World Ultrasound Market Analysis and Forecasts 2020-2025 with Company Evolution Matrix and Company Profiles – Yahoo Finance

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DUBLIN, Sept. 4, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Ultrasound Market by Technology (Diagnostic (2D, 3D, Doppler), Therapeutic (HIFU, ESWL)), Display (Color, B&W), Portability (Trolley, Compact, POC), Applications (Gynecology, Urology, Cardiology, Orthopedic), End user (Hospitals) - Global Forecasts to 2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

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The ultrasound market is projected to reach USD 8.2 billion by 2025 from USD 6.1 billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 6.1% during the forecast period. Growth of the market is mainly attributed to the technological advancements; increasing incidences of target diseases; rising patient preference for minimally invasive procedures; and growing public and private investments, funding, and grants are driving the growth of the global ultrasound market. However, stringent government regulations may restrict the growth of this market to a certain extent in the coming years.

Therapeutic ultrasound technology segment to register significant growth, during the forecast period.

On the basis of technology, the ultrasound market is segmented into diagnostic ultrasound and therapeutic ultrasound devices. The therapeutic ultrasound segment is expected to grow at a significant rate over the forecast period. Therapeutic ultrasound technologies include focused ultrasound and shockwave lithotripsy. The growth of this market is driven mainly by ongoing technological innovations in the field of focused ultrasound as well as the expansion of its application horizons.

The color ultrasound devices segment is expected to witness the highest growth in the ultrasound market, by device display, during the forecast period.

On the basis of the device display, the ultrasound market is segmented into black & white ultrasound and color ultrasound devices. The color ultrasound devices segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period owing to the benefits offered by these devices, such as better image quality and higher image resolution. Also, the growing availability of advanced color ultrasound devices, coupled with the continuous decline in product cost across major countries and expanding distribution networks of major manufacturers across emerging countries, are expected to support the growth of this market segment during the forecast period.

The trolley/cart-based ultrasound systems segment is expected to account for the largest share of the ultrasound market, by system portability.

Based on system portability, the ultrasound market is segmented into trolley/cart-based ultrasound systems, compact/handheld ultrasound systems, and point-of-care (PoC) ultrasound systems. In 2019, the trolley/cart-based ultrasound systems segment is expected to account for the largest market share due to the growing adoption of these systems across major markets (as a result of their increasing use in emergency care and acute care settings in hospitals and healthcare institutions).

Asia Pacific market is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

The Asia Pacific market is estimated to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period majorly due to the increasing healthcare expenditure across the region's major countries (especially India and China), growing public awareness about the therapeutic potential of ultrasound technologies, a continuous decrease in device costs (due to growing localized manufacturing and the presence of global market players), rising prevalence of target diseases, and the ongoing trend of device miniaturization.

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Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction

2 Research Methodology

3 Executive Summary

4 Premium Insights

5 Market Overview

6 Ultrasound Market, by Technology

7 Ultrasound Market, by Device Display

8 Ultrasound Market, by System Portability

9 Ultrasound Market, by Application

10 Ultrasound Market, by End User

11 Ultrasound Market, by Region

12 Competitive Landscape

13 Company Evolution Matrix and Company Profiles

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/25w2b4

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World Ultrasound Market Analysis and Forecasts 2020-2025 with Company Evolution Matrix and Company Profiles - Yahoo Finance

Entertainment Evolution: What’s Happening to Content Due to COVID-19 (Part 1) – Disruptive Competition Project

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Much of the content, industries, and people we enjoy watching has been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. Live entertainment such as sporting events, concerts, and festivals has been particularly impacted. Among many negative impacts to the music industry, the most noticeable has been the cancellation of concerts and festivals worldwide. And sports, an industry that goes hand-in-hand with live entertainment, are struggling to maintain their 2020 seasons under the weight of the pandemic. This post is the first in a two-part series covering the shifts in entertainment due to COVID-19.

The music industry is experiencing massive upheaval due to COVID-19; everything from cancelled live concerts and festivals to delayed album releases, instrument and equipment sales, and the volume of music released has been affected. However, as most music festivals have been cancelled, many artists are pursuing live music through streaming events. Many creators are utilizing popular digital services as a means of holding virtual concerts. Artists, small and large alike, are performing live through services such as Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch. BTS, a K-pop group popular throughout the world, hosted Bang Bang Con: The Live in June, a live hour and a half online concert which received over 750,000 viewers across 107 countries and territories. And Fortnite partnered with Travis Scott this past April to hold Astronomical, a series of live in-game events centered around Travis Scotts music with multiple tour dates for players around the world to participate. Epic Games (the creator of Fortnite) reported that 27 million unique players participated in the Travis Scott event live 45 million times. More recently, a webcast series called Verzuz which pits artists against each other live on Instagram and allows the audience to vote on the winner, has garnered attention.

While the first major income stream for the music industry is live music, the second is recorded music, which includes streaming, digital downloads, licensing of music for movies, games, TV and advertising, and more. Many of these revenue streams have not been as negatively affected. In fact, streaming music now makes up nearly half of global recorded music revenue. However, the Coronavirus has altered how people are listening to music and as festivals and concerts are only just returning (some as an experiment in determining how the virus spreads), on-demand consumption of music is on the rise. Spotify recently reported that the daily habits of its consumers have shifted. Many bands and individual creators are utilizing popular digital services as a means of releasing their new music. Famously, Lil Nas X first uploaded the tune to Old Town Road on TikTok. Individuals are making more music than ever before and many services are playing host to these new creations. Further emphasizing the streaming and on-demand opportunities in the music industry, Amazon just expanded its music service by integrating Twitch live streams, which has seen rapid growth from musicians moving to the platform. Spotify appears to be following suit and developing a virtual events section as well.

Live professional sports have also experienced setbacks due to the Coronavirus, many of which paused or cancelled their seasons earlier this year. However, some sports at the collegiate and professional levels are attempting to make a comeback. While the Big Ten and PAC-12 have both decided to postpone their competitions through the end of this calendar year, the AAC, SEC, and Big 12 have yet to alter their plans. The NHL petitioned Canada to host their teams and hold their post season tournament up north. The MLB is also reportedly considering a playoff bubble similar to the NHL. While the MLS resumed play in a bubble with the MLS is Back Tournament, its actually set to become the first major North American sports league to try to hold games with fans in the stands. The MLS recently announced the continuation of the season, allowing teams to play back in their home markets with limited capacity for fans in the stadium. The NCAA had to cancel March Madness this year; however, the NBA has had success with their bubble and resumed their season July 30. The U.S. Open was live-streamed in August without fans. Additionally, the 2020 INDY 500 was watchable and streamable live and had no fans in the stands. While increased vigilance and heightened safety guidelines will likely continue for some time, sports as live entertainment are returning.

Live streaming video game services are also seeing growth due to the upward trend of the industry as a whole. And some sports are even turning to e-sports as a way to give consumers the sporting entertainment they want in one form or another. NASCAR recently embraced e-sports and in March Fox Sports said it would stream the full season of NASCARs virtual race series. Further, while the pandemic has forced the cancellation or postponement of certain e-sport events, e-sports as a whole is actually gaining notoriety as a result of this pandemic. Global e-sports revenue is expected to grow just beyond $1 billion by 2020 and live streaming is key to that growth.

After experiencing the disruption to their previous standards of business that COVID-19 has brought about, many individuals, businesses, and organizations have been forced to alter their practices to continue to operate through the changes wrought by the pandemic. However, even throughout the Coronavirus, one thing remains clear: live entertainment has gone digital and its still highly attractive. The next post in this series will discuss movies, television, and video games.

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Entertainment Evolution: What's Happening to Content Due to COVID-19 (Part 1) - Disruptive Competition Project

Ball Hill: The evolution of Coventry’s busiest shopping street – Coventry Live

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Walsgrave Road, known locally as Ball Hill, was at one point a bustling centre for shopping, serving the residents of Stoke and Wyken for years.

Ask any local taxi driver to take you to Ball Hill and they'll know where to go.

Many Coventrians will have memories of picking up a bargain in Stardust or getting a slap up breakfast at the Rosebud cafe, or even queuing up outside Britton's sport shop for the latest CCFC strip.

Many of those shops are still there and Ball Hill remains a busy stretch, serving as one of the city's major bus routes.

But as Covid-19 put a stop to much of the footfall that once inhabited our region's high streets, how has Ball Hill fared? Have there been any shop closures and what do locals think?

Here's what happened when we paid a visit.

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We visited Ball Hill on a busy Thursday lunchtime, just as the sun arrived. A feeling of familiarity crept in as we queued up to the main junction to access the shopping area, most commuters into Coventry will have sat in a traffic jam on this stretch.

As we parked the car and wandered up to the top of the hill, families and couples milled about doing their shopping, and a huge queue snaked up to the high street from the bank.

We start at the top of the hill and head into Ade's plaza salon, a hair and beauty supplier who has had to diversify so she can keep her shop open.

Owner Ade Osunwe said: "Everyone is afraid. It is not easy, we are just trying to cope, it was busier before lockdown."

Her shop has been open since 2015, but it was only post-lockdown that she had to widen her offering from hair and beauty to general goods so that she could attract a bigger customer base.

The shelves groan as containers of peanuts and milk powder sit next to wigs and curl cream. Ms Osunwe said: "The rent on this high street is expensive. Everyone is shopping online now - the Government need to think of us.

"I have four children and we are not on benefits - how will we survive?"

We head across the road to the key and shoe repair shop, which current owner Dave Oates informed us has operated in this capacity for more than 80 years.

Mr Oates, who has owned the shop for five years, said: "The last three weeks have been really good, with students coming back landlords often come to me to get their keys cut."

And how has the shop recovered as shoppers have returned? "We do have regular customers and walk-ins, when we started [the shop] there were key cutters and shoe repairs everywhere, but slowly it's become a dying trade" he said.

Mr Oates said that trade just hasn't been the same since Covid-19, and despite the last few weeks "going back to normal", they were twice as busy last September.

As we continue down the hill, some of the businesses have their shutters rolled down and some have permanently closed like the Age UK charity shop.

A sign in the window read: "As this shop has permanently closed, please do not leave any donations outside this shop, thank you."

The was an incredibly popular spot for avid bargain hunters, at one point selling clothes for 99p, but it did not make it out of the Covid-19 lockdown.

A few doors down there is an empty unit where the once popular Boss Shoes stood. The family-ran shoe shop, which had been in the city for 32 years and had a warehouse in Tile Hill, closed at the start of the year.

A couple of hundred yards further down, we pop into the indoor arcade which houses a barber shop, butcher's shop, sweet shop and key cutters among others.

At the centre of Ball Hill is Coventry's Music Museum - a treasure trove of music history and with its very own 2-Tone village, it was voted one of the best museums in the Midlands on TripAdvisor a few years ago.

We finish off at Fiveways Fish Bar, on the corner of the busy Brays Lane and Clay Lane junction. The popular chippy has been in the area for 25 years and was closed for six weeks at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Owner Mr Singh, who owns another chip shop locally, said that things have not returned to normal in the area. "It is definitely quieter, before the street was very busy. We are still busy at lunchtime, everywhere is the same," he said.

The area sits across the Upper Stoke ward and Lower Stoke ward. Public Health England 2017 data shows this part of the city to have just over 17,682 residents. The age group with the most people in is 25-64 and the smallest age group is the those aged over 85.

We asked local residents what they thought of the area and if they had any memories.

Martin Winstanley said: "1980. 269, Walsgrave Road. Bargain Bathrooms in between Stardust and The Rosebud Cafe. They did the best Polish sausage mash and cabbage! I worked selling bathrooms as a Saturday job. Great memories!"

Another resident added: "We live just by where youre standing - on Marlborough Road - it was fantastic to be able to shop during the Covid-19 lockdown, many of the independents really were a lifeline!"

Look: memories of Ball Hill over the years

Despite some of the local favourites closing down over this past year, Ball Hill remains a bit of an anomaly, with many of the independent businesses still standing, managing to trade over generations.

It is perhaps the only road in Coventry where you can get a fry up, order new blinds and do your weekly shop as you wait for your tyres to be fitted.

Things may have changed over the years, but one thing that is certain is that Ball Hill will never be quiet.

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Ball Hill: The evolution of Coventry's busiest shopping street - Coventry Live

Macau Cathedral to close in October for renovation – Macau News

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Macaos Catholic Cathedral will close next month for about nine months for renovation, the Portuguese-language radio channel of public broadcaster TDM reported today.

According to the report, the project is estimated to cost around 9 million patacas (US$1.1 million). The report did not indicate the source of the estimate, nor how it will be financed.

The report cited the cathedrals vicar, Fr Daniel Ribeiro, as saying that at the request of the government the project includes structural strengthening.

The concrete building of the Cathedral of the Nativity of Our Lady was constructed in 1937, which replaced an edifice built in 1850 that was badly damaged by a typhoon in 1874. A small wooden chapel built in the present location was elevated to cathedral in 1623, according to information provided by the diocese.

The report also said that the installation of a large and weighty organ donated to the diocese will require structural strengthening of the nave.

Fr Ribeiro told Radio Macau that the government requested the renovation project as some parts of the building are believed to be in risk of collapse. The report pointed out that some of the present building structure dates back to the 18th century.

Fr Ribeiro also said that from next month the Masses customarily celebrated at the Cathedral will take place at the nearby S. Domingos Church during the renovation project, following the same schedule.

According to the report, the renovated Cathedral is slated to reopen next June. However, Fr Ribeiro admitted that possible complications could delay the reopening.

Macaus Catholic diocese, which was founded in 1576, comprises 11 churches in nine parishes. According to its website, the diocese runs 31 education establishments and 22 social service institutions.

An introduction to the diocese on the website estimates its flock at 30,000 or about 4.5 per cent of the population.

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Macau Cathedral to close in October for renovation - Macau News

Macau marathon to be held with infection control measures – Macau Daily Times

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The Galaxy Entertainment Macao International Marathon will be held on December 6, opening with a total of 12,000 spots available for participants, the Sports Bureau (ID) announced in a press conference.Registration for the marathon and half marathon will open to the public on September 12. Registration for the mini marathon will open on September 13.The 38th iteration of the event will have 1,400 spots available for the marathon, 4,800 for the half marathon and 5,800 for the mini marathon.The full marathon and half marathon courses will start at Governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge, pass World Heritage site A-Ma Temple and run along the Sai Van Bridge.The marathon and half marathon races will start at 6 a.m., while the mini-marathon will kick off at 6:15 a.m.Registrants who opt for on-site registration may go to the Tap Seac Multisport Pavilion from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on September 12 and 13. They should bring the completed registration form, a copy of their identification document, membership card from the General Association of Athletics of Macau for the current year and the registration fee.Galaxy Entertainment Group will sponsor the event until 2021, following the renewal of their title sponsorship for the event last year.The marathon is one of the few events in the city that will occur despite the ongoing pandemic. Macau has not seen a new locally-transmitted case of Covid-19 for several months.The ID said that it will pay close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic and will adopt preventive measures according to the guidelines by the Health Bureau.Meanwhile, there was no information given about what will happen to foreign athletes who are keen on participating in the marathon.If foreigners and non-resident workers are still not allowed to enter the city prior to the date of the marathon, the event will likely be held with athletes from mainland China and Hong Kong only.

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Macau marathon to be held with infection control measures - Macau Daily Times

New urban plan to expand Macau tourism areas but casino activity to remain within current locations – Inside Asian Gaming

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The draft of the Master Plan for Macaus urban development has revealed that the future of the SARs tourism and entertainment industries would remain in the current Cotai and NAPE areas, while several locations would become new non-gaming tourism areas.

The draft, launched on Thursday, separated and classified various functions for different districts in Macau. According to the drafts suggestions, the core tourism and entertainment industries would remain in their current areas.

Officials of the Macau SAR Government said at a press conference that casinos would be mainly based in and around hotels in these areas, however the government will keep a certain level of flexibility in considering the compatibility of land in practice.

Meanwhile, the northern part of Taipa, currently referred to as new urban area zones C and D, would become an urban waterfront area via the development of tourism and business elements.

The government also plans to build a new tourism and leisure route along with the new urban area B, Nam Van and Barra areas in order to enrich entertainment experiences in Macau.

The southern part of the artificial island upon which the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge boundary sits would be reserved for the development of hotels, exhibitions and conventions in order to promote a platform of cooperation between the three cities.

With the re-tendering of gaming licenses scheduled for 2022, when the six current concessions expire, the distribution of land for gaming operators and further development of tourism industries in Macau would be a focus in the foreseeable future.

A public consultation for the draft will be held from 4 September to 2 November 2020.

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New urban plan to expand Macau tourism areas but casino activity to remain within current locations - Inside Asian Gaming

Aollywood (Macau-Hollywood, the Eastern Hollywood) established the first Film Critics Association in Macau, China – Business Wire

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MACAU, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Recently, the high-profile Aollywood Film Critics Association declared to establish in Macau, China. This is one of the film industry associations founded by Aollywood which is Eastern Hollywood founded in Macau, China. It is committed to speaking out for the establishment of Chinese films international discourse power, aesthetic standards and evaluation system. Moreover, its mission is to enable outstanding Chinese films to receive objective and fair evaluation from overseas and to help build the bridge between Chinese films and other films from all over the world.

The Aollywood Film Critics Association board members elected a new leadership team, and the chairman is the famous film critic Zhou Liming; the vice-chairmen are Mao Jian, Lie Fu, Wei Junzi, Song Ziwen, and Zuo Heng; the secretary-general is Hu Jianli. In addition, Alang was elected as the supervisor of the association and the members are senior film critics Li Xingwen, Han Haoyue, Tan Fei, Ye Hang and other 25 people. These scholars are all well-known Chinese film critics.

Zhou Liming, the chairman of the Aollywood Film Critics Association, said that film criticism is a link in the entire film ecosystem. Film critics need to provide evaluations of films, provide guidance to audiences, and provide feedback to the filmmakers. He hopes that the Aollywood Film Critics Association can help the healthy development of Chinese film industry, discover more potential successful filmmakers, recommend more excellent films, and grow together with the whole Chinese film industry.

It is also reported that the Aollywood Film Critics Association will participate in hosting of the Aollywood International Film Festival.

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Aollywood (Macau-Hollywood, the Eastern Hollywood) established the first Film Critics Association in Macau, China - Business Wire

Ulysse Nardin – The brand and DFS Present Sharks in Macau Exhibition – Events – WorldTempus

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Xploring has become Ulysse Nardins motivation, and the result is a universe of X-factor: X like an adventure, X like our deepest desires, X for the unknown, X for whats forbidden, bold and exciting. To bring this sense of exploration to life, Ulysse Nardin has partnered with DFS Group, the worlds leading luxury travel retailer, on the Sharks in Macau exhibition at T Galleria by DFS, Macau, City of Dreams. Inspired by the discovery of the mysterious underwater world, the pop up features Ulysse Nardins first interactive shark photobooth in Asia Pacific where adventurers can dive into the deep sea and experience a thrilling moment with ferocious and dangerous sharks suddenly appearing and attacking courageous divers.

To celebrate the opening of the pop up store, Ulysse Nardin presents the below novelty and high complication pieces:

The SKELETON X case, reshaped and very small, a mere 42mm, is perfectly on-trend: more angular, more masculine, less round. Its shape-within-shape-within-shape geometry - an X formed by four of the indexes is framed in a rectangle, in turn inside a circle - delights the eye. Inside and clearly visible beats one of the star innovations of the watchs antecedent: a super-light balance wheel in silicium, extra-wide, with nickel flyweights and stabilizing micro-blades. The new Manufacture movement, the UN-371 caliber has 96-hour power reserve can be read through the back by means of windows, like those in the barrel. The SKELETON X eXists in four different satin-finish versions: satin-finish titani-um blue, satin-finish titanium black, satin-finish rose gold or matte-finish Carbonium GOLD.

Skeleton X Ulysse Nardin

The FREAK X, the little cousin of its Freak antecedents, stands out as the entry point into the FREAK collection. It has a crown for time correction, which breaks with one of the most iconic as-pects of the previous crown-less FREAK models. The sizing is tighter - 43mm. The baguette move-ment is still a carousel, turning once on itself every hour to indicate the time. It is simpler, bolder, and has fewer wheels. It has no dial and no hands - the central bridge acts as a minute hand and one of the wheels indicates the hours.

FREAK X Ulysse Nardin

From now until December 31, 2020, Ulysse Nardin timepieces will be showcased in T Galleria by DFS, Macau, City of Dreams. Do you dare to explore this deep-sea adventure?

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Ulysse Nardin - The brand and DFS Present Sharks in Macau Exhibition - Events - WorldTempus

Govt collaborates with gaming operators to promote in Beijing – Macau Daily Times

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The government is set to launch a tourism promotion campaign during the second week of September on Beijings busiest commercial street. The campaign will involve the citys six gaming concessionaires.According to a report by Radio Macau, the promotional campaign, which is being coordinated by the MacaoGovernment Tourism Office (MGTO), will take place on Wangfujing Street in Beijing.This is the first tourism campaign being run abroad since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.During the first half of 2020, visitor arrivals declined by 84% year-on-year to 3.26 million due to travel and border restrictions.Last month, China had set a date for the resumption of tourist visas for visitors travelling to the Macau SAR. From September 23, any mainland resident will be able to apply for an Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) visa to visit Macau for tourism purposes.The timing positions Macau for a tourism recovery bounce during Chinas Golden Week in early October, a normally popular time in the Macau gaming calendar.As the promotion of gambling is prohibited on the mainland, gaming operators are likely to publicize their hotel and restaurant promotions during the upcoming campaign.Recently, the government launched a scheme for tourists from mainland China, aiming to boost the economy and protect local jobs.The scheme was initiated by the Macau SAR government with support from e-commerce giants Tencent and Alibaba, as well as Air Macau. It aims to attract tourism to the city through promotions on air tickets and hotels, and rebates on shopping and dining to encourage tourists to increase their spending and length of stay.After the IVS was reinstated for Guangdong residents on August 12, preliminary data shows that the city recorded a 25% rise in visitor arrivals compared to the weekend prior.Previously, the Public Security Police Force had said that it did not expect significant changes in border traffic. However, they are now predicting a gradual upward trend in the number of arrivals in the coming weeks.

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Govt collaborates with gaming operators to promote in Beijing - Macau Daily Times

China says Czech visit to Taiwan harmed its sovereignty – Macau Business

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The Chinese embassy in Prague on Saturday condemned this weeks visit to Taiwan by a Czech delegation as a serious infringement on Chinas national sovereignty.

A delegation of about 90 Czech politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists and journalists led by senate speaker Milos Vystrcil visited Taiwan from August 30 to September 4.

Under its One China policy, Beijing considersTaiwana part of its territory and does not send official delegations to the island.

TheCzechcentre-left government officially accepts the One China policy, but Vystrcil is a member of the right-wing opposition Civic Democrats and is not bound by the protocol.

The embassy said the visit was a serious interference in Chinas internal affairs and called on the Czech Republic to take specific steps to remove the unfavourable impact of the said incident.

There is only one China in the world and Taiwan is an inseparable part of its territory, it said.

No matter what manipulation the Taiwanese authorities and anti-China forces come up with, they cannot change this.

On Monday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the trip as a provocation, saying that China would make Vystrcil pay a high price for his short-sighted behaviour.

The Czech foreign ministry then summoned Chinas ambassador to Prague and Beijing followed suit.

Vystrcil gave a speech inTaiwans parliament and met President Tsai Ing-wen, whose re-election earlier this year upset China as she views the island as a sovereign nation.

Ties between Prague and China suffered a blow last October when Prague city hall, run by a mayor from the anti-establishment Pirate Party, pulled out of a twinning deal with Beijing over its insistence on the One China policy.

Prague mayor Zdenek Hrib, who was on Vystrcils delegation, then signed a partnership agreement with Taipei in January, triggering outrage in Beijing.

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China says Czech visit to Taiwan harmed its sovereignty - Macau Business

Trump in ‘different reality’ on racism: Harris – Macau Business

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Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris said Sunday that President Donald Trump is living in a different reality when he denies there is systemic racism in America.

The reality of America today is what we have seen over generations and, frankly, since our inception, which is we do have two systems of justice in America, Harris told CNN.

I think that Donald Trump and Bill Barr are spending full time in a different reality, said Harris, the first woman of color on a major US White House ticket taking aim at the president and his attorney general.

Joe Bidens running mate spoke two days after the White House disclosed that Trump had ordered federal agencies to stop funding anti-racism training sessions for employees, saying they amount to divisive, un-American propaganda that suggests the country is inherently racist.

And last week Barr dismissed the idea that there is, effectively, one justice system for whites in the United States and another for blacks.

I think we have to be a little careful about throwing the idea of racism around, Barr said. I dont think it is as common as people suggest.

Trump is working feverishly to appeal to his largely white, blue-collar base with a tough law-and-order mantra while fighting an uphill battle for re-election amid a pandemic, a struggling economy and a fraught national reckoning over racial injustice in policing and other walks of life.

Protests in major US cities erupted after the death of African American George Floyd in May at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, and flared up again last month after another black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back repeatedly by a white policeman in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Trump has blasted such demonstrators as violent anarchists.

Harris insisted that peaceful protest is an American right and that racism is indeed embedded in the country.

I dont think that most reasonable people who are paying attention to the facts would dispute that there are racial disparities and a system that has engaged in racism in terms of how the laws have been enforced, said Harris.

She blasted Trump as having bungled the nations handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly 190,000 people in America, and for not doing enough to help millions of people left jobless or otherwise suffering as a result of the global health crisis.

There is no question that Donald Trump has been an abject failure and incompetent when it comes to addressing the severe job loss that has happened as a result of the pandemic, because he has failed to address the pandemic itself, she said.

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Trump in 'different reality' on racism: Harris - Macau Business

First Clone of Endangered Przewalskis Horse Born in Conservation Effort to Save the Species – TIME

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The first successfully cloned endangered Przewalskis horse was born on Aug. 6 in a veterinary facility in Texas, San Diego Zoo Global announced on Friday. The horse was cloned from DNA of a male Przewalskis horse cryopreserved by the zoo in 1980.

Przewalskis horses are critically endangered animals that are found in Mongolia, per Smithsonians National Zoo. Theyre considered the last species of truly wild horses and are distant cousins of modern day domestic horses, having likely split from a common ancestor around 500,000 years ago, per the Smithsonian.

Przewalskis horses were once extinct in the wild, and while intensive breeding programs helped revive the species and reintroduce them into the grasslands of China and Mongolia, nearly all can be traced back to 12 Przewalskis horses that were born in the wild, the San Diego Zoo said in its press release. The successful cloning of DNA collected 40 years is meant to introduce key generic diversity into the species that could benefit its survival. The zoo said the cloned Przewalskis horse will eventually be transferred to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and integrated into a herd of other Przewalskis horses for breeding.

The work to save endangered species requires collaborative and dedicated partners with aligned goals, Paul A. Baribault, president of San Diego Zoo Global, said in a statement. We share in this remarkable achievement because we applied our multidisciplinary approach, working with the best scientific minds and utilizing precious genetic material collected and stored in our wildlife DNA bio bank.

The cloned Przewalskis horse was named Kurt after Dr. Kurt Benirschke, the creator of the San Diego Zoo Global Frozen Zoo, which has been collecting and preserving genetic material of endangered animals since 1975.

San Diego Zoo Global partnered with Revive & Restorea wildlife conservation group that aims to incorporate biotechnology into conservation effortsand ViaGen Equinea company that clones horses and petsto successfully clone the Przewalskis horse.

This birth expands the opportunity for genetic rescue of endangered wild species, said Ryan Phelan, executive director of Revive & Restore, in a statement. Advanced reproductive technologies, including cloning, can save species by allowing us to restore genetic diversity that would have otherwise been lost to time.

Przewalskis horses are not the only species Revive & Restore is trying to revive via biotechnology. The group is attempting to revive at least six endangered or extinct species, including the Wooly Mammoth, which went extinct around 4,000 years ago. Other organizations and research facilities are also attempting to revive extinct or endangered species with biotechnology, including the International Islamic University Malaysia, which plans to revive the recently extinct Sumatran rhino.

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Write to Madeleine Carlisle at madeleine.carlisle@time.com.

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First Clone of Endangered Przewalskis Horse Born in Conservation Effort to Save the Species - TIME

Cloning Crescendo: US Open Computer Crowd Noise Fills The Void of No Fans – Tennis Now

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By Erik Gudris

The US Open is known for its often raucous, vocal fans who make themselves heard everywhere.

But when it was announced that this years US Open would not have spectators on site, many tennis watchers wondered how that might impact not only the players, but the overall experience of the event.

More: Ashe Experience Special for Tsitsipas, Auger-Aliassime

Tournament organizers turned to IBM to help them provide a solutionAI (artificial intelligence) generated crowd noise. Using technology called AI Sounds, engineers digested video from last years US Open and then ranked the excitement level of various video clips. These clips were then turned into a reel and then classified to create a crowd reaction score.

From a player hitting an ace, to saving a break point, or winning a match, all these various sounds were then made available to in-stadium and television production crews covering this years event to use the sounds depending on whats happening in a match during real-time.

COVID-19 brought disruption to sports as a whole, and the ability of fans to experience live sporting events has been heavily impacted in 2020. At the same time, the pandemic accelerated the need for engaging technologies using AI and underpinned by a scalable hybrid cloud," said Noah Syken, Vice President of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships, IBM. "As the technology partner to the USTA, we transformed our offerings to meet tennis fans where they are this yearexperiencing the sport through the US Open digital properties everywhere.

These sounds are definitely noticeable in matches being played at the site two biggest courtsArthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium. Without them, it sometimes feels like the players are competing inside an empty parking lot, rather than inside one of the sports most prestigious stages.

Using digital sounds in sporting events is nothing new; even before the current pandemic prompted many sports leagues to not allow fans at their respective matches or games.

According to the New York Times, 20 years ago CBS used taped nature sounds during a PGA golf event that drew criticism from bird experts over the use of such sounds. Nowadays, the practice is more common.

European football leagues when they returned to action this summer are employing virtual stadium noises created for FIFA video games. The National Football League (NFL) is considering using artificial crowd sounds during football games this fall.

Getting back to tennis, fans watching at home are divided over the non-natural sounds being used in New York. Some fans like that it adds some atmosphere for them as they cheer on their favorite pros. Others dont like the artificial sounds and would prefer experiencing the court as it is.

For the players themselves, although they would prefer to have fans on-site, not having fans this year is just one more thing they have to adjust to during this very different U.S. Open.

It's digital fans. It's 2020, Serena Williams said when asked about not having fans on site. Im all about the future. I'm glad we're able to have the Open.

"It's really cool that we can have it. It's so important that this is justwe don't know what the new normal is going to be. So it's just good that we can have virtual fans and be able to have sport.

Photo credit: Andrew Ong/USTA

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Cloning Crescendo: US Open Computer Crowd Noise Fills The Void of No Fans - Tennis Now

Can love be replicated? – The Times of India Blog

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Why chase after an ideal or a lost love? Each love is unique and cannot be cloned, no matter what!

You can never love any two or more people in the same manner and with the same intensity. Love is an emotion of a myriad hues, never experienced in exactly the same way by different people. And never again even by the same two people in an unchanged form. This is because love is dependent on so many variable factors that it cannot possibly be replicated.

The love that two people share stems from their individual needs, mutual chemistry, and also from their own capacity to give and receive the emotion. It is dependent on individual personal characteristics, and each persons experiences and unique circumstances also have a deep bearing on the outcome. This accounts for the rather changeable nature of love.

Not all loves, nor indeed all relationships, can feed the same need in you. Physical need is just one aspect; we also have emotional needs, spiritual and intellectual needs, and some needs that we ourselves may not understand. Hence you get attracted to other people and at any given time, could theoretically have loving relationships with multiple people. Needs vary, and so a relationship based on need, would vary too.

The only people who can love everyone in exactly the same manner, repeating the same experiences, are almost certainly psychopaths, or at least sociopaths, using their bookish understanding of the emotion to exploit others. In short, these are people just acting out the emotion.

We waste a lifetime in the impossible pursuit of an ideal love or the recreation of a love we once had and lost but cloning is not part of the Love DNA! You cannot ever experience the love of a Romeo and Juliet however hard you try, because that love was the product of their circumstances and the interplay of their individual characteristics and chemistry at a certain time in history, placed in a unique geographical setting. How can you possibly love like them, when you are not them? Heck, even if Romeo and Juliet were themselves to step out of Shakespeares pages, with changed variables, they cannot possibly love the same way again! This time round they might end up happily married, growing old together or splitting paths along the way!

You can certainly love several times in your lifetime, sometimes simultaneously too, but never ever in the exact same manner, clocking the same experiences and emotion. That is impossible because we change and evolve as we go along in life, and our needs and dependencies change too. Time and experience teach us better control of our emotions, patience, forgiveness and self-sufficiency. Conversely, bad experiences at love and relationships may lead to bitterness and cynicism in some.

So, if people change so much and so do their needs, how then can our experience of love remain the same? Love changes too. And that is what makes it so precious, so unique to each. Why look for a clone when you can create your own unique love?

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Can love be replicated? - The Times of India Blog

Growing Focus on Product Innovation Likely to Impact the Growth of the Fosmid Cloning Market 2017 2025 – StartupNG

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Persistence Market Research recently published a market study that sheds light on the growth prospects of the global Fosmid Cloning market during the forecast period (20XX-20XX). In addition, the report also includes a detailed analysis of the impact of the novel COVID-19 pandemic on the future prospects of the Fosmid Cloning market. The report provides a thorough evaluation of the latest trends, market drivers, opportunities, and challenges within the global Fosmid Cloning market to assist our clients arrive at beneficial business decisions.

The recent published research report sheds light on critical aspects of the global Fosmid Cloning market such as vendor landscape, competitive strategies, market drivers and challenges along with the regional analysis. The report helps the readers to draw a suitable conclusion and clearly understand the current and future scenario and trends of global Fosmid Cloning market. The research study comes out as a compilation of useful guidelines for players to understand and define their strategies more efficiently in order to keep themselves ahead of their competitors. The report profiles leading companies of the global Fosmid Cloning market along with the emerging new ventures who are creating an impact on the global market with their latest innovations and technologies.

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The recent published study includes information on key segmentation of the global Fosmid Cloning market on the basis of type/product, application and geography (country/region). Each of the segments included in the report is studies in relations to different factors such as market size, market share, value, growth rate and other quantitate information.

The competitive analysis included in the global Fosmid Cloning market study allows their readers to understand the difference between players and how they are operating amounts themselves on global scale. The research study gives a deep insight on the current and future trends of the market along with the opportunities for the new players who are in process of entering global Fosmid Cloning market. Market dynamic analysis such as market drivers, market restraints are explained thoroughly in the most detailed and easiest possible manner. The companies can also find several recommendations improve their business on the global scale.

The readers of the Fosmid Cloning Market report can also extract several key insights such as market size of varies products and application along with their market share and growth rate. The report also includes information for next five years as forested data and past five years as historical data and the market share of the several key information.

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The company profile section of the report offers great insights such as market revenue and market share of global Fosmid Cloning market. Key companies listed in the report are:

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The key participants in fosmid cloning Market are Bio S&T, Illumina, Inc., Lucigen, and others. The companies are mainly focusing on intense marketing to convey benefits of fosmid cloning.

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For any queries get in touch with Industry Expert @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.co/ask-an-expert/19651

Some of the Major Highlights of TOC covers in Fosmid Cloning Market Report:

Chapter 1: Methodology & Scope of Fosmid Cloning Market

Chapter 2: Executive Summary of Fosmid Cloning Market

Chapter 3: Fosmid Cloning Industry Insights

Chapter 4: Fosmid Cloning Market, By Region

Chapter 5: Company Profile

And Continue

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Growing Focus on Product Innovation Likely to Impact the Growth of the Fosmid Cloning Market 2017 2025 - StartupNG

Cryonics – Wikipedia

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For the study of the production of very low temperatures, see Cryogenics. For the low-temperature preservation of living tissue and organisms in general, see Cryopreservation. For the Hot Cross album, see Cryonics (album).

Freezing of a human corpse

Cryonics (from Greek: kryos meaning 'cold') is the low-temperature freezing (usually at 196C or 320.8F or 77.1K) and storage of a human corpse or severed head, with the speculative hope that resurrection may be possible in the future.[1][2] Cryonics is regarded with skepticism within the mainstream scientific community. It is generally viewed as a pseudoscience,[3] and its practice has been characterized as quackery.[4][5]

Cryonics procedures can begin only after clinical death, and cryonics "patients" are legally dead. Cryonics procedures may begin within minutes of death,[6] and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation.[7] It is, however, not possible for a corpse to be reanimated after undergoing vitrification, as this causes damage to the brain including its neural networks.[8] The first corpse to be frozen was that of Dr. James Bedford in 1967.[9] As of 2014, about 250 dead bodies had been cryopreserved in the United States, and 1,500 people had made arrangements for cryopreservation of their corpses.[10]

Economic reality means it is highly improbable that any cryonics corporation could continue in business long enough to take advantage of the claimed long-term benefits offered.[11] Early attempts of cryonic preservations were performed in the 1960s and early 1970s which ended in failure with companies going out of business, and their stored corpses thawed and disposed of.[12]

Cryonicists argue that as long as brain structure remains intact, there is no fundamental barrier, given our current understanding of physical law, to recovering its information content. Cryonics proponents go further than the mainstream consensus in saying that the brain does not have to be continuously active to survive or retain memory. Cryonics controversially states that a human survives even within an inactive brain that has been badly damaged, provided that original encoding of memory and personality can, in theory, be adequately inferred and reconstituted from what structure remains.[10][13]

Cryonics uses temperatures below 130C, called cryopreservation, in an attempt to preserve enough brain information to permit future revival of the cryopreserved person. Cryopreservation may be accomplished by freezing, freezing with cryoprotectant to reduce ice damage, or by vitrification to avoid ice damage. Even using the best methods, cryopreservation of whole bodies or brains is very damaging and irreversible with current technology.

Cryonics advocates hold that in the future the use of some kind of presently-nonexistent nanotechnology may be able to help bring the dead back to life and treat the diseases which killed them.[14] Mind uploading has also been proposed.[15]

Cryonics can be expensive. As of 2018[update] the cost of preparing and storing corpses using cryonics ranged from US$28,000 to $200,000.[16]

When used at high concentrations, cryoprotectants can stop ice formation completely. Cooling and solidification without crystal formation is called vitrification.[17] The first cryoprotectant solutions able to vitrify at very slow cooling rates while still being compatible with whole organ survival were developed in the late 1990s by cryobiologists Gregory Fahy and Brian Wowk for the purpose of banking transplantable organs.[18][19][20] This has allowed animal brains to be vitrified, warmed back up, and examined for ice damage using light and electron microscopy. No ice crystal damage was found;[21] cellular damage was due to dehydration and toxicity of the cryoprotectant solutions.

Costs can include payment for medical personnel to be on call for death, vitrification, transportation in dry ice to a preservation facility, and payment into a trust fund intended to cover indefinite storage in liquid nitrogen and future revival costs.[22][23] As of 2011, U.S. cryopreservation costs can range from $28,000 to $200,000, and are often financed via life insurance.[22] KrioRus, which stores bodies communally in large dewars, charges $12,000 to $36,000 for the procedure.[24] Some customers opt to have only their brain cryopreserved ("neuropreservation"), rather than their whole body.

As of 2014, about 250 corpses have been cryogenically preserved in the U.S., and around 1,500 people have signed up to have their remains preserved.[10] As of 2016, four facilities exist in the world to retain cryopreserved bodies: three in the U.S. and one in Russia.[2][25]

Taking into account the lifecycle of corporations, it is extremely unlikely that any cryonics company could continue to exist for sufficient time to take advantage even of the supposed benefits offered: historically, even the most robust corporations have only a one-in-a-thousand chance of surviving even one hundred years.[11] Many cryonics companies have failed: as of 2018[update] all but one of the pre-1973 batch had gone out of business, and their stored corpses have been defrosted and disposed of.[12]

Without cryoprotectants, cell shrinkage and high salt concentrations during freezing usually prevent frozen cells from functioning again after thawing. Ice crystals can also disrupt connections between cells that are necessary for organs to function.[26] The difficulties of recovering large animals and their individual organs from a frozen state have been long known. Attempts to recover frozen mammals by simply rewarming them were abandoned by 1957.[27] At humanity's present level of scientific knowledge, only cells, tissues, and some small organs can be reversibly cryopreserved.[18][28]

Large vitrified organs tend to develop fractures during cooling,[29] a problem worsened by the large tissue masses and very low temperatures of cryonics.[30]

Actual cryonics organizations use vitrification without a chemical fixation step,[31] sacrificing some structural preservation quality for less damage at the molecular level. Some scientists, like Joao Pedro Magalhaes, have questioned whether using a deadly chemical for fixation eliminates the possibility of biological revival, making chemical fixation unsuitable for cryonics.[32]

In 2016, Robert L. McIntyre and Gregory Fahy at the cryobiology research company 21st Century Medicine, Inc. won the Small Animal Brain Preservation Prize of the Brain Preservation Foundation by demonstrating to the satisfaction of neuroscientist judges that a particular implementation of fixation and vitrification called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation[33] could preserve a rabbit brain in "near perfect" condition at 135C, with the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures intact in electron micrographs.[34][35] Brain Preservation Foundation President, Ken Hayworth, said, "This result directly answers a main skeptical and scientific criticism against cryonicsthat it does not provably preserve the delicate synaptic circuitry of the brain.[36] However the price paid for perfect preservation as seen by microscopy was tying up all protein molecules with chemical crosslinks, completely eliminating biological viability.

Outside the cryonics community, many scientists have strong skepticism toward cryonics methods. Cryobiologist Dayong Gao states that "we simply don't know if (subjects have) been damaged to the point where they've 'died' during vitrification because the subjects are now inside liquid nitrogen canisters." Biochemist Ken Storey argues (based on experience with organ transplants), that "even if you only wanted to preserve the brain, it has dozens of different areas, which would need to be cryopreserved using different protocols."[37]

Revival would require repairing damage from lack of oxygen, cryoprotectant toxicity, thermal stress (fracturing), freezing in tissues that do not successfully vitrify, finally followed by reversing the cause of death. In many cases extensive tissue regeneration would be necessary.[38]

Historically, a person had little control regarding how their body was treated after death as religion held jurisdiction over the ultimate fate of their body.[39] However, secular courts began to exercise jurisdiction over the body and use discretion in carrying out of the wishes of the deceased person.[39] Most countries legally treat preserved individuals as deceased persons because of laws that forbid vitrifying someone who is medically alive.[40] In France, cryonics is not considered a legal mode of body disposal;[41] only burial, cremation, and formal donation to science are allowed. However, bodies may legally be shipped to other countries for cryonic freezing.[42] As of 2015, the Canadian province of British Columbia prohibits the sale of arrangements for body preservation based on cryonics.[43] In Russia, cryonics falls outside both the medical industry and the funeral services industry, making it easier in Russia than in the U.S. to get hospitals and morgues to release cryonics candidates.[24]

In London in 2016, the English High Court ruled in favor of a mother's right to seek cryopreservation of her terminally ill 14-year-old daughter, as the girl wanted, contrary to the father's wishes. The decision was made on the basis that the case represented a conventional dispute over the disposal of the girl's body, although the judge urged ministers to seek "proper regulation" for the future of cryonic preservation following concerns raised by the hospital about the competence and professionalism of the team that conducted the preservation procedures.[44] In Alcor Life Extension Foundation v. Richardson, the Iowa Court of Appeals ordered for the disinterment of Richardson, who was buried against his wishes for cryopreservation.[39][45]

A detailed legal examination by Jochen Taupitz concludes that cryonic storage is legal in Germany for an indefinite period of time.[46]

In 2009, writing in Bioethics, David Shaw examines the ethical status of cryonics. The arguments against it include changing the concept of death, the expense of preservation and revival, lack of scientific advancement to permit revival, temptation to use premature euthanasia, and failure due to catastrophe. Arguments in favor of cryonics include the potential benefit to society, the prospect of immortality, and the benefits associated with avoiding death. Shaw explores the expense and the potential payoff, and applies an adapted version of Pascal's Wager to the question.[47]

In 2016, Charles Tandy wrote in favor of cryonics, arguing that honoring someone's last wishes is seen as a benevolent duty in American and many other cultures.[48]

Cryopreservation was applied to human cells beginning in 1954 with frozen sperm, which was thawed and used to inseminate three women.[49] The freezing of humans was first scientifically proposed by Michigan professor Robert Ettinger when he wrote The Prospect of Immortality (1962).[50] In April 1966, the first human body was frozenthough it had been embalmed for two monthsby being placed in liquid nitrogen and stored at just above freezing. The middle-aged woman from Los Angeles, whose name is unknown, was soon thawed out and buried by relatives.[51]

The first body to be frozen with the hope of future revival was James Bedford's, a few hours after his cancer-caused death in 1967.[52] Bedford's corpse is the only one frozen before 1974 still preserved today.[51] In 1976, Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute; his corpse was cryopreserved in 2011.[50] Robert Nelson, "a former TV repairman with no scientific background" who led the Cryonics Society of California, was sued in 1981 for allowing nine bodies to thaw and decompose in the 1970s; in his defense, he claimed that the Cryonics Society had run out of money.[51] This led to the lowered reputation of cryonics in the U.S.[24]

In 2018, a Y-Combinator startup called Nectome was recognized for developing a method of preserving brains with chemicals rather than by freezing. The method is fatal, performed as euthanasia under general anethesia, but the hope is that future technology would allow the brain to be physically scanned into a computer simulation, neuron by neuron.[53]

According to The New York Times, cryonicists are predominantly nonreligious white males, outnumbering women by about three to one.[54] According to The Guardian, as of 2008, while most cryonicists used to be young, male and "geeky" recent demographics have shifted slightly towards whole families.[40]

In 2015 Du Hong, a 61-year-old female writer of children's literature, became the first known Chinese national to have their head cryopreserved.[55]

Cryonics is generally regarded as a fringe pseudoscience.[3] The Society for Cryobiology have rejected as members those who practiced cryonics,[3] and have issued a public statement saying that cryonics is "not science", and that it is a "personal choice" how people want to have their dead bodies disposed of.[56]

Russian company KrioRus is the only non-US vendor of cryonics services. Yevgeny Alexandrov, chair of the Russian Academy of Sciences commission against pseudoscience, said there was "no scientific basis" for cryonics, and that the company's offering was based on "unfounded speculation".[57]

Although scientists have expressed skepticism about cryonics in media sources,[24] the Norwegian philosopher Ole Martin Moen has written that it only receives a "miniscule" amount of attention from academia.[10]

While some neuroscientists contend that all the subtleties of a human mind are contained in its anatomical structure,[58] few neuroscientists will comment directly upon the topic of cryonics due to its speculative nature. Individuals who intend to be frozen are often "looked at as a bunch of kooks".[59] Cryobiologist Kenneth B. Storey said in 2004 that cryonics is impossible and will never be possible, as cryonics proponents are proposing to "over-turn the laws of physics, chemistry, and molecular science".[60] Neurobiologist Michael Hendricks has said that "Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry".[24]

William T. Jarvis has written that "Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery".[4][5]

According to cryonicist Aschwin de Wolf and others, cryonics can often produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists. James Hughes, the executive director of the pro-life-extension Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, chooses not to personally sign up for cryonics, calling it a worthy experiment but stating laconically that "I value my relationship with my wife."[54]

Cryobiologist Dayong Gao states that "People can always have hope that things will change in the future, but there is no scientific foundation supporting cryonics at this time."[37] As well, while it is universally agreed that "personal identity" is uninterrupted when brain activity temporarily ceases during incidents of accidental drowning (where people have been restored to normal functioning after being completely submerged in cold water for up to 66 minutes), some people express concern that a centuries-long cryopreservation might interrupt their conception of personal identity, such that the revived person would "not be you".[10]

Maastricht University bioethicist David Shaw raises the argument that there would be no point in being revived in the far future if one's friends and families are dead, leaving them all alone; he notes, however, that family and friends can also be frozen, that there is "nothing to prevent the thawed-out freezee from making new friends", and that a lonely existence may be preferable to no existence at all for the revived.[47] The technology required to actually revive any corpse preserved in such a manner does not currently exist, and so any such conjecture remains speculative.[1]

Suspended animation is a popular subject in science fiction and fantasy settings. It is often the means by which a character is transported into the future.

A survey in Germany found that about half of the respondents were familiar with cryonics, and about half of those familiar with cryonics had learned of the subject from films or television.[61]

Corpses subjected to the cryonics process include those of baseball players Ted Williams and son John Henry Williams (in 2002 & 2004),[62] engineer and doctor L. Stephen Coles (in 2014),[63] and software engineer Hal Finney (in 2014).[64]

People known to have arranged for cryonics upon death include television host Larry King[65] and PayPal founders Luke Nosek[66] and Peter Thiel.[67]

Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein wanted to have his head and penis frozen after death so that he could "seed the human race with his DNA".[68][69]

The corpses of some are mistakenly believed to have undergone cryonics for instance, the urban legend suggesting Walt Disney's corpse was cryopreserved is false; it was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.[70][a] Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote enthusiastically of the concept in The Door into Summer (serialized in 1956), was cremated and had his ashes distributed over the Pacific Ocean. Timothy Leary was a long-time cryonics advocate and signed up with a major cryonics provider, but he changed his mind shortly before his death, and was not cryopreserved.[72]

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Cryonics - Wikipedia

Cryonics – RationalWiki

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That is not dead which can eternal lie.And with strange aeons even death may die.

Cryonics is the practice of freezing clinically-dead people in liquid nitrogen (N2) with the hope of future reanimation.

Many scientists will admit that some sort of cryogenic preservation and revival does not provably violate known physics. But they stress that, in practical terms, freezing and reviving dead humans is so far off as to hardly be worth taking seriously; present cryonics practices are speculation at best, and quackery and pseudoscience at worst.

Nevertheless, cryonicists will accept considerable amounts of money right now for procedures based only on vague science fiction-level speculations, with no scientific evidence whatsoever that any of their present actions will help achieve their declared aims. (Cryonicists often point to presently-nonexistent "sufficiently advanced" nanotechnology or mind uploading as favored methods for revival.) They sincerely consider this an obviously sensible idea so common-sense that one would have to be stupid not to sign up.

Cryonics should not be confused with cryobiology (the study of living things at low temperatures), cryotherapy (the use of cold in medicine), cryogenics (subjecting things to cold temperatures in general) or Whole-body cryotherapy (alternative medicine for the living).

Alcor's "bigfoot" dewar can contain 4 whole-bodies and 6 brains immersed in liquid nitrogen

Robert Ettinger, a teacher of physics and mathematics, published The Prospect of Immortality in 1964. He then founded the Cryonics Institute and the related Immortalist Society. Ettinger was inspired by "The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones (Amazing Stories, July 1931).[1] Lots of science fiction fans and early transhumanists then seized upon the notion with tremendous enthusiasm.

Corpses were being frozen in liquid nitrogen by the early 1960s, though only for cosmetic preservation. The first person to be frozen with the aim of revival was James Bedford, frozen in early 1967. Bedford remains frozen (at Alcor Life Extension Foundation) to this day.

New hope came with K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, postulating nanobots as a mechanism for cell repair in 1986. That Drexlerian nanobots are utterly impossible has not affected cryonics advocates' enthusiasm for them in the slightest, and they remain a standard proposed revival mechanism.[2]

A major advance in tissue preservation came in the late 1990s with vitrification, where chemicals are added to the tissue so as to allow it to freeze as a glass rather than as ice crystals. This all but eliminated ice crystal damage, at the cost of toxicity of the chemicals.

(Cryonicists are very big on asserting that putting a human substantially made of water into liquid nitrogen at -196C, turning them into a lump of ice, is not "freezing" at all but vitrification if you added enough antifreeze, and will get very shirty at people calling it "freezing" and claim this makes every further criticism wrong. In real medical technology, e.g. embryo preservation, vitrification is spoken of as a kind of freezing, which of course it is.)

Upon his death in 2011, Ettinger himself was stored at the Cryonics Institute in Detroit, the 106th person to be stored there. In all, about 250 people had been "preserved" as of 2015.[3] There are about 2000 living people presently signed up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute the cryonics subculture is very small for its cultural impact.

Cryonics, in various forms, has become a theme in science fiction,[4], either as a serious plot device (The Door into Summer, the Alien tetralogy), or a source of humor (Futurama, Sleeper). Its usual job is one-way time travel, the cryonics itself being handwaved (as you are allowed to do in science fiction, though not in reality) as a pretext for one of various Rip Van Winkle scenarios.

As a fictional concept, "cryogenics" generally refers to a not-yet-invented form of suspended animation rather than present-day cryonics, in that the worst technical issue to be resolved (if at all) in the far future is either aging, or the cause of death/whatever killed you.

Timothy Leary, the famous LSD-dropper, was also famously interested in the "one in a thousand" chance of revival. He signed up with Alcor soon after it opened.[5] Eventually, the cryonicists themselves creeped him out so much[6] that he opted for cremation.[7]

Walt Disney often believed (in urban legend) to have had his head or body frozen died in December 1966, a few weeks before the first cryonic freezing process in early 1967.[citationneeded]

Hall of Fame baseball player and all-time Red Sox great Ted Williams was frozen after he died in 2002. A nasty fight broke out between his oldest children, who had a will saying he wished to be cremated, and his youngest son John-Henry who produced an informal family agreement saying he was to be frozen. This resulted in a macabre family feud for much of the summer of 2002. Williams was eventually frozen.[8]

Cryonics enthusiasts will allow that a person is entirely dead when they reach "information-theoretic death", where the information that makes up their mind is beyond recovery.

The purpose of freezing the recently dead is to stop chemistry. This is intended to allow hypothetical future science and technology to recover the information in the frozen cells and repair them or otherwise reconstruct the person, or at least their mind. We have literally no idea how to do the revival now or how it might be done in the future but cryonicists believe that scientific and technological progress will, if sustained for a sufficient time, advance to the point where the information can be recovered and the mind restarted, in a body (for those who see cryonics as a medical procedure) or a computer running an emulator (for the transhumanists).

Most of the problems with cryonics relate to the massive physical damage caused by the freezing process. Attempts to alleviate this cause chemical damage.

Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.

Cryonics for dead humans currently consists of a ritual that many find reminiscent of those performed by practitioners of the world's major religions:

As the Society for Cryobiology puts it:[9]

The Society does, however, take the position that the knowledge necessary for the revival of live or dead whole mammals following cryopreservation does not currently exist and can come only from conscientious and patient research in cryobiology and medicine. In short, the act of preserving a body, head or brain after clinical death and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of speculation or hope, not science, and as such is outside the purview of the Society for Cryobiology.

In the US, cryonics is legally considered an extremely elaborate form of burial (At Cryonics Institute in Michigan),[10] or as a donation to science (at Alcor in Arizona) and cannot be performed on someone who has not been declared medically dead (i.e., "brain dead"). Once you are declared legally dead, your fellow cryonicists swoop in to preserve you as quickly as possible.

The body, or just the head, is given large doses of anti-clotting drugs, as well as being infused with cryoprotectant chemicals to allow vitrification. It is then frozen by being put into a bath of liquid nitrogen at -196C. At this temperature chemical reactions all but stop.

The body is stored upside down so that if staff are unable for any reason to "top off" the liquid nitrogen in the tank, the head will be the last part to thaw. The Cryonics Institute only allows for full-body freezing, but Alcor will let you freeze only your head. The heads are stored in the center of their dewars (big aluminum frozen coffins), so if your head is close to the top and they can't refill it with nitrogen then you're just out of luck.

You can also have your pet frozen, because future societies will not only be able and willing to resurrect centuries old humans, but Fido as well.

Long-term memory is stored in physical form in the neural network as proteins accumulated at a chemical synapse to change the strength of the interconnection between neurons. So if you freeze the brain without crystals forming, the information may not be lost. As such. Hopefully. Though we have no idea if current cryonics techniques preserve the physical and chemical structure in sufficient detail to recover the information even in principle. Samples look good, though at least one working scientist with a strong interest in preserving the information disagrees.[11]

Recovering the information is another matter. We have not even the start of an idea how to get it back out again. No revival method is proposed beyond "one day we will be able to do anything!" Some advocates literally propose a magic-equivalent future artificial superintelligence that will make everything better as the universal slam-dunk counterargument to all doubts.[12]

Ben Best, CEO of the Cryonics Institute, supplies in Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice[13] a list of cryobiology findings that suggest that cryonicists might not be completely wrong; however, this paper (contrary to the promise of its title) also contains a liberal admixture of "then a miracle occurs." His assertions as to what cited papers say also vary considerably from what the cited papers' abstracts state.

Alcor Corporation calls cryonics "a scientific approach to extending human life" and compares it to heart surgery.[14] This is a gross misrepresentation of the state of both the science and technology and verges on both pseudoscience and quackery. Alcor also has a tendency to use invented pseudomedical terminology in its suspension reports.[15][16]

To date, the strongest evidence for cryonics comes from experiments with mammal brains. In 2016, researchers showed that a rabbit's brain could be frozen and thawed while keeping interconnections between neurons intact.[17]

Keeping the head or entire body at -196C stops chemistry, but the freezing process itself causes massive physical damage to the cells. The following problems (many of which are acknowledged by cryonicists[18]) would all need to be solved to bring a frozen head or body back to life. Many would need breakthroughs not merely in engineering, but in scientific understanding itself, which we simply cannot predict.

This is the big problem. The existing cryonics facilities are charities with large operational expenses run by obsessive enthusiasts. They are small and financially shaky.[28][29] In 1979, the Chatsworth facility (Cryonics Company of California, run by Robert Nelson) ran out of money and the frozen bodies thawed.[30][31] The cryonics movement as a whole was outraged and facility operators are much more careful these days. But it's an expensive business to operate as a charity.

The more general problem is that many cryonicists are libertarians and, unsurprisingly, have proven rather bad at putting together highly social nonprofits designed well enough to work in society on timescales of decades, let alone centuries. The movement has severe and obvious financial problems the cash flows just aren't sustainable, and Alcor relies on occasional large donations from rich members to make up the deficit.[32][33]

Insurance companies are barely willing to consider cryonics. You will have to work rather hard to find someone to even sell you the policy. There are, however, cryonicist insurance agents who specialise in the area.[34]

Furthermore, Alcor are distressingly slapdash and amateur in their procedures, as per the famed case of Kim Suozzi's 2013 cryopreservation:[35]

Within minutes of taking custody of the body, the bumbling Alcor team began experiencing a series of equipment failures. A temperature monitor didn't work because, as it turned out, the batteries were dead. Shortly thereafter, their expensive mechanical chest-compression device stopped functioning. Then, having moved Suozzis body into a tub of ice, the Alcor team realized they'd forgotten to bring along a key piece of cooling equipment. Alcor's after-action report, compiled from the haphazard "free-form" observations of an unnamed but "experienced" observer, determined that such mistakes could in the future be remedied by "the use of a checklist." Now theres a thought.

Eliezer Yudkowsky of LessWrong signed up with the Cryonics Institute, but recommends Alcor as the "high-priced high-quality organization".[36]

Of the early frozen corpses, only James Bedford remains, due to tremendous effort on the part of his surviving relatives. Though they didn't do anything to alleviate ice crystals, so his remains are likely just broken cell mush by now.

Terry [dramatically]: Welcome to the world of tomorrow!!Lou: Why do you always have to say it that way?

There are many medical issues connected with reanimation, but it is worth pointing out that a reanimated person faces numerous non-medical issues after returning to society. These might include:

All of these could cause the person great social, not to mention psychological, problems after revival. The person may also experience an identity crisis or delusions of grandeur.

Cryonics is not considered a part of cryobiology, and cryobiologists consider cryonicists nuisances. The Society for Cryobiology banned cryonicists from membership in 1982, specifically those "misrepresenting the science of cryobiology, including any practice or application of freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation."[note 1] (This specific provision was not present in the 2017 revision of the bylaws.[38]) As they put it in an official statement:

The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science.

The Society's planned statement was actually considerably toned down (it originally called cryonics a "fraud") after threats of litigation from Mike Darwin of Alcor.[39]

It can be difficult to find scientific critics willing to bother detailing why they think what the cryonics industry does is silly,[40] though some will detail just why the fundamental notions of present-day cryonics practice are biologically ludicrous.[11] Mostly, scientists consider that cryonicists are failing to acknowledge the hard, grinding work needed to advance the several sciences and technologies that are prerequisites for their goals.[41] Castles in the air are a completely acceptable, indeed standard, part of turning science fiction into practical technology, but you do have to go through the brick-by-brick slog of building the foundations underneath. Or, indeed, inventing the grains of sand each brick is made of. (Some cryonicists are cryobiologists and so are personally putting in the hard slog needed to get there.)

Cryonicists, like many technologists, also frequently show arrogant ignorance of fields not their own not just sciences[42] but even directly-related medicine[43][44] leaving people in those fields disinclined to take them seriously.

William T. Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, said, "Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery."[45] Mostly, doctors ignore cryonics and consider it a nice, but expensive, long shot.

Demographically, cryonics advocates tend to intersect strongly with transhumanists and singularitarians: almost all well-educated, mostly male to the point where the phrase "hostile wife syndrome" is commonplace[46] mostly atheist or agnostic but with some being religious, and disproportionately involved in mathematics, computers, or physics.[47] Belief in cryonics is pretty much required on LessWrong to be accepted as "rational."[48]

Hardly any celebrities have signed up to be frozen in hopes of being brought back to life in the distant future.[49] (This may be a net win.)

Cryonicists are some of the smartest people you will ever meet and provide sterling evidence that humans are just monkeys with shiny toys, who mostly use intelligence to implement stupidity faster and better.

When arguing their case, cryonics advocates tend to conflate non-existent technologies that might someday be plausible with science-fiction-level speculation, and speak of "first, achieve the singularity" as if it were a minor detail that will just happen, rather than a huge amount of work by a huge number of people working out the many, many tiny details.

The proposals and speculations are so vague as to be pretty much unfalsifiable. Solid objection to a speculation is met with another speculation that may (but does not necessarily, or sometimes even probably) escape the problem. Cryonicists will often tell you that there isn't any proof it won't work. You will find many attempts to reverse the burden of proof and demand that you prove a given speculation isn't possible. Answering can involve trying to compress a degree in biology into a few paragraphs.[42] Most cryonicists' knowledge of biology appears severely deficient.

Cryonicists also tend to assert unsupported high probabilities for as-yet nonexistent technologies and as-yet nonexistent science.[50][51][52] Figures are derived on the basis of no evidence at all, concerning the behaviour of systems we've built nothing like and therefore have no empirical understanding of they even assert probabilities of particular as-yet unrealised scientific breakthroughs occurring. (Saying "Bayesian!" is apparently sufficient support with no further working being shown under any circumstances.) If someone gives a number or even says the word "probable," ask them to show their working.

One must also take care to make very precise queries, distinguishing between, "Is some sort of cryogenic suspension and revival not theoretically impossible with as yet unrealised future technologies?" and "Is there any evidence that what the cryonics industry is doing right now does any good at all?" Cryonics advocates who have been asked the second question tend to answer the first, at which point it is almost entirely impossible to pry a falsifiable claim out of them.

When you ask about a particularly tricky part and the answer is "but, nanobots!" take a drink. If it's "but, future nigh-magical artificial superintelligence!", down the bottle.

Cryonicists are almost all sincere and exceedingly smart people. However, they are also by and large absolute fanatics, and really believe that freezing your freshly-dead body is the best current hope of evading permanent death and that the $30200,000 this costs is an obviously sensible investment in the distant future. There is little, if any, deliberate fraud going on.

Some cryonicists considered the Chatsworth facility going broke to be due to fraud, but there's little to suggest it wasn't primarily the owner just being out of his depth.

Alcor have multiple reports of being incredibly careless with the frozen heads in their care.[53] Despite suing to get a book on the subject dropped from publication[54] and threating further legal action, their carelessness further came to light in the case of Kim Suozzi, a breathtaking saga of slapdash amateurism, particularly for an organisation that has been doing this for four decades.[35]

One cryonics fanatic, scientist Kurt Pilgeram, had been giving lectures for Alcor since 1971.[55] Only his head was preserved by Alcor after his death in 2015, but according to a lawsuit by his son, Laurence Pilgeram, Alcor had been mandated to preserve all of his father's remains, no matter how damaged.[55]

Cryonics enthusiasts are fond of applying a variant of Pascal's wager to cryonics[56] and saying that being a Pascal's Wager variant doesn't make their argument fallacious.[51][52][57] Ralph Merkle gives us Merkle's Matrix:

The questionable aspect here is omitting the bit where "sign up" means "spend $30,000 (at the Cryonics Institute), $80,000 (at Alcor; head-only), or $200,000 (at Alcor; whole-body) of your children's inheritance for a spot in the freezer and a bunch of completely scientifically unjustified promises from shaky organizations run by strange people who are medical incompetents." It also assumes that living at some undetermined future date is sufficiently bonum in se that it is worth spending all that money that could be used to feed starving children now. Or, if you care only about your own survival, on medicine today which is much more likely to extend your life.

When you freeze a steak and bring it back to edible, I'll believe it.

The basic notion of freezing and reviving an animal, e.g. a human, is far from completely implausible.

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Cryonics, brain preservation and the weird science of …

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Linda Chamberlain works just down the hallway from her husband. She walks past him every day. Occasionally she'll stop by to check in on him and say hello.

The only problem is, Fred Chamberlain has been dead for eight years. Shortly after he was pronounced legally dead from prostate cancer, Fred was cryopreserved -- his body was filled with a medical-grade antifreeze, cooled to minus 196 degrees Celsius and carefully lowered into a giant vat of liquid nitrogen.

So when Linda visits Fred, she talks to him through the insulated, stainless-steel wall of a 10-foot-tall preservation chamber. And he's not alone in there. Eight people reside in that massive cylinder along with him, and more than 170 are preserved in similar chambers in the same room. All of them elected to have their bodies stored in subzero temperatures, to await a future when they could be brought back to life. Cryonically preserved in the middle of the Arizona desert.

This story is part of Hacking the Apocalypse, CNET's documentary series on the tech saving us from the end of the world.

Linda Chamberlain is cheerful as she shows me her husband's perhaps-not-final resting place. She places her hand on the cool steel and gives it a loving pat. Being in a room with 170 dead people isn't morbid to her.

"It makes me feel happy," she says. "Because I know that they have the potential to be restored to life and health. And I have the potential of being with them again."

Alcor proclaims itself a world leader in cryonics, offering customers the chance to preserve their bodies indefinitely, until they can be restored to full health and function through medical discoveries that have yet to be made. For the low price of $220,000, Alcor is selling the chance to live a second life.

It's a slim chance.

Critics say cryonics is a pipe dream, no different from age-old chimeras like the fountain of youth. Scientists say there's no way to adequately preserve a human body or brain, and that the promise of bringing a dead brain back to life is thousands of years away.

But Alcor is still selling that chance. And ever since Linda and Fred Chamberlain founded the Alcor Life Extension Foundation back in 1972, Linda has watched Alcor's membership swell with more people wanting to take that chance. More than 1,300 people have now signed up to have their bodies sent to Alcor instead of the graveyard.

And when her time is up, Linda Chamberlain plans to join them.

Hacking the Apocalypseis CNET's new documentary series digging into the science and technology that could save us from the end of the world. You can check out our episodes onPandemic,Nuclear Winter,Global Drought,Tsunamis,CryonicsandEscaping the Planetand see the full series onYouTube.

Photographs of "patients" line the walls of Alcor's offices.

From the outside, Alcor's facilities don't look like the kind of place you'd come to live forever.

When I arrived at the company's headquarters, a nondescript office block in Scottsdale, Arizona, a short drive out of Phoenix, I expected something grander. After all, this is a place that's attempting to answer the question at the heart of human existence: Can we cheat death?

I've come here to find out why someone would choose cryonics. What drives someone to reject the natural order of life and death, and embrace an end that's seen by many, scientists and lay people alike, as the stuff of science fiction?

But after a short time at Alcor, I realize the true believers here don't see cryonics as a way to cheat death. They don't even see death as the end.

"Legal death only really means that your heart and your lungs have stopped functioning without intervention," Linda Chamberlain tells me. "It doesn't mean your cells are dead, it doesn't mean even your organs are dead."

Alcor refers to the people preserved in its facilities as "patients" for that very reason -- it doesn't consider them to be dead.

In Chamberlain's view, the idea of death as an "on-off switch" is outdated. People that died 100 years ago could well have been saved by modern medical interventions that we take for granted in the 21st century. So what about 100 years from now? Alcor hopes that by pressing pause on life, its patients might be revived when medical technology has improved.

"Our best estimates are that within 50 to 100 years, we will have the medical technologies needed to restore our patients to health and function," says Chamberlain.

We're killing people who could potentially be preserved. We're just throwing them in the ground so they can be eaten by worms and bacteria.

Alcor CEO Max More

Alcor CEO Max More agrees. In his view, cryonics is about giving people who die today a second chance. And he says our current views about death and burial are robbing people of a potential future.

"We're killing people who could potentially be preserved," More says. "We're just throwing them in the ground so they can be eaten by worms and bacteria, or we're burning them up. And to me, that's kind of crazy when we could give them a chance if they want it.

"If you think about life insurance, it's actually death insurance -- it pays out on death. This really is life insurance. It's a backup plan."

An early copy of Cryonics magazine sits in Alcor's offices, showing the inside of one of its preservation chambers.

Alcor hasn't exactly mapped out how its patients will be brought back to full function and health, or what revival technologies the future will bring. Its website speaks about the possibility of molecular nanotechnology -- that is, using microscopic nano-robots to "replace old damaged chromosomes with new ones in every cell."

But that level of cellular regeneration isn't something Alcor is working on. The company is in the business of selling preservation, but it's not developing the technologies for restoration. In fact, no one currently working at Alcor is likely to be responsible for reviving patients. That responsibility will be handed on to the next generation (and potentially many more generations after that) -- scientists of some undetermined time in the future, who will have developed the technology necessary to reverse the work that Alcor is doing now. It seems like a convenient gap for cryonics: Sell the promise in the present without the burden of proving the end result.

Our goal is to have reversible suspended animation, just like in the movies. We want it to be that perfect.

Alcor founder Linda Chamberlain

Chamberlain herself admits the future is ultimately unclear and that they "don't know how powerful the revival technologies are going to be." But she does know the end result Alcor is aiming for.

"Our goal is to have reversible suspended animation, just like in the movies," she says. "We want it to be that perfect. We're not there yet, but we're always working on improving our techniques."

The science behind cryonics is unproven. The procedures are highly experimental. No human -- specifically, no human brain -- has been brought back from death or from a state of postmortem preservation. Alcor points to research in worms and the organs of small mammals that it says indicates the potential for cryonics. There are famous names associated with the movement (Alcor admits famed baseballer Ted Williams is a patient), but there aren't exactly any human success stories who've awoken from cryonic preservation to hit the motivational speaking circuit.

James Bedford, the first man to enter cryonic suspension, according to Alcor. Bedford was preserved in a "cryocapsule" in 1967 (five years before Alcor was founded), before being transferred into Alcor's facilities in 1991.

Even More isn't making any promises. He acknowledges that the company may not even exist when it comes time for its patients to wake up.

"There are no guarantees," he says. "We're not promising to bring you back on May 27th, 2082, or whatever. We don't know officially this will work. We don't know for sure that the organization [Alcor] will survive... We don't know if an asteroid will land on us. There's no guarantees. But it's a shot. It's an opportunity. And it just seems to be better than the alternative."

The way the Alcor team sees it, you have a better chance of waking up from here than you do if you're sent to the crematorium.

One of the central questions of cryonics is how you preserve a dead body if you hope to revive it.

Even if they don't know exactly when or how patients will be brought back, the team at Alcor knows one thing is vital: They need to preserve as much of the brain and body as perfectly as possible.

While they may be clinically dead when they arrive in the operating room, Alcor's "patients" are intubated and kept on ice while a mechanical thumper (shown here on a dummy) keeps blood flowing around the body, all in a bid to preserve the body as thoroughly as possible.

That life-saving mortuary practice takes place inside Alcor's operating room -- a sort of hospital-meets-morgue where the organization prepares bodies for "long-term care."

When patients come through the doors at Alcor, they've already been pronounced legally dead. Ideally, they haven't had to travel far to get here and they've had their body put on ice as soon as possible after clinical death. According to Chamberlain, that hypothermia is vital for "slowing down the dying process." I didn't think I'd hear someone say that about a dead person.

During the first stages of cryonic preservation, bodies are "perfused" with a medical-grade antifreeze, all in a bid to prevent ice crystals forming. From here, the body vitrifies, rather than freezing.

(I also didn't expect to see a dead person in the operating room. At least, that's what I thought when I saw a human dummy waiting in the ice bath by the door. One of Alcor's employees picked up the dummy's hand to wave at me and I genuinely think that moment shortened my life span by two years.)

The ice bath is the first step in the preservation process, and it's here where the patient is placed in a kind of post-death life support. Drugs are administered to slow down metabolic processes, the body is intubated to maintain oxygen levels, and a mechanical thumper pumps the heart to ensure blood keeps flowing around the body.

The team then prepares the body to be cooled down to its permanent storage temperature. The blood is replaced with cryoprotectant (think of it like medical-grade antifreeze), which is pumped through the veins, all in a bid to (surprisingly) prevent the body freezing.

Freezing might sound like the natural end goal of cryopreservation, but it's actually incredibly damaging. Our bodies are made up of about 50 to 60% water, and when this water starts to freeze, it forms ice crystals which damage the body's organs and veins.

But if that water is replaced with cryoprotectant, Alcor says it can slowly reduce temperatures so the body vitrifies -- turning into a kind of glass-like state, rather than freezing. From here, the body is placed in a giant stainless steel chamber, known as a dewar. And Alcor says a cryopreserved body can be stored in this "long-term care" for decades.

I missed something when I first walked into the operating room. At the back, behind the ice bath and medical instruments (including surgical scissors and, chillingly, unexplained saws), there's a clear box, about the size of a milk crate, with a circular metal ring clamped inside.

It's a box for human heads.

This is designed for patients who've elected to preserve their head only, removed from the body from the collarbone up. These preserved heads are referred to as "neuro patients."

This small perspex box in the Alcor operating room is used to clamp human heads in place for cryopreservation.

If putting my whole body on ice was a bridge too far, then cutting off and preserving my head is beyond anything I can fathom. But it's a choice some of Alcor's patients make. The neuro patients are stored in small, barrel-sized vats while they wait for long-term care. The moment I lifted the lid on one of these vats -- nitrogen gas billowing out, human head obscured just inches below -- will stay with me forever.

Each preservation chamber can hold four bodies (positioned with the head at the bottom, to keep the brain as cool as possible) and five "neuro patients" stacked down the center.

It's cheaper if you elect to preserve just your head. Alcor charges only $80,000 for the head, compared with $220,000 for the full body. But there are also pragmatic reasons for choosing this more selective form of cryonic preservation.

When Alcor cryopreserves a body, the main priority is to preserve the brain and cause as little damage as possible. After all, the brain is not only the center of cognitive function, but also long-term memory. Essentially everything that makes you who you are.

You might be attached to your body now (both figuratively and literally), but many people at Alcor believe that, by the time medical science has advanced enough to bring a person back to life, their full body won't be needed. Whether you're regenerating a human body from DNA found in the head or uploading a person's consciousness to a new physical body, if we reach a point where cryonic preservation can be reversed, potentially hundreds of years in the future, your 20th or 21st century body will be outdated hardware.

That's certainly a view Linda Chamberlain takes. When she goes, only her head will stay.

"There's a lot of DNA in all that tissue and material," she says of the human head. "A new body can be grown for you from your own DNA. It's just a new, beautiful body that hasn't aged and hasn't had damage from disease."

In fact, when Chamberlain thinks of her future body, she doesn't want to limit herself to the kind of human form she has now.

"I hope that I won't have a biological body, but I'll have a body made out of nanobots," she tells me. "I can be as beautiful as I want to be. I won't be old anymore."

I hope that I won't have a biological body, but I'll have a body made out of nanobots.

Alcor founder Linda Chamberlain

I tell her she's already beautiful. She laughs.

"But if you have a nanobot swarm, it can reconfigure itself any way you want!" she replies, completely serious. "If I want to go swimming in the ocean, I have to worry about sharks. But after I have my nanobots body, if I want to go swimming in the ocean, I can just reconfigure myself to be like an orca, a killer whale. And then the sharks have to look out for me."

Waking up 100 years from now as a fully reconfigurable, shark-hunting nanobot orca sounds like fun.

But this kind of future is possible only if the process of going into cryonic preservation doesn't damage your brain. The brain is a staggeringly complex organ, and storing it at subzero temperatures for decades at a time has the potential to cause serious cellular damage.

And according to some scientists, that's the main issue with cryonics. Before you even get to the issue of reanimation, they say, cryonics doesn't come close to delivering on the promise of preservation.

Surgical instruments in Alcor's operating room.

Neuroscientist Ken Hayworth is one expert who's highly skeptical. Hayworth isn't opposed to preservation -- he was a member of Alcor before he left to found the Brain Preservation Foundation with the goal of building dialogue between cryonicists and the broader scientific community. He wants brain preservation to be a respected field of scientific study. And in 2010, he laid down a challenge to help build that credibility.

"[We] put out a very concrete challenge that said, 'Hey, cryonics community, prove to us that you can at least preserve those structures of the brain that neuroscience knows are critical to long-term memory, meaning the synaptic connectivity of the brain," he says.

"The cryonics community, unfortunately, has not met the bare minimum requirements of that prize."

Hayworth says he's seen examples of animal brains preserved using techniques very similar to what cryonics companies say they use, but the samples showed a significant number of dead cells.

"I take that to mean that there was probably a lot of damage to those structures that encode memory," he says. "It was like, 'We're looking at something that doesn't look right at all.'"

We're looking at something that doesn't look right at all.

Ken Hayworth

However, Hayworth has seen a technique that successfully preserved a brain so well that it was awarded the Brain Preservation Prizeby his foundation. This prize recognized a team of researchers for preserving synapses across the whole brain of a pig. But the technique, known as "aldehyde stabilized cryopreservation," has two limitations that differ from the promise of cryonics. Firstly, it requires the brain to be filled with gluteraldehyde, a kind of embalming fluid, which means the brain can never be revived. And secondly? It's a lethal process that needs to be conducted while a mammal is living.

"It almost instantly glues together all the proteins in the brain," says Hayworth. "Now you're as dead as a rock at that point. You ain't coming back. But the advantage of that is it glues all of them in position, it doesn't destroy information."

Retaining that information is vital because, according to Hayworth, it could allow you to re-create a person's mind in the future. Forget transplanting your head onto a new body. Hayworth says the information from a preserved brain could potentially be scanned and uploaded into another space, such as a computer, allowing you to live on as a simulation.

You might not be a walking, talking human like you once were. But, in Hayworth's view, that's not the only way to live again.

"I think there's plenty of reason to suspect that future technologies will be able to bring somebody back -- future technologies like brain scanning, and mind uploading and brain simulation."

Being preserved long enough (and well enough) that you can live on as a simulation may be one of the end goals that cryonicists hope to achieve.

But there are plenty of critics who say we won't reach that point anytime soon. They say there's no way to know whether cryonics adequately preserves the brain, because we don't fully understand how the mind works, let alone how to physically preserve its complexity.

Ken Miller is a professor of neuroscience and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York. He's spent his life trying to understand the complexity of the human brain.

"Some people say [the brain] is the most complicated thing in the universe," says Miller.

"The most basic answer to how the brain works is, we don't know. We know how a lot of pieces work ... but we're very far from understanding the system."

It's at least thousands of years before we would know and really understand how the brain works.

Ken Miller

According to Miller, while we know a lot about parts of the brain -- how the neurons function, how electrical signals travel to the brain -- the complete picture is still a mystery.

"In my opinion, it's at least thousands of years before we would know and really understand how the brain works to the point where you could take all the pieces ... and put it back together and make a mind out of it," says Miller.

"It's just the complexity. Levels and levels and levels and levels -- it's beyond the imagination."

And what if we reach that point? What if, a thousand years from now, science was capable of restoring my cryonically preserved brain and uploading it to some kind of simulator -- would I still be me?

Sitting in his office, I put the question to Miller. And in the kind of meta way that I've realized is normal when speaking to a professor of theoretical neuroscience, I see the cogs of his mind working. His brain, thinking about another brain, living on as a simulated brain. My brain is melting.

"I think so, but it's a funny question," he says. "Because of course, if it was all information that you got up into a computer... making something feel like Claire, we could have a million of them on a million different machines. And each of them would feel like Claire.

"But immediately, just like twins -- immediately, identical twins start having divergent experiences and becoming different people. And so all the different Claires would immediately start having different experiences and becoming different Claires."

Back in Arizona, with the vision of a million computerized versions of myself enslaving the human race far from my mind, the promise of cryonics still feels like a dream.

I'm walking through the long-term care room as waterfalls of fog cascade from the cryonic chambers. These dewars need to be regularly refilled with liquid nitrogen to make sure patients stay at the perfect temperature, and today's the day they're getting topped up.

As I slowly step through the fog, stainless steel chambers loom large around me. Visibility drops, so I can barely see my outstretched hand in front of my face. For just the tiniest moment, as my feet disappear beneath me and I'm surrounded by reflections on reflections of white vapor, I lose my bearings. I feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience.

Walking through Alcor's long-term preservation room is a surreal experience.

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Cryonics: Could you live forever? – BBC Science Focus Magazine

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For centuries, the worlds physicists, writers and philosophers have argued over whether time travel is possible, with most coming to the conclusion that its never going to happen.

But on an 800-acre plot of land just outside the small town of Comfort, Texas, a group of architects, engineers and scientists are building a Timeship that they say could transport tens of thousands of individuals to a far-distant future.

Their approach does not involve the use of flux capacitors, or zooming at light-speed through black holes.

Instead, the Timeship aims to store people at such low temperatures that their bodies are preserved for a future civilisation to reanimate them, a concept known as cryonics.

Read more about cryonics:

Just as a spaceship allows people to move through space, Timeship will allow people to travel to another time in the future, explains Stephen Valentine, who is the director and principal architect of the Timeship project.

Valentine has been given a multimillion-dollar budget from anonymous donors to develop a Mecca for cryonics and life extension.

As well as a fortress-like building that can store frozen people, Timeship plans to store other precious biological samples such as organs, stem cells, embryos, and even the DNA of rare or threatened species.

The site will also house the worlds largest life extension research centre, the Stasis Research Park.

This concept shows how Timeship might look. The inner region is used for liquid nitrogen storage. The eight square-shaped structures house hundreds of frozen patients Timeship

The entire facility will be off-grid, using wind and solar energy to avoid potential power outages, and the location has been carefully chosen to be far from earthquakes, tornadoes, snowstorms and any other turmoil the world might throw at it in the next few hundred years.

You dont want to be near a military base or nuclear plant either, says Valentine, who speaks at a frantic pace with a theatrical Boston drawl.

He spent five years finding and designing the site, while studying pyramids, ancient tombs, bank vaults and medieval fortresses anything that has stood the test of time. He has even consulted experts on how to protect frozen time-travellers from the effects of a nearby two-megaton nuclear bomb.

The resulting design is an epic spaceship-castle hybrid, with thick, low, circular walls surrounding a central tomb-like chamber, where thousands of storage pods will be held under high security.

The exact technique that will be used to cool the bodies is not yet clear, but it is likely to involve the bodily fluids being drained and replaced with a solution that helps protect tissue from the formation of ice crystals.

The storage pods will use the cooling power of liquid nitrogen to keep the bodies at around -130C, and should be able to maintain low temperatures without power or human maintenance for up to six months, says Valentine.

He hopes to start testing the first prototype pods next year.

The idea of freezing people in the hope of reawakening them is not new.

In January 1967, cancer patient James Bedford became the first person to be cryogenically frozen, and his body remains in cold storage to this day, in a capsule designed by American wigmaker and cryopioneer Edward Hope.

Various organisations and companies have offered similar services over the past decades, often using hopelessly crude freezing techniques or failing to store the bodies properly.

Edward Hopes cryocapsule deisgned to freeze James H. Bedford. Getty Images

Today, the cryogenic freezing of human stem cells, sperm, eggs, embryos and other small tissue samples is a routine part of scientific research and reproductive medicine in many countries.

Vitrification, a process that turns samples into a glass-like state rather than ice, was developed in the early 2000s as a way of overcoming the problems of ice formation in and around cells. Ice formation is an issue because it can cause dramatic differences in concentration inside and outside the cell, sucking water out and destroying it.

In late 2002 and early 2003, a team led by vitrification pioneer Gregory Fahy used a cocktail of antifreezes and chemicals to cryopreserve a whole rabbit kidney. The organ appeared to function normally after it was thawed and transplanted back into its donor.

Several other breakthroughs have encouraged Valentine, and the wealthy entrepreneurs backing Timeship, that freezing a person properly is now feasible. In 2015, a team from the company 21st Century Medicine claimed to have developed a new vitrification technique that preserved pig and rabbit brains without any visible damage.

Freezing embryos, eggs and sperm has become a normal part of modern science and medicine Getty Images

That same year, scientists from Alcor, a company associated with Timeship, found that when microscopic worms were deep-frozen and thawed, they not only survived but could remember associations they had learnt before they were frozen.

For Valentine and the cryonics community, these studies are proof that if the most advanced scientific techniques are used, then human organs, brains, and even memories and personalities could survive being frozen.

However, cryonics is unique in that it is utterly reliant on technology that does not exist yet. Even if so-called patients are frozen perfectly after death, they are simply guessing that scientists will one day be able to reanimate them and cure their illnesses and will want to.

Prof Brian Grout, chairman of the Society for Low-Temperature Biology, says that cryonics has become more credible in recent years, and that it would be wrong to dismiss the idea of whole-body freezing.

Read more about extending life:

But he does have one big problem with the central idea of the Timeship mission: the preservation of dead bodies.

The biggest difficulty is not whether it is possible to recover a whole person from ultra-low temperatures there is a reasonable chance that will happen in the future. It is the fact that they will be dead. If they were dead when they were frozen, they will still very much be dead when you thaw them out.

Timeship wouldnt tell us what these glacial pods would be used for Timeship

Freezing people alive could mean they can be placed in suspended animation for, say, long-term space flights, says Grout.

Technology that may be able to cure what are now incurable illnesses is also not hard to imagine, he says, but overcoming death is another matter.

The technology they will need is not cryotechnology, its reversing death. Thats a pretty big leap for me.

Valentine refuses to be drawn into a debate on whether Timeship would accept living patients if the authorities allowed such a thing, saying that it is a matter for the medical and legal professions.

But he and others believe that various technologies such as gene editing and nanotechnology could one day change how we perceive death, and reverse it.

Other futurists believe that it may one day be possible to upload our minds onto a computer, freeing humanity from the restraints of a physical form entirely.

Read more about death:

Banking on these future technologies may seem like a pretty big gamble, especially when the costs of cryonic preservation start at around $30,000. Yet for people whose lives are cut short by illness, a miraculous breakthrough may literally be the only hope they have.

An example is the14-year-old British girl known as JS who made global headlinesin 2016 after writing, before she died of cancer, that shewanted to be frozen. A judge ruled that her wishes must be respected, and her body was sent to the US to be frozen.

She wrote: Im only 14 years old and I dont want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years time.

What the world will look like in hundreds of years time is anyones guess, but there are many logistical challenges for anyone is woken from the dead.

For a start, all your money, friends and family would be long gone, and youd probably struggle to find work in whatever hyper-advanced society has managed to resurrect you.

And there are bigger questions about how the planet would cope with a human population living far longer than it does now.

We are not going to have to worry about all that right now, says Valentine, frustrated by questions he sees as pointless hypothesising. The world may have changed in ways we cant even imagine! We could be inhabiting other planets or have modified ourselves to live in other environments.

Futurist body modification Getty Images

Its certainly hard to dismiss these ideas completely, given the remarkable progress our species has made in just the last few decades. And Valentine is confident that a change of mindset is just round the corner.

If scientists one day freeze a rabbit and bring it back to life, then the idea will spread so fast. People will start to think: why am I being buried in the ground? Why am I being cremated? Ill get frozen, and then one day, who knows. There could be many of these places around the world. This might become the norm.

Valentine himself is not currently signed up to be frozen at the Timeship he says it would distract from his architectural mission and could look like he was designing some kind of monument for myself. But his excitement and enthusiasm for this ambitious project is clear.

Will the travellers in the Timeship find themselves alive and well in the future, freed from the limitations of todays medical science? Or is it an expensive folly, doomed to result in several thousand bodies denied a proper burial?

Theres really only one way to find out and it involves a very long, very cold wait.

1 Upload your consciousness to a computer

Getty Images

Some believe that we may one day be able to recreate every detail of our brains on powerful computers, enabling our thoughts and experiences to live on without physical bodies. However, neuroscientists still struggle to simulate the workings of the most primitive animal brains, so it remains a distant prospect.

Read more about cryonics and life extension:

2 Hibernate

Hibernation, like this dormouse is enjoying, could be one solution for inter-planetary space flight Getty Images

Doctors sometimes lower the body temperature of patients dying from severe injuries to buy more time while they perform emergency surgery.

Lowering the bodys temperature from 37C to around 10C slows down all biological processes, resulting in a kind of induced hibernation.

A similar technique has been proposed as a way of putting long-distance astronauts into a deep sleep.

3 Build a new body for yourself

Vampirism has literary roots in disease, manifesting as a malignant way of cheating death iStock

After research in mice showed that the blood of young animals helped old animals memory, endurance and tissue repair, trials have begun to see if blood transfusions from young people can reduce or reverse ageing in older humans, too.

Scientists hope to identify the blood-borne chemical components of ageing.

4 Travel through time

If time machines ever get invented, chances are they wont look like this Getty Images

If it was possible for a person to travel at very close to the speed of light, then time would slow down for them relative to everyone else.

This means that when they return to Earth, thousands of years may have flown by. However, unlike in Back To The Future, there would be no way back to the past.

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Cryonics: Could you live forever? - BBC Science Focus Magazine

‘Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice’: Release date, plot, trailer and all you need to know about the Netflix d – MEAWW

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Science has evolved significantly over the past century, characterized by a number of innovations specifically in the medical field. One of the groundbreaking and skeptical techniques to ever be invented is that of Cryonics, the low-temperature freezing and storage of a human corpse with the speculative hope that they can be resurrected and restored back to full health in the possible future. A subject that has been regarded with skepticism within the mainstream scientific community, there has been little to no visual documentation of this process until now.

Adding to its ever-growing library of poignant and impactful documentaries, Netflix is set to premiere an incredible moving unscripted film entitled 'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice' that touches upon Cryonics. It is the story of a Thai Buddhist family and their unorthodox decision to have their two-year-old daughter cryogenically frozen after she died from brain cancer. Here's all you need to know about the film.

'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice' will be available on Netflix starting September 15.

The documentary chronicles the heart-wrenching journey of Thai Buddhist parents, who make an unconventional decision after the death of their baby daughter. Einz, a two-year-old toddler passed away in January 2015 in Bangkok, Thailand, after battling brain cancer. Her parents had her body cryonically frozen in the hope that she can one day be revived and will fulfill her life in a new body.

Einz became the youngest person in the world to undergo this preservation procedure. Her remains are stored in an American lab, while her head and brain rest inside a tank in Arizona. The 79-minute documentary follows the family who made this unorthodox decision and includes a montage of the family's archival footage.

Einz's father, a laser scientist, yearns to give his deceased daughter the opportunity to experience a rebirth inside a regenerated body, He instills this dream within his son, a precocious 15-year-old named Matrix who also wants to play a role in the revival of his little sister. But what the boy later discovers will rattle the family's radical hope in science.

"It's been an emotional journey to cover Einzs family on their biggest decision and dedication for their daughter. Witnessing the pivotal moments that the family went through was a privilege and a mind-expanding experience. Their story has led me to ask fundamental questions about life, faith, and love. It has touched me in so many ways. I'm so thrilled to share this experience with worldwide viewers on Netflix," said Pailin Wedel, the director and producer of 'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice'.

"We are delighted to welcome 'Hope Frozen' to our growing slate of award-winning documentaries on Netflix. What makes this announcement extra special, is that the story comes from Thailand, and authentically crafted by Pailin and her team of talented Thai producers. We fully support Pailins vision with the creative freedom to express this unique story of unconditional love, which resonates universally," Adam Del Deo, Vice President of Original Documentary Features said in an official press statement.

The Netflix edition of 'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice' will be available in 31 languages including dubbing in Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, German, Italian, Latin Spanish, Polish, Spanish (Castilian), Thai and Turkish.

'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice' is directed by journalist-filmmaker Pailin Wedel who followed the story of the family for the documentary. The film has been recognized with numerous international awards, including the Best International Feature Documentary at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival 2019. At San Antonio Independent Film Festival 2020, Pailin won Best Documentary Feature for her documentary from more than 900 films that were presented.

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'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice': Release date, plot, trailer and all you need to know about the Netflix d - MEAWW