Electronic Tracking And Speedy Fugitive Capture
Susan Landau. author of Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, told a New Yorker writer that electronic surveillance tools have slashed the time needed to capture fugitives. . In fact, Landau told me, metadata and other new surveillance tools have helped cut the average amount of time it takes the U.S. Marshals to capture a fugitive from forty-two days to two. Phone records are, btw, a form of metadata. 42 days to 2 days seems hard to believe. Though if fugitives rely on friends to stay free the ability to look back at, say, every phone call a person has made or received and to know ins...
Source: FuturePundit - June 7, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
General Anaesthesia Increases Dementia Risks
Prefer local anesthesia if you ever have a choice. Exposure to general anaesthesia increases the risk of dementia in the elderly by 35%, says new research presented at Euroanaesthesia, the annual congress of the European Society of Anaesthesiology (ESA). The research is by Dr Francois Sztark, INSERM and University of Bordeaux, France, and colleagues. Postoperative cognitive dysfunction, or POCD, could be associated with dementia several years later. POCD is a common complication in elderly patients after major surgery. It has been proposed that there is an association between POCD and the development of dementia due to a c...
Source: FuturePundit - June 2, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
3 Genetic Variants For Educational Attainment Found
Genetic variants that influences intellectual ability each make very small contributions. One reason for this is that the brain is very complex. To boost performance by a large amount it is not enough to tweak just one gene. Many different genes must be tweaked. This makes the job of finding genetic variants for IQ differences much harder to find. But the cost of genetic testing has gotten low enough that the search for IQ genes is starting to turn up useful results. Here's another report, this time from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC): A few genetic variants that are associated with differences i...
Source: FuturePundit - May 31, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Will Social Networks Make Psychopath Cheating Harder?
Will psychopaths find it harder to use and abuse people because computer social networks will label them? Even further: if there are genetic causes of psychopathy (which seems very likely) will people surreptitiously get genetic samples from each other, get the samples tested, and get confirmation that, yes, the abuser is a psychopath? Will people then become adept at publishing the DNA testing results in a way that can't be traced back to them? Granted, governments get emails and track down who said what and who went to what web site. But there are ways to make emails very hard to trace to their origins. So given a web si...
Source: FuturePundit - May 26, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Anticholinergic Drugs Cause Cognitive Impairment In 60 Days
Hey, can I get your attention? If I can't get your attention you might just be on an anticholinergic drug. INDIANAPOLIS -- Research from the Regenstrief Institute, the Indiana University Center for Aging Research and Wishard-Eskenazi Health on medications commonly taken by older adults has found that drugs with strong anticholinergic effects cause cognitive impairment when taken continuously for as few as 60 days. A similar impact can be seen with 90 days of continuous use when taking multiple drugs with weak anticholinergic effect. Using a sleeping pill or antihistamine? The Regenstrief Institute, IU Center for Aging Rese...
Source: FuturePundit - May 25, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Intense World War II Combat Increased Long Term Religiosity
Scared into believing? After the battle, the moral and mortality stresses of combat influence different people in different ways. Using two large-scale surveys of World War II veterans, this research investigates the role of combat and long-term religiosity. Study 1 shows that as combat became more frightening, the percentage of soldiers who reported praying rose from 42% to 72%. Study 2 shows that 50 years after combat, many soldiers still exhibited religious behavior, but it varied by their war experience. Heavy combat (versus no combat) was associated with a 21% increase in church attendance for those who claimed their ...
Source: FuturePundit - May 25, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Amazon Deforestation To Cut Rain, Crop Production
Continued deforestation will actually cut total agricultural production in the Amazon area of Brazil. The researchers used model simulations to assess how the agricultural yield of the Amazon would be affected under two different land-use scenarios: a business-as-usual scenario where recent deforestation trends continue and new protected areas are not created; and a governance scenario which assumes Brazilian environmental legislation is implemented. The massive global tragedy of the commons is going to cause some big problems in the 21st century. They predict that by 2050, a decrease in precipitation caused by deforestati...
Source: FuturePundit - May 25, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Better Cellular Trash Removal Can Extend Lives?
One of Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) aims to improve the ability of cells to remove accumulated intracellular trash. Accumulation of damaged proteins and other cellular components is one of the causes of aging. With this thought it mind it is interesting to look at research research where by turning up the parkin protein (whose malfunction is implicated in Parkinson's Disease) UCLA scientists were able to extend the lives of fruit flies. UCLA life scientists have identified a gene previously implicated in Parkinson's disease that can delay the onset of aging and extend the healthy ...
Source: FuturePundit - May 9, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Humans To Become Space Aliens
Is it really going to be necessary for people from another planet to show up for us to see people who look like they are from another species? My answer: No. Future advances in plastic surgery and genetic engineering will do it for us. As technologies for radical body alterations enable cheaper, easier, and more reliable how far will people go? A search on what Google Images returns for "plastic surgery" returns pictures heavily weighted toward really botched and, in some cases, bizaare intended outcomes. The search "plastic surgery transformation" yields more of a mix of successful and unsuccessful changes. Justin Jedlica...
Source: FuturePundit - May 7, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Brain Scans Predict Math Tutoring Success In Children
3rd graders with a larger hippocampus in their brains learned math much faster when tutored. Why do some children learn math more easily than others? Research from the Stanford University School of Medicine has yielded an unexpected new answer. In a study of third-graders' responses to math tutoring, Stanford scientists found that the size and wiring of specific brain structures predicted how much an individual child would benefit from math tutoring. However, traditional intelligence measures, such as children's IQs and their scores on tests of mathematical ability, did not predict improvements from tutoring. The research ...
Source: FuturePundit - May 2, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Embryo Selection For Higher IQ Kids Getting Close
Long time brain genetics researcher Robert Plomin and his colleagues are getting much closer to identifying genetic variants that cause IQ differences. The title of their latest paper signals an impressive accomplishment: Common DNA Markers Can Account for More Than Half of the Genetic Influence on Cognitive Abilities. Note that they haven't actually identified the genes or genetic variants causing differences in IQ. Rather, they've discovered genetic variants "in the neighborhood", figuratively speaking. Lots of genetic variants vary together. They used 1.7 million known variants and discovered variants that correlate wit...
Source: FuturePundit - April 29, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Earth Cooling Trend Reversed Around 1900 AD?
The industrial revolutionaries were accidental climate engineers too? A reconstruction of 2,000 years of global temperatures shows that a long-term decline in Earth's temperatures ended abruptly about 1900, replaced by a warming trend that has continued despite the persistence into the 20th century of the factors driving the cooling, according to a new study. The more interesting thing about this report isn't that humans humans are probably causing rising temperatures by causing so much CO2 emissions. That already seems pretty likely. What is more interesting: the long term cooling trend could mean we were headed for anoth...
Source: FuturePundit - April 28, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
SciAm: Supervolcanoes in the Ancient World
A Scientific American piece relays the fact that 4 VEI-7 (Volcanic Explosivity Index where an 8 means that civilization will collapse) volcanoes have erupted in the last 2000 years. Says the writer: "it would be prudent to identify high-risk volcanoes and prepare for such events." Agreed. Not expecting that preparation by governments though. If you want protection from VEI-7 eruptions it is up to you to stockpile some food. The last such eruption was Tambora in 1815. Then 1816 became known as "the year without summer". Want to prepare for the collapse of global agriculture? It is fun to do the numbers. Suppose you want to ...
Source: FuturePundit - April 18, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
The Incest Taboo And Genetic Load
Some day we'll have biotechnology that will enable parents to prevent their children from getting harmful recessive genetic variants. The genetic harm from making babies with close relatives will vanish once the harmful recessives aren't passed along. At that point would you still favor laws against incestuous relationships? One reason to remain opposed: the resulting high level of genetic similarity across generations will likely increase loyalty to family at the expense of loyalty to the rest of society. On a somewhat related note: We all have lots of mildly harmful genetic mutations, only some of which are recessives. T...
Source: FuturePundit - April 16, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Transhumans: Will They Be More Heavily Taxed?
Transhumans (genetically engineered, enhanced with embedded computers) will earn more money because they'll be more productive. So they will be higher tax brackets. Therefore they'll pay much more in taxes than unenhanced humans. Okay, but beyond their earning power will they be singled out for special taxes due to their beyond-human status? This is one of the thoughts that came across my mind while reading Ramez Naam's excellent novel Nexus. A couple of decades hence Naam imagines embedded nanotech as illegal rather than just subjected to higher tax rates. But suppose it is actually allowed. Or suppose offspring genetic e...
Source: FuturePundit - April 13, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
