Daily Archives: June 20, 2020

Art showing stencilled hands (mostly left) in the Cueva de las Manos caves, Argentina, is dated between 11,000-7,000 BC. Photo: Mariano/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Any story that begins with the words 14 billion years ago is bound to be epic, and Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time, by Gaia Vince, is no exception. In the first chapter alone, Vince, an award-winning science writer and broadcaster based in London, covers the Big Bang, evolution, photosynthesis, the extinction of the dinosaurs, climate change and the presence of our early primate ancestors on the African savannah. Its a whirlwind and its only the beginning.

By the books conclusion, Vince has taken readers on a journey encompassing tens of thousands of years of human evolution that shows how our exceptional species has reset our relationship with nature and transformed into a new creature from our hypercooperative mass of humanity: we are becoming a superorganism. Vince calls it Homo omnis.

Whether you enjoy this kind of epic treatment of human history might depend on whether you like authors such as Jared Diamond, Stephen Pinker, Bill Bryson, and Yuval Noah Harari, who all write in a similar style: approachable, smart, and very ambitious. (Bryson got there first but nearly all of these authors books could have been called A Short History of Nearly Everything) Transcendence is most comparable to Hararis 2014 blockbuster Sapiens: both offer a sweeping account of human existence beginning with our origin as a species and ending with the idea that our species is becoming something post-human.

Unlike Harari, who focuses on a series of revolutions from the cognitive to the scientific, Vince chooses to highlight more nebulous and even poetic turning points in human evolution like beauty and time. We exist as the result of what she calls an evolutionary triad of genes, environment, and culture, and are now agents of our own transformation. She defines Homo omnis as a species that has transcended our evolutionary purpose to advance our genes for our cultural purpose, which is to be self-determining. Today, we are organisms with options: We can edit our genomes, choose the embryos of our offspring, prolong our lifespans, and maybe one day defeat death itself.

Vince takes care to deftly transition between one subject and another, bringing the reader along as she moves from topics like Wikipedia to cultural evolution to altruism to the neocortex to gossip to the survival of genes to monotheistic religion, as she does in the chapter called Telling. She argues early on that new collaborations between scientific fields, and in particular between the natural and social sciences, has allowed us to look at ourselves with new eyes and recognise the deep links that run through our biology, culture, and environment.

Likewise, Vince assembles the threads of these different disciplines and weaves them together to create moments of revelation for readers. She is uniquely talented in this respect, capable of presenting an impressive breadth of research from palaeoarchaeology to genetics to anthropology. In one of the best chapters, Story, she gives a rich and compelling account of Australian Aboriginal storytelling and the culturally universal strategy of the brain using story as a means to organise information and make it more memorable. Stories are a powerful survival adaptation, writes Vince, because they dont just allow us to travel back in time with our memories, they also allow us to mentally explore different future scenarios without expending time and energy.

Vince offers readers a vertiginous perspective of our existence on the planet. The cumulative effect seems intended to create awe and wonder in the reader, and inspire them to take seriously the responsibility of being an extraordinary species capable of directing our own destiny. But such an approach doesnt leave much room for nuance, and there are many instances when Vince presents readers with statements that would seem to merit greater skepticism, such as when she writes that In the United States, southerners are, as a group, more friendly and polite than northerners, who are often more brusque and ruder. Or, that more intelligent people tend to have fewer children; perhaps intelligence is being diluted in the gene pool.

Should we really accept without any discussion that people who live in cities are more inventive, or that the number of friends we have is determined by our genes? Other assertions seem intended to knock us over with profundity but end up feeling like platitudes. While animals are driven by biological urges to find food and mate, humans are also motivated by meaning and purpose, Vince writes. Or, We are all creatures of time.

In the end, Vinces provocative assertion that we are becoming a new species and the implications for our future become somewhat vague. She writes that human cultural evolution involves peaks and troughs, and that while there are reasons for pessimism and despair about the fate of our species today, its mostly a problem of perspective. Once we recognise and embrace our shared humanity, according to Vince, we can achieve a good, liveable Anthropocene. Perhaps. The lack of specificity regarding how our species will transcend the serious problems she enumerates (tribalism, individual self-interest, partisanship, fascism, war, violence, environmental catastrophe) feels like a letdown after such an intellectually voracious book.

Its worth asking why there is such a public appetite for science books written from a God-like vantage point at this time. Why do we seek out authors who try to explain everything? Is there security in the sense that someone out there can offer a coherent narrative that makes sense of where we come from and where we are going? Unfortunately, such authoritative, sweeping narratives often leave out what makes science so interesting in the first place: not just the certainties but the unknowns. Transcendence never lets us in on the process or methodologies by which studies come to their conclusions. Readers arent given a sense of the evolution of ideas or debates within scientific disciplines, or the individual scientists behind these ideas and what might drive them to do their research. We are never shown that just as science gives us answers, it also exposes the mysteries of our existence.

M.R. OConnor, a 2016-17 Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, writes about the politics and ethics of science, technology and conservation. She is the author of Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things and Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the Earth.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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The Whirlwind Path of Human Evolution - The Wire

A group of Pacific leaping blennies out of the water on the foreshores of the island Guam. Credit: Terry Ord, UNSW Sydney

A diverse diet and flexible behavior may have empowered blenny fish to make a dramatic transition out of the water but once on land, they have been forced to become specialized, a new study led by UNSW shows.

The analysis of multiple big datasets, a collaboration between UNSW and the University of Minnesota, was published today in journal Functional Ecology.

Some species of blennies never emerge from water and others stay on land full-time as adults so they present a unique opportunity to study fish evolution in action and explore the transition from water to the land in a living animal, says study lead and UNSW evolutionary ecologist, Associate Professor Terry Ord.

In this study, we found that having a flexible diet has likely allowed blennies to make a successful leap onto land but once out of the water, these remarkable land fish have faced restrictions on the type of food available to them.

These restrictions have triggered major evolutionary changes in their morphology, specifically dramatic changes in their teeth, as they have been forced to become specialist scrappers of the rocks to forage on algae and detritus.

Looking at the fish pre- and post-transition could hold broader clues about what makes such a dramatic move successful, the scientists say.

There is ample evidence that transitions from one environment into another are responsible for the evolution of many of the species we see today, as well as the diversity in morphology and behavior we see across different species. But little is known about the mechanisms behind what drives those transitions in the first place, A/Prof Ord says.

To shed light on exactly that, the researchers applied a set of complex evolutionary statistical models to their data. They were able to reveal the sequence of events that likely allowed aquatic marine fish to ultimately evolve into fish that could leave water and colonize land and what happened once they got there.

Our findings suggest that being a jack-of-all-trades for example, being flexible in the types of foods you can eat and being flexible in leaving water for very brief periods of time can open the door to making what would seem to be a really dramatic change in habitat, A/Prof Ord says.

This core insight can be extended to any species making a move between habitats and might have other implications as well.

The flipside of our study suggests that some species that are already uniquely specialized to their existing environment are probably less able to make further transitions in habitat, or might not cope well if abrupt changes occur to their environment, for example as a consequence of the current climate crisis.

The scientists say there are limits to their study and further research is needed.

This study is essentially observation, or what we call a correlational study. The data is suggestive that diet and behavioral flexibility is important for making major transitions in habitat, and that once those transitions have occurred, that flexibility is eroded by adaptation, A/Prof Ord says.

But ideally we would want to perform some type of experimental investigation to try to establish causality that it is flexibility in diet and behavior specifically and not something else that allows such transitions to occur. Its possible that diet or behavioral flexibility are not responsible, and that some other currently unknown factor is. What this experimental study might be is hard to imagine at this stage, but were working on it.

Previous studies by A/Prof Ord found that avoiding nasty aquatic predators is a big motivator for blennies to spend time out of the water, and that once on land, they use camouflage to avoid further attacks by other predators on land.

Reference: Crossing extreme habitat boundaries: Jackofalltrades facilitates invasion but is eroded by adaptation to a masterofone by Terry J. Ordand Peter J. Hundt, 16 June 2020, Functional Ecology.DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.13600

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Dramatic Fish Evolution in Action: Land Fish Forced to Adapt After Leap Out of Water - SciTechDaily

Artistic impression of the background hum of gravitational waves permeating the Universe. Credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav/Swinburne University of Technology

Every year, 2 million black hole mergers are missed Australian scientists work out how to detect them, revealing a lost 8 billion light-years of Universe evolution.

Last year, the Advanced LIGO-VIRGO gravitational-wave detector network recorded data from 35 merging black holes and neutron stars. A great result but what did they miss? According to Dr. Rory Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery at Monash University in Australia its likely there are another 2 million gravitational wave events from merging black holes, a pair of merging black holes every 200 seconds and a pair of merging neutron stars every 15 seconds that scientists are not picking up.

Dr. Smith and his colleagues, also at Monash University, have developed a method to detect the presence of these weak or background events that to date have gone unnoticed, without having to detect each one individually. The method which is currently being test driven by the LIGO community means that we may be able to look more than 8 billion light-years further than we are currently observing, Dr. Smith said.

This will give us a snapshot of what the early universe looked like while providing insights into the evolution of the universe.

The paper, recently published in the Royal Astronomical Society journal, details how researchers will measure the properties of a background of gravitational waves from the millions of unresolved black hole mergers.

Artistic impression of the background hum of gravitational waves permeating the Universe. Credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav/Swinburne University of Technology

Binary black hole mergers release huge amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves and are now routinely being detected by the Advanced LIGO-Virgo detector network. According to co-author, Eric Thrane from OzGrav-Monash, these gravitational waves generated by individual binary mergers carry information about spacetime and nuclear matter in the most extreme environments in the Universe. Individual observations of gravitational waves trace the evolution of stars, star clusters, and galaxies, he said.

By piecing together information from many merger events, we can begin to understand the environments in which stars live and evolve, and what causes their eventual fate as black holes. The further away we see the gravitational waves from these mergers, the younger the Universe was when they formed. We can trace the evolution of stars and galaxies throughout cosmic time, back to when the Universe was a fraction of its current age.

The researchers measure population properties of binary black hole mergers, such as the distribution of black hole masses. The vast majority of compact binary mergers produce gravitational waves that are too weak to yield unambiguous detections so vast amounts of information is currently missed by our observatories.

Moreover, inferences made about the black hole population may be susceptible to a selection bias due to the fact that we only see a handful of the loudest, most nearby systems. Selection bias means we might only be getting a snapshot of black holes, rather than the full picture, Dr. Smith warned.

The analysis developed by Smith and Thrane is being tested using real world observations from the LIGO-VIRGO detectors with the program expected to be fully operational within a few years, according to Dr. Smith.

Reference: Inferring the population properties of binary black holes from unresolved gravitational waves by Rory J E Smith, Colm Talbot, Francisco Hernandez Vivanco and Eric Thrane, 10 June 2020, Royal Astronomical Society.DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa1642

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Lost 8 Billion Light Years of Universe Evolution Revealed by Gravitational Waves - SciTechDaily

As we shelter behind closed doors, the Sars-CoV-2 virus causing Covid-19 has spread like no other disease before. In just a few months, from its identification in December 2019, more than a third of humanity was living under some form of lockdown. It is, to use the clich of 2020, unprecedented.

The Covid-19 pandemic has undeniably and dramatically exposed many weaknesses in human society. But it has also revealed that, despite the enormous advances we have made in medical science and technology, humans are just as vulnerable as any other organism to a novel disease. We are equipped with a very effective immune system that keeps us all alive, but that system has to learn to identify new invaders, and to react appropriately. Our naive immune system renders us all vulnerable to Covid-19, and in some people the overreaction of the immune system in response to the virus, a cytokine storm, can be fatal.

Our immune system, in all its complexity, is an evolved feature. It is an adaptation that, through natural selection, has been shaped and refined to combat disease. But there are subtler aspects of our evolutionary heritage at play during this pandemic. In the modern world of our own creation some of these aspects, so central to our global dominance as a species, can also conspire against us.

Evolution has equipped humans with large and complex brains capable of abstract thought, innovation, language and qualities we term intelligence. The evolved structure of our brain and the thought processes it allows also help us to be social, living and working collectively. Together, these features have allowed humans to achieve truly incredible things. At the same time, some of these features have rendered us horribly and uniquely vulnerable topandemics.

Social behaviour was essential during our evolutionary past, when our ancestors were far more likely to be the hunted than the hunter. Grouping for defence, and using the power of groups to keep safe and extend our diet, went hand-in-hand with evolutionary changes, and larger social units became possible. This accelerated greatly when we latched onto the idea of agriculture. Released to some extent from a foraging existence, human societies expanded, our skulls, dentition and metabolism evolved, technological advances flowed and ever larger settlements became possible. The supercity of the modern world is the culmination of this simultaneous expansion and concentration of humanity. Technology, arising from our unparalleled ability for innovation allows for such control over our environment that sometimes tens of millions of people are able to live a high-rise, high-density lifestyle, literally on top of each other. But high-density urban living provides the perfect conditions for a disease to spread.

The modern lifestyle hugely increases the number of people we have contact with, both socially and when we are crammed together in offices, streets and train carriages. Our social behaviour is now a threat, our conversations a liability. The primary defensive strategy in the face of Covid-19 is to actively and continually oppose our evolutionary heritage and, rather than group together for defence, we must defend ourselves by isolation.

Social distancing is affecting most parts of our daily lives at a local level, but we have also distanced globally. Our large and innovative brains dreamed of flight long before we invented the jet engine and shrank the world. The problem is that our ability to fly is also shared by any diseases we carry with us.

Gathering together people from far and wide for long periods in cramped airports and flying them all over the world is a wonderful dispersal mechanism for a virus like Sars-Cov-2. It is evolution that gave us all the innovative power of our brain, and it is our brain that has allowed us to create a globalised, interconnected world. If viruses had hands they would be have been rubbing them together in anticipatory glee when the Wright brothers took to the air.

Our cerebral evolutionary legacy laid the track for this pandemic but evolved aspects of our bodies arent always helping either. We have a wonderful ability to lay down fatty reserves, and for many of us the modern world is a landscape of caloric potency and opportunity.

Obesity is a major health risk any way you look at it, but it is also emerging as a risk factor for complications arising from Covid-19. The simple evolutionary story of obesity, often repeated, is that we are famine-adapted creatures living in a world of feast. The thrifty gene hypothesis as it is known is a seductive and popular idea, not least because of the implication that getting fat is somehow not our fault.

But it has proved difficult to support. Thrifty genes have been identified, in South Pacific islanders for example, but globally the evidence suggests that obesity cannot be put down to a Boy Scout metabolism, always prepared for famine.

Another evolutionary explanation is that, a few million years ago, the predation risk to our ancestors decreased. Evolved upper limits to fat storage were no longer so restrained by having to run away and they changed upwards not by natural selection but by a process called genetic drift (the drifty gene hypothesis). Whether we are thrifty or drifty, echoes of the mismatch between our evolutionary past and the calorie-filled modern world we have created are being heard.

Beneath our thin veneer of civilisation, far away from the dazzle and glare of our achievements, humans are vulnerable animals. Covid-19 has changed that. It has found itself the perfect host, a species with a powerful evolutionary double-hit of highly social behaviour and an innovative brain, leading to dense urban living and global travel.

The very nature of the modern world, building as it does on our evolutionary heritage, is our weakness in this pandemic. But just as our brain power helped us to get into this, it will also be our way out.

Unfit for Purpose: When Human Evolution Collides with the Modern World by Adam Hart (Bloomsbury Sigma, 16.99) is out now

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Evolution of the immune system and modern lifestyle have left us vulnerable to coronavirus - iNews

This months edition tells the story of how mowing the lawn evolved from a task for an expert scythe-man to an amusing, useful and healthy exercise for everyone.

In recent days, the scope for an engineer, even an eccentric one, to roam far and wide has been somewhat curtailed, so weve had to look for engineering where we can find it in the shed. With little to do other than mow the lawn, weve had time to ponder that most useful of machines, the lawnmower.

Were this the 18th century, popping out to mow the lawn would have also accounted for our daily if not weekly exercise allowance. Lawns were cut by hand with a scythe, so the large garden sward could only really be considered by those who could afford scythe-men. These were the professional lawn-cutters of their day, using made-to-measure scythes that fitted their height. Adjustments to the height of grass were made by strapping blocks of wood to the soles of their boots, rather than by trying to adjust the height at which they swung the blade, as the very finely honed edges were instantly blunted if they hit the ground by accident.

Such labour-intensive work was clearly in need of a hero, and one was found in 1830 in a textile mill in Thrupp, Gloucestershire. Foundryman Edwin Beard Budding had established an ironworks in 1827 to provide parts for John Ferrabees nearby Phoenix textile mill, and it was here that he saw an ingenious machine for shaving the nap of the cloth used for Guardsmens uniforms to make it smooth.

Inspired by this debobbling machine, Budding wondered if it could be put to any other use. After much tinkering, he and Ferrabee went into business manufacturing their first lawn-mower, or as the 1830 patent puts it: ...machinery for the purpose of cropping or shearing the vegetable surface of Lawns, Grass-plats and Pleasure Grounds.

This patent must have caused the heart of many a scythe-man to sink, but the lawnmower was not so much putting scythe-men out of business as creating the demand for lawns. So expensive was scything lawns that few places had them and even parks relied on sheep to graze grass down rather than having it cut. As Budding also points out in his specification, his machine was considerably more reliable that the most expert scythe-man and with his cut: ...the eye will never be offended by those circular scars, inequalities, and bare places, so commonly made by the best mowers with the scythe, and which continue visible for several days.

Buddings mower consisted of a series of curved blades around a cylinder set in a cast-iron frame with a handle for pushing from behind (or later pulling from in front). A system of 16:1 gears powered by a rear roller turned the blades and brought them against a rigid knife-bar on the underside of the machine where cutting took place. Another roller behind the cutting cylinder adjusted the height of the cut. The cuttings were thrown up and caught in a collection tray.

Under their agreement, Budding was responsible for the technical work and Ferrabee provided money for development, patenting and production. After costs, the profits were then shared equally between the two. Ferrabee was an astute businessman and in these early days of patenting, he decided to license the design to other agricultural manufacturers rather than wait for them to pirate it. In 1832 Ransomes, Sims, and Jeffries of Ipswich acquired the rights to produce the machines and one of the great names in lawn-mowing was born.

The lawnmower democratised grass-growing, once the preserve of the extremely wealthy. The mechanical lawnmower allowed municipal parks to manage large lawns, and one of the earliest machines was sold to the London Zoological Gardens. Oxford and Cambridge colleges also snapped them up, and rave reviews appeared in the Gardeners Magazine for 1831. For larger lawns, horse-drawn versions were produced including pony boots leather overshoes for the horses to prevent their hoof marks spoiling the finish.

The lawnmower also democratised sport, allowing local teams to maintain a proper playing surface for the first time and leading to the codification of many sports including cricket, bowls and lawn tennis.

Budding himself would go on inventing, holding several more patents including the screw adjustable spanner, but it would be another 60 years before the first (steam) powered mowers appeared. The personal mower remained a luxury well into the 20th century, but the British love of a finely cut lawn had been kindled. We can all agree with Budding that, in troubled times, Country gentlemen may find in using my machine themselves an amusing, useful and healthy exercise.

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The eccentric engineer: the evolution of the lawnmower - E&T Magazine

In 1996, there were over 8,000 public companies listed on exchanges in the United States. Fast forward to 2020 and there are only approximately 4,400 a drop of 46% despite the fact that the S&P 500 quadrupled in value. Conventional wisdom would lead readers to think they are looking at a misprint. This paradox has led to efforts from both the public and private sectors to help jump-start initial public offerings. Unfortunately, legislation like the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS, has not had the desired impact, and companies have instead elected to stay private longer than they once did. While we could chalk this up to capital being freely available via private equity and venture funds, the simple fact is that, for smaller companies, the benefits do not currently outweigh the burden and expense of going public.

Legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or SOX, the additional scrutiny that comes with being a public company, and byzantine U.S. equity market structure are all partially to blame. Fortunately, the pace of formation of private companies is at a record high and entrepreneurism is alive and well in the U.S. There has been a 106% growth in the number of private equity-backed companies from 4,000 in 2006 to more than 8,000 in 2017. While we champion the formation of new innovative companies, the shift from public to private ownership has had the negative side effect of locking out most public investors from the rewards of ownership. AOL, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook and many other successful companies went public early in their evolution. Now, with large companies going public later, private investors reap most of the financial gains by the timeshares that are available on a listed exchange.

Secondary equity market trading has been transformed by technology, but capital raising on public markets is stuck in the past.

Technological innovations have so far not significantly improved the process of going public on an exchange. Transformational tech companies are going public in an almost identical fashion as did their grandfathers rail and industrial companies decades ago. However, there are green shoots to be seen in fintech today that could help the financial markets evolve and improve the path to becoming a public company. Novel technologies such as blockchain are starting to be embraced by stakeholders in financial industries. One application of blockchain technology that has been getting particular notice is security token exchanges.

Security token exchanges would allow blockchain technology to simplify the complexities of custody, clearing and trading. The outcome is a simple exchange listing venue with price discovery that has the potential to encourage more issuers to go public to reach new investors. In turn, investors would benefit by gaining access to previously closely held assets a virtuous circle for capital markets.

New token exchanges would comply with traditional regulated public exchange processes but have the benefits of the computer programmability features of smart contracts. Compliance processes, ownership restrictions, contractual terms and conditions would be automatically implemented and embedded via a distributed network of computers that maintain a shared source of immutable information.

In Canada and Europe, there are options, namely the TSX Venture Exchange and the AIM Market, respectively, for small to mid-sized companies to access public markets. Currently, there is no U.S. venture market equivalent. In the U.S., if a company is considering public routes for capital raising and attracting new investors, their options are limited to:

All of these options need improvement one way or another. However, regulated security token exchanges have the potential to improve on all the current incumbent options and offer price discovery, corporate governance and investor protection. In addition, security token exchanges can also offer a less complex path to an IPO. These are the central functions that regulated exchanges do well for large-cap issuers. Furthermore, a security token exchange is not limited to just accredited and institutional investors but is open to all participants thereby providing issuers exposure to a greater number and variety of investors.

Prospectuses and earnings reports are used by investors to gauge the risk factors involved in investing in companies listed on a public exchange. Regulated security token exchanges will be equal to the incumbent exchanges by imposing high corporate governance standards and investor protections as part of their responsibilities as regulated listing venues.

Security token exchanges will follow the same rules that govern the trading of companies on incumbent exchanges. They will also have a responsibility to maintain fair and orderly markets and provide oversight and surveillance. Security token exchanges will take a role in helping corporate issuers understand their disclosure and regulatory requirements of being a publicly-traded company, and all listing candidates will undergo a comprehensive review to ensure they meet the listing standards of the security token exchanges.

Mid-sized companies looking for a quicker route to access and receiving funding from the public market may also find the direct listing of a token on a security token exchange to be the more efficient path when compared to a traditional IPO process.

For starters, listing on a security token exchange costs less, as there are lower frictional costs involved. Costly registration fees that are charged by the incumbent exchanges for IPOs are avoided on a security token exchange, and listing fees are logically based on market capitalization rather than public share count. This results in lower costs for equity tokens versus traditional listings. A token offering would provide a more streamlined process at a lower cost for a mid-sized startup that is looking to raise money, create monetization opportunities for early investors and employees, restructure a cap table, or take the next step to go public.

From the public investor standpoint, being able to buy and trade security tokens on an exchange opens up access to a new universe of assets that were previously closely held and traded. Ownership limitations of closely held assets have primarily benefited sophisticated institutions and accredited investors.

Furthermore, a token can represent ownership not only of traditional listed equity and debt securities but also securitized assets, such as real estate, income streams, art and wine. Tokenization can enable difficult-to-hold assets to be divided into smaller units, which, in turn, allows investors a chance to own a share of the underlying assets previously unavailable to the investing public.

Security token exchanges would allow secondary trading of tokens through a transparent and regulated platform. This would streamline the process to boost liquidity and provide exit options for investors who might have otherwise had to go through a more complicated route to liquidate their investment.

Through owning a token, which would represent vested interest in a security, disposing of an investment would take the form of a traditional clearing process with a potentially quicker settlement process.

From a regulatory perspective, a security token exchange gives greater transparency on asset ownership throughout its lifecycle since records are maintained on a decentralized network of computers that share the same source of information. Trust is further enabled, as data is stored in a cryptographic algorithm that ensures immutability of data.

Moreover, since records are shared, there is no need for reconciliation among network participants. This, coupled with the higher degree of automation that exists in smart contracts, could remove the need for registrars and nominees, which could shorten overall settlement times and increase the efficiency of financial markets in general.

In the future, tokenization could introduce a new option for raising capital, improve liquidity for issuers and their employees and investors, speed up settlement times, and lower costs overall for both the listed company and market participants.

Security tokens and the exchanges on which they operate could prove to be the next phase in finance as they are technologically more efficient, safe and transparent all of which are qualities that are embraced by stakeholders in the industry who range from investors to regulators.

Although the concept of tokenization will need to be socialized to the many participants in capital markets, they hold promise to jump-start the IPO process where other efforts have faltered. Security token exchanges could be the future for small to mid-cap companies and the inevitable securitization of closely held assets.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Jay Fraser is the director of strategic partnerships at BOX Digital Markets and BSTX. Prior to joining BOX, Jay was the head of business development and listings at IEX Group a national securities exchange and the head of Deutsche Banks Autobahn Americas the first app-based electronic distribution system in the financial services industry. A graduate of Emory University, Jay began his career in equity trading at Lehman Brothers before holding roles at ITG and Citadel Investment Group.

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Security Token Exchanges May be the Next Phase in the Finance Evolution - Cointelegraph

Aftera week of intense activity,Demo Day at the Ed-Tech Evolution acceleration program arriveson Friday, June 19, with the participating startup teams presenting the projects theyve been workingon.

Selected from 40 startups representing 17 countries, the participants have developed tools that help teachers and students, from small children to adult professionals, to learn and to organise the process of learning and teaching.

Project areas range from gamefication of studies to robotic platforms and virtual coaching. Ed-Tech Evolution is tech worlds response to Covid-19 crisis, which presents a challenge to society, but also an excellent opportunity for technological breakthroughs. The week-long, all-online program brought together tech gurus, investors, educational institutions and government officials from Nordic and Baltic region.

The COVID-19 crisis came as a "black swan"event for educational sector, prompting schools and universities to move online and redesign their curriculum accordingly. It will make a lasting impact on how we think about teaching and learning, according to organizers of the five-day event.

Prototype or fully-designed tools and platforms scrutinised as part of the program are more than likely to find a way into school and university classes in Europe and beyond in the future.

You can watch a livestream of the Demo Day event below at 16:00 (GMT+3)featuring 11 pitches fromstartups, where they will be presenting their products, the goals they reached during the accelerator week and their future plans.In turn, a total of 7 prizes will be awarded.

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Ed-Tech Evolution week wraps up with Demo Day - Eng.Lsm.lv

Viruses walk a fine line between severity and transmissibility. If they are too virulent, they kill or incapacitate their hosts; this limits their ability to infect new hosts. Conversely, viruses that cause little harm may not be generating enough copies of themselves to be infectious.

But SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease, sidesteps this evolutionary trade-off. Symptoms often dont appear until after infected people have been spreading the virus for several days. One study of SARS-CoV-2 estimated that the highest rate of viral shedding, and therefore transmissibility, was one to two days before the person infected begins to show symptoms.

Put simply, you only feel ill once the virus has accomplished its evolutionary goal: to spread.

Viruses that are good at making copies of themselves, and then getting those copies inside new hosts, are more successful and become more prevalent until host immunity or public health efforts restrain them.

As professors who study evolutionary medicine, we know the trade-off between virulence and transmissibility helps keep a pathogen in check. The very destructiveness of a virus keeps it from spreading too much. This has been the case with other pandemic pathogens, including Marburg, Ebola and the original coronavirus responsible for SARS. Outbreaks that consistently cause severe symptoms are more easily corralled by public health measures because infected individuals are easy to identify. SARS-CoV-2, however, can invade communities stealthily, because many infected individuals have no symptoms at all.

Looking at it this way, COVID-19 resembles a sexually transmitted disease. The infected person continues to look and feel fine while spreading the illness to new hosts. HIV and syphilis, for example, are relatively asymptomatic for much of the time they are contagious. With SARS-CoV-2, recent research suggests that 40-45% of people infected remain asymptomatic. And those carriers seem able to transmit the virus for a longer period.

COVID-19 has another similarity to many sexually transmitted diseases. Its severity is not the same across hosts, and often its dramatically different. There is evidence that the ability to fight the infection differs among people. The severity among strains of the virus might also differ, though there is no solid evidence of this yet.

Even for a single strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus can affect people in different ways, which could facilitate its spread. The SARS-CoV-2 virus or any other pathogen is not deliberately changing what it does in order to exploit us and use our bodies as vehicles for transmission, but pathogens can evolve to look like they are playing games with us.

Studies show pathogens can express conditional virulence meaning that they can be highly virulent in some individuals and less virulent in others depending on host characteristics, like age, the presence of other infections and an individuals immune response. This might explain how SARS-CoV-2 escapes the trade-off. In some individuals, virulence is maximized, such as in older hosts. In others, transmissibility is maximized.

Age, so far, seems the critical factor. Older people tend to get highly destructive infections, while younger hosts, although just as infectious, remain largely unscathed. This might be because different hosts have different immune responses. Another explanation is that as we get older, we are more likely to develop other illnesses, such as obesity and hypertension, which can make us more susceptible to harm from SARS-CoV-2.

Regardless of the mechanism, this age-based pattern permits SARS-CoV-2 to have its evolutionary cake and eat it too: ravaging older individuals with high virulence, yet maintaining younger individuals as vehicles for transmission. Some studies suggest younger people are more likely to be asymptomatic. Both presymptomatic and asymptomatic carriers can transmit the virus.

What do we know about the evolution of SARS-CoV-2? Unfortunately, not much yet. There is some evidence that the virus may be adapting to us as its new hosts, but so far no evidence shows that these mutations are causing changes in the virulence or transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2. And because SARS-CoV-2 may be able to circumvent the typical trade-off between virulence and transmissibility, there may be little evolutionary pressure to become less severe as it spreads.

For all the mysteries surrounding COVID-19, one thing is certain: We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security. As Sun Tzu warned in The Art of War, know your enemy. There is a great deal more to know about SARS-CoV-2 before we claim any victories.

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How the coronavirus escapes an evolutionary trade-off that helps keep other pathogens in check - The Conversation US