Category Archives: Transhuman News

Scientists in Canada have used commercially available genetic material to piece together the extinct horsepox virus, a cousin of the smallpox virus that killed as many as a billion human beings before being eradicated.

The laboratory achievement was reported Thursday in a news article in the journal Science.

The lead researcher in Canada, David Evans, a molecular virologist at the University of Alberta, told The Washington Post that his efforts are aimed at developing vaccines and cancer treatments. There is nothing dangerous about the synthetic horsepox virus, which is not harmful to humans.

He has not yet published his findings in a scientific journal how to report this kind of research is necessarily fraught for the editors of such journals but he did discuss them at a meeting on smallpox research last November at the World Health Organization in Geneva. A report on the meeting published by the WHO noted that Evans had received approval from regulatory authorities for his work, but the report added that those authorities may not have fully appreciated the need for regulation of the steps involved in synthesizing a virulent horse pathogen.

Evans said he has applied for a patent and is collaborating with a commercial company, Tonix Pharmaceuticals. In a news release, Tonix said it hopes to use horsepox virus to develop a new vaccine for smallpox that is safer than the one currently available, which can have serious side effects.

Evans said he was not trying to prove a point, but he acknowledged that he has long argued that it would be possible to synthesize a pox virus through laboratory techniques.

Smallpox, the deadliest disease in human history, was formally declared eradicated in 1980. Government officials and virologists have long debated whether to destroy the existing samples of smallpox kept under close guard at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as in government facilities in Russia. One argument against doing so, advanced by Evans and others, is that destroying the known stocks would not conclusively get rid of smallpox, because there could be unknown caches of the virus hidden somewhere, and that, in any case, modern techniques would be able to synthesize the virus based on already published genetic sequences.

Evans's experiment, according to Science, required about $100,000, a relatively modest sum, and used commercially available genetic material. Companies sell scraps of cloned DNA that scientists stitch together. Laws restrict access to smallpox genes, however, and Evans said that even a highly credentialed researcher would not be able to obtain such material: Youd probably get a call from the FBI if you tried.

Evans said the creation of synthetic horsepox isn't trivially easy. He said he was not seeking publicity and wished that news organizations would not make a fuss about his work.

Whether you can make the virus, or whether there are these hidden stocks of virus, doesnt change the fact that in the case of smallpox, we have to be prepared for it, he said. I dont know whether the risk has gone up or not. The fact were talking about it is to some extent increasing the risk.

Tom Frieden, former head of the CDC, said the breakthrough was not surprising but probably makes the debate over destroying the existing smallpox stockpiles less relevant. He said it highlights the need to monitor more closely dual-use experiments research that could be used either for protective purposes or, in theory, to create a deadly pathogen.

It is a brave new world out there with the ability to re-create organisms that existed in the past or create organisms that have never existed, said Frieden, who favors limiting the number of such experiments and institutions where they can take place.

Frieden said this research should spur improvements in laboratory safety to prevent the accidental release of microbes something that has happened a number of times in American facilities and others around the world. The broader story here, Frieden said, is that the U.S. and other countries need to be prepared for emerging pathogens, which can and will appear naturally no laboratory necessary.

That sentiment was echoed by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The danger of naturally evolving microbes, like Zika, like pandemic influenza, like Ebola, that naturally evolve, are much more of a threat to civilization than the possibility that someone might be able to synthesize a microbe, Fauci told The Washington Post. People should concentrate on what weve been talking about for a long time: getting ourselves prepared for the natural emergence in nature of microbes that could threaten us.

Smallpox vaccination programs ceased several decades ago after the smallpox virus stopped circulating widely. Today, a majority of Americans have never been vaccinated against smallpox. That's a straightforward example of risk analysis: The potential side effects (including, in rare cases, death) from smallpox vaccination have been viewed as greater than the risk of anyone becoming infected with the virus once it stopped circulating in the population.

Ethicists have struggled with the question of how to handle dual-use biomedical research.

We are still struggling with how to manage the dual-use dilemma. How do we get the benefit of the research without the risk of it being turned against us? said Alta Charo, a law professor and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin who has followed the debate closely.

She cautioned against overreaction to Evans's research. Creating a pathogen is not the same thing as weaponizing one, she said.

Peter Jahrling, director of the NIH Integrated Research Facility, praised Evans's work: I think he did a terrific service. You had a lot of people saying this can't be done. And he said yes it can. Jahrling added, If he had done it with smallpox virus, that would be a real [tempest]."

Jahrling and other experts noted that a synthetic polio virus was built in a lab some years ago. The pox viruses are much larger, and their synthesis represents a breakthrough. But Jahrling said this kind of work could be replicated by other researchers.

Maybe not some guy in a cave, Jahrling said. But a reasonably equipped undergraduate microbiology lab could repeat this trick.

The smallpox virus's complete genome has been known since the 1990s. Scientists and government officials debated whether the genomic information should be published, but synthetic biology was such a primitive field at the time that few people expected anyone would be able to reconstitute the virus.

Since then, biotechnology has advanced at a stunning rate. The global health community has known for roughly a decade that synthesis of pox viruses, including smallpox, was possible, said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and author of Synthetic Biology: Safety, Security and Promise. The Evans experiment, she said, had no technical breakthrough.

Still, restrictions are in place to prevent smallpox DNA from falling into the wrong hands. In the United States, experiments that are identified as Dual Use Research of Concern go through an additional round of review by funding agencies and must include a risk mitigation plan in their design.Last year, the World Health Organization recommended that no institution be allowed to posses more than 20 percent of the smallpox virus's genome. Companies that produce DNA for research are required to screen customers' orders for matches against known pathogens.

You couldnt have somebody just order smallpox DNA to a P.O. box, Gronvall said.

This is not the first experimental work on engineered pox viruses. In 2001, Australian researchers manipulated the genetic code of mouse pox and showed that it could be deadly even to those who had been vaccinated or naturally immune. A researcher in St. Louis demonstrated similar alterations in mouse pox in 2003, inciting alarms about the potential misuse of biomedical experiments.

Such concerns spiked after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks of that autumn. The controversy flared again in 2011 when researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands conducted experiments on bird flu virus. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged the journals Science and Nature to refrain from publishing the research, and the journals initially complied. But the researchers later revealed that their experiments did not create any killer pathogens, and publication went forward.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the breakthrough with horsepox suggests that similar work is likely to be occurring around the planet.

The question is how many other people have done it. We never thought or expected it to come from a place like Alberta, he said. It's not one of the leading universities in the world for microbiology and synthetic biology. If it came out of there, how many other places like this are also doing the same work right now? He said the U.S. government is unprepared to handle an emergency involving a synthetic pathogen particularly given that many senior positions haven't been filled yet by the Trump administration.

This has been the storm coming for years, Osterholm said. Weve known about it, but unfortunately, were not ready.

Ariana Eunjung Cha and Sarah Kaplan contributed to this report.

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Scientists synthesize smallpox cousin in ominous breakthrough - Washington Post

A Michigan chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is warning thatsomebody is coming to take union jobs. Not immigrants, not robots but goats.

After Western Michigan University renteda crew of 20 goats to clear weeds and brush this summer, AFSCME filed a grievance contending that the work the goats are doing in a wooded lot is taking away jobs from laid-off union workers, according to the Detroit Free Press.

If you haven't been paying attention, goat rentals are all the rage in landscaping right now. With their voracious appetites they can clear weeds and brush in areas that humans have a hard time reaching. They're gentler on the environment than heavy landscaping equipment or chemicals. They will eat literally anything, including poison ivy.

If you're a union representing guys who mow or clear brush for a living, you can see the threat coming from a mile away even if said threat has two horns, four legs and looks adorablein a sweater.

AFSCME's warning got us thinking just how many jobs are really at risk from the rise of goat-scaping? What follows is a heavily simplified, back-of-the-envelope, it's-Friday-afternoon-and-nothing-really-matters estimate of the potential impact of goat labor on the U.S. workforce. Are you ready?

The first thing we need to do is figure out how much land a goat and a person can clear in a given period of time. We're going to assume the human is operating a tractor with a Bush Hog BH16 Single-Spindle Rotary Cutter attached. With a cutting width of 72 inches, the Hog can handle tree saplings up to 2 inches in diameter perfect for the kind of rough undergrowth that goats are often deployed to.

We'll assume our employee is running the tractor at about 3.5 mph, the middle-of-the-ground-speed-range recommended in the Bush Hog's manual. According to the mowing calculator at tractordata.com, an information repository for all things tractor-related, that setup should be capable of clearing about 18 acres of land in an eight-hour workday.

There are, of course, literally hundreds of external factors that could influence this number.A worker using only a handheld trimmer say, a guy working for a landscaping company wouldn't be able to clear nearly as much. Rough or varied terrain might require using a smaller cutter. Easier terrain could let you get away with going faster.

But this number seems like a good, middle-of-the-road estimate for what one person could reasonably accomplish. It's also more or less in line with rough estimates for brush-clearing rates given in various online forums by people who do this type of thing for a living.

On to goats then. According to the pamphlet Using Goats for Brush Control as a Business Strategy, published by the Cooperative Extension at the University of Arkansas, a generalruleofthumbisthat 10 goatswillclearanacreinaboutonemonth. Sometimes it takes more goats, sometimes fewer. But that seems to be the average.

Now we need to standardize the time period to make the goat and human numbers comparable. If one person can clear 18 acres in a day, how many acres can they clear in 30?

We're going to assume a normal worker who takes weekends, so call it 20 days of actual labor (or four 5-day weeks). That works out to 360 acres cleared in a month by one person, compared to 1 acre cleared by 10 goats. Multiply 360 by 10 to get the per-goat work equivalent, and you get something like this.

In a month, our typical human can do the brush-clearing work of about3,6oo goats. Take that, goats! Humans rule! But wait: Exactly how many worker-goats are there in the United States?

The unfortunate answer to that question is, we don't know. The USDA does issue annual head counts of the nation's goat population. But it only tracks subcategories such as meat and dairy, the products goats have traditionally been used for.It doesn't include newer innovations such as weeding goats, yoga goats, therapy goats orpack goats.

However, a September 2005 report from the USDA notes that goats can be multipurpose. Since producers can be paid for grazing their goats in troubled areas, there appears to be a synergy to this type of operation with either dairy or meat (market kid) production, according to the report. Producers could receive payment for grazing and then sell kids or dairy products, thereby benefiting twice from their goat herd.

So let's assume worst-case scenario: How many jobs would be at risk if each one of the nation's meat and dairy goats also had a side job clearing brush? Per the USDA there are about 2.5 million meat and dairy goats in the U.S. as of 2017. Divide that by 3,600 to determine how many human brush-clearing jobs they could replace.

Further divide that number by 2, since we assume that brush-clearing only happens duringthe growing season (May through October, or half of the year), and we have an estimate of how many full-time-equivalent human jobs are threatened by goats in a typical year.

That's ... actually not a lot of jobs. If you consider that only some unknown fraction of the nation's meat and dairy goats are actually currently being used to clear brush, the number gets even smaller.

Again, this is a wild,back-of-the-envelope calculation subject to who knows how much error. (If you have a better one I'd love to hear it!)It relies heavily on the assumptions above, which are probably wildly inaccurate in certain circumstances. If tractors aren't available, for instance, humans lose a good portion of their advantage over goats.

Butthe overall degree of magnitude, or lack thereof, of the final number suggests that goats won't be taking a bite out of the national jobs numbers anytime soon.

None of which is any comfort if you're a laid-off union worker in Michigan watching a goat do a job that was once yours.

Icons by Symbolon, Gan Khoon Lay, Hamish, Pro Symbols, H Alberto Gongora, Sagit Milshtein and Andrew Doane, the Noun Project.

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Forget robots the goats are coming for our jobs - Washington Post

A few months ago I had an interesting, albeit brief, conversation with a father of a daughter and son. I was fascinated to hear him say that he exerts energy on "protecting" and teaching his daughter about the perils of dating boys, but doesn't do the same with his son.

Hearing that was rather interesting to me as a mother to three young women. I had always assumed that parents of boys were putting the same amount of energy into teaching their sons about being good partners as my friends and I were putting into telling our girls about how to not only pick a great partner, but how to be one.

It seems to me that the world is still a bit behind in teaching young boys how to treat young women. In fact, judging by some of the stories I've come across in recent weeks of escalating violence against women, I think it is a perfect time to address the elephant in the parenting room.

Boys don't raise themselves. Boys don't learn how to respect, honour and treat women as their equals if they're not taught it at home. Forgive me for saying it, or for coming across as old-fashioned, but I truly believe that young men who are being "raised" on a steady stream of video games and social-media porn are not learning how to be decent members of society at all.

Now, before I offend all the parents of boys out there, I would like to say that obviously this doesn't fall on the shoulders of all the parents raising young men out there. I happen to know a fair few who are doing an excellent job in teaching their boys how to be responsible global citizens.

Also, I'm in no way, shape or form excluding the poor parenting that some parents are also doing with their girls. Poor parenting is not gender specific: the trend toward lazy parenting applies to parents of both sexes. This is a trend that needs to be nipped in the bud. The world needs all of us to be giving our parenting our all, at all times. Parenting is not a part time gig, it is 24 hours, seven days a week for LIFE.

I like to think that if I had a son, I would have raised him in the same way I raised my girls. Everything I did as a mother was with one desired outcome in mind: I wanted to be able to enjoy the company of my own kids as adults. If I didn't parent them when they were younger to be kind, respectful and thoughtful individuals, how would they grow into those sort of human beings on their own?

The answer is, which I'm confident you already know: They wouldn't.

Meaning the onus falls on us, the parents, to raise them into this. This includes the parents of boys. I suppose it is a given that we want our little girls to be polite, kind and respectful, but don't we want the same for our sons? I'd say since we still live in a time where the bulk of leadership roles and jobs are held by men, we need to raise them with these qualities even more so than our daughters.

Nothing about being a decent human being "just happens" -- these are all qualities that are taught, so if up until this point you've been the parent of a young boy who has had more of a "he'll figure it out on his own" approach, I invite you to rethink your parenting strategy.

Take a more active role in raising your son. Invest the same energy teaching your son how he should act in the world as you would in your daughter, rather than letting the world show him how it's done. You won't be disappointed. You'll end up having a son who is one of your favourite people on this earth. You can trust me on this, I have three adult daughters who are my favourite people.

Also on HuffPost:

Things I Never Said Until I Had A Son

Read more:
To Parents Of Boys: Please Raise Them To Be Decent Human Beings - Huffington Post Canada

You've heard this one before. It's a classic tale of romance, really. Your biological parents, presumably one of which is a sex robotand/or doll sent back in time from the year 2030 to put their simulated procreation abilities to good use, have probably told you a similar version of this story a million times. Boy meets robot, robot moves in with family, and everyone lives synthetically ever after.

Anyway, just in case your heart needs further warming this Friday, let's meetMasayuki Ozaki of Tokyo, who told AFP in a recent interview that a sex doll namedMayu is, no exaggeration here, the "love of his life."

The dollalong with three othersreside with Ozaki in the same house he shares with his wife and teen daughter. "Even when things don't go well at work or even if I had a bad day, I feel safe knowing that shes always awake, waiting for me,"Ozaki said, seemingly unaware of the immediate existential quandaryhe was likely thrusting viewers into upon hearing such comments about a doll.

But there's more, so prepare thy heart.Ozaki, described by AFP as a 45-year-old physiotherapist, said it was "love at first sight" when he spotted Mayu in the showroom. "After my wife gave birth we stopped having sex and I felt a deep sense of loneliness," he said. Now, he takes Mayu on wheelchair-assisted dates. Sex dolls, miraculously, are unable to walk around. Probably because they're dolls.

Speaking of not being alive, Ozaki is already making plans to bring Mayu and the other dolls with him for some post-existence hangouts. "In Japan, people are cremated," he explained, "but I'm told I wouldn't be allowed to be cremated with them." Bummer. Instead, he's considering just getting buried with all four dolls, as one does.

These particular silicone dolls run about $6,000 and move around 2000 units a year. In other words, jump right into the nightmare of post-human dystopia. The water's warm!

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This Story of a Man and the Sex Doll He Calls the Love of His Life is the Creepiest Shit You'll Read Today - Complex

Lena Dunham is caught-up in what shes calling, unironically, a micro-scandal.

An animal shelter in Brooklyn claims the 31-year-old creator of HBOs Girls series lied about her dog Lamby, who she recently gave away because, she said, it has behavioral problems. (Shes previously tweeted about Lambys Prozac prescription).

The shelter where Dunham got her dog, meanwhile, told Yahoo News this week that Lamby did not have a traumatic past. Dunham hit back, as they say, with another Instagram post Thursday night, insisting she did not lie. I will not apologize, she said, explaining that as the dogs mother she did what was best.

The whole incident is like 85 percent of the reason why people hate millennials,so-called coastal elites and the blackhole that is celebrity social media in 2017.

But beyond that trifecta of horror, and overlooking the question of whether or not Dunham told the truth, the real vexation of the Lamby situation is the way Dunham talks about her relationship with the dog, continuously referring to herself as Lambys mom.

This isnt just a Dunham quirk either. Shes just another annoying dog-person whos confused having a pet with raising a human child.

I did what I thought the best mother would do, which was to give him a life that provided for his specific needs, Dunham wrote in herInstagram post this week. Hed been with me for nearly four years and I was his mom- I was in the best position to discern what those needs were.

Lena Dunham is a lot of things: Creator of a truly funny and original show that changed the way women are portrayed on the small screen. She is a talented comic actor. A skilled essayist.The creator of a cool email newsletter. A provocateur even.

She is not, however, a mother.

The relationships adult humans have with their pets are indeed complex, loving and beautiful. I do not doubt there was a real canine to human bond here, as Dunham aptly demonstrated with many cute photos on her Instagram (and on Lambys personalInstagram) over the years. Alas, a dog is not a human child.

Would the mother of a human child explain why she gave away her kid after four years by writing this? Shout out to @jennikonner for listening to endless hours of Lamby pain, and especially my partner @jackantonoff for loving him even when he ruined floors and couches and our life.

Dunham owned her dog for a few years, and apparently it peed on the floor a lot and didnt always act the way it was supposed to. (I mean, its a dog.) So, she gave it up.

We can leave the shelter and Dunham and the rest of the internet to quibble about why the dog was annoying, I guess.

None of this is typically how parenting works. Parents of young children clean up kid pee, vomit, poop and god knows what other horrors from our homes and our bodies. We deal. We learn that we cannot have nice things. Theres typically not another option.

Also, its worth noting: Dunham saw this coming.

Nothing about my life these days makes me an especially good candidate for having a dog. For starters, Im never home. I work all the time, and when Im not working Im asleep in a pile on my couch, Dunham wrote in a New Yorker essay about getting Lamby in 2013. She also says that her boyfriend is allergic to dogs and not especially interested in getting one.

She recounts her first nights with the dog, how it kept her awake with its barking. Still, by the end of the essay at least, she makes her peace.

He is mine, and I am old enough to have him, she writes.

Its possible that was the biggest lie of all.

So You Want To Raise A Feminist?

Start here, with the latest stories and news in parenting.

Link:
The Real Problem With Lena Dunham And Her Dog - HuffPost