Category Archives: Futurist

Even after vaccinating everyone on Earth against the coronavirus, COVID-19 could continue to spread.

Thats because scientists arent yet sure whether the vaccines currently being deployed actually stop disease transmission or if they merely prevent symptomatic disease, Trinity College Dublin immunologist and biochemist Kingston Mills told New Scientist. That means theres a chance the vaccine doesnt actually keep people from catching and spreading COVID-19, but simply makes them less likely to suffer from it.

Scientists are still trying to figure out whether the vaccines actually prevent the virus from spreading, butScientific American notes that it wouldnt be unheard of if they didnt the hepatitis B vaccine doesnt prevent transmission, for instance. If that ends up being the case,experts told SciAm, COVID-19 will remain a public health concern no matter how many people get vaccinated even after the pandemic finally ends.

I dont see that these vaccines will be eliminating SARS-CoV-2 any time in the coming years, Mills told New Scientist.

That said, mass vaccination will play a major part in ending the pandemics devastation, even if the coronavirus technically continues to spread and infect new people under the radar. Being able to prevent serious or even mildly symptomatic cases of COVID-19 will be a game changer in getting life back to normal, ending lockdown, and making it safe to once again be around other people.

The issue is that even when that happens, new cases of the coronavirus will likely pop up among those who didnt or couldnt get vaccinated if those who were inoculated can in fact still spread the disease. Plus, New Scientist notes, the coronavirus could theoretically mutate as it spreads among people or different animal species, potentially causing new outbreaks.

I think this virus is here to stay, Public Health England epidemiologist Susan Hopkins told New Scientist.

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Expert: We Could Vaccinate Everyone on Earth and Not Eliminate the Coronavirus - Futurism

Gun Stabilizer

The US Army is developing a gun barrel stabilizer for its next-generation rifle that could greatly level out any unintended movement, Task & Purpose reports.

The piece of tech is a leftover part of the militarys Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) effort, which was originally part of the US Special Operations Commands (SOCOM) Iron Man suit project.The powered suit was abandoned in early 2019 but the impressive-looking stabilizer shows that portions of its tech could still end up on the battlefield.

It also looks like impressive firearm tech on its own. Heres a GIF of the device in action.

The Aim Control Enhancer (ACE) is designed to remove any unwanted movements from the soldiers supporting hand, much like a camera gimbal.

A user selects a target or a direction, and then the system holds the weapon in the proper orientation, reads the contract for the ACE. This effort seeks to merely correct for the shaking of the weapon that is not controllable by the user. In this manner, a compact, self-contained unit may be constructed in a form factor that is useful on a tactical rifle.

The attachment was initially developed as part of SOCOMs Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS), better known as the Iron Man suit. TALOS was shut down in February 2019, however, after failing to meet the expectations of the SOCOM leadership.

The Army is still looking for a weapon vendor to produce automatic rifles that could make use of the attachment, according to Task & Purpose.

READ MORE: The Army is testing a piece of SOCOMs Iron Man suit for its next-generation squad weapon [Task & Purpose]

More on hi-tech army suits: The Army Is Spending Millions on Powered Exoskeletons

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The US Army Is Testing an Auto-Aiming Part of Its "Iron Man" Suit - Futurism

Solar Probe

China has is making massive strides in space exploration. The country has successfully sent multiple probes to the surface of the Moon and is making moves to establish its very own orbital space station as well as landing on Mars.

Now its also angling to get a closer look at the Sun, as the South China Morning Post reports a further flex of what Chinas leadership wants to see become a growing space supremacy.

The upcoming mission, called the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S), is scheduled to launch in the first half of 2022 and will perform 24 hour continuous observation of our star from a Sun-synchronous orbit of 720 km above Earth for at least four years, according to state-owned news outlet Xinhua.

The goal of the probe is to study space weather, particularly solar storms that can wreak havoc on sensitive scientific equipment back on Earth and in its orbit. ASO-S will be able to predict solar storms at least 40 hours ahead of their arrival, according to Xinhua, providing an advanced warning of any damage.

The mission will include three payloads that it will release upon reaching : an X-ray imager to track the Suns magnetic fields, as well as a magnetic detector and solar telescope.

READ MORE: Chinas space programme plans to launch first mission to the sun next year [South China Morning Post]

More on solar probes: More on A Space Probe Just Took the Closest Pictures of the Sun Ever

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China Is Sending a Mission to Study the Sun - Futurism

A team of Chinese scientists have developed a gene therapy that they say reverses some aspects of aging and extend lifespans in mice, Reuters reports.

While plenty more research still needs to be done, the research sheds light on the underlying processes involved in aging, and reveals a twinkle of hope for a therapy that turns back the biological clock for human patients.

The teams therapy, outlined in a paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine this month, involved deactivating a gene called KAT7, which was found to contribute to the aging of cells.

These mice show after 6-8 months overall improved appearance and grip strength and most importantly they have extended lifespan for about 25%, Qu Jing, co-supervisor of the project and aging specialist at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), told Reuters.

To make the changes to the mices genes, the team used the popular gene-editing method CRISPR/Cas9 to identify about 100 genes that contribute to cellular aging, a process known as senescence.

The team targeted KAT7 because they believe it contributes to senescence more than other aging-related genes.

Inactivating the gene in human stem cells, human liver cells and mouse liver cells also didnt cause any observable side effects, according to the scientists.

Its still definitely necessary to test the function of kat7 in other cell types of humans and other organs of mice and in the other pre-clinical animals before we use the strategy for human aging or other health conditions, Qu told Reuters.

Excerpt from:
New Gene Therapy Reverses Aging in Mice - Futurism

Looking Down

Sensitive storm-chasing equipment on the International Space Station caught a dazzling light show on video as it watched the electrical activity of a thunderstorm from above.

The recordings, which were captured by the European Space Agencys Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), help reveal how lightning originates and even how storms can distribute greenhouse gases through the atmosphere, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

But just as importantly, the orbital view provides a really,really cool look at electrical storms from a perspective youve never seen before.

The video, which can be found in a European Space Agency press release, shows an unusual phenomenon called blue jets blue-colored lightning blasts that shoot upward from storm clouds into the highest regions of the stratosphere.

Then, after a few quick flashes of light, the video shows what scientists call elves, or rings of electrical activity that burst outward from a storm way up in the ionosphere. Seeing blue jets and elves from space is difficult since they pass so quickly, and spotting them from Earth is nearly impossible due to cloud cover.

The inherent difficulty in even spotting these light shows, as their mythological names suggest, makes them extremely hard to study and understand. But now, with these ASIM recordings, scientists are beginning to make sense of whats actually going on in the upper atmosphere.

This paper is an impressive highlight of the many new phenomena ASIM is observing above thunderstorms, European Space Agency Physical Sciences Coordinator Astrid Orr said in the press release, and shows that we still have so much to discover and learn about our Universe.

READ MORE: Genesis of blue lightning into the stratosphere detected from ISS [European Space Agency]

More on storms: NASA Detects Bright Flashes of Light on Jupiter

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Space Station Captures Amazing Footage of Lightning From Above - Futurism

Career-Ending Injury

No matter where you stand on the can video games be sports? debate, it cant be denied that professional gaming has become a competitive commercial space, with many of the same things that make other sports so captivating like charismatic pros, major sponsorship deals, and massive events.

But now, a more unfortunate overlap between Esports and conventional athletics is emerging: career-ending injuries, as illustrated by professional Call of Duty player Thomas Paparattos Tuesday retirement announcement. Paparatto, who plays under the moniker ZooMaa, could no longer compete through an ongoing thumb and wrist injury, NBC News reports, marking the end of a prominent competitive gaming career.

Playing through the weakness and pain in my hand just isnt possible anymore, Paparatto wrote in his announcement.

Paparattos injury may seem minor compared to the shattered bones or brain damage that athletes face in contact sports. But the injuries that force players into early retirement will always vary by sport and regardless of any such comparisons, it means Paparatto is cut off from his livelihood with a professional team.

In all sports youll find people who put in the hours, unfortunately some will be injured and this also applies to eSports, Mark Griffiths, the director of Nottingham Trent Universitys International Gaming Research Unit, told NBC.

Personal tragedy aside, the emergence of career-ending injuries in eSports is interesting from an academic perspective because it symbolizes another way that competitive gaming is like any other sport.

Were at a really exciting point with games in our societies now, Oxford Internet Institute director Andrew Pryzybylski told NBC. Theyre no longer seen as a pursuit of social outcasts, theyre now part of the mainstream

READ MORE: Professional video-gamer, 25, hangs up controller over thumb injury [NBC News]

More on Esports: Goddamn, I Guess We Need to Get Into Esports Now

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Professional Gamer Retires After Career-Ending Injury to Thumb - Futurism

Provided by Community Foundation for Northern Virginia

The Community Foundation for Northern Virginia is hosting the 2021 Shape of the Region Conference: Co-Creating a New Northern Virginia. The conference is billed as An Emerging Vision of a More Inclusive, Sustainable, and Equitable Region.

The keynote speaker isNancy Giordano,Strategic Futurist | Global Keynote Speaker.Described as endlessly optimistic, Nancy Giordano is a strategic futurist, global keynote speaker, corporate strategist and gatherer with a drive to help enterprise organizations and visionary leaders transform to meet the escalating expectations ahead. Recognized as one of the top female futurists, Nancys expertise and experiences ranges from A.I. to frozen foods to reinventing the internet, and all her projects have a key common denominator: transitioning away from the extractive operating systems and outdated business thinking that no longer hold up to create the more sustainable, inclusive and dynamic solutions the future demands.

Thursday, March 11,12:30 to 2:30 p.m.Virtual Conference. Link will be sent to all registered guests.

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Fourth Annual Shape of the Region Conference - Prince William Living

Of the many things that COVID-19 has made abundantly clear to us, surely one of them is a newfound realization that public health has become increasingly complex. Understanding the challenges to public health that is, the task of guarding the well-being of the U.S. population is essential now more than ever.

As an engineer, design futurist and graduate program director, I have seen how COVID-19 has transformed how public health preparedness is viewed and understood. Some say the pandemic has delivered an urgency for a reimagining of public health.

From problems in producing PPE that demonstrate the vulnerabilities in critical supply chains to solutions in vaccine distribution challenges that leverage innovative public-private partnerships, new perspectives and approaches to public health are necessary.

A way to accomplish this: using health care engineering, or more specifically, the application of systems engineering in health care. Systems engineering is defined as an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. These could include such complex systems as aircraft and spacecraft systems. Already, this concept is flourishing. Research centers throughout the U.S., including those at the Mayo Clinic and Northeastern Universitys Healthcare Systems Engineering, suggest challenges such as patient safety could be made better by applying systems engineering principles and techniques through more holistic and human-centered approaches to systems design.

These efforts have proven helpful to health care delivery in response to COVID-19. But more is required, particularly in the use of systems engineering in informing public health responses and interventions. A field of public health systems engineering is needed.

Its intent: to develop and apply systemic and integrated approaches to understanding and solving public health problems. Formalizing a field of public health systems engineering focused on health care at the population level offers the needed research and educational pathways to advance this work.

Examples of this include designing and developing personal protective equipment, repairing the vulnerabilities in the food supply chain, and grappling with vaccine logistics. COVID-19 has made clear the growing interconnected, interdisciplinary and multifaceted nature of public healths future. In partnering with public health, systems engineering can mature mindsets (systems thinking) and practices that can aid in meeting this future.

Illustrating this notion are efforts by Pinar Keskinocak, the co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Institute of Technology, and her colleagues. In a recent interview, Keskinocak said: Whenever there is a complex problem, it needs serious analysis or technology and thats where an engineer comes in. This is exactly the situation now, very complex, dynamic and uncertain. Its difficult to understand whats going on or make decisions just by sitting around a table and discussing. We need expertise in engineering.

And its not just technical or technological concerns. Human systems integration or human factors considerations are equally central in systems engineering approaches. For example, building trust with Black Americans is vital to the success of contact tracing. Public health systems engineering could advance efforts to develop more equitable practices that could improve Black participation. An example is works that further the development of requirements elicitation techniques such as storytelling that provide a more comprehensive understanding of users and their context of use. These more inclusive practices would consider historical context and support more community-led public health design engagements.

COVID-19 has often been called a stress test for public health. COVID-19 will not be our last or worst pandemic; our emerging understanding of the public health implications of climate change further spotlights this growing need. What is true for COVID is true for climate change, says a recent Scientific American opinion piece. Were not prepared. Part of the gap is a knowledge gap: We havent done the needed research, and we lack critical information.

As the future of public health is likely to become increasingly digital, the technical understanding and holistic approach offered by systems engineering will begin to fill this critical public health knowledge gap. Fortunately, efforts are emerging in meeting these needs. Emory Universitys Health DesignED, the Design Institute for Health at the Dell Medical School, Vanderbilts Medical Innovators Development Program and recent initiatives such as those at Johns Hopkins are examples. The time is ripe for evolving the field of public health systems engineering. It is something the U.S. public health system desperately needs.

The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

Licenced as Creative Commons - attribution, no derivatives.

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Engineering can contribute to a reimagining of the US public health system | The Conversation - News-Herald.com

Sci-fi fans, gadget geeks, and futurists have been awaiting the arrival of automated smart houses for a very long timefrom the early 1950 prototype of a push-button manor, to the Jetsons technicolor visions of leisurely life in a home run by robots, to the surprisingly prescient 1999 Disney Channel original movie Smart House.

Those dreams remained firmly in the realm of fantasy until the late 2010s, when big tech companies began mass producing smart speakers. The gadgets, which come with voice assistants eager to do consumers bidding, are crucial for making any real-world home smart.

Smart speakers are expected to be a future-dwellers main point of contact with their automated home. In their current iteration, you talk to the speaker, and it relays your commands to a web of connected devices that can turn on a lightbulb or change the thermostat or get a pot of coffee brewing. The speakers also wield a good deal of behind-the-scenes market power: When you ask a question, the voice assistant routes your query through a preferred search engine; when you ask it to restock your laundry detergent, it directs your order to a favored ecommerce platform.

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The companies making the most essential smart home gadgets - Quartz

David Houle| Sarasota Herald-Tribune

My previous column titledDark Winterwas my suggestion that we will have a dark winter ahead primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The only thing I got wrong was thinking that America might top out at 135,000 new cases a day.Well, I am writing this on Dec. 7 and we have already hit 200,000 as a daily new case load, so I was off by 40%.This, of course, only makes the winter darker.

Americas Vision Deficit was about how, until recently, Americans came together to face common enemies, whether it was the Axis Powers in WWII or the Soviet Union in the race to the moon and the Cold War.

Remember 9/11/01?Of course you do!That was when 3,000 died in one day at the hands of Islamic terrorists, when several days later President Bush climbed the rubble of the World Trade Center, grabbed a megaphone and in just a matter of minutes united us against those that had attacked us and killed our fellow Americans.

If you were like me, you bought and proudly wore an FDNY hat for several years after that.We honored our heroes who went toward the towers.Today we honor our front-line heroes who are overwhelmed at all the hospitals dealing with virus deaths every day, often every hour.Close to 2,000 of them have died from the virus, often working with less than adequate PPE. We honor them by saying they are heroes.

Many of us, however, do not honor them. Every single front line health worker I have heard interviewed have all said the same thing: please help us, wear a mask and follow health guidelines.With these pleas from weeping, exhausted heroes, I just cant understand why so many people will not wear masks.

In one day, there were 3,000 deaths of Americans and we all were changed by it, and our sense of being Americans under attack seemed to unite us.Last week, three days had almost the same number of dead Americans as 9/11: 2,777, 2,802 and 2,669. In the first five days of December, 13,289 Americans died from the COVID-19 virus, or more than four times the death toll of 9/11.

After 9/11, and up to this day, we have tolerated hours of waiting to go through TSA security lines.We unpack our liquids, take off our shoes and belts, empty our pockets and walk through a scanner.Often, we have to be frisked.This is much more personally intrusive, much more time consuming and yet we do it.The obvious reason for this difference is that none of us could fly if we didnt go through TSA security, so we tolerate it.Yet many chose to not wear masks as it is an invasion of freedom.Well, for those of you who dont wear masks, think about TSA lines.If you accept the government rule that you cant fly without going through security, why would you resist a government mandate to wear masks?None of us want a terrorist on our plane.None of us want to get COVID-19.

We are under attack and yet we argue about masks.While our front-line workers are crying and pleading with us to wear masks and follow the health scientists, we argue amongst ourselves about mask wearing.What has happened to us these last few years?Yes, you can say President Trump as he doesnt wear a mask and actually has ridiculed those that wear them.But that is an easy cop-out as we all have the freedom of choice, unless of course you need a politician to control how you act.How we as Americans stay divided andignore those front-line workersis simply beyond me.The only real conclusion is that millions of Americans have chosen to be selfish and opinionated to a degree that we no longer can come together to fight the enemy.

Back to todays date of Dec. 7, the 79th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.That day changed history.Within days we were in a declared war and within weeks tensof thousands had signed up to fight the enemy.Any idea how many Americans died that day? 2,403.That means that three days last week more people died in a day thandied at Pearl Harbor.

We are all caught up in our opinions.We dont honor our health and front-line workers. We moan about our freedom to not wear a mask.If we had been so selfish, we wouldnt have won WWII, as the home front, the factory floors of Detroit, and unprecedented rationing were big parts of being the victor.

So here is what we know to be true as of this writing:

Back to the premise at the top of the column:A unique opportunity to shape our future. If we want to have fewer deaths than we sustained in WWII 420,000, over four years we can wear masks, social distanceand havea commitment to our neighbors, the elderly, the infirm and our frontline health care workers.If we want to keep Florida as a place where people can feel safe to visit during season, we can all do what is needed and what is right,and do it now.

Or we can decide to act selfishly and dismiss science, in ways that the Greatest Generation should find appalling.We can bond and come together in a singular way to lessen death, suffering and economic loss … and feel good about it.Or we can refuse to fight with the tools we know can help us win this battle against an invisible and deathly enemy.

What our collective future for the next six months will be is up to us. We can jointogether for the common good, for saving lives, for a faster economic recovery, or we can actselfishly and make the road ahead longer and more deadly.

What are you going to do?

Sarasota resident David Houle is a globally recognized futurist. He has given speeches on six continents, written seven books and is futurist in residence at the Ringling College of Art + Design. His website is davidhoule.com. Email him at david@davidhoule.com.

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FUTURIST: Our choices can save lives over the next six months