Articles

Can genetic testing identify Olympic level athletic potential?

Usain Bolt The premise of the Olympics is to measure and reward the greatest human ability at various skills or sports. Modern pharmacology offers many substances identified as potentially beneficial to an athlete - meaning they give an unfair advantage to a competitor - the World Anti-Doping Agency provides a nine page handout identifying substances for which an athlete can be disqualified. With so much pressure on the athletes and so much money for sponsorships on the line, there are substantial reasons to cheat for those who are less sporting.

That doesn't mean there aren't other ways to help athletes reach or maintain their potential. In addition to regular training and hiring the best coaches, athletes also use the services of dieticians, massage therapists, sleep counselors, hydration specialists and gait analysis professionals in order to smooth every bump in their lifestyle, conditioning and performance. Some athletes even choose to sleep in a chamber that mimics high-altitude air quality to increase performance. And as modern research enables more experiments finding ways to benefit athletes that aren't cheating, by eliminating hurdles that keep athletes from reaching their peak performance, we'll hear of more bizarre - and questionable - methods athletes will use to enhance their skills.

Should we open the world to telepresence robots?

Telepresence robotEngadget reports the Tate Britain museum in London will begin offering remote controlled robotic night tours this summer. The idea is multilayered in that it presents the museum from a telepresence viewpoint and also while the museum is dark, so artwork is only viewable via light on the robot itself.

Artifact from the future: Species Design Symposium

Subway view of artifact contentAnother great artifact from Institute for the Future. This time focusing on the use of genetics to create predator species capable of limiting the growth of problem species - ocean species in this scene.

It raises some good questions and brings together a few current trends: genetic engineering, failure of ecosystems as important species are wiped out to provide food (whether they are the food species or depend on disappearing habitat), and using prize money to crowd-source innovations.

Can a flawed humanity create a future with a flawless government?

Karl MarxWars are fought over which flawed ideology works best and communism has turned out to be one of the most flawed, even if the original roots were designed to fix the flaws in the capitalist structures of 19th century Europe. Karl Marx's work developed into 1848's Communist Manifesto and later in Das Kapital in a response to conflict between the more wealthy ownership classes and the labour class that provides the man power for production. Marx viewed Capitalism as "the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" and made many predictions on how this socioeconomic system would eventually fail due to the internal tension between these two classes. His work would later be used to overthrow nations in order to create failing economic states where the communist effort was misused to create more disproportionate social inequality than found in nearly any other form of representative government.

Tracking emergencies - who gets the data?

DJI Phantom DroneChemical sensors are capable of detecting and analyzing gases in order to alert us to airborn pollutants from industrial processes, smog, natural events such as volcanic eruption and even terrorist activities (hopefully before they occur). These devices can be arranged wherever we require an awareness of what the air is carrying. US embassies use air quality units to release air quality measurements, sometimes in real time - or not at all.

When there is a major event, awareness of risk conditions for first-responder units is key. This week, Popular Science covered a Connecticut fire department using a drone to identify risk conditions for fire fighters at a quarry. While there isn't much new in using remote controlled devices to minimize the risk to human lives - bomb squads and SWAT teams have used robots for some time to get a look at situations before sending in humans - the drone provided a very different look from the air.

Can we find another planet comparable to Earth?

EarthScience fiction commonly presents a universe full of Earth-like planets, each capable of sustaining human life with only a few changes to terraform into a near-perfect environment. Popular Science offers an article that explain the five characteristics required to match Earth and another that presents all of the known explanets in graphics helping understand how few match these characteristics.

The characteristics are:

  1. Earth size, with a rocky structure...
  2. Near a sunlike star, but not too close...
  3. With liquid water...
  4. Biosignatures...
  5. ...and intelligent life.

Can current cities be redesigned for a future of healthier citizens?

Isometric view of a cityCities are dense life centers offering a greater range of opportunities and services than those typically present in rural settings. While this offers a strong draw to people looking to take advantage of the wealth and income cities offer, organic growth of urban areas can decrease efficiency and home values when the settings become too complex and disorganized to remain inviting. Urban decay then leads to increases in crime and can be connected with shifts towards suburban settings, which in turn increase air pollution. It's a complex problem that has largely been met with middling results. Can new trends in urban planning help reclaim urban zones?

The World Health Organization forecasts that 60% of humans will live in a city by 2030 and the number will rise to 70% by 2050. Bigger, higher, denser - the characteristics of cities around the world involve a lot of words ending with '-er' - such as dirtier as air pollution increases along the population curve.

What are the long term social impacts of neuro-enhancing technologies?

A couple wearing Foc.us devicesWired's Christian Jarrett covers a new technology designed to "overclock your brain." It's a great article in which he thoroughly covers the spectrum of what benefits the Foc.us offers, a bit of history, and some of the warnings we should be aware of.

For this article, let's pretend it is possible to use electrical current to stimulate our brains, making the user "smarter." What are the social impacts? Let's look at a few.

The 'True Love' Bra

Heart rate responses to various input The Japanese lingerie manufacturer Ravijour has a new product out they call the True Love Tester bra. You can watch the video linked off the Popular Science article for their presentation of how it works, but the truly interesting detail is the graph of heart rate responses to varying stimuli - and how a company looking to market a new product uses our data.

If I understand this correctly, the bra senses the wearer's heart rate and when it "exceeds a certain value, the bra hook is unlocked automatically." A situation where a biological response can act as a trigger may be a bit part of our wearable future, but is it something we can trust or simply a gizmo to play with?

While the novelty isn't world-changing, it is an example of how our biodata can be used in different ways and how wearables can impact the world around us using our biology as a key.

Artifact from the Future: Swap spit for rides (not as bad as it sounds)

Artifact from the Future: Give Some Spit, Get a Free Ride - See more at: http://www.iftf.org/future-now/article-detail/artifact-from-the-future-give-some-spit-get-a-free-ride/#sthash.mP4l3MBI.dpuf Another IFTF artifact this week. This time offering a trade of DNA from your spit with an offer of free transportation with the purpose of identifying "toxins, the environment, even daily stressors."

It's an interesting idea and the trade of free for personal data keeps trending upwards. Just last week we read about Glow First, the non-profit arm of the Glow app where women can earn money towards fertility treatment by filling out ten months of fertility data.

How much data will we provide? How will it be stored? For how long? There are so many ways FREE can get us to give up details of our lives. Girls Gone Wild has proven how intimate details can be leveraged from a free T-shirt. So this view of the future doesn't beg questions about spit or transportation. Instead, I ask what it will take for us to become inoculated against so freely giving up our data/bodies/intimate details in return for the free of email/prizes/social media?

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