit biometrically linked digital ID system. So this is a process that's underway?

Well, that's a good point, because that is a very centralized system of digital identity, as you point out, much like the Chinese system where there is a unique identifier, and in particular with India, that is linked to a biometric. And this is the big debate:is it a centralized digital identity scheme where literally the government or big tech or private enterprises that run technology services, know your identity, and that's the way they deliver the services? Or could we have a decentralized system that is much more flat, much more peer to peer,that's based on cryptographic technology, where we as owners of selves, and owners of our digital self, have much more control over which layers of information we allow other people of institutions to see.

Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit. Because you do raise the prospect that we might end up with this very decentralized digital ID that lives on the blockchain that will give us more individual control over our identities. Can you explain a bit more how that would work?

One I would highlight is verifiable credentials, the sorts of credentials that you can keep in a digital wallet, much like you would keep a credential like a driving license, or maybe your passport or some sort of office-related passcodeor something like [it] that you might keep in your physical wallet. So it might have our age, it might have our location, our residence.

This new system of verifiable credentials would have an institution or an organization put in a proof request, and that proof request would be matched with a proof response. When these two proof requests and proof responses match, it dings and says to the organization that is requesting my verification or authentication, "yes, she's verified or authenticated."And that's done without me having to share any personal information whatsoever.

I think one of the things that people really worry about when they hear the words digital identity, is that there's going to be a lot of trackable, traceable information, so that an institution or an organization, maybe even the government, knows everywhere I've been, but that's not necessarily the case. Somebody somewhere, has got a copy of my passport, a copy of my address, and a utility bill, etc, etc. This is all over the place in the physical world, but because we don't see it, and we don't worry about it, we're not necessarily that aware. These sorts of systems, like verifiable credentials, are privacy protecting, so they're trying to circumvent that kind of data leakage, or that idea that I have lots of personal information flying around in the world that I'm not in control of.

In the book, you also explore what we might think of as the more philosophical side of identity, that as we start to spend more and more time online, we start to perform different aspects of our identities online, which I think we're certainly already starting to do. How do you think that might affect our sense of personal identity as we do this more and more?

I try and look to the future and think about, well, how will this be in the future when we have virtual reality? Will this just exacerbate where we have multiple personalities or identities that we want to express in many, many different virtual circumstances? Or will we have different avatars that we can send off to various meetings and actually end up being in three or four different meetings all at once with our three or four different avatars? So all of these possible scenarios are yet to be seen. But we can have a think about whether we think what is happening on social media will apply in virtual reality, too.

I think, I'm hoping actually, that virtual reality will quell some of the disagreement and some of the aggression that we see, certainly on some social platforms, and I'm thinking about Twitter, obviously, in particular, because as Marshall McLuhan said, "violence is a quest for identity."So when we see people being really quite aggressive and fairly obnoxious, sometimes on a social media platform, it's really a quest for identity. They're trying to overcompensate, trying to communicate themselves in an environment where we don't really have the tools to fully represent ourselves. It's just a few characters. It's just a bit of text and a strange profile picture.

In virtual reality we'll probably have haptics [touch-based functionality].We'll have a much greater sense of awareness. We'll be in a 3D, more absorbing, engaging, immersive environment. So in a sense, we'll have a much more rounded, complex, richer identity, and one hopes because of that, we won't need to overcompensate and fight for the idea of our own personal identity in these spaces.

Do you think this is going to start to become a political issue? I'm thinking of the example of the Sidewalk Labs Smart City pilot project that was being considered for a while in my hometown of Toronto. There was a lot of pushback from activists and citizens, challenging, where's the data going? Do you think we're going to start to see more politicized conversations about things like what's being done with our data, what's being done with our identity?

I really think we are, especially with the emergence of [a decentralized,blockchain-based]Web3, which is very different to a Google, Facebook, Web 2.0 world where data is all centralized and owned by those platforms, and harvested for their own commercial gain, versus a world of Web3, where I control my own data to a certain extent.

As Web3 becomes much more of a challenger, I think exactly that will happen. There will be a much more politicized conversation, because people will become aware that there is actually an alternative system. I don't think people have really considered there is much of an alternative system until now, because we've all got very used to the convenience and the frictionlessness of these sorts of services that we use as utilities day in, day out now. I think it's going to challenge what we've become used to and what we think of as the status quo.

Written by McKenna Hadley-Burke. Produced by Nora Young and Michelle Parise.Q&A has been condensed for length and clarity. To hear the full conversation with Tracey Follows, press the play button at the top of the page.

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In the future, will you own your digital self? This futurist thinks so - CBC.ca

An Exhibition Unearths Rare Production Drawings from the Futuristic Neo Tokyo of the Anime Classic ‘Akira’ – Colossal

AnimationHistoryIllustration #anime#architecture#drawing#film#science fiction

Akira, cut #1, Final production background detail, Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 93 x 53 centimeters. All photos from AKIRA (Movie), based on the graphic novel AKIRA by Katsuhiro Otomo. First published by Young Magazine, Kodansha Ltd. MASH ROOM / AKIRA COMMITTEE, shared with permission

Katsuhiro Otomos 1988 sci-fi classic Akira has had an unparalleled influence on anime and film, and an exhibition at the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin showcases the original drawings that brought its futuristic cyberpunk setting to life. Akira The Architecture of Neo Tokyo features 59 production backdrops, layouts, concepts, and image boards, many of which have never been shown publicly. The collection includes now-iconic works by art director Toshiharu Mizutani and collaborators Katsufumi Hariu, Norihiro Hiraki, Shinji Kimura, Satoshi Kuroda, Hiromasa Ogura, Hiroshi no, Hajime Soga, Tsutomu Uchida, and Takashi Watabe.

Otomo first released the dystopian story as a manga series in 1982 before turning it into the highly influential action film a few years later. The narrative follows characters Shtar Kaneda, the telekinetic Tetsuo Shim, and their friends, who navigate the imagined Japanese metropolis of Neo Tokyo with its neon streetlights, crumbling infrastructure, and unrelenting post-apocalyptic vibe.

Ahead of the exhibition, curator Stefan Riekeles also released the book Anime Architecture: Imagined Worlds and Endless Megacities. The volume contains fantastic scenes from various animated classics including Ghost in the Shell and Metropolis. You can see Akira The Architecture of Neo Tokyo through September 4, and according to Its Nice That, the show might travel to London next.

Akira, pattern no. 182, final production background, Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 55 x 42 centimeters

Akira, pattern no. 2211, final production background, Hiroshi Ohno, poster color on paper, 50 x 36 centimeters

Akira, pattern no. 2204, picture board, Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 25 x 35 centimeters

Akira, pattern no. 700, final production background Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 26 x 37 centimeters

Akira, pattern no. 214, final production background, Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 25.5 x 37 centimeters

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An Exhibition Unearths Rare Production Drawings from the Futuristic Neo Tokyo of the Anime Classic 'Akira' - Colossal

Heres what Teslas futuristic diner with drive-in theater and Supercharger could look like – Electrek

Teslas futuristic diner with drive-in theater and Supercharger station is finally becoming a reality, and we get a look at what could look like thanks to renders based on the construction plans.

This project has been in the work for a long time.

In 2018,Elon Musk said that Tesla plans to openan old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in Los Angeles. It was yet another, Is he joking? kind of Elon Musk idea, but he apparently wasnt kidding.

A few months later,Tesla actually applied for building permits for a restaurant and Supercharger station at a location in Santa Monica. However, the project has since stalled, apparently due to local regulations. Nevertheless, Tesla still moved forward with a Supercharger at the location, but it had to move the diner project to Hollywood earlier this year.

Last month, Tesla filed the construction plans with the city giving us the first look at what the automaker intends to build.

We learned from the plans that it will be a semi-circular two-story diner with 29 Supercharger stalls and two movie theater screens, but everything is from architectural plans.

Ed Howard, an expert in architectural models, built renders based on those plans to give us a better idea of what the Tesla diner could look like:

Obviously he took some liberties for things that werent in the plans, like the name of the diner, Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

But for the most part, thats what the building and layout should look like:

It looks like the right mix of retro-looking, which was the original plan, and a more futuristic design, which was the new plan once it got moved to Hollywood. The renders are accurate down to the bamboo walls that are going to separate the Tesla diners lot from the rest of the block.

We dont have a solid timeline on when Tesla plans to open the diner, and it is going to be dependent on permit approvals, but things are moving forward.

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Heres what Teslas futuristic diner with drive-in theater and Supercharger could look like - Electrek

Food supply chains are in crisis. Could these futuristic farms fix that? – Global News

The first time Cesar Cappa stepped foot on the farm, he thought he was on another planet.

He grew up on a small family farm in Argentina. But this facility, located just outside of Guelph, Ont., was unlike anything he had ever seen.

I thought I was on Mars. Its incredible, he says. You dont realize the magnitude of something like this, a project like this, until you see it with your own eyes.

Towers of large metal trays, full of leafy greens, are stacked on top of each other in a large warehouse bathed in a bright fuchsia light. Theres an earthy scent in the air and the room is ever so slightly humid.

Indeed, if humans were to inhabit the moon or Mars someday, GoodLeaf Farms facility is a blueprint of how produce could be grown. The 45,000-square-foot facility is the largest vertical farm in Canada. GoodLeaf grows baby lettuce, spinach, arugula and an assortment of microgreens using the latest agricultural technology.

If greenhouses are the suburbs of farming, then vertical farms are the condos. By stacking layers of crops, growers can produce a great deal of food even where real estate is scarce and the weather isnt agreeable. LED lights replace the sun and the plants receive nutrients through recycled water rather than soil.

Every aspect of this environment is controlled and optimized for growth, from the hue of the lights to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. The result is astounding: higher crop yields that require less space and 95 per cent less water than a traditional farm. And theres no need for pesticides, herbicides or fungicides.

Cappa is the head grower at GoodLeaf Farms. He studies how the crops interact with their manufactured environment in order to make the system more efficient. While giving me a tour of the facility, Cappa says its technically possible to grow a variety of produce in these conditions. But so far, leafy greens are what the company has perfected and whats profitable. This single facility provides roughly 70,000 pounds of leafy greens to grocery stores across southern Ontario each month.

I really think were making a difference in terms of food security for Canada, Cappa says. This is pretty much the only way to grow produce year-round.

Canada currently imports most of its leafy greens from California. But labour shortages and an unprecedented drought have led to supply chain disruptions over the last two years, exposing how precarious it is to rely exclusively on produce from abroad.

By the time we get lettuce in Vancouver, its already travelled for eight days and its shelf life is really only about 10 days, says Lenore Newman, the director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley.

So when it comes into the distributor, they usually throw away a third to 40 per cent of what they bought. And when you take whats left home, youve only got a couple of days to make a salad, max.

More than $18 billion of food is wasted each year in Canada at this stage of the food cycle. That food ends up in landfill, where it releases tonnes of methane gas a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful at trapping heat in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide as it decomposes.

So you take a look at all of those elements and you say, is there an alternative? Is there a better way? says Barry Murchie, the CEO of GoodLeaf Farms. This is an example of how technology and agriculture have merged to create an alternative that is really better in every element.

Vertical farms have become a solution to many of the issues plaguing traditional outdoor farming. They are impervious to the effects of climate change, occupy less land, use fewer resources, grow produce faster, and cut out long-haul transportation and fertilization emissions. These farms are also scalable, meaning they can be as big or small as the community they serve.

Commercial vertical farms have started popping up near many of Canadas major cities. In Quebec, producers are growing strawberries and mushrooms indoors. In B.C., urban vertical farms have focused on herbs and microgreens. GoodLeaf is expanding, too two new facilities are underway in Montreal and Calgary.

With all of the benefits attached to vertical farming and really no downside, its only going to continue to get bigger and expand, says Murchie. His goal is to build a national network of vertical farms across Canada.

This technology is also being used in rural and remote areas where fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive or unavailable.

In 2016, Opaskwayak Cree First Nation in northern Manitoba began operations at their vertical farm. The facility, which was made possible through partnerships with the federal government and the University of Manitoba, provides fresh vegetables to its 6,420 members, year-round.

With all these benefits, you might wonder why we dont just grow everything this way. There is a catch: these farms require a lot of electricity. How sustainable these farms are depends, in part, on where that power comes from.

GoodLeaf sources its energy through the Ontario power grid, which uses a mix of natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectricity, wind and solar. The company estimates its carbon footprint is half that of a traditional farm. Its Guelph facility, though, does use peat as its substrate, which is a natural carbon sponge many people want left in the ground. It is composted and upcycled into landscaping material after use.

As LED technology improves and brings down energy costs, Newman says she anticipates more farmers moving their crops indoors, especially as they contend with the more severe weather to come.

During the heat dome (in 2021), it was 39 degrees on my front porch in Vancouver and I was getting reports of fruit actually cooking on the vine, Newman says. We had massive crop loss due to that and then, we had flooding. Were really seeing people say, well, what can we do?

With the worlds population expected to climb to 10 billion by 2050, we will need to produce more food while confronting climate change. The United Nations estimates that food production will need to increase by 70 per cent to meet increasing food demand.

Nearly 40 per cent of the earths land surface is already used for agriculture. Of that, about one-third is cropland, while the remaining two-thirds is used for grazing livestock.

The animal protein sector is one of the urgent issues facing humanity, says Newman. We know demand for protein is rising rapidly. We cant scale animal agriculture to make it any bigger.

The greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the cultivation of animals for food, as well as livestock feed, are twice that of plant-based food production, according to a 2021 study. Beef and cow milk production are the worst culprits, contributing 25 per cent and 10 per cent of emissions, respectively.

As the granddaughter of proud dairy farmers, even this writer found that statistic a hard pill to swallow.

I grew up drinking a glass of milk at breakfast and dinner something my mother still enjoys. I revere my grandparents for their hard work; my grandfather and grandmother would go up to the barn at 5:00 each morning to milk the cows, returning after 8:00 most evenings.

Farming is in my blood, but its difficult to square this part of my identity with my environmental bent and affinity for animals. Many people experience a similar quandary; almost half of Canadians are concerned about the environmental impacts of animal consumption, according to a recent survey, but the vast majority of Canadians continue to eat meat. (In recent years, though, there has been more of a general effort to reduce meat consumption.)

Theres a name for this cognitive dissonance: the meat paradox. Author Rob Percival, who wrote a book by the same name, says our societys relationship with the animals we consume is fundamentally broken.

The split between what we say we believe and the values we hold and what we do is becoming increasingly apparent, Percival says. Were very detached from what goes on and wrapped up in all these psychological strategies of evasion and denial.

This tension is becoming more pronounced, he argues, due to the worsening climate crisis and the growing availability of plant-based alternatives that make a vegetarian or vegan diet more attainable.

But for those who simply dont want to give up meat, scientists are working hard on an ethical and sustainable alternative. In highly secretive labs across the Bay Area in the U.S., various biotech companies are growing poultry, beef, seafood and dairy products from cells.

One such company is Wildtype, a cell-based seafood company producing a very convincing replacement for wild Pacific salmon.

In its San Francisco-based facility, microscopic salmon cells harvested from a fish are grown into a perfectly rectangular sushi-grade filet ready for consumption. Wildtype co-founder Arye Elfenbein first worked with stem cells as a cardiologist. Then on a visit to Australia, where he grew up, he watched as cattle grazed where a lush rainforest once was and got to thinking: Do we need animals to have meat? Could we just create what we consume just outside of the animal?

The question propelled him and his business partner, Justin Kolbeck, into the emerging field of cellular agriculture. The pair decided to focus on salmon because it is the most consumed finfish in the U.S., and Elfenbein says, it was also a way for them to give back to their hometown fish.

Wild salmon stocks along the West Coast have been struggling for decades due to overfishing and the destruction of natural habitats. Elfenbein hopes that Wildtype salmon will take some pressure off wild fisheries and help them replenish.

There are other benefits too. Wildtype salmon is free of mercury, microplastics and other contaminants commonly found in seafood and it takes only four to six weeks to grow a filet. In comparison, farmed salmon takes about three years to go from egg to harvest.

There have just been more and more of these realizations that our current method of production is not just unsustainable, but also deleterious for our environment and also for our own personal health, says Elfenbein.

The biggest hurdle for Wildtype and other cellular agriculture companies now is scaling up production to a commercial level. For that, cells need to be grown in bioreactors large brewery-style tanks where they can multiply at high densities and volumes. In order to mimic the shape of a filet you might find at a fish market, Wildtype uses a rectangular scaffold that the cells grow into.

Its a complex and costly process, but Wildtype is forging ahead, building a larger production facility as it awaits regulatory approval, which could come as soon as this year in the U.S.

Weve made an enormous amount of progress in terms of coming down that cost curve, says Elfenbein. Our mission is one of greater accessibility. Thats not one that we can reach if we are just selling expensive salmon.

When Wildtype was in the prototype stage, a small serving of sushi-grade salmon cost thousands of dollars to produce, but today, the company says it only costs US$25 to make two pieces of salmon nigiri.

Lab-grown protein, or cultured meat, is still a very new technology. It was just in 2013 that the world was first introduced to the first lab-grown burger to much fanfare. It cost US$330,000 to make and was eaten in a matter of minutes.

In the nine years since, the industry has made leaps and bounds forward, but it is still missing what David Kaplan calls a strong scientific foundation.

Kaplan is a professor at Tufts University and one of the leading researchers into cellular agriculture. At his lab in Boston, he is working to answer the many questions regulators have, including: What is the best nutrient-rich medium to feed the cells? How nutritious is cultured meat compared with traditional meat? How do you produce these products at scale in a cost-effective and sustainable way?

These unanswered questions havent scared off investors, though. Cultured meat and seafood companies secured US$1.4 billion in investments in 2021 the most capital raised in any single year in the industrys history, according to The Good Food Institute, a non-profit that supports and studies alternative protein creation.

There are now dozens of cellular agriculture companies worldwide producing animal products without the animals.

Any new technology takes roughly 20 years to become acceptable. So were embryonic, Kaplan says. However, that does not mean the field cant move fast and become more real in the next few years. It takes a lot of effort by a lot of folks and youre seeing that.

Singapore became the first country in the world to approve the sale of cultured meat at the end of 2020. San Francisco-based Eat Justs lab-grown chicken nuggets are now being sold in restaurants across the region.

In the U.S., you can already buy milk and other dairy products such as ice cream and cream cheese that were made without any cows. Using precision fermentation, a process similar to brewing beer, Perfect Day creates whey protein that is molecularly identical to cow whey protein. It has the taste and texture of traditional dairy, but is naturally free of lactose, hormones and antibiotics and carries a significantly reduced environmental footprint.

We are focused on offering a sustainable alternative to factory farming, says Ravi Jhala, the head of global commercial operations at Perfect Day.

Jhala envisions a world where cow-less whey products replace the supply of dairy milk provided by these large industrial farms, while allowing small family farms to thrive.

These technologies work in tandem with that high-end (product), says Newman. Seventy per cent of dairy in the U.S. goes into powdered milk thats used in food products. We can replace that without even noticing and we can actually make food slightly cheaper, better for us, and we can eliminate a giant chunk of industrial dairy.

Startups in Canada are developing these innovative products too. Toronto-based Cell Ag Tech is working on a cultured snapper. Montreal-based Opalia is creating a cell-based milk. And Edmonton-based Future Fields is selling the liquid medium used to grow the cells.

With the exception of a few skeptics, onlookers in the agri-food sector are optimistic that cellular agriculture is the meat of the future. Studies have already shown that climate-conscious younger people will be resoundingly open to eating cultured protein. And with the price of meat anticipated to continue to rise, lab-grown meat may someday become the cheaper option. Thats when things will get interesting, Newman says.

One hundred and fifty years ago, we ate a lot of wild game. Back then, I might have gone out to get a pigeon pie. What we eat changes, she says.

I quite confidently predict that in 100 years therell be very little animal agriculture on earth. Well look back at industrial slaughter and well say, Wow, its amazing we did that. And the labour conditions were horrible, the animal conditions were terrible. And, wow, we have a way better product.

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Food supply chains are in crisis. Could these futuristic farms fix that? - Global News

Priyanka Chopras Robert Wun number oscillates between intriguing realms of futurism and fashion – VOGUE India

Jun 09, 2022 | 13:40:22 IST Chopra takes forward her Bulgari ambassadorship in a hard-to-miss Robert Wun number

Its been a hot minute since the Quanticostar donned an orange sequin Rasario gown for Bulgaris Jewelery Gala in Paris. While Chopras fascination with shimmer and sequins is the thing of dreams, it was outlived by another of her extravagant, bold looks that she has been opting for lately. Robert Wun, known for his inventive, cutting-edge designs that celebrate the female form, unveiled an ethereal contrast gown where fashion collided with futurism. Be it the masterful juggling of shapes and forms, or the razor-sharp contrast of black and white the contrast dove gown taking over the internet. While on one hand she left fashion enthusiasts stunned with this sartorial statement outfit, on the other hand, Instagram was flooded with a thread of memes relating the gowns resemblance to that of pencil shavings. Either way, the Priyanka ChoprasRobert Wun gown was undoubtedly a conversational piece to begin with. Scroll down to know the details of her look.

Chopra, in collaboration with her long term stylist Law Roach, donned Robert Wuns statement floor-grazing number featuring asymmetrical, dramatic white ruffles layered over a black fitted bodycon dress. The contrasting details blends flawlessly with the softness of the pleated elements, enhancing Chopras hourglass shape. Similar to her previous Rasario number, Chopra veered to her usual plunging neckline. With a sensuous tie-up detail at the back, the halter-neck gown was styled with an emerald embellished Bulgari necklace and earrings.

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Priyanka Chopras Robert Wun number oscillates between intriguing realms of futurism and fashion - VOGUE India

Scientists Intrigued by Treatment That Put Every Single Patient’s Cancer Into Remission – Futurism

Doctors working on an experimental cancer treatment were heartened when every single patient in a small trial went into remission, their cancer becoming undetectable.

Published in theNew England Journal of Medicine, the paper that resulted from the trial details how all 12 patients who were given the experimental rectal cancer treatment went into remission without having chemotherapy.

"I believe," Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center scientist Luis Diaz Jr told the New York Times, "this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer."

As an MSK press release about the study describes, study participants were treated to an incredible surprise when, after undergoing six months of the experimental immunotherapy treatment, they learned from their doctors that they were in remission.

The first patient, named Sascha, was preparing to travel to New York to have radiation therapy when she got the call from her oncologist, Andrea Cercek, who said the patient was "stunned and ecstatic" at the news.

"Its incredibly rewarding," Cercek said in the press release, "to get these happy tears and happy emails from the patients in this study who finish treatment and realize, 'Oh my God, I get to keep all my normal body functions that I feared I might lose to radiation or surgery.'"

The MSK doctors behind the study wanted to investigate whether immunotherapy alone could treat cancer, but they never expected it to work this well and especially could not have foreseen that none of the 12 people in the initial trial had adverse reactions to the drug, known as dostarlimab.

Dostarlimab is a checkpoint inhibitor, which "releases the brake on an immune cell, freeing it to recognize and attack cancer cells,"according to the team.

The finding is intriguing, but unlikely to represent a miracle cure. As the NYT cautioned, an average one in five people who take drugs like dostarlimab have an allergic reaction, and as many as 3 to 5 percent have severe reactions that include muscle weakness and trouble chewing and swallowing.

Dr. Alan Venook, a University of California, San Francisco colorectal cancer specialist who wasn't involved in the study, told the NYT that the lack of side effects means that "either they did not treat enough patients or, somehow, these cancers are just plain different."

Venook is not alone in his caution about the results. The trial was small, with only 12 participants, and has yet to be replicated.

In an editorial published in theNew England Journal of Medicine in tandem with the initial study, Dr. Hanna Sanoff, a gastrointestinal medical oncologist at the University of North Carolina who was also not involved in the study, wrote that the "small but compelling" trial needs more time before doctors can fully understand the results.

"Very little is known," Sanoff wrote, "about the duration of time needed to find out whether a clinical complete response to dostarlimab equates to cure."

All the same, these unprecedented results are clearly pretty exciting for doctors and patients alike.

READ MORE:Rectal Cancer Disappears After Experimental Use of Immunotherapy [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center]

More immunotherapy:Scientists Complete First Human Test of Vaccine Against Brain Cancer

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Scientists Intrigued by Treatment That Put Every Single Patient's Cancer Into Remission - Futurism

What every museum reveals about past, present and future – ArtsHub

Climate change. Social inequity. Global pandemics. These subjects are just as relevant to the present as they are to past and future, and for Museum of Discovery (MOD.) Director Kristin Alford, museums should offer free-ranging dialogue on all of it.

Theres a fascinating discussion to be had here about theories of time, Alford told ArtsHub from her base at the University of South Australias MOD. ahead of her keynote address at the 2022 Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA) conference HEAR.US.NOW.

If you look at neuroscience, the part of our brain thats responsible for imagining the future is the same part that holds memory, she continued.

So, I think theres something important there in terms of how we imagine and interpret stories of the past, present and future its important to acknowledge those similarities, she said.

Alford admitted that as a museum director and futurist she is highly attuned to whats coming next, but she also sees how closely her forecasting aligns with historians journeys through the past.

Futurists always talk about there being multiple futures, and that the future is uncharted and uncertain, Alford explained. But when you speak to historians, they talk very similarly about the past.

Historians talk about how there being many interpretations of the past, and how the past is up for imagining and reimagining.

So, thinking broadly about how people engage with museums, they are coming into spaces where they are expecting to hear stories of place and of people and sense-making out of that, and that applies just as much to the past as it does to present and future, she said.

A lot of Alfords work champions futures literacy a term coined by UNESCO as part of their advocacy for museums and learning worldwide.

UNESCO describes futures literacy as the ability to better understand the role of the future in what we see and do and our capacity to empower our imaginations to prepare, recover and invent in response to changes brought on in the 21st century.

Alford said that in her work at MOD. and as a consultant to other museums, she routinely applies these big-picture ideas to local contexts.

When I think of futures literacy its about the need for our communities to be thinking about the future, and to ensure they have the capabilities to imagine some alternatives futures, and then put some of that imagination [about what the future will look like] into action, she said.

Read: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallerys new Director is a scientist who loves art

At MOD. Alfords focus is on helping young people, especially those considering tertiary study and careers in STEM, to navigate the future.

We want to present plausible representations of what the future might entail, so we can help them work through some of those uncertainties, she said.

In terms of what other museums can do to filter futures literacy into more of their existing programs, Alford advised that it could be as simple as using their collections to tell stories that can be extended into the future.

Or, they might think about what future questions might be prompted by the collection their featuring, she said.

Alford sees museums as facilitators of curiosity as much as they are experts in their fields, and said this formidable reputation is not something thats likely to be threatened by any new curatorial directions.

Letting people in to discussions around future possibilities, and the ethics around those possibilities is something museums are well placed to do as high trust institutions, Alford said.

Yes, there needs to be that body of expertise and evidence that is held by the institution, she continued. But there are also ways for the museum to invite other ways of knowing into the discussion of a topic.

Alford said this open-mindedness to other knowledge systems is something often seen in the actions of highly capable leaders.

Good leaders will have a good body of expertise and they will know what they are talking about, but theyll also open opportunities for other people to share their lived experiences and share other perspectives, and theyll allow paths of mutual discovery to open, to find out things we dont know, she remarked.

So, good leadership is about being prepared to reconsider and reframe and re-tell. And thats absolutely attributable to the changing nature of the expertise of museums in their being less fixed and authoritative, and being more about capable leadership.

Kristin Alfords keynote address at the 2022 AMaGA conference takes place on Tuesday 14 June, Perth. Browse the conference program.

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What every museum reveals about past, present and future - ArtsHub

Brew a Better Cup With These Coffee Accessories – Futurism

For millions of people, coffee is an essential part of the day. Whether youre into instant coffee or have a barista-style machine in your house, your coffee is only really as good as the tools you use to make it. If youre looking to level up your coffee game, or just want to change up your routine, these accessories can jump start your morning jolt.

Key Selling Point: This medium-roast, fair-trade blend is certified to be USDA Organic.

You cant get a good cup of coffee without, well, good coffee. This blend from Bean & Bean which was started by a mother-daughter duo uses beans from Latin America, Africa, and Asia to deliver a flavor rich with roasted nuts, cedar, and herbs. We also like that the packaging is compostable and recyclable.

Key Selling Point: This small kettle is attractive, lightweight, and award-winning.

This electric kettle from BALMUDA makes two to three cups of coffee and weighs around two pounds. Its spout allows you to easily control the pour, and it takes up little real estate in the kitchen. It's available in black and white models.

Key Selling Point: These reusable pods help you cut down on waste. Its well-documented that single-use coffee pods are terrible for the environment. I definitely sympathize with pod-lovers its just so much easier to pop one in a machine, press a button, and get your favorite cup in seconds. These reusable pods give you the best of both worlds add your favorite blend to them and simply clean them after every use for guilt-free podding.

Key Selling Point: Sweeten your tea or coffee in a healthier way with honey instead of sugar.

Tea lovers, this ones for you. Honey is a great alternative to sugar, and its usually the healthier option. The Coffee Blossom Honey from Dona is sourced from a Guatemalan farm, using honey from the bees that pollinate the farms coffee trees.

Key Selling Point: No need to brew a cup just grab the can in the morning and head out the door.

Taika uses Guittard cocoa and macadamia milk to deliver a rich, creamy mocha latte. We like that this pre-made beverage saves you time in the morning you can either pour it into a mug or drink it straight. Its low-calorie but high in caffeine. Taika also offers a matcha latte, black coffee, oat milk latte, and macadamia latte.

If youre keen on caffeine, theres no need to opt for flat instant coffee. If you want a great mug first thing in the morning or just want to broaden your horizons, look into a great blend or tasty additives to keep yourself from hitting snooze.

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Brew a Better Cup With These Coffee Accessories - Futurism

We Just Got the First Peek at NASA’s Artemis Moon Landing Suits – Futurism

In a press frenzy on Wednesday, NASA revealed thatAxiom Space and Collins Aerospace will provide new-and-improved and very expensive spacesuits for the upcoming Artemis Moon landings.

This information is a pretty big deal,which is why observers felt a little disappointed when neither NASA nor the contractors produced any actual imagery of the fits.

Since the announcement, though, we got a sneak peek at the Collinssuits. Honestly? Kinda fire.

The suit, shown above, and the below rendering do appear to be more streamlined than the marshmallow-esque uniforms of astronauts past. Which checks out, given that Collins Aerospace's Dan Burbank a senior technical fellow at the company, not to mention former NASA astronaut said during a press conference that they're going for a sportier, outdoorsy vibe. Moon hike, anyone?

NASA has also made clear that the ensembles in development must be able to fit a variety of body types, as the Artemis III landing, planned for 2025, will be a major moment for diversity in space travel.

"When we get to the Moon, we will have our first person of color and our first woman that will be wearers and users of these suits in space,"said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston, during the press conference.

Though not much technical detail has been disclosed, there's clearly much to be excited about.

At the end of the day, visiting Earth's OG satellite is cool but it's even better if you look fresh doing it.

More on spacesuits: Scientists Are Trying to Make Spacesuit Underwear Less Putrid

Originally posted here:

We Just Got the First Peek at NASA's Artemis Moon Landing Suits - Futurism

The stench of eugenics at the White House – WSWS

In remarks reminiscent of the darkest days of the eugenics movement, Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Friday that the fact that COVID-19 predominantly kills people who are unwell to begin with is encouraging news.

As the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 reached a record high, the CDC director was asked in an interview on ABCs Good Morning America about those encouraging headlines that were talking about this morning.

Walensky replied:

The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who are unwell to begin with, and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.

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As a factual matter, the claim that COVID-19 in general, and the Omicron variant in particular, is only affecting the elderly and ill is false. The spread of the new variant has driven a record surge in hospitalizations of young people, and in particular children and infants. The long-term consequences for those who survive and suffer the consequences of Long COVID is still little understood.

However, the suggestion that the overwhelming number of deaths occur among the elderly and those with preexisting conditions (comorbidities) is encouraging news is shocking in its implications.

Walenskys comments were broadly condemned by doctors, scientists and advocates for the disabled as an embrace of eugenics by the Biden administration.

This is eugenicist, lawyer and disability activist Matthew Cortland, who is chronically ill, wrote on Twitter. The problem is that the people running @CDCgov, including @CDCDirector, **fundamentally believe** its encouraging if disabled and chronically ill people die. And all of their decisions are informed by, and enact, that belief.

None of this is hyperbole. Walenskys comments express the turn on the part of the White House and dominant sections of the US political establishment toward an open embrace of the view that the lives of the chronically ill, the disabled, and the elderly are fundamentally valueless.

The leading advocate of this policy is Ezekiel Emanuel, the former Obama administration official and current Biden COVID task force adviser, who is now being promoted in a full court press in the US print and broadcast media.

On Wednesday, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a set of articles by Emanuel and other former Biden health advisors arguing for making COVID-19 the new normal and calling on states to retire the reporting of COVID-19 deaths. These articles were treated as gospel in the US media, with fawning front-page write-ups in the New York Times and Washington Post.

But this campaign went into overdrive on Sunday, with Emanuel serving as the unstated surrogate for the White House on NBCs Meet the Press. Emanuels call for a new normal was simultaneously hailed by the lead editorial in the Washington Post, which called it a sensible strategy for living with covid, presented by experts.

In reality, the call by Emanuel and his co-authors is nothing more than a recapitulation of the pseudo-scientific Great Barrington Declaration, stripped of the myth that herd immunity would lead to the end of the pandemic. It is a plan for COVID-19 in perpetuity, with wave after wave, variant after variant, taking countless lives each year.

Neither Meet the Press nor the Washington Post editorial mentioned that Emanuel is a leading advocate of reducing life expectancy and slashing the provision of medical care for the elderly and chronically ill.

Emanuel, in the words of University of South Carolina philosophy professor Jennifer A. Frey, thinks of disabled and elderly people as useless and ineffectual; when we run the cost/benefit analysis they cost more than they are worth. Emanuel believes that life after 75 [is] not worth living and old people a drain on our resources, she concluded.

Emanuel has expressed his eugenicist ideas time and time again, noted journalist and disability researcher Laura Dorwart.

Emanuels basic precept is that the fundamental determinant of medical care must not be the individuals rights to decency and dignity, but rather a cost-benefit analysis driven by the costs to society of extending the lives of the ill and the elderly.

Emanuel claimsrightlythat the medical profession is averse to such cost-benefit analysis. But this is because the application of such an analysis to medicine and public health is informed by the legacy of eugenics and the German Nazi Partys murder of tens of thousands of people with chronic illnesses whom the Nazis branded unfit to live.

In the bioethics textbook From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, professors Allen Buchman, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler note the legacy of cost-benefit analysis in the American eugenics movement.

They cite the Eugenics Catechism of the American Eugenics Society of 1926, which argues, It has been estimated that the State of New York, up to 1916, spent over $2,000,000 on the descendants of one familythe Jukesclaimed to be genetically deficient. How much would it have cost to sterilize the original Jukes pair? asked the society: Less than $150.

The book continues, Similar examples abounded in the arithmetic books of German schoolchildren in the 1930s, extending to the cost of keeping institutionalized, handicapped people alive; not long afterward, tens of thousands lost their lives.

In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of mercy death code-named Operation T4, writes the US Holocaust Museum. The killings secretly continued until the wars end, resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities.

Today, hundreds of thousands of elderly and chronically ill people are dying, not in gas chambers, but gasping for air in Americas hospitals. Seventy-five percent of those who have died from COVID-19 have been above the retirement age of 65, and 93 percent have been over the age of 50. In 2020, a year in which 373,000 Americans died from COVID-19, US life expectancy at birth fell by 1.8 years, from 78.8 years to 77.0, according to federal mortality data released last month.

But this reality is not, as Walensky says, encouraging, but a horrifying source of guilt and shame, a condemnation of an utterly inhuman society driven by the needs of enriching the few at the expense of the many.

Scientists and doctors have responded to Walenskys remarks with the demand that she resign. Their anger is justified. But the fact is that Walensky was speaking not only for herself, not only for the Biden administration, but for the entire capitalist class.

For years, American think tanks and military strategists have systematically advocated reducing the life expectancy of American workers. The pandemic has created the means by which this policy could be implemented through seeming inaction and incompetence.

It is, in fact, a deliberate policy, driven by the diseased reliance of all aspects of American capitalism on the perpetual rise in the markets, fueled by the ever-greater immiseration and impoverishment of the working class. Having bled much of the working class dry, the capitalist oligarchy looks to the elderly and the disabled as a source of untapped value.

If they have their way, the cutting of outlays on Social Security and Medicare is to be accomplished not by politicians touching the third rail of American politics, but by allowing the pandemic to continue in perpetuity.

This filthy policy is accompanied by an equally filthy lie: That COVID-19 cannot be stopped. China has successfully executed a Zero COVID policy, with just 5,000 deaths in a country of 1.4 billion. If a similar policy had been carried out in the United States at the start of the pandemic, over 850,000 people would still be alive.

This homicidal new normal demanded by the capitalist oligarchy is being challenged by a growing movement of the working class to resist mass infection and mass death. Teachers in Chicago voted last week to oppose the resumption of in-person instruction, and teachers in Chicago, New York and San Francisco have launched sickouts. They will be joined this week with a wave of walkouts by students in opposition to the Biden administrations homicidal drive to keep schools open no matter the costs in human lives.

The open turn to eugenics by the ruling class expresses a fundamental reality that is dawning on millions of people: Capitalism is incompatible with the social rights of the great mass of humanity. Securing those rights requires the struggle to end this social order and replace it with socialism.

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The stench of eugenics at the White House - WSWS

Raymond J. de Souza: The tragedy of eugenics and the babies not born – National Post

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A New York Times investigation found some non-invasive prenatal tests to be wrong up to 85 per cent of the time

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The New Years baby story is a news standard, an endearing report about the couple who planned a quiet New Years Eve at home but instead delivered a baby at 12:05 a.m. on January 1st. In smaller cities and towns, local merchants often provide gifts to the New Years baby.

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So it was a bit jarring to see The New York Times Jan. 1 feature about non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT). It was about babies who had never been born. An NYT investigation found the non-invasive tests to be wildly inaccurate wrong up to 85 per cent of the time which often leads to abortions. Its a tale of two doleful phenomena: the widespread return of eugenics and the financial corruption of medicine.

Eugenics was a respectable, even fashionable, cause in progressive circles in the 1920s and 1930s. When I studied economics at Cambridge, I came to learn that the giants of the departments history John Maynard Keynes most prominent among them advocated for eugenics.

Closer to home, Tommy Douglas voted the greatest Canadian of all time in 2004 wrote his masters thesis on The Problems of the Subnormal Family in 1933. He advocated medical licences prior to marriage to prevent those with intellectual disabilities from being permitted to breed.

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Eugenics was a respectable cause in the 1920s and 1930s

The Nazi medical horrors put eugenics in a bad odour for a few generations. As premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, Douglas declined to implement the policies that he had advocated years earlier.

In recent decades, eugenics has made a comeback in polite society due to two changes, one legal and one technological. Easy access to abortion and pre-natal testing for genetic abnormalities have made it possible for eugenics to be applied in utero .

Children with Down syndrome were the primary target, as the chromosomal anomaly is relatively easy to detect. Screening for Down syndrome has been very successful. In 2017, Iceland declared itself to be free of Down syndrome children, as nearly 100 per cent of them are now aborted after testing.

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In many countries, a majority of Down syndrome pregnancies are aborted. In the United States the abortion rate for Down syndrome is 67 per cent (1995-2011); in France its 77 per cent (2015); and Denmark, 98 per cent (2015).

In Canada , public health does not keep figures, but reports that despite the trend in delayed childbearing and advanced maternal age at delivery in the last several decades, rates of Down syndrome in Canada have not increased proportionately. This is due to increased use of prenatal diagnostic procedures followed by terminations of Down syndrome pregnancies.

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The NYT story looked at non-invasive prenatal testing for five other abnormalities and found startlingly high false positive rates, with 81 to 93 per cent of the tests giving wrong results.

Why would doctors prescribe tests for very rare conditions with sky-high false positive rates, when the likely consequence is catastrophic?

There is a financial incentive.

Its a little like running mammograms on kids, Mary Norton, an obstetrician and geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, told the NYT. The chance of breast cancer is so low, so why are you doing it? I think its purely a marketing thing.

Successful marketing at that.

Why would doctors prescribe these tests?

The NYT reported that one large test maker, Natera, performed more than 400,000 screenings for just one abnormality in 2020 the equivalent of testing roughly 10 per cent of pregnant women in America.

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Americas medical-industrial complex provides built-in incentives for excessive use of unreliable tests. In other countries financial incentives might be lesser, but the phenomenon remains. Where the medical system does not encourage NIPT, individual parents can seek the tests on their own. The eugenic purpose remains the same even if pursued and paid for differently.

The simplest prenatal test is for gender. Being male or female is not a disorder, but even that can be put to eugenic purposes. Its been more than 30 years since Amartya Sens landmark article on the 100 million missing women, missing largely due to sex-selected abortion and infanticide. Testing technology has only grown more widespread since.

Abortion for gender reasons is widely denounced, but is rarely done by mistake. Eugenic abortion for disabilities is not denounced. But when done by mistake the horror is all the more grave.

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Raymond J. de Souza: The tragedy of eugenics and the babies not born - National Post

Toppling the Monument to Silence: Racism and the Founding Fathers of Environmental Organizations – Non Profit News – Nonprofit Quarterly

The environmental field is no less steeped in white supremacy than any other field currently being held up for inspectionindeed, the very foundation of environmentalism is rooted in white supremacy, and the rampant racism and discrimination in the writing and actions of early environmental leaders are well documented.1 Yet, acknowledgment of the troubled racial history of environmental organizations is slow coming. Most environmental organizations prefer to ignore inconvenient aspects of their history, disregard disturbing revelations, and respond with deafening silence.

But the summer of 2020 was a watershed moment. It changed how some major environmental nonprofits deal with racism and their past. Amid the Black Lives Matter protests over the killing of George Floyd and other Black men and women, the presidents and chief executive officers of some prominent environmental organizations sheepishly acknowledged the troubling racist past of their institutions.2

Over summer and early fall of 2020, there was a sudden flurry of apologies from environmental organizations forced by internal battlesenergized by the overall societal eruptionto step up and acknowledge their full history, and exercise transparency vis--vis their current practices.

On June 19 (Juneteenth), 2020, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Bronx Zoo apologized for and acknowledged their bigoted actions and attitudes in the early 1900s toward non-whitesespecially African Americans, Native Americans and immigrants, including such reprehensible treatment as displaying a young Central African man, Mbye Otabenga, in a Bronx Zoo exhibit in 1904.3 WCS also apologized for their ties to eugenicists Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, both of whom espoused eugenics-based, pseudoscientific racism.4 Cristin Samper, president and CEO of the Society, wrote in a letter to staff, We deeply regret that many people and generations have been hurt by these actions.5

The Sierra Club followed suit, posting Pulling Down Our Monuments on its website on July 22.6 In the article, Michael Brunethe organizations executive directorwrote, As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy. Its time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Clubs early history.7

Brune acknowledged that The most monumental figure in the Sierra Clubs past is John Muir. And Muir was not immune to the racism peddled by many in the early conservation movement. He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes.8 He noted that Muirs words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.9 Brune also named other early members and leaders of the Sierra ClubJoseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan, for example, who were vocal advocates for white supremacy and its pseudo-scientific arm, eugenics.10 He discussed exclusionary practices that protected and maintained whiteness in the club: Membership could only be granted through sponsorship from existing members, some of whom screened out any applicants of color.11 And he admitted that, currently, some of the clubs members want the organization to stay in our lane and stop talking about issues of race, equity, and privilege.12

Later, A. Tianna Scozzaro, director of the Sierra Clubs Gender Equity and Environment Program, also wrote an article. In it, she argued that the history of eugenics has a deeply troubling relationship with the environmental movement. Race, population eugenics, and natural order were highly problematic features and values of the movementsand the Sierra Clubsbeginning.13

On July 31, Audubon Magazine published The Myth of John James Audubon, as part of an effort to chart a course toward racial equity.14 The author, Gregory Nobles, identified Audubon, from whom the National Audubon Society took its name, as a slaveholder.15 He noted that many people are unaware of this fact but that those who are aware tend to ignore and excuse the icon.16 Apologists claim that Audubon was a man of his timebut, as Nobles points out, not everyone owned slaves or favored slavery during Audubons lifetime; some opposed slavery vigorously.17 In a letter penned to his wife in 1834, a dismayed and frustrated Audubon complained that Britain had acted imprudently and precipitously in granting emancipation to West Indian slaves.18

On September 15, Save the Redwoods League (SRL), an organization with well-known eugenicists among its founders, also acknowledged its racist origins,19 with Sam Hodder, the organizations president and chief outdoors enthusiast, publishing Reckoning with the League Founders Eugenics Past.20 Hodder noted, As we elevate diversity, equity, and inclusion at the League, we must acknowledge our full history.21 He also stated, Our founders were leaders in the discriminatory and oppressive pseudoscience of eugenics in the early 20th centuryaround the very same time they dedicated themselves to protecting the redwood forest.22 Hodder also discussed the white supremacist and eugenicist ideas of Madison Grant, one of the Leagues cofounders.23

(Other SRL founders, Charles Goethe, for one, were also prominent eugenicists. Goethe wrote prolifically about Blacks, Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Jews in degrading terms.)24

Some organizations remain mum on the eugenics, white supremacy, racism, and discrimination in their history. The Boone and Crockett Club remains firmly tethered to its past, featuring, without acknowledgment or commentary, Theodore Roosevelt, Madison Grant, and Gifford Pinchotinfluential political figures, white supremacists, and eugenicistson its website.25(Other well-known eugenicists, such as Henry Fairfield Osborn, were also members of the Boone and Crockett Club.)26 And the American Bison Society, which numbered eugenicists and white supremacists like Madison Grant and Theodore Roosevelt among its founders and members, has also remained silent.27

The ethos of these founding clubs, leagues, and societies spilled over into early nineteenth century outdoor recreation and environmental organizations. As a result of the fields root culture, environmental advocates founded and organized institutions on exclusionary principles that resulted in cloistered, gendered, and racially homogenous organizations for the better part of two centuries.

Early on, only wealthy white males could join or participate in these institutions. At the end of the nineteenth century, rich white women pried open the doors to join the membership and leadership of environmental nonprofits. However, the participation of elite white women in environmental nonprofits did little or nothing to stem the flow of sexist, classist, racist, and eugenicist ideas that shaped the founding of some of the early environmental organizations.28

The white working class, who often worked as servants, guides, and porters, were barred from membership. By the early twentieth century, working-class whites objected to their lack of input into environmental affairs and the inequitable policies . . . [and] created their own outdoor organizations.29 These outdoor enthusiasts and environmentalists owned slaves and hired free people of color . . . [as] servants, guides, porters, cooks, and launderers.30 Though men and women of color began joining segregated outdoor clubs in the early 1900s, they were not allowed to participate fully in many environmental organizations until the latter part of the twentieth century.31

In 1981, historian Stephen Fox noted, Few questioned the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the environmental sector until the 1960s, when academics and activists pointed to the overwhelming whiteness of the environmental movement and its workforce.32 In the face of this criticism, environmental leaders argued that increasing the racial diversity of their staff, boards, and/or membership was incompatible with their environmental mission.

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The idea of enhancing racial diversity also caused conflict within some organizations. For example, although David Brower, the Sierra Clubs first executive director, declared in 1959 that membership was open to people of the four recognized colors, the matter was far from settled for some time after.33 Some Sierra Club members viewed Black members with skepticism, describing them as trying to push themselves into the club and not having any interest in the conservation goals of the club, and even that Blacks were trying to infiltrate.34 The question of their participation in the organization resulted in many complaints, screaming matches, reports of intimidation, and a proposal for a loyalty oath to the American Way of Life.35

The result? Japanese American George Shinno and his son Jon were admitted to the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club in the 1950s.36 And, although members who feared Blacks strategized to keep them out of the chapter in 1958, a Black schoolteacher, Elizabeth Porter, was admitted to the Angeles Chapter in 1959; the Angeles Chapter later admitted two other Black members, Mr. and Mrs. Kelsey, in 1959 or 1960.37

The debate over Black participation in the Sierra Club lasted into the 1970s.38 An attorney and former director of the club, Bestor Robinson, summed up the struggle by saying this is not an integration club; this is a conservation club.39Many club members shared Robinsons perspective that conservation was separate from social justice issues, that racial inclusion was a social justice or civil rights issue, and that it did not belong in the Sierra Club. Because club members did not see any connections between social justice and the environment, they did not believe that increasing racial diversity in the organization was an initiative the institution should undertake. Club members voted against resolutions to admit people of color into the organizations membership.40 In 1971, as it struggled to make connections between race and environment, the Sierra Club polled its members and asked if the club should concern itself with the conservation problems of such special groups as the urban poor and ethnic minorities. Forty percent of the members were opposed to the organization getting involved in such issues; only 15 percent were supportive of engaging in matters concerning people of color and economically disadvantaged people.41

Instead of building racially diverse organizations, environmental leaders, thinkers, and social critics searched for explanations to help justify the lack of diversity in environmental nonprofits. For example, Fox wrote in 1981 that Blacks scorned conservation as an elitist diversion from the more pressing tasks at hand.42 The idea that Blacks are averse to conservation and the environment is a popular and enduring misconception as well as a convenient excuse that is used to justify exclusion.

Given the above, it should come as no surprise that environmental nonprofits have had difficulty embracing and instituting diversity, equity, and inclusion in their mission and practices in the twenty-first century.

Retention of people of color in senior and executive positions is proving to be a challenge in a number of environmental organizations. Attention to the racist roots and practices of environmentalism over the past few years, however, is finally shining a spotlight on organizational leadership.

In June 2019, women employed at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) alleged that sexual harassment and wage discrimination were commonplace at the nonprofit, prompting the resignation of TNCs CEO Mark Tercek.43

Other diversity, equity, and inclusion issues were also a factor.44 (Employees of Conservation International had filed similar complaints back in 2018, as had a staff member of the National Wildlife Federation [NWF], who sued her former supervisor and NWF in 2010.)45

In May 2019, women birders, members, and staff at the National Audubon Society had also reported sexual harassment while birding or on the job.46 And, in November 2020, National Audubon Society staff claimed that organization leaders discriminated against employees and tried to intimidate them.47

In fall 2020, David Yarnold, then-CEO of the National Audubon Society, had published Revealing the Past to Create the Future in Audubon Magazine, in which he wrote, Over the last few months, weve committed

to making Audubon an antiracist institution.48 Yarnold noted, Audubons founding stories center on the groups of women who came together to end the slaughter of birds for their feathers (mostly for fancy hats), but we have glossed over the actions of the American icon whose name we bear, as well as the racist aspects of our organizations history.49

Yarnolds statement was written shortly after the departure of a top diversity and inclusion staff member, six months after the departure of the organizations diversity and inclusion vice president, due to a toxic environment of intimidation and coercion.50

Yarnold resigned, suddenly, in April 2021, amid widespread staff dissatisfaction regarding the organizations efforts to address diversity-related complaints.51Both Tercek and Yarnold had praised and vowed to support the Green 2.0 diversity and transparency campaign.52

***

These are clarion bells sounding the demise of white supremacy in environmentalism. We have entered a new era that goes beyond diversity, equity, and inclusion to justice and transformation. It is time to act to institute meaningful, deep-rooted change. Reckoning of the past and transparency moving forward is how we will identify and root out the systemic problems causing and perpetuating injustice.

Funding for this research was obtained from The JPB Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and The Nathan Cummings Foundation.

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Toppling the Monument to Silence: Racism and the Founding Fathers of Environmental Organizations - Non Profit News - Nonprofit Quarterly

Gal Gadot officially regrets the cursed Imagine video – i-D

When the coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns first took over the world nearly two years ago it birthed a multitude of oddities, from awkward enforced weekly Zoom quizzes to gifting health workers non-refundable clapping from our front doorsteps. But while the majority of us became sourdough bread specialists, the most deranged reactions came from celebrities, who took to social media to accidentally advocate for eugenics (Vanessa Hudgens) or cry about a delay to their album release (Dua Lipa). But the prize for the most cringe post of the early pandemic era belongs to, of course, the Gal Gadot-led Imagine video.

Spearheaded by the Wonder Woman actress and Bridesmaids Kristen Wiig and featuring a smorgasbord of stars Jamie Dornan, Natalie Portman, Ashley Benson, Kaia Gerber, Cara Delevingne, Zo Kravitz those benevolent millionaires each hoped to cheer the world with an awkwardly-sung line of the John Lennon song from the comfort of their Selling Sunset-style homes. Naturally, the video was slammed across social media; now, almost 2 years later, Gal has finally admitted that the video might have been a mistake.

Speaking to InStyle, after recently parodying the video during her acceptance speech at the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards, Gal said: I was calling Kristen [Wiig] and I was like, "Listen, I want to do this thing." The pandemic was in Europe and Israel before it came [to the US] in the same way. I was seeing where everything was headed. But [the video] was premature. It wasn't the right timing, and it wasn't the right thing. It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don't hit the bull's-eye, right?

In truth, looking back since Gal posted it on Instagram in March 2020, the cursed video has only aged worse to the extent that, in a way, its almost swung back round to camp. In a little intro Gal sighs as if she hasnt seen another human soul in months, when in fact shes in day six of quarantine. She then says the past less-than-a-week-of-isolation has got her feeling philosophical. The deep mind-blowing philosophical realisation? The virus affects everyone. Between Sia over-singing the hell out of her two lines to Mark Ruffalos struggle to figure out his selfie camera angles, the video is essentially the equivalent of those 1 like = 1 prayer posts your aunt still shares on Facebook.

Though the intention behind the video may have been sincere, watching the ridiculously rich act like the pandemic had put us all in the exact same situation and that the only things they had to contribute were vibes and positive energy felt in pretty poor taste. Especially when other celebs, like our queen Britney, were offering struggling fans money. As i-D editor Risn Lanigan wrote at the time: Rather than rushing to push content into the world which doesnt actually help anyone, it might first be best to take some time and consider how your platform, and your millions of dollars of income, could be put to better use.

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Gal Gadot officially regrets the cursed Imagine video - i-D