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Monthly Archives: August 2017
Is the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism like Wikipedia? – Cato Institute (blog)
Posted: August 20, 2017 at 5:47 pm
I see that my colleagues are referring to the new online Encyclopedia of Libertarianism as a Wikipedia for libertarianism. I suppose thats sort of true, in that its an online encyclopedia. But its not exactly Hayekian, as Jimmy Wales describes Wikipedia. That is, it didnt emerge spontaneously from the actions of hundreds of thousands of contributors. Instead, editors Ronald Hamowy, Jason Kuznicki, and Aaron Steelman drew up a list of topics and sought the best scholars to write on each one people like Alan Charles Kors, Bryan Caplan, Deirdre McCloskey, George H. Smith, Israel Kirzner, James Buchanan, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Jeremy Shearmur, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Norman Barry, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, and Vernon L. Smith, along with many Cato Institute experts. In that regard its more like the Encyclopedia Britannica of libertarianism, a guide to important topics by top scholars in the relevant field.
The Britannica over the years has published articles byAlbert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, Leon Trotsky, Harry Houdini, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Milton Friedman, Simon Baron Cohen, and Desmond Tutu. They may have slipped a bit when they published articles by Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Lee Iacocca. And particularly when they chose to me to write their entry on libertarianism.
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How to live forever – TechRadar
Posted: at 5:46 pm
Humans have wanted to live forever for as long as we've lived at all. It's an obsession that stretches back so far that it feels like it's somehow hard-coded into our DNA. Over the years, immortality (to a greater or lesser extent) has been promised by everyone from religions and cults to the cosmetics industry, big tech companies and questionable food blogs.
It's also a staple of fiction, all the way back to the earliest surviving great work of literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh, carved onto stone tablets in 2100 BC, depicts its titular king hunting for the secret of eternal life, which he finds in a plant that lives at at the bottom of the sea. He collects the plant by roping stones to his feet, but then a snake steals it while he's having a pre-immortality bath. Gilgamesh has a little cry, then gives up.
A cuneiform tablet containing part of The Epic of Gilgamesh.
The reason why we age is still the subject of major scientific debate, but it basically boils down to damage accumulating in our cells throughout our lives, which eventually kills us. By slowing that damage - first by making tools, then controlling fire, inventing writing, trade, agriculture, logic, the scientific method, the industrial revolution, democracy and so on, we've managed to massively increase human life expectancy.
There's a common misconception that to live forever we need to somehow pause the ageing process. We don't. We just need to increase the rate at which our lifespans are lengthening. Human lifespan has been lengthening at a constant rate of about two years per decade for the last 200 years. If we can speed that up past the rate at which we age then we hit what futurist Aubrey de Grey calls "longevity escape velocity" - the point we become immortal.
There's a common misconception that to live forever we need to somehow pause the ageing process. We don't. We just need to increase the rate at which our lifespans are lengthening.
That all sounds rather easy, and of course it's not quite that simple. It's all we can do at the moment to keep up with the Moore's Law of increasing lifespans. But with a major research effort, coordinated around the world, who knows? Scientific history is filled with fields that ticked along slowly and then suddenly, massively, accelerated. Computer science is one. Genetics is another recent example.
To understand what we need to do to hit longevity escape velocity, it's worth looking at how life expectancy has increased in recent history. The late statistician Hans Rosling made a powerful case that average lifespans rise alongside per capita income. Take a couple of minutes to watch this video and you'll be convinced:
Reducing the gap between the global rich and poor, therefore, is probably the fastest way to boost the world average life expectancy figure, but it's limited. And it won't do much for people in rich countries.
To boost the lifespans of the people living in countries that are already pretty wealthy, we need to look closer at the countries that are forecast to have the highest life expectancies in the coming years. A study published earlier this year in the Lancet shows what life expectancy might look like in 2030 in 35 industrialised countries, using an amalgamation of 21 different forecasting models.
South Korea tops the chart with women living on average beyond 90, while France, Japan, Switzerland and Australia are not far behind. Most of the countries at the top of the chart have high-quality healthcare provision, low infant deaths, and low smoking and road traffic injury rates. Fewer people are overweight or obese. The US, meanwhile, is projected to see only a modest rise - due to a lack of healthcare access, and high rates of obesity, child mortality and homicides.
The study results are interesting, not only because they're the best possible guess at our future but because they clearly show how social policies make a massive difference to how long people live. There are unknowns, of course - no-one could have predicted the 80s AIDS epidemic, for example, and no doubt further pandemics lurk in humanity's future. But ban smoking, fight obesity, and introduce autonomous cars and personalised medicine, and you'll see lifespans rise.
The US is projected to see only a modest rise in lifespan - due to a lack of healthcare access, and high rates of obesity, child mortality and homicides.
The other interesting thing is that the study's results are a shot across the bows of scientists who claim that there are hard limits to human lifespan.
"As recently as the turn of the century, many researchers believed that life expectancy would never surpass 90 years, lead author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London told the Guardian back in February.
That prediction mirrors another, published in Nature in October 2016, that concluded that the upper limit of human age is stuck at about 115 years.
"By analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the worlds oldest person has not increased since the 1990s," wrote the authors - Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland & Jan Vijg.
"Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints."
The maximum length of a human lifespan remains up for debate.
Other researchers, however, disagree. Bryan G. Hughes & Siegfried Hekimi wrote in the same journal a few months later that their analysis showed that there are many possible maximum lifespan trajectories.
We just dont know what the age limit might be. In fact, by extending trend lines, we can show that maximum and average lifespans, could continue to increase far into the foreseeable future, Hekimi said.
Three hundred years ago, many people lived only short lives. If we would have told them that one day most humans might live up to 100, they would have said we were crazy.
That's all big-picture stuff, so let's dive down to a more personal level. Assuming that you can't change your genetics or your life up until the point that you're currently at, what can you personally do to live longer?
Here's the list: Don't smoke. Exercise your body and mind on a daily basis. Eat foods rich in whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and unsaturated fat. Don't drink too much alcohol. Get your blood pressure checked. Chop out sources of stress and anxiety in your life. Travel by train. Stay in school. Think positive. Cultivate a strong social group. Don't sit for long periods of time. Make sure you get enough calcium and vitamin D. Keep your weight at a healthy level. And don't go to hospital if you can help it - hospitals are dangerous places.
All of those things have been correlated with increased lifespan in scientific studies. And they're all pretty easy and cheap to do. If you want to maximise your longevity, then that's your to-do list. But there are also strategies that have a little less scientific merit. The ones that people with too much money pursue when they realise they haven't been following any of the above for most of their life.
Inside the Cryonics Institute.
Cryonics is probably the most popular. First proposed in the 1960s by US academic Robert Ettinger in his book "The Prospect of Immortality", it involves freezing the body as soon as possible after death in a tube kept at -196C, along with detailed notes of what they died of. The idea is that when medicine has invented a cure for that ailment, the corpse can be thawed and reanimated.
Calling someone dead is merely medicines way of excusing itself from resuscitation problems it cannot fix today, reads the website of top cryogenics firm Alcor.
The problem is the brain. First, it's so dense and well-protected that it's extremely difficult for the cryonics chemicals to penetrate it. It's almost impossible that it doesn't get damaged in the freezing process.
The 21,000,000,000 neurons and ~1,000,000,000,000,000 synapses in the human brain means that it'll be a while until we have the computational resources to map it.
Secondly, your neurons die quickly - even if you're immersed within minutes of death, you're still likely to suffer substantial brain damage. To which cryonics proponents argue: "What do I have to lose?" If the choice is between probably never waking up again and never waking up again, and it's your money to spend, then why not give it a shot?
An alternative to deep freeze is storing your brain in a computer. Not literally a lump of grey matter, but a database detailing in full all of the connections between the neurons in your brain that make you you (known as your connectome). Future doctors could then either rewire a real or artificial brain to match that data, resurrecting you in a new body (or perhaps even as an artificial intelligence).
A close look at a slice of mouse brain. Credit: Robert Cudmore
So far, we've only managed to map the full connectome of one animal - the roundworm C. elegans. Despite the worm's mere 302 neurons and 7,500 or so synapses, the resulting data is about 12GB in size - you can download it in full at the Open Connectome Project, and even install it in a robot, which will then act like a worm.
Unfortunately the human brain is a somewhat larger undertaking. The Human Connectome Project is making a start, and AI is helping, but the 21,000,000,000 neurons and ~1,000,000,000,000,000 synapses in the human brain means that it'll be a while until we have the computational resources to get it done. It's worth noting that this isn't an unassailable goal, especially if we can somehow figure out which bits are actually important to our personality and who we are as individuals and which bits are just used to remember the lyrics of Spice Girls songs.
For now, though, my recommendation would be to stick to the list of simple life extension strategies above. It's probable that in time we'll have new ways of augmenting our bodies that will extend our lifespans (we've already started with cyborg technology - just look at pacemakers and artificial hips).
But if you want to be at the front of the waiting list then you'll need to arrive at that point with as youthful a body as possible.
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When thoughts often turn to death – The Economist
Posted: at 5:46 pm
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Bloodborne, Transhumanism and Cosmic Cyberpunk – Kotaku UK (blog)
Posted: at 5:46 pm
With all its morbid decadence, the richly-layered Gothic imagination and cosmic horror of Bloodborne tends to overshadow some of its more (post)modern influences. Bloodborne isnt a traditionalist, after all, but a punk: or to be more precise, a cyberpunk. It may not havesinister corporations or hackers, yet this sci-fi renegade still conjures the rebellious ghost in the machine.
Most obviously, theres the overpowering presence of that looming megalopolis Yharnam as dependent on monumental, almost brutalist architecture as any good futuristic urban sprawl. The social dynamics within Yharnam echo the politics of cyberpunk, the hegemonic power of the Healing Church pitted against the social outcasts roaming the grimy streets. Dangerous social experiments and unchecked technological advancements have led to a Victorian dystopia. There are even cyberspaces, simulated, subordinate worlds in the form of the Dreams, which can be accessed and even hacked by those who are privy to secret knowledge.
Yharnham:
Ridley Scott'sBlade Runner:
And just like cyberpunk, the world of Bloodborne is held captive by the promise of transhumanism the idea that humankind will, one day, be able to transcend our fleshlylimitations and become something more. Whether it is Deus Ex or Bloodborne, the tool for this quasi-religious endeavour is cutting edge research and technology. In Deus Ex, that means body modification through nanotech or even merging consciousnesses with an omnipresent AI. In Bloodborne, its the Healing Church and Byrgenwerth researching into the old ones and their blood that drives this change: aiming to transform humans, in theory, into celestial beings that have entirely discarded their humanity. Not unlike in Blade Runner, the eye becomes an omnipresent symbol of self-directed evolution and the dangerous knowledge necessary to pursue it.
However, Bloodborneisa punk that refuses to slavishly follow in the tracks of those that came before. The differences are the most fascinating thing here. The futuristic vision of transhumanism, whether it is presented as a utopian promise or a dystopian threat, is seen as an evolutionary culmination or perhaps even singularity that severs the umbilical cord that connects us to our evolutionary history. The human is a product of natural processes, distant cousin of the apes. The posthuman the product of transhumanism is something different (strangely, it is our human arrogance that leads to this fallacy of teleological evolution.)
Blade Runner
Eye of a Blood-Drunk Hunter
Bloodbornes idea of transhumanism is recognisable, but different. Its still a morally complex idea, both pursued by individuals and institutions while also causing societal upheaval, but its vector is in the opposite direction. The path to transcendence doesnt lead the inhabitants of Yharnam away from humankinds evolutionary history, but confronts it head-on in a retrogressive journey. The first enemies our hunter encounters are beastmen, many of them recognisably human but some, like the werewolves or Vicar Amelia, almost devoid of human characteristics. Theyre hairy and canine, clearly mammalian despite their deformities. So far, this is in keeping with stories like Robert Louis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or H.P. Lovecrafts tales of human degeneracy, such as Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, in which a British nobleman burns himself alive after discovering that one of his ancestors was an ape goddess from the Congo. These stories play with our post-Darwinian revulsion at being the offspring of mere animals.
But as you progress through Bloodborne, the hunter descends deeper down the evolutionary ladder. Soon, enemies resemble snakes, insects, arachnids. Later, they become more alien still, strange variations of squids, snails, slugs (that is, molluscs) or even fungi. They have names like Celestial Emissary, or Celestial Child and are closely related to the Great Ones, some of whom, like Ebrietas or Kos, share similarities with the games mollusc-like creatures. Bloodborne displays a special fascination with mushrooms and molluscs, as well as the creatures of the ocean (especially in The Old Hunters DLC). These creatures are associated with the primordial, the early origins of life on earth, and their strange forms, both beautiful and disturbing, gives them a semblance of otherworldliness. And since they dont seem to belong to this world, perhaps they originally visited earth from unknown regions of the cosmos?
Kos
Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos
Celestial Child
Nudibranch, Nembrotha Kubaryana. Photo by Nick Hobgood
Nudibranch, Nembrotha Cristata. Photo by Chriswan Sungkono.
Nudibranch, Tritoniopsis Elegans. Photo by Sean Murray.
From this anthropocentric perspective, becoming like these creatures means getting closer to the miraculous origins of life, when the earth and the cosmos had yet to be disentangled. The transhumanism of Bloodborne thus turns the usual teleological view of human evolution on its head; the forces of evolution, whether natural or self-directed, will not bring humans closer to the gods, but have instead distanced them from the celestial spring of life. To fulfil their atavistic yearning to return to the lap of the cosmos, the inhabitants of Yharnam must regress to earlier evolutionary stages. The horror and tragedy of turning into wolf-like beasts, therefore, isnt just due to a revulsion to our animal ancestors or the destruction they cause, but the knowledge that those beastmen didnt regress far enough. If only they hadnt gotten lost in this evolutionary valley, they could have emerged on the other side as transcendental beings, as kin not of the earth, but the cosmos. At least, thats one way of looking at the complex picture Bloodborne paints.
The transcended hunter as slug-like Great One in Bloodbornes true ending
The beautiful thing about this is that it doesnt just fly in the face of transhumanism as it is usually understood, but the most problematic aspects of Lovecrafts work, too. The ugly concept of degeneracy, with all its overt racism, was an integral part of Lovecrafts fictional worlds. The ancient and unambiguously evil powers of the Great Old Ones is tied to primitives and mongrels, marginalised humans seen as genetically impure and degraded. They are easily manipulated by the old gods and worship them in the hidden and remote corners of the earth.
In Bloodborne, the blame of Yharnams ruin is dramatically shifted. The hidden corners of worship arent foreign jungles or secluded villages, but the sacred spaces of a church that is the backbone and centre of a sprawling megalopolis; the mysteries of the Great Ones are still secret knowledge, but secrets of a powerful, manipulative elite (as you would expect in the conspiracy-filled worlds of cyberpunk stories). But while this elites endeavours clearly lead to a horrific dystopia, the moral issues of this regressive transhumanism stay ambiguous throughout. The degenerate beastmen are hapless, unfortunate victims rather than villains. The experiment of transcendence through reverse evolution seems doomed to fail, but it is not at all clear whether that goal is inherently misguided. After all, the Great Ones seem amoral rather than evil (not unlike the people of Yharnam), and the hunter is no stranger to the allure these celestial beings exert through their disturbing kind of beauty. Perhaps their apparent darkness stems purely from the human minds failing to comprehend their true nature? Either way, Lovecrafts ideas of degeneracy doesnt entirely fit into Bloodbornes world.
Being kin to both the Lovecraftian as well as cyberpunk, Bloodborne, too, is a kind of mongrel. But this impurity is precisely what enables it to distinguish itself and comment meaningfully on its ancestral genres. It reshapes its influences by letting disparate ideas collide and creates something fresh from the wreckage. Its not unique in its subversion of transhumanist idealism or Lovecraftian racist tropes, but the way it combines these separate issues in a seamless if ambiguous whole is entirely original.
Bloodborne is both a cyberpunk dystopia in which the end point of self-directed evolution is not a disembodied mind, but a slug or a squid, as well as a tale of cosmic horror where that dubious degeneracy stems not from shady outsiders or social outcasts, but squarely from within organised mainstream religion and science. It shares with cyberpunk an awareness and distaste for the unequal power dynamics in a world governed by the amoral ambitions of hegemonies, but, like Lovecraft, looks backwards to our distant origins rather than to the future. And soBloodborne transcends its influences, and challenges us on new planes of existence.
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Bloodborne, Transhumanism and Cosmic Cyberpunk - Kotaku UK (blog)
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Human remains found in caiman may belong to missing man – New York Post
Posted: at 5:45 pm
Forensic experts in Brazil are investigating a mans disappearance after locals discovered human remains in the guts of a 13-foot caiman.
Farmer Adilson de Oliveira, 47, was camping on the banks of the Javae River, in Tocantins, last month when he was likely swallowed by a black caiman, according to a report from the Palmas Forensic Medical Institute released Tuesday.
Locals slaughtered the reptile during a search for the presumed victim, who was last seen fishing on the night of July 27. Oliveiras flip-flops and a lighter were found at the edge of the river but he was nowhere to be seen.
After a campsite official reported Oliveira missing several hours later, it took firefighters nearly a day to access the dangerous and remote area near the campsite.
More than 30 officers searched the alligator-, stingray- and piranha-infested waters for two days.
When we reached the deepest part of the river, where the water stands still, I dived in and went about 13 feet down, Sgt. Ronaldo Barbosa said of the perilous rescue mission.
It was a huge risk. The water was very dark and cloudy with very little visibility. About 20 minutes later, when I came back to the surface, an alligator was swimming about 20 feet away from me, he added.
When rescuers failed to find any further trace of Oliveira, locals concluded he was likely devoured by one of the reptiles in the area.
They also noticed at least seven alligators gathered on the opposite banks of the river a day after Oliveira went missing another sign that the creatures ate a big meal recently.
Locals told us these creatures dont normally come together unless they have been eating. Because of their experience in the area, they decided to take matters into their own hands, Barbosa said.
A group of the victims colleagues hunted down, trapped and killed a gator that appeared to be fatter than normal and that had an unusual swelling in its abdomen.
They disemboweled the creature and found a round lump of flesh in its stomach along with some plastic bags.
Adilson was known to stuff plastic bags into his trouser pockets and when the locals called us to report their find, we discovered evidence of plastic bags, broken bones, hair, skin and other body parts inside the caimans stomach, Barbosa said.
Forensic experts are waiting to confirm the human remains belong to the victim. They asked members of Oliveiras family to supply samples of their DNA for analysis and comparison.
The test results will be released within the next few weeks, pathologists said.
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Human remains found in caiman may belong to missing man - New York Post
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Natalee Holloway’s dad finds human remains in Aruba – New York Post
Posted: at 5:45 pm
Authorities discovered human remains behind a house in Aruba, a grisly find that may finally crack the mystery surrounding a young womans disappearance 12 years ago.
The remains, discovered following a renewed 18-month probe, are being tested to see if theyre a DNA match with Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager who went missing while on a graduation trip in 2005, her father, Dave Holloway, and investigator T.J. Ward revealed on Today on Wednesday.
I know theres a possibility this could be someone else, and Im just trying to wait and see, Holloway said. It would finally be the end.
In 2012, an Alabama judge granted Holloways request to have his daughter declared dead but no one has ever been charged in her disappearance.
Joran van der Sloot, a Dutch man the teen was last seen with outside a bar, is serving a 28-year sentence in a Peru jail for killing business student Stephany Flores a killing that came five years to the day after Natalees disappearance.
In March 2016, van der Sloot appeared to have made a shocking confession to an undercover reporter about having murdered Natalee.
The dad said the investigation led them to an informant known as Gabriel, who lived with a friend of van der Sloot, and eventually, to the remains.
[He] had information that took us to a spot where remains were found. And we took those remains and had those remains tested, Holloway said. Weve chased a lot of leads and this one is by far the most credible lead Ive seen in the last 12 years.
The DNA tests will take several months.
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Natalee Holloway's dad finds human remains in Aruba - New York Post
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British scientists develop world’s smallest surgical robot that can mimic human arm – Firstpost
Posted: at 5:45 pm
British scientists have developed the worlds smallest surgical robot which could transform daily operations for tens of thousands of patients, the media reported on Sunday.
Representational image. Reuters
From a converted pig shed in the Cambridgeshire countryside, a team of 100 scientists and engineers have used low-cost technology originally developed for mobile phones and space industry to create the first robotic arm specifically designed to carry out keyhole surgery, reports the Guardian.
The robot, called Versius, mimics the human arm and can be used to carry out a wide range of laparoscopic procedures including hernia repairs, colorectal operations, and prostate and ear, nose and throat surgery, in which a series of small incisions are made to circumvent the need for traditional open surgery.
The robot is controlled by a surgeon at a console guided by a 3D screen in the operating theatre, according to its maker Cambridge Medical Robotics.
"Having robots in the operating theatre is not a new idea," said the company's chief executive, Martin Frost.
"But the problem at the moment is that they are phenomenally expensive, not only do they cost $2.5 million each to buy but every procedure costs an extra $3,800 using the robot... and they are very large."
The Cambridge Medical Robotics said it was already working with a number of National Health Services-owned and private hospitals to introduce the robots.
The current global market for surgical robots is worth approximately $4 billion a year but this is expected to grow to $20 billion by 2024.
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Big Brother: Elena slams Josh as ‘an irrational human’ – EW.com
Posted: at 5:45 pm
Big Brother is a game built on broken promises. But when you publicly break one to the Head of Household moments after making it just to score $5,000, the other thing being broken is your game.
Elena Davies may have passed her camping curse onto Alex, but the move also sealed her fate and she was voted out by the house in the second elimination of double eviction night. Does Elena regret that decision? What are her real thoughts on Josh? And is there a future for her and showmance partner Mark outside of the house? We caught up with the radio personality on her way to the jury house unfortunately with no live feeds to ask her that and more. (Also make sure to read our Q&As with Cody and Julie Chen.)
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Lets talk about your big decision at the Veto competition to stick Alex with the camping curse and taking her $5,000 after you promised you wouldnt. Why did you do it anyway and did you regret it after?ELENA DAVIES: That was a tough decision for me in the moment. I did promise that I wouldnt punish her, but the way I see it is, she shouldnt have kept the $5,000. She should have traded it for Marks Colorado trip, and I could have taken the money from him and he would have been punished. Instead of executing it the logical way, she wanted to be selfish and keep the $5,000 and me take a lesser prize, even though I won the competition. I dont regret it because Im pretty confident Id be speaking to you regardless, and now Im speaking to you with 5,000 extra dollars.
Give me your thoughts on Josh and why you all mixed it up a few times.Josh is a frustrating person to have a mature conversation with. I say you cant have a rational conversation with an irrational human, and he is an irrational human. A lot of the times when he talks, I dont even process what hes saying as words, its just sounds. He doesnt always make sense, hes a walking contradiction, he makes every argument in the house about himself, and everyone else seems to support it whenever hes doing it, and then talks bad about him behind his back.
I wasnt afraid to be direct. I dont think it was fair for him to switch up some of the dialogues we had and paint me in a way that wasnt fair, and it probably made me a bigger target by addressing it, but Im not going to roll over and let Josh win a word battle with me. Hell no. But talking to him gives me acid refluxes, as he likes to call it.
What do you regret most about your time in the house and what is the one thing you would you change if you could?I threw Alexs first HOH comp to her, and I regret that a little bit, and I also threw the last HOH comp that Alex won, when it was getting too close because I was certain this week would be a double eviction and I wanted to be able to participate in it. But maybe if I had taken that last HOH things would be different. Working with Cody week 1, I regret, but there were a lot of people working with him.
Do you think there is any future for you and Mark outside of the house?I think there is a future, whether it be romantic or friendship, I definitely see us maintaining a relationship in some way. I have yet to share with him how I feel, because I was still kinda figuring it out, and am still figuring it out. But, it is weird, because right when I left I did miss him and I cant wait to see him, so I think that says something.
For more Big Brother nonsense, follow Dalton on Twitter @DaltonRoss.
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Further Research into Artificial Wombs Brings Us Closer to a Future Where Babies Grow Outside the Body – Futurism
Posted: at 5:45 pm
In Brief Innovative artificial womb technology successfully incubated lambs for one week and might soon be helping preterm babies to fully develop. The device and its accompanying unique method was developed by a collaboration of scientists from Australia, Japan, and elsewhere. An Innovation in Artificial Incubation
Around 15 million babies are born preterm or premature every year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). This number is expected to rise, bringing moreinfants into the world before completing 37 weeks of gestation. How we are going to care for a growing number of premature infants is a real concern: preterm birth complications were responsible for almost a million deaths in 2015, making it the leading cause of death among children below 5 years of age.
Thankfully, there are a number of interventionsthat can help, many of whichinvolve developing better incubation chambers evenartificial wombs and placentaswhere the premature infants can continue their growth outside the womb. One of these is an artificial womb developed by a combined team of researchers from the Women and Infants Research Foundation, the University of Western Australia, and Tohoku University Hospital, Japan.
Designing treatment strategies for extremely preterm infants is a challenge, lead researcher Matt Kemp said in a press release. At this gestational age the lungs are often too structurally and functionally under-developed for the baby to breathe easily. Their work, published in The American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, took a different approach. The key was treating the preterm infants not as babies,but as fetuses.
Their device and method successfully incubated healthy baby lambs in an ex-vivo uterine environment (EVE) for a one-week period. At its core, our equipment is essentially is a high-tech amniotic fluid bath combined with an artificial placenta. Put those together, and with careful maintenance what youve got is an artificial womb, Kemp explained.
He added in the press release, By providing an alternative means of gas exchange for the fetus, we hoped to spare the extremely preterm cardiopulmonary system from ventilation-derived injury, and save the lives of those babies whose lungs are too immature to breathe properly. The end goal is to provide preterm babies the chance to better develop their lungs and other important organs before being brought into the world. Its this approach that makes it revolutionary.
The scientists hope that this EVE therapy could soon help bring preterm human babies to term. We now have a much better understanding of what works and what doesnt, and although significant development is required, a life support system based around EVE therapy may provide an avenue to improve outcomes for extremely preterm infants, Kemp said.
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NASA: We’re Going to Try and Make Oxygen From the Atmosphere on Mars – Futurism
Posted: at 5:45 pm
In BriefFor any Mars exploration plans, surviving on the Red Planet isas important as getting there. This is why NASA is looking forwardto its Mars 2020 Rover mission, which would include a test formaking oxygen on the Red Planet's surface. Small Steps for Man
Getting humans to land on Mars is the biggest space project this generation will ever see. Such a bold endeavorgetting humans to another worldcomes with a cornucopia of nitty-gritty details to iron out. These details need to be set before we can even begin to proceed with a manned mission.
The most obvious is the needto build rockets and spacecraft able to ferry probes (carrying food and other supplies) and people. For NASAs mission to Mars, this also entails the construction of a lunar space station thatll serve as a jump-off point to the rest of the solar system.Click to View Full Infographic
Speaking to Futurism after the successful launch of SpaceXs CRS-12 mission on Monday, NASA Acting Chief Administrator Robert Lightfoot, Jr. explained how getting to Mars requires small, incremental steps, and he noted that NASA has a remarkable project in the works. When you look at our plans today [for getting to Mars], we use the International Space Station as much as we canfor example, our life support systems, we test them up there. He added that the Moon would be the next logical step in this process.
But getting to Mars and surviving there are two disparate yet equally important aspects of the same mission. We try and make sure that, when we do a science mission or a human spaceflight mission, that we have a cross between the science and the human exploration, Lightfoot explained.
Now no one wants to fly to Mars, land on the ground, yawp I did it!and then turn around and head home. Space exploration is more than symbolic pretense. We want to stay on Mars and install a colony. Of course, the eventual plan is to terraform Mars, but that could take thousands ofyears to accomplish if its at all possible.
So, in Lightfoots mind, we ought to start small, and theres nothing more basic for survival on Mars (or anywhere) than having a secure source of air to breathe. The next lander that is going to Mars, Mars 2020, has an experiment where we are going to try and actually generate oxygen out of the atmosphere on Mars, clearly thats for human capability down the road, Lightfoot said.
What we know is that the Red Planets atmosphere is thinner than Earths, with some 95.32 percent carbon dioxide, 2.7 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent argon, and about 0.13 oxygen, plus a bunch of other elements in even smaller amounts. By contrast, the Earths atmosphere has 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen. Water wont be much of a problem, though.
Is it possible to make oxygen from Mars atmosphere? NASAs had plans for this since 2014, when it first revealed the Mars 2020 Rover. It involves bringing some microbial life to Mars, perhaps bacteria or algae, that would would use Martian soil as fuel and then pump out oxygen as a product. The oxygen could then be harnessed and made available for breathing and also to make rocket fuel for return flights to Earth.
It may sound like science fiction right now, but lab experiments have shown that its possible. Thats why the Mars 2020 Rover mission is crucial. Other efforts to make Mars habitable include plans of building a magnetic shield around the planet, similar to Earths, building a nuclear reactor, as well as growing potatoeslike in Matt Damon inThe Martian.
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