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Hinge of History Thread Part 4


Valin

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On 2/11/2017 at 8:28 AM, Valin said:

Printed human body parts could soon be available for transplant

How to build organs from scratch

Jan 28th 2017

 

 

OTHO............................................

 

Hybrid zoo: Introducing pig–human embryos and a rat–mouse

Chimaeras could pave the way for growing human organs in other animals.

Sara Reardon

26 January 2017

 

Scientists have published the first peer-reviewed account of creating pig–human hybrid fetuses, a step toward growing animals with organs that are suitable for transplantation into humans.

 

The team that made these chimaeras also reports the creation of mouse–rat and human–cow hybrids on 26 January in Cell1. Such modified animals could provide researchers with new models for testing drugs and understanding early human development.

 

To create chimaeras, scientists generally inject pluripotent stem cells — which can become any type of organ — from one species into the early embryo of a second species. In theory, the foreign cells should differentiate and spread throughout the body, but in practice, producing viable hybrid embryos has proven difficult.

 

To get around this, a team led by developmental biologist Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, used CRISPR gene-editing technology to create mouse embryos without the genes that cause organs to form. The scientists then injected rat stem cells into the mouse embryos and implanted the embryos into a mouse’s uterus.

 

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The ethical quandaries of genetic editing
Jazz Shaw
Feb 22 2017

I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the last year on the subject of genetic engineering, particularly in light of the advent of CRISPR technology. If you haven’t heard of that yet you might want to look into it. It’s an amazing scientific advancement which allows scientists to go in and conduct some surgical stitching of the genetic code which defines the physical makeup of all living things. While that sounds tremendously exciting, it’s also pretty darned frightening when you stop to think about it. Potential advancements in medical technology aside, there are also a number of ethical and even religious questions which become immediately tangled up in the debate. Christine Emba published an excellent article on the subject at the Washington Post this week.

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Before diving into that quagmire it’s worth recognizing some of the huge challenges facing us just in the nuts and bolts of the science of genetic engineering. As I said, I read a number of pieces, both pro and con, which examine this field of science, as well as sitting through numerous interviews with both scientists and ethicists who are debating it currently. We have indeed reached the point where we can map the entire human genome and that is an incredible achievement which deserves recognition. Having done so, you might expect that we are well on the path toward eliminating all of our problems, right? I mean, having this map we can just go in and turn off whichever gene causes cancer and eliminate one of the great plagues which is crushing humanity.

 

Not so fast. While we’ve come a long way a short period of time I’ve still heard scientists describing the situation as being akin to handing a pile of electrical components and a schematic to a chimpanzee. We have the map in our hands but the truth is we are still light years away from being able to use it to quickly arrive at a definitive destination. Returning to the example of curing cancer, you might be tempted to think that somewhere in that gigantic DNA string there is one gene causing the problems which we could simply turn off. If only it were that simple. It turns out that almost nothing that happens in the human body is the responsibility of one single gene. Multiple genes work in combination and produce all sorts of results, frequently unexpected. Even if you could locate the precise combination of genes causing breast cancer and switch them off, you still don’t know what else those jeans might’ve been doing. There has probably never been a better example of the dangers inherent in the law of unintended consequences.

 

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Everything You Need to Know About CRISPR, the New Tool that Edits DNA

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Israeli Invention Produces Clean Water From Thin Air

3/29/17

 

At the Israel Innovation Showcase at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC earlier this week, more than 18,000 Israel advocates learned about a technology to extract water from air; an Arab-Israeli business accelerator; a touch-free smartphone; a user-friendly security system for public venues; and a dance program breaching barriers between Jews and Arabs in northern Israel.

 

 

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Those Darn Jews!

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3-D-Printed Sneakers, Tailored to Your Foot
Throw out your custom insoles. Adidas is selling shoes with soles that will soon include bespoke shock absorbers.
Katherine Bourzac
April 7, 2017

roponents of 3-D printing have long talked about the possibility of using the technology to customize consumer products. One of the most oft-cited possibilities is printing sneakers with soles tailored to individual runner’s biometrics or to the quirks of each couch potato’s arches.

Today, Bay Area 3-D-printing company Carbon announced that it has made that happen. Carbon has been working with the apparel company Adidas to develop materials and designs for athletic-shoe midsoles, the squishy, shock-absorbing part of the sneaker. Adidas will sell FutureCraft 4D shoes with midsoles printed on Carbon’s machines, starting with 300 promotional pairs this month at an undisclosed price. It promises that 5,000 will be available at retail outlets later in the year. Adidas will produce millions of midsoles by 2018—which Carbon says makes this the largest-scale production of a 3-D-printed product so far.

 

The first product won’t be individually tailored, but that’s in the works. Adidas will soon begin using Carbon’s printers at distributed manufacturing centers, where the company will make bespoke shoes for local customers. Adidas opened a pilot “Speedfactory” in the German city of Herzogenaurach in December 2015; the company plans to open one in Atlanta this year.

 

Carbon, originally called Carbon 3D, was cofounded by chemical engineer Joseph DeSimone in 2013 to commercialize his research on materials and processes for faster 3-D printing using high-performance polymers (see “Speeding Up 3-D Printing”). DeSimone, who won the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2008 and has worked on materials for stents, nanomedicine, and many other applications, is currently on leave from a faculty position at the University of North Carolina to serve as the company’s CEO.

 

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Sounds really great. My feet feel happy just looking at those pictures. I wonder how much they will cost. ohmy.png

 

 

How much did a Cell Phone cost in the 70's, Or a Color TV in the early 60's?

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Stretching the boundaries of neural implants

Rubbery, multifunctional fibers could be used to study spinal cord neurons and potentially restore function.

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office
March 31, 2017

 

Implantable fibers have been an enormous boon to brain research, allowing scientists to stimulate specific targets in the brain and monitor electrical responses. But similar studies in the nerves of the spinal cord, which might ultimately lead to treatments to alleviate spinal cord injuries, have been more difficult to carry out. That’s because the spine flexes and stretches as the body moves, and the relatively stiff, brittle fibers used today could damage the delicate spinal cord tissue.

 

Now, researchers have developed a rubber-like fiber that can flex and stretch while simultaneously delivering both optical impulses, for optoelectronic stimulation, and electrical connections, for stimulation and monitoring. The new fibers are described in a paper in the journal Science Advances, by MIT graduate students Chi (Alice) Lu and Seongjun Park, Professor Polina Anikeeva, and eight others at MIT, the University of Washington, and Oxford University.

 

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The ethical quandaries of genetic editing

Jazz Shaw

Feb 22 2017

 

I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the last year on the subject of genetic engineering, particularly in light of the advent of CRISPR technology. If you haven’t heard of that yet you might want to look into it. It’s an amazing scientific advancement which allows scientists to go in and conduct some surgical stitching of the genetic code which defines the physical makeup of all living things. While that sounds tremendously exciting, it’s also pretty darned frightening when you stop to think about it. Potential advancements in medical technology aside, there are also a number of ethical and even religious questions which become immediately tangled up in the debate. Christine Emba published an excellent article on the subject at the Washington Post this week.

 

(Snip)

 

______________________________________________

 

Everything You Need to Know About CRISPR, the New Tool that Edits DNA

 

 

CRISPR Has a Pro-Life Problem

Ankita Rao

Mar 31 2017

 

It's hard to discuss CRISPR without discussing, even tangentially, the issue of abortion. The gene editing technology has now been applied to viable human embryos, opening up a door to editing genetic code in future humans. But there's an age-old debate, especially in the United States, over using embryos for scientific research, that has higher stakes than ever.

 

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"As of right now, you have to have the embryo not in a uterus, where it naturally belongs. You put an embryo in a dish," said Rebecca Taylor, a clinical laboratory specialist and pro-life advocate in California. "That's not how human beings were meant to be treated in their earliest stages."

Taylor highlighted two concerns with applying CRISPR technology to human embryos. As a Catholic, she believes that the moment an egg is fertilized, the cluster of cells becomes a human being with a conscience. This means the editing is being done without a person's consent, because you can't really ask a growing embryo if it wants its genes tweaked.

 

She also echoes a widespread concern that CRISPR could be used for enhancements—changing genetic traits like height or strength. Shaping future generations with the limited knowledge we have at present moment, Taylor said, is "arrogant" and shortsighted.

 

Bioethicist Françoise Baylis said that anyone who has a moral opposition to conducting experiments on embryos will also have an issue with CRISPR research going forward. And she said it's unlikely that we'll find the same middle ground that Bush carved out during the stem cell decision, simply because the embryos used in that research no longer exist, meaning that more would have to be harvested.

 

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America’s West and America’s Rest
Jim Geraghty
April 17, 2017

One of the most intriguing comments I read over the Easter break came from sportswriter Jason Whitlock:



Yes, sportswriting has moved far left. The entire media has moved far left. The media used to cater to New York, the hub for traditional liberal values. Journalists used to be obsessed with working at a New York magazine or newspaper or TV network. Now the entire industry is obsessed with going viral and how words will be received via social media. Who determines this? San Francisco/Silicon Valley, the hub for revolutionary, far-left extremism, the home base for Twitter and Facebook. Twitter and Facebook’s employee base is from the area. New York and San Francisco are distinctly different. San Francisco is driving the American media, not New York. You have young, microwaved millionaires and billionaires reshaping the American media in a way that reflects San Francisco values. This is a major story the mainstream media ignore. San Francisco hacked the media. Frisco-inspired clickbait is the real fake news.


There’s a lot of truth to that, and Whitlock puts his finger on why today’s conservative complaint about a liberal media is different from that of ten years ago or twenty years ago. The old New York establishment Left, shaped heavily by Watergate — Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Anthony Lewis, Woodward & Bernstein – could drive the right batty but it was largely driven by a sense of noblesse oblige – a self-awareness of the power of their positions and a duty to correct the world’s injustices through exposure. The old journalism saying, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” implied punching up; the more powerful you were, the more you needed scrutiny. For Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, all that the press needed to do was expose the wrongdoing and the public would instinctively recoil and dole out appropriate consequences.

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May 6 2017

Elected in 2014, Ben Sasse is a U.S. Senator from Nebraska. In this Conversation, Sasse shares his thoughts on the state of American society and culture. Drawing on themes from his forthcoming book, The Vanishing American Adult, Sasse highlights an erosion of American civic life and a corresponding decline in work ethic. Along with Bill Kristol, he argues for the importance of a culture that promotes self-reliance and rewards meaningful work. Sasse also reflects on his first years in the Senate and the politics of Washington.

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Manchester, Political Upheaval, and the Desertion of the Global Left

Peter Zeihan
May 24, 2017

This article first appeared at Zeihan on Geopolitics. Follow Peter Zeihan on Twitter @PeterZeihan. The views expressed are the author's own.

 

:snip:

 

What’s going on in the United Kingdom is hardly unique; Center-left parties are collapsing across the developed world. It is a symptom of a wider change in the way we all live.

Contemporary political systems are an outgrowth of the economic structures established by the industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Before those economic revolutions the world was a constellation of fairly small places. Low-output per hour of work in agriculture forced most of the population to be farmers. Life before semis and railroads and globalized supply chains meant that foodstuffs needed to be lugged around by horse and backpack. Cities — places where you could not grow your own food — were small as well as, well, revolting. Cram a bunch of people in a small space with no running water or plumbing, make them dependent upon food that has to be carried in from somewhere else, and things get gross and violent pretty quickly. In such a world, there weren’t a lot of mass-mobilization politics. Either you were a landowner or other flavor of aristocrat who ruled, or you were a pleb who didn’t get a vote.

The First Industrial Revolution of roughly 1760 to 1820 upended that system. The introduction of mechanized energy such as steam engines enabled us to shift from producing goods by hands to producing them with machines. Such mass outputs increased worker efficiency while concentrating the geography of production. The result was mass urbanization and mass worker concentration. Within a few decades these economic evolutions shifted the balances of power. The “Left” catered to those who provided the labor in the new order, while the “Right” represented those who controlled the land and capital. There are many different ways to categorize the Left and the Right, but the transition to industrialization is where the political cleavages in the modern world started, and have remained the most powerful delineating factor in Western politics ever since.

Plenty of folks vested in the pre-industrial order fought tooth and nail against the emerging political landscape, but they faced two insurmountable challenges. First, the winds of history were blowing and you cannot un-invent technology without removing the bedrock of the civilization that supports it (i.e. devolution into anarchy). As the new Lefters and Righters gained power, these older groups fought back. Political instability and even revolutions were the rules of the day. And even when the old-order folks won, its isn’t like their areas suddenly de-industrialized. New challenges arose the very next day until all the old world was swept away.

Second, there was a new country on the scene that had the gall to let the people decide who would be in charge. Those pesky Americans devised a political system — democracy — that was (quite accidentally) able to reshape itself, contain and ultimately harness the new economic-political lines of identification. Democracy quickly became a way to accelerate the shift from the old world of aristocrats, plutocrats and royals to a newer system with a deep economic rationale that enjoyed broader support.

The Second Industrial Revolution of 1860 to 1945 was the equivalent of rocket fuel in a station wagon. Machine tools gave way to assembly lines. Coal gave way to diesel and gasoline. Railways, telegraphs and ocean-going fuel-burning cargo ships took over global commerce. Many of the new developments — in transport, medicine and sanitation — were expressly designed to counter some of the more disgusting aspects of early industrialization. Antibiotics, sewers, electricity and new distribution techs didn’t just make cities bigger, but also removed some of the features that made them death traps when compared to the countryside — accelerating urbanization. The countryside, where Left-Right classifications weren’t entirely appropriate, became systematically less important as populations en masse shifted into the urban worker-capital categories.

This broad system of political alignment then held until about ten years ago.

 

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The last time our economic-political systems faced this much evolution and upheaval, the disruption lasted over a century and culminated in the world wars. The issue is that you can’t have normal political parties unless you have a grand vision, and you can’t form a grand vision unless you understand the rules of the game. As the developed world moves into a post-industrial economic system — and one in which the global population structure shifts from young, working tax-payers to retirees — we don’t know what those rules are. And until we do, we cannot begin process of exploring how to rule ourselves.

 

 

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Warplanes: The Robotic Loyal Wingman

June 6, 2017:

 

In April 2017 the U.S. Air Force demonstrated that F-16s equipped to operate as UAVs could successfully operate in formation with manned F-16s. This is all part of the “Loyal Wingman” program for eventually integrating combat UAVs with piloted warplanes. The F-16 UAV needed software that would allow it to fly in formation execute attack missions on its own, to avoid interference from jamming. That software worked although the initial flight tests of Loyal Wingman simply confirmed that the F-16 UAVs could safely fly in formation with piloted F-16s and effectively receive and respond to commands from the flight leader or other piloted F-16s. Upcoming tests will see if the F-16 UAV can carry out complex attack runs on its own. This involves avoiding ground fire (mainly missiles) and using its own EW (electronic warfare) equipment to deal with jamming. All this live software testing would eventually be used in combat UAVs like the ones the navy has been testing and the air force is now developing. The U.S. Army has already been testing similar software control of UAVs by suitably equipped (with secure digital commo gear) attack helicopters.

Loyal Wingman came about after four years of effort to develop a UAV version of the F-16. This UAV version was based on the QF-16, the remotely controlled target version of the F-16. Back in 2013 the air force got its first QF-16 flying and began converting over a hundred retired F-16s to QF-16s. At the time it was noted that with a little extra work the QF-16 could be turned into a combat UAV for dangerous missions like SEAD (suppression of enemy defenses) or attacking ground targets guarded by heavy air defenses. The air force was already planning to use combat UAVs for this but those are not available yet. It was noted that QF type aircraft use GPS to help with navigation and to insure that QFs flying in formation don't collide with one another. The QF-16 also carries sensors to detect near misses by missiles. Out of that came modified software and some additional hardware to enable the recent flight tests.

 

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May 19, 2017

For all of his childhood and adolescence, Bill has always---, that is, Bill has a FRIEND that always --- loved to geek out with flight sims, first person shooters and science fiction roleplaying games. Now, however, it seems that many of those things that Bill always --, I mean, that Bill's friend always thought were impossible...AREN'T!

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Nanomachines that drill into cancer cells killing them in just 60 seconds developed by scientists

Sarah Knapton

31 August 2017

 

Nanomachines which can drill into cancer cells, killing them in just 60 seconds, have been developed by scientists.

The tiny spinning molecules are driven by light, and spin so quickly that they can burrow their way through cell linings when activated.

In one test conducted at Durham University the nanomachines took between one and three minutes to break through the outer membrane of prostate cancer cell, killing it instantly.

 

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Related..............

 

An Army Of Davids

Glenn Reynolds

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when large companies and powerful governments reigned supreme over the little guy. But new technologies are empowering individuals like never before, and the Davids of the world-the amateur journalists, musicians, and small businessmen and women-are suddenly making a huge economic and social impact.

In Army of Davids, author Glenn Reynolds, the man behind the immensely popular Instapundit.com, provides an in-depth, big-picture point-of-view for a world where the small guys matter more and more. Reynolds explores the birth and growth of the individual's surprisingly strong influence in: arts and entertainment, anti-terrorism, nanotech and space research, and much more.

The balance of power between the individual and the organization is finally evening out. And it's high time the Goliaths of the world pay attention, because, as this book proves, an army of Davids is on the rise.

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The party's over: Republicans and Democrats are both finished

*Trump's election and his increasing comfort in shifting from right to left prove that the Republican and Democratic parties as we know them are finished.

Never before have we seen the leadership of both major political parties so humbled.

*Here's how this power vacuum will play out in the coming elections.

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* Or Not One thing I will say with the upmost confidence is It Will be different.

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New nanomaterial can extract hydrogen fuel from seawater

Oct. 4 2017

 

 

H/T Instapundit

 

An Evening with Michael Crichton
November 15, 2005

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"Ehrlich’s message, crying out in desperation to urge what’s already happening, is not unique. We have a contemporary example of the call by politicians and activists to end our dependence on fossil fuels and move to a carbon-neutral lifestyle. Their call to action is, however, a little bit late.

According to Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller Institute, the industrialized nations have been decarbonizing their energy sources for 150 years, meaning that we are moving away from carbon toward hydrogen. In other words, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen decreases as you go from wood and hay, which is one to one, to coal, to oil, and finally to natural gas, where it’s one to four.

image018.jpg

 

Here’s an illustration from one of Ausubel’s articles. The blue atoms are hydrogen and the dirty brown ones are carbon.

And you can see as we go from coal to oil to gas, natural gas, if there’s still any for sale, we are increasing the proportion of hydrogen to carbon. Ausubel expects this trend will continue through this century as we move toward what he imagines as a pure hydrogen energy system, without the assistance of lawyers and activists. Obviously, if a trend has been continuously operating since the days of Lincoln and Queen Victoria, it probably does not need the assistance of organizations like the Sierra Club and the NRDC, which are showing up about a hundred years too late.

 

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Language: The Most Disruptive Technology

Charles Hill

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Editor’s note: This essay is an excerpt of a larger paper the author delivered at a conference of the Hoover Institution, “Governing in a Time of Technological Change.”

 

Language is arguably the most fundamental human tool. At certain points in history, when other technologies have enhanced or damaged the use of language, major changes in world order have resulted. We are witnessing such a phenomenon now.

At present, a “language revolution” is under way, propelled by an eruption of electronic communication technologies that, while enhancing productivity, are also creating social and political chaos. The e-revolution in communication is now challenging, even threatening, the conduct of responsible governance. Thanks to digital technologies, marginal sociopaths are being empowered to organize and act collectively as never before; dictatorial regimes are perfecting powerful tools to monitor and suppress entire populations; and instantaneous popular judgments on political issues are beginning to overwhelm representative government as designed by the Founders to avoid the chaos-producing “direct” democracy of pre-modern societies.

The e-revolution in language is the next great “Revolution” in human history. Through it, any person anywhere in the world can instantly and constantly communicate with every other person. At the same time, technology has taken command of language to both serve technology and distort linguistic standards; one need only look at the average self-published book, blog post, or tweet for evidence. This process disrupts and corrodes the foundations of the modern era and shows no sign of being able to positively reconstruct from what it is tearing down.

In three significant cases, the modern approach is now being undermined by the disruptive powers of twenty-first-century language technology.

 

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Dec 8, 2017
 

 

Unlike hard plastic models, University of Minnesota mechanical engineers have created models of organs that feel and react like the real thing.
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  • Valin changed the title to Hinge of History Thread Part 4

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