Category Archives: Futurism

DAVOS, Switzerland Tech companies are coming for the healthcare industry's lunch.

That's according to Amy Webb, a quantitative futurist and professor of strategic foresight at New York University Stern School of Business. When Business Insider asked Webb for a prediction she expects to happen that most others don't think will happen, her response turned to the relationship between big tech companies and healthcare.

"Amazon, Google, and Apple completely dismantle the healthcare industry as we know it," Webb told Business Insider on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

"From diagnostics to pharmaceuticals to the physician-patient relationship, and I would argue they're already in the process of doing that," Webb said.

Read more: Tech giants like Google and Amazon are beefing up their healthcare strategies. Here's how 7 tech titans are tackling the $3.6 trillion industry.

Tech powerhouses like Google, Amazon, and Apple are increasingly focused on expanding in US healthcare. They've pursued strategies such as building out life-sciences divisions and offering hardware like fitness trackers, and even shown some signs that they'll get into the business of providing healthcare.

Tech companies have an advantage that established healthcare players don't when working to change how the healthcare industry operates.

"Part of what is on their side is the regulatory issues that traditional players have to deal with don't apply in the same way," Webb said, referring to the regulations that protect patient-data privacy within doctors' offices and other established healthcare institutions. "We could, 20 years from now, have a completely different approach with completely different providers."

Read more: Verily just presented for the first time at JPMorgan's big health conference. Here's how the CEO of Alphabet's life sciences firm laid out the unusual business to top investors.

Webb pointed in particular to the tools getting developed that collect information about our health, such as wearables like Fitbit, which Google is acquiring, and the Apple Watch and voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa.

In the future, that information and other sensors and tools could be used to get a better picture of a patient's health without a doctor's office visit. That goes beyond the initial intention of the devices.

"What's happening in a sort of transparent way because this is not the primary use case for all these technologies is our homes are being turned into clinics," Webb said.

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How tech giants will dismantle healthcare industry: Amy Webb - Business Insider

A newly discovered immune cell that "may kill all cancer" has been discovered by British scientists by accident.

According to the Telegraph, researchers at Cardiff University were analyzing a blood bank in Wales, looking for immune cells that could fight bacteria, when they discovered an entirely new type of T-cell.

Now, the researchers are saying there is a potential that the ubiquitous T-cell could be harnessed to develop a universal cancer treatment that works for all people, against all cancers.

On Monday, the Cardiff University researchers published a new study in Nature Immunology detailing their discovery of the T-cells a type of white blood cell which are equipped with a new type of T-cell receptor (TCR) that finds and kills most human cancer types while ignoring healthy cells.

It does this by locating and destroying MR1, which is a molecule found on the surface of many types of cells, both cancerous and healthy. But the T-cells equipped with the new type of receptor know to only kill cancer cells and that they do.

According to a news release from Cardiff, the researchers found in lab tests that the T-cells equipped with the new receptor were able to kill lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells, all while leaving healthy cells alone.

The researchers have not yet tested the T-cells on humans, but conducted the lab tests on mice injected with human cancers to "encouraging" results.

Professor Andrew Sewell, lead author on the study, said the discovery raised the prospect of "universal" cancer therapy.

"Cancer-targeting via MR1-restricted T-cells is an exciting new frontier. It raises the prospect of a 'one-size-fits-all' cancer treatment; a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population," he said.

"Previously nobody believed this could be possible," he added.

Experiments are now underway to determine exactly how the new TCR distinguishes between healthy cells and cancerous cells, the news release said.

Sewell noted that "current TCR-based therapies can only be used in a minority of patients with a minority of cancers."

What Sewell is referring to is an existing therapy called CAR-T, which involves removing T-cells from a patient's blood and genetically engineering them to seek and destroy cancer cells, a report on Futurism.com says.

While promising, CAR-T has limitations," the Futurism report argues. "It's patient-specific, works against only a small number of cancers, and isn't effective against solid tumors, which comprise the majority of cancers."

The new discovery by Cardiff researchers does not seem to exhibit the same limitations.

The Cardiff group hopes to test the new treatment in patients by the end of this year, but must conduct more safety testing first to verify with extreme confidence that the killer T-cells with the new receptor know only to kill cancer cells.

"There are plenty of hurdles to overcome, however, if this testing is successful, then I would hope this new treatment could be in use in patients in a few years' time," Sewell said.

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British scientists accidentally discover immune cell that 'may kill all cancer' - TheBlaze

8 hours ago__Victor Tangermann__Filed Under: Advanced Transport

Self-driving company Cruise, a Honda-backed General Motors subsidiary, has unveiled an SUV-sized vehicle called Origin thats been designed from the ground up to never have a driver, The Verge reports.

We built this car around the idea of not having a driver and specifically being used in a ride-share fleet, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt told The Verge.

Instead of the usual setup of a drivers seat with pedals and steering wheel, the Origin is just one large cabin. Two rows of two seatseach face each other allowing for a luxurious amount of legroom in the center.

By making each component everything from the interior to the computer and sensors completely replaceable, the company is hoping to drive the cost per mile down way lower than you could ever reach if you took a regular car and tried to retrofit it, Vogt told The Verge.

READ MORE: Exclusive look at Cruises first driverless car without a steering wheel or pedals [The Verge]

More on driverless cars: Waymo Is Taking the Safety Drivers out of Its Autonomous Taxis

Up Next__Japan Is Launching Its Own Space Defense Unit >>>

<<< Scientists Discover Ancient Viruses Inside Glacier__Previously

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This Functioning Driverless Car Has No Driver's Seat - Futurism

Level Playing Field

Harvard Law Journal has published a bold but, its authors say, entirely constitutional plan to save democracy by creating 127 tiny new states.

Currently, every state has two senators, and every senators vote carries equal weight. That means voters in less-populated states have more influence over what happens in Congress than those in more-populated states.

So, thats the issue but according to the anonymous Harvard piece, it could also be the solution.

If, say, New York wanted to designate Manhattan as its own state, New Yorks state legislature would have to agree to the creation of the new state. And then the decision would need to win a majority vote in Congress.

But if a newly proposed state was never part of an existing one, according to the paper, securing a congressional majority is the only hurdle to statehood.

Since Washington D.C. isnt a state, the idea is that Congress could slice 127 new states out of the area it currently occupies and the two senators from each of those new states would provide enough votes to ensure the democracy-saving amendments proposed in the Harvard piece are ratified.

Radical as this proposal may sound, it is no more radical than a nominally democratic system of government that gives citizens widely disproportionate voting power depending on where they live, the author of the Harvard note wrote. The people should not tolerate a system that is manifestly unfair; they should instead fight fire with fire, and use the unfair provisions of the Constitution to create a better system.

READ MORE: A modest proposal to save American democracy [Vox]

More on democracy: Prominent Researcher Predicts That Democracy Is Going to Collapse

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Harvard Plan Suggests Adding 127 States to the United States - Futurism

Flashing Lights

With rare exception, stars die in one of two ways: they either slowly transition into white dwarfs or quickly explode as supernovae.

But some stars appear to temporarily die without a whimper or a bang they just disappear from the night sky and then appear again later and the scientists behind a newly published study believe this strange phenomenon could have one of two explanations: were either witnessing something brand new in astrophysics or seeing signs of alien activity.

On Thursday, the scientists involved in the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project published their first study in The Astronomical Journal, a prestigious and peer-reviewed publication. It details their hunt for objects that appeared in surveys of the night sky dating as far back as the 1950s, but that no longer appear in modern surveys.

That hunt turned up a hundred red objects that have blinked in and out of existence over the past 70 years.

Study co-author Martin Lpez Corredoira noted in a press release that the VASCO team hasnt found any direct evidence linking the lights to extraterrestrial intelligence but the studys abstract implies that the authors arent ruling out the possibility, either.

The implications of finding [vanishing and appearing sources] extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations, they wrote.

READ MORE: Unexplained Lights in Sky Could Be Alien Structures or Communication Lasers, Scientists Say [The Independent]

More on aliens: Penn States SETI Center Could Legitimize Alien Research

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Newly Discovered Blinking Space Lights Could Be Signs of Aliens - Futurism

Rewriting History

A new image of the center of the Milky Way has astronomers rewriting the history of our galaxy.

Thats because the image, which reveals new information about 700,000 stars near the galaxys core, contradicts scientists assumption that new stars are constantly forming in that region, CNET reports. Rather, it suggests that star formation in the galactic center occurred mostly in our galaxys infancy before dying down for most of its life.

Existing scientific dogma holds that there was a more constant stream of star formation, but the new data suggests that 80 percent of stars in the region were created during the first high-activity period.

The Very Large Telescopes new survey found that the center of the Milky Way sprang back to life and began rapidly churning out new stars again about a billion years ago, accordingto research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

This burst of activity, which must have resulted in the explosion of more than a hundred-thousand supernovae, was probably one of the most energetic events in the whole history of the Milky Way, lead author Francisco Nogueras-Lara of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy said in a press release.

But other astronomers arent quite ready to rewrite history one new paper isnt necessarily enough to overturn everything they know. Monash University astronomer Michael Brown, who didnt work on the study, told CNET that the particularly-complex methodology of the new research didnt fill him with confidence.

I find the evidence presented tentative rather than absolutely compelling, he said.

READ MORE: This unreal image of the Milky Ways center could rewrite galactic history [CNET]

More on the Milky Way: The Milky Ways Supermassive Black Hole Just Did Something Wild

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Astronomers May Have Been Wrong About The Milky Way's History - Futurism

A first-of-its-kind health study has yielded bad news for e-cigarette users and even worse news for those who both vape and smoke conventional cigarettes.

On Monday, a team from the University of California, San Francisco, published the results of the first long-term study focused on the relationship between e-cigarettes and respiratory illness in theAmerican Journal of Preventive Medicine.

For the study, they analyzed data collected as part of a study called the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH), which tracked the tobacco usage of more than 32,000 American adults from 2013 to 2016, noting any new lung disease diagnoses they received.

The UC San Francisco team looked at people who had no reported lung disease at the beginning of the PATH study and found that vaping alone increased their chances of developing chronic lung disease by about a third over the course of the studys three years.

We concluded that e-cigarettes are harmful on their own, researcher Stanton Glantz said in a press release, and the effects are independent of smoking conventional tobacco.

Using traditional cigarettes made a person 2.6 times more likely to develop lung disease, so it would seem that vaping is comparatively safer than smoking, as some vape manufacturers have claimed.

The problem, though, is that the vast majority of e-cigarette users dont fully give up smoking cigarettes and using both forms of tobacco more than triples a persons risk of developing lung disease.

Switching from conventional cigarettes to e-cigarettes exclusively could reduce the risk of lung disease, but very few people do it, Glantz said. For most smokers, they simply add e-cigarettes and become dual users, significantly increasing their risk of developing lung disease above just smoking.

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Study: Just Three Years of Vaping Increases Lung Disease Risk - Futurism

Trypophobia

Even putting its Great Red Spot aside for the moment, Jupiter is a bizarre place covered in gigantic, swirling storms.

NASA recently discovered another storm this one the size of the United States on the planets south pole, joining an array of six others that were already swirling around in abeautiful hexagonal pattern, according to an agency press release.

NASA first observed the new storm when the space agencys Juno spacecraft flew past the south pole in late November.

The flyby, which marked the 22nd time Juno checked up on Jupiter, was actually a bit of an evasive maneuver: NASA had to reroute Juno to keep it from dying in an eclipse that would have blocked its solar panels and ended the mission.

We realized that the orbit was going to carry Juno into Jupiters shadow, which could have grave consequences because were solar powered, Juno principal researcher Scott Bolton said in the release. No sunlight means no power, so there was real risk we might freeze to death.

Lo and behold, first thing out of the gate on the other side, we make another fundamental discovery, he added.

READ MORE: NASAs Juno Navigators Enable Jupiter Cyclone Discovery [NASA]

More on Jupiter: Scientists: Jupiters Great Red Spot Isnt Dying After All

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Check Out This Hypnotic Array of Colossal Storms on Jupiter - Futurism

Space Rocks

Russian space agency Roscosmos is creating a center devoted to monitoring meteors, comets, and asteroids to ensure they dont collide with Earth even it means having to blow them up in space.

As part of the creation of a monitoring system and information support for the safety of space activities in near-Earth space, we plan to launch the Russian Center for Small Celestial Bodies, whose main task will be to detect and track celestial bodies approaching Earth, Igor Bakaras, a senior official at Roscosmos subsidiary TsNIIMash, told Russian-owned news agency Sputnik.

Pakistani news agency UrduPoint News has reported that officials are expected to approve the center in mid-2020. It will go online shortly after and then remain in operation until 2030.

Russia also recently announced plans to build a series of telescopes on the Moon to help it track potentially hazardous space rocks, so it seems likely the new center will play a role in bringing that effort to fruition.

Before Russia can blast any dangerous asteroids out of the sky, itll need to do a lot of research. To that end, Bakaras told Sputnik that Russian scientists are currently exploring a variety of ways to destroy or redirect a space rock heading toward Earth, including through the use of satellites, rocket engines, and solar sails.

At present, work in these areas is limited largely to theoretical research and the mathematical modeling of various countermeasures, Bakaras said and that research could be key to saving the planet if an asteroid does make its way toward Earth.

READ MORE: Russia Working on Means to Destroy Dangerous Asteroids Hurtling Toward Earth [Sputnik]

More on asteroids: Russia Wants to Build an Observatory on the Moon

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Russia Is Working on Its Own Plan to Blow up Killer Asteroids - Futurism

Star Light

Scientists just observed a new galaxy for the first time, and at 13 billion lightyears away, its one of the most distant galaxies spotted to date.

The galaxy, MAMBO-9, isnt setting any long-distance records. Scientists have found galaxies at similar and even greater distances from us. But MAMBO-9 is nearly as old as the universe, CNN reports, so the new finding could help astronomers reveal more information about the earliest days of the cosmos.

MAMBO-9 is only about 970 million years younger than the universe itself, according to research published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal. Thats an unfathomable length of time for humans, but a mere blip in the cosmic calendar.

The new discovery presents a rare opportunity to watch a galaxy form. Light from MAMBO-9 that just reached Earth which portrays things that actually happened 13 billion years ago reveals a vast cloud of dust that will someday form into new stars and exoplanets.

We expect 100 times more stars than dust, lead researcher Caitlin Casey from the University of Texas at Austin told CNN. But MAMBO-9 has not produced that many stars yet, and we want to find out how dust can form so fast after the Big Bang.

READ MORE: Meet MAMBO-9, one of the most distant galaxies to ever be observed [CNN]

More on space: Something Very Strange Seems to be Synchronizing Distant Galaxies

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Scientists Spot One of the Most Distant Galaxies Ever: MAMBO-9 - Futurism