Third Of Olympic Medalist Athletes Dopers?
Several hundred athletes were drugging up to enhance their performance. Click thru to read all the details. More here. My standard spiel on this subject: We could just allow enhancement. Race car engineering has sped up the development of tech for higher performance cars. Drugs and gene therapies for athletic enhancement could do same for humans The biotech for doing this is only going to get better. It is only a question of how fast. Gene therapies will eventually provide the most powerful ways to enhance athletic performance (unless nanotech turns out to be even better). Enhanced humans will eventually far exceed the per...
Source: FuturePundit - August 2, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Long Telomeres Associated With Higher Lung Cancer Risk
Longer caps at the ends of chromosomes are associated with a greater risk of lung cancer. A large-scale genetic study of the links between telomere length and risk for five common cancers finds that long telomeres are associated with an increased risk of lung adenocarcinoma. This relationship did not hold for other cancer, except prostate cancer. The lack of relationship with other cancers is what surprises me. Telomere shortening when cells divide is probably an evolved response to reduce the risk of death from cancer. Cancers need to mutate to turn on telomerase to make telomere caps longer. This enables them to keep div...
Source: FuturePundit - July 30, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Robotic Cooks And Your Own Preferred Recipes
You will have a set of computer-encoded very detailed recipes for your favorite dishes along with specific aversions and preferences you might have about various fruits, vegetables, fish, seasoning and other food ingredients. Friends will give you access to own favorite recipes. A computer somewhere in the cloud will store all this information. That computer will also have extensive knowledge about various models of robotic cooking equipment and their food preparation capabilities. Plus, the computer will know which restaurants have which kinds of equipment. The computer will also known the inventories of currently stocked...
Source: FuturePundit - July 25, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
National Security Will Drive Genetically Enhanced Offspring
Eugene Volokh responds to the recent poll that found most people in the United States are opposed to raising offspring IQs. Volokh thinks the US will feel pressure to allow offspring IQ boosting or fall behind other nations. It becomes a national security issue if the American population becomes 20 IQ points lower than China, India, and Russia. So expect the national wing of a nation's elites to promote offspring genetic engineering. Volokh does not think people will go so far as to alter their offspring to have an extra pair of arms. But the internet has made it easier for people with outlier preferences to find each othe...
Source: FuturePundit - July 22, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Beijing Area 130 Million Super City Planned
Jing-Jin-Ji will unite Beijing (Jing), the port of Tianjin (Jin), and Hebei province (known as Ji) into one large urban area united by expanded high speed rail service. The Chinese have decided that since high speed rail is so much faster than cars they can create a larger city area with commutes from bedroom communities located further away from city centers. The development in Jing-Jin-Ji is quite unbalanced due to peculiarities of Chinese tax law. The suburbs can't build up many obvious pieces you'd expect them to have. What I find most interesting about this report is the impact of high speed rail on official thinking....
Source: FuturePundit - July 20, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Jeep Hacked And Shut Down From Miles Away
Cars have sofware complex enough to be hacked. Can car companies do a better job than, say, PC operation system makers and build computer systems in cars that can't be taken over remotely? I sure hope so. Otherwise when cars become capable of driving themselves a hacked car could be instructed to drive anywhere or at an unsafe speed or to suddenly veer into incoming traffic. Autonomous vehicles going to some day communicate with each other to avoid accidents. But imagine a vehicle driving along spoofing other vehicles. One vehicle could pretend to be a few other vehicles in order to make another vehicle do something very d...
Source: FuturePundit - July 19, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Rate Of New Business Formation On Steady Decline, Even In Tech
Company size growing, fewer new competitors forming, number of small businesses shrinking. Start-up failure rate is increasing too. Happening in tech too. This isn't just the death of small town stores and pharmacies and shift to big chains. Read the whole thing. I suspect that computer and communications tech are behind this trend. Why I think this is happening: It is easier for a single company to sell into many markets because cheap communications, cheap shipping, lower trade barriers. Best company beats lower ranked companies that used to not compete directly. Large IT infrastructure with large amounts of developed sou...
Source: FuturePundit - July 11, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Biomarkers Show Some People Aging 3 Times As Fast As Others
How fast are you aging? Using people from a long running longitudinal study in Dunedin New Zealand and an assortment of biomarkers scientists find that some people are aging 3 years for every chronological year: Based on a subset of these biomarkers, the research team set a "biological age" for each participant, which ranged from under 30 to nearly 60 in the 38-year-olds. The researchers then went back into the archival data for each subject and looked at 18 biomarkers that were measured when the participants were age 26, and again when they were 32 and 38. From this, they drew a slope for each variable, and then the 18 sl...
Source: FuturePundit - July 7, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Robotic Brick Layers And Other Construction Robots
A company called Construction Robotics has a real working brick laying robot. They claim 900 bricks laid by a robot and a mason (human) in 6 hours. How does that compare to human brick layers working alone? How many bricks in a typical brick house? Here is another video of their robot at work building walls for a high school in Laramie Wyoming. And another one. An Australian company, Fast Brick Robotics, claims their Hadrian robot will be able to build a brick house in 2 days. They do not seem to have that capability yet (at least as measured by a Youtube video showing it in action).They say they will be able to lay 1000 b...
Source: FuturePundit - July 5, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Rapid Price Declines Driving Fast Solar PV Growth
First Solar CEO Jim Hughes says By 2017 solar photovoltaics will cost $1 per watt installed. "We have a technology roadmap -- by 2017, we'll be under $1.00 per watt fully installed on a tracker in the western United States." To put that in context, solar cost $4 per watt about a dozen years ago. First Solar has been boosting the conversion efficiency of their CdTe thin film. They've recently found a way to add another 2.3% to conversion efficiency. Ramez Naam points out that while the world now gets 1% of electricity from solar by 2020 we will get 3% of electric power from solar. These price drops are making solar more com...
Source: FuturePundit - July 3, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Small Robot Grocery Store Planned
Check out the proposed self-serve grocery store . Its like a big and fancy vending machine. A few hundred items to be offered. A store like that could operate 24x7. A 7-11 style store could be set up to work that way. Though cigarettes and alcohol would require a human cashier unless the cash register could verify the age of the purchaser with the credit card or debit card company. How to make a robotic store attractive to use? Speed. The 24x7 open hours is great for night owls. But for the rest of us speed could set a robotic store apart. Very fast service. Imagine you could order from a tablet at home. Or access their pr...
Source: FuturePundit - June 21, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Periodic Partial Fasting Cuts Biomarkers For Aging
First the researchers tried calorie reduction in old mice with promising results In a new study, Longo and his colleagues show that cycles of a four-day low-calorie diet that mimics fasting (FMD) cut visceral belly fat and elevated the number of progenitor and stem cells in several organs of old mice -- including the brain, where it boosted neural regeneration and improved learning and memory. Then the researchers did a similar low calorie regime for 5 days a month for 3 months with good effects on biomarkers for aging. In a pilot human trial, three cycles of a similar diet given to 19 subjects once a month for five days d...
Source: FuturePundit - June 21, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Autonomous Vehicles Won't Need Horns
If you aren't already sold on the idea of autonomous vehicles imagine never hearing honking car horns. The computers will communicate with each other wirelessly. How pleasant. Will autonomous vehicles use horns to signal human drivers who are about to cause an accident? Even if they do horn use will decline. Autonomous vehicle research has turned up some lessons about dangerous human drivers. What struck me about it: if vehicles could just detect when drivers aren't paying attention the vehicles could apply the brakes and beep at the driver with an inside speaker. Anyone want to hazard a prediction in the comments? In what...
Source: FuturePundit - June 20, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Robot Impact On Productivity
Lately robots have been boosting productivity about 0.35% annually. By comparison, IT has been boosting productivity by about 0.60% annually with about 5 times as much capital expenditure. So higher ROI from robots? Keep in mind these numbers could contain substantial inaccuracies. Does it make sense that IT is doing more than robots to boost productivity? My intuition is yes because so far robots have been used mainly in manufacturing and manufacturing is a much small portion of the economy than it used to be. Manufacturing only makes up 8.8% of total employment in the United States, about 12 million workers in 2013. So r...
Source: FuturePundit - June 19, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Staph Bacteria Toxin Causes Type 2 Diabetes In Rabbits
This might explain the higher incidence of insulin resistant diabetes among the obese. A new study by University of Iowa microbiologists now suggests that bacteria may even be a cause of one of the most prevalent diseases of our time - Type 2 diabetes. The research team led by Patrick Schlievert, PhD, professor and DEO of microbiology at the UI Carver College of Medicine, found that prolonged exposure to a toxin produced by Staphylococcus aureus (staph) bacteria causes rabbits to develop the hallmark symptoms of Type 2 diabetes, including insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, and systemic inflammation. "We basically rep...
Source: FuturePundit - June 7, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
