Monthly Archives: June 2017

In Brief Dubai is set to shake up the taxi and travel sector at the end of the year by introducing an autonomous airborne taxi service that will transport passengers along set routes. Given the growing population, innovative transportation solutions like Dubai's will be an integral part of future society.

As part of Dubais bid to be a city of the future, they plan to have 25 percent of their public transport autonomously controlled by 2030. An exciting aspect of this is the autonomous aerial taxi (AAT) service they announced in February.

Now, theyve provided an updated timeline for the services implementation, announcing that testing will begin toward the end of this year. It will continue for approximately five years until legislation is in place to facilitate a larger expansion.

The goal of the AAT is to eliminate the growing problem of traffic within the city. The service was due to launch at the end of Julywith the single-seater EHang 184, but theplan now it to use the two-seater Volocopter. Implementation has been delayedto ensure the technology is as safe as it possibly can be.

Dubai will be the first city to use air taxis, and its experiment will have a profound effect on the future of transport, as other cities and companies will be judging the applicability of the idea based on Dubais successes or failures. A particularly interested party will be Uber, which is planning to develop an autonomous airborne taxi service of its own.

A key question the transportation industry currently faces is how to deal with the congestion caused by an ever-increasing demand on infrastructure. Although air taxis are one solution, Elon Musk has been boring tunnels under cities, Dubai is developing a hyperloop, and autonomous cars are being programmed specifically to prevent traffic jams.

Whether one of these approaches proves better than the others or we end up using some combination of two or more, well need to be innovative when planning the transportation of the future.

Disclosure: The Dubai Future Foundation works in collaboration with Futurism as a sponsor and does not hold a seat on our editorial board.

See the original post here:
Dubai's Autonomous Flying Taxi Service Will Be Ready for Takeoff This Year - Futurism

In Brief Industry leaders have estimated that the cost of producing energy using wind farms has dropped to around $100 per megawatt hour, making the energy source as cost effective as coal and nuclear energy. The Plummeting Price of Wind Energy

Bent Christensen, who is responsible for cost projection for Siemenss wind power division, has estimated that Europes offshore wind industry has reached a milestone three to four years ahead of schedule: achieving wind energy at 100 ($113) per megawatt hour (MWh). This means that offshore wind farms could be built without government subsidy because they are economically viable without additional support.

In wind energy, there has been a fast reduction in price over the last three years, falling 27 percent since 2014. According to a Lazard survey in 2016, this means that the energy source has become either cheaper or equal to coal-fired generators, nuclear reactors, and rooftop solar arrays.

Some even predict a further reduction in price estimating that in the future it will be possible to deliver wind energy at 75 ($84) and 62 ($70) MWh. But this hopeful advancement depends on turbine, cable, and converter technology developing much further. Siemens Gamesa and MHI Vestas Offshore Wind plan to have such technology in place in time for the 2024-2025 North Sea projects completion.

Wind powers fall in price marks a major victory for renewable energy because it makes the power source attractive economically as well as environmentally, which is crucial for its widespread adoption. Other promising news that could advance the trend for adopting wind-power is Denmark providing all their power for a day using the source, and the development of record-breaking turbines capable of producing 216,000 kWh of energy in a 24 hour period.

The decreasing price of renewable energy, however, is not just reserved for wind-power: similar victories are also taking place in the solar energy sector. A recent report by Bloomberg has estimated that in four years solar will be cheaper than coal worldwide, having dropped in price by 58 percent within the last five years.

It is unlikely that our world will use less power as populations increase and industry hasto keep up. Therefore, in order to save our planet from pollution and the progression of climate change,we must tinker with the other side of the formula making the energy we use cleaner and greener. Advances in wind and solar power, in particular, are especiallypromising, as they lay the path for renewables creating both individual and collective gain.

Continue reading here:
Wind Energy Has Officially Become Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels - Futurism

In BriefIn 2016 researchers said that there is a limit to the humanlifespan, of about 115 years. Meanwhile, 5 teams of scientists havepublished rebuttals to the 2016 study, and other researcherscontinue to push the aging envelope with new technologies. The Claim And Criticisms

In October 2016, molecular geneticist Jan Vijg published a paper claiming that the human lifespan was limited to 115 years. This kindled a vigorous controversy among scientists, and on June 28 of this year, five groups of scientists published formal rebuttals to the claim.

Vijgs work analyzed demographic data from the 20th century, taken all over the world, and demonstrated that peak age plateaued at about 115 years starting in the mid-1990s. Based on their results, the authors concluded that the natural human age limit is 115 years old and that there is the probability of less than 1 in 10,000 of living to be more than 125 years old.

You could probably guess, not everyone in the scientific community agrees. Most criticisms arise from the way the Vijg team handled their data, and their process for drawing conclusions. First, the Vijg team tested their data to prove whether or not the plateau they felt they observed after 1995 was in fact present. In other words, they generated a hypothesis and then tested it using the same dataset, which is typically unacceptable, as it causes inaccurate results due to severe overfitting, a fit based on error or noise, not a real relationship.

Second, the teams actual data set was very small because in each year they counted only the oldest person who died. They then subjected this inordinately small sample to standard linear regression techniques, which was not appropriate based both on the small sample size, and the additional fact that the individuals being counted were outliers who should have been subject to extreme event analysis. In fact, the decline suggested in the 2016 conclusions appears to be suggested by a single death in the data set.

Moreover, other scientists reanalyzed the data and found it consistent with multiple lifespan trajectories, not just the one reported in 2016. Finally, several scientists in their rebuttals point to the overall body of work on the biology of aging over the past few decades which suggests that the human lifespan has been far more flexible than previously believed; which alone indicates that the proposed limit should be viewed with extreme caution.

The authors of the original study stand by their work and disagree with the criticisms of the statistical methods used. Vijg also believes that the real cause of the outcry is not the data, which is convincing, but the fact that aging cant be stopped and there is a limit to human life: I guess the main message is that a lot of people have difficulty accepting that everything now points toward an end in the increase of maximum lifespan, Vijg told The Scientist.

University of Illinois at Chicago professor of public health Jay Olshansky, who was involved in neither the original study nor the rebuttals, thinks the criticizing scientists are missing the real point of the 2016 study, which he clarified for The Scientist: The most important message to get across, in my view, is that we should not be trying to make ourselves live longer, we should only be trying to extend the period of healthy life.

However, there are many others pushing the limits of human longevity right now who disagree strongly enough to put their money where their philosophy is. Since research has demonstrated that transfusions of younger blood, or parabiosis, was able to rehabilitate cognitive abilities in mice, a startup called Ambrosia has started to offer a human clinical trial of parabiosis for paying clients. Peter Diamandis of the genotype research facility, Human Longevity, Inc., is searching for the key to using nanomachines or stem cells to regenerate our bodies. And Metformin, which has been shown to prevent cancer and extend life in animals, began clinical testing as an anti-aging drug in February.

There are so many possibilities in motion that it does seem hard to agree with a firm limit to the human lifespan. In the end, time will resolve the controversy once and for all. Ironically, well only be here to see it if the critics are right.

Read more:
There May Be No Limits to How Long Humans Can Live - Futurism

In Brief These positive results from a small clinical trial may mean you will have a new way to get your next flu vaccine. Instead of an actual injection, researchers from Georgia Teach and Emory University have developed a sticker patch that comes with microneedles that you can just stick on your skin. No Fear of Injections

We all have that friend who avoids getting flu shots out of fear of injections, right? Well, researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and the Emory University had you we mean, your friendin mind while designing this new way todeliver vaccinations. Instead of the usual injection, the researchers came up with a sticker patchthat you can applyon yourself.

The patch comes with a hundred tiny hair-like microneedles located on its adhesive side. If you zoom in under the microscope what youll see are microscopically small needles, lead researcher Mark Prausnitz told the BBC. They puncture painlessly into the skin. Unlike regular injections that go all the way through the muscle, the microneedles puncture and dissolve into the upper layer of the skin, delivering the vaccine in about 20 minutes.

A small preliminary clinical trial was recently published in The Lancetthatinvolving 100 volunteers and showed that applying the patch was relatively painless compared to a regular flu shot. A few people got some mild side-effects, like redness and irritation on the skin where the patch was applied. These disappeared after a couple of days. Initial findings also revealed that the patch vaccines successfully immunized the users against the flu.

The FDA will require larger human studies before it definitively determines that the vaccine patch is safe and effective, but such a technology is truly revolutionary. As soon as this patch system gets approval for widespread use in the next couple of years, getting flu shots or other vaccines would be as easy as putting a Band-Aid. We could envisage vaccination at home, in the workplace or even via mail distribution, said Emorys Nadine Rouphael,speaking to the BBC.

Plus, you can do it yourself. With the microneedle patch, you could pick it up at the store and take it home, put it on your skin for a few minutes, peel it off and dispose of it safely, because the microneedles have dissolved away,Prausnitz said in a press release.

This also opens up a better transport and delivery system for vaccines to reach remote areas. The patches can also be stored outside the refrigerator, so you could even mail them to people, Prausnitz added in the press release. Hes already working witha company that wants to license this technology.

As John Edmunds from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who wasnt involved in the study, told the BBC, This study is undoubtedly an important step towards a better way to deliver future vaccines.

Original post:
Your Next Flu Shot Could Be Delivered Using an Injectionless Patch - Futurism