FEATURE: New Cures & Treatments Coming Soon
Need a new Liver or heart or kidney? Soon you’ll be able to PRINT ONE OUT!
A friend of mine recently died from kidney failure. The transplant of a new kidney, genetically appropriate for him, would have saved his life. But they’re hard to come by, and they’re rarely of a genetic typology that won’t be rejected by the body of the recipient. Can replacement organs come from a 3D printer? That’s the ultimate goal of the bioprinting program at the Wake Forest Institute’s School of Medicine. They’re one of many institutes investigating the possibility of printing tissues and organs. “Multilayered skin, bones, muscle structures, blood vessels, retinal tissue and even mini-organs all have been 3D printed.…
OPTIMISM & PESSIMISM – John Shirley
PESSIMISM!
A Mass Migration in the USA from South to North?
Currently, Texas is caught up in extreme heat, extreme drought. It also has had, for Texas, extreme cold weather in recent winters, for which it was not prepared, this lack of infrastructural preparation leading to collapse of its electric grid in some places.
One of the basic assumptions of futurologists is that climate change will drive new waves of migration as this dangerous century wears on. Usually these desperate mass migrations are pictured as taking place in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Africa. But It seems inevitable that climate change will make parts of the USA almost unlivable, due to the coming intensity of heatwaves; due to consistent unprecedented heat.…
HORIZON SCANNING: The Global Future
Horizon scanning is a method futures researchers use to expand their personal awareness of weak signals of change that are emerging around them every day, of which they were not previously aware. William Gibson is often quoted as saying “the future is already here, but it’s just not evenly distributed.” Less often quoted, he goes on to point out that it (the future) “is arriving constantly, in bits and pieces.” In other words, the future isn’t here full cloth, but the threads are here, from which the future will be woven. Other people have pointed out the human brain is a “prediction machine,” constantly turning out predictions, mostly subconsciously, scanning for threats, food, sex, money, power, and so forth.…