Monday, November 8, 2021
Sunday, November 7, 2021
The billion dollar race to defy ageing is the last thing the planet needs, John Harris.
Illustration by R Fresson.
According to one estimate, the revenues of the global anti-ageing industry will increase from about $200bn today to $420bn by 2030. One sure sign of its rosy prospects is the involvement of high-profile people in the US who have made vast fortunes from the internet. If many of them can avoid taxes, why not death?
The sums invested in anti-ageing research by such tech players as the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the Trump-supporting venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, show what happens when such ideas meet big money. The same goes, somewhat predictably, for the activities of the Amazon founder and aspiring astronaut, Jeff Bezos, who has previously funded an anti-ageing setup called Unity Biotechnology, and, via his personal investment vehicle Bezos Expeditions, is now reportedly a donor to a newly founded California venture called Altos Labs.
Plenty of other companies – they have such names as BioViva, Youthereum Genetics, the Longevity Fund and AgeX Therapeutics – are also trying to somehow arrest ageing. Piercing through the research and journalism that surrounds what they are doing, you occasionally get the vague feeling that some of the people involved may eventually come across some or other revelation about age-related diseases, but there is usually a sense of fuzzy, hubristic ideas, and money that would be better spent elsewhere.
Besides, even if anti-ageing techniques eventually proved successful, what would be the social and cultural consequences of literally pathologising old age?
If we lived much longer, would we also be expected to work indefinitely?
How would the planet cope with a hugely increased population, and who would be first in the queue?
Friday, November 5, 2021
Thursday, November 4, 2021
Ipanema Beach , Sandra Cattaneo Adorno
Reality check
Global carbon emissions are shooting back to the record level seen before the coronavirus pandemic levels, new analysis has shown. Scientists said the finding is a “reality check” for the world’s nations gathered at the Cop26 climate summit.
What We're Reading
Bound with loose threads and inscribed with sinuous lines that crawl across the page, the textile works created by Tennessee-based artist Rima Day evoke the Japanese good luck charms called sennibari.
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
Why the secret symbols of magic and witchcraft fascinate us
Tarot has been a muse for countless writers, artists and designers in their work – TS Eliot wrote of the "wicked pack of cards" in The Waste Land, Salvador Dalí created his own deck, while Andy Warhol made a film of the Velvet Underground having their cards read.
Earlier this year, fashion house Dior cast models as the characters from a deck of tarot cards for its spring/ summer 2021 couture show (Christian Dior himself had his cards read before every show).
Recently, the costume designer for the sci-fi film Dune revealed that tarot cards were a source of inspiration.But tarot does not only inspire artists and designers – it's a powerful art form in its own right. Look at tarot decks across the last 600 years and you'll get a crash course in art history, from Renaissance Italy through to Art Nouveau and Art Deco, to Pop Art and digital collage.
Walrus leaves Arctic comfort zone for snooze on Dutch submarine
Another wandering walrus, seen off the Scilly Islands, France, Spain and West Cork, Ireland, has since been sighted back in Icelandic waters.
Freya, as the animal has been named, is the first of her species to visit the Netherlands in 23 years.
She was spotted snoozing on a submarine in the naval port of Den Helder by Jeroen Hoekendijk, a Dutch scientist specialising in marine mammals.
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Do you watch Home Alone every holiday season?
The classic Christmas film is well-loved by many, but LEGO Fan Designer Alex Storozhuk is perhaps its biggest fan.
He designed an epic Home Alone LEGO set, allowing anyone to build their own miniature McCallister house and recreate iconic moments from the movie.
Bezos pledges $2bn for restoring nature
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has said his Bezos Earth Fund will spend $2bn (£1.5bn) restoring landscapes and transforming food systems.
He told the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow that he had grasped nature's fragility when he travelled into space.
Entrepreneurs including Mr Bezos have been criticised for spending money on trips into space instead of solving problems on Earth.
Amazon has also been criticised by its workers over environmental practices.
Speaking to the COP26 conference, Mr Bezos said: "In too many parts of the world, nature is already flipping from a carbon sink to a carbon source."
The Bezos Earth Fund plans to spend $10bn fighting climate change overall.
Let them eat space!
‘My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness.’ Elon Musk.
Musk’s latest Twitter beef is with David Beasley, the director of the World Food Programme (WFP). Beasley’s crime was this: he suggested that Musk, who recently became the richest person in the history of the universe and the first person ever to be worth more than $300bn, might help the hungry. According to the WFP, 42 million people are on the brink of famine due to a combination of the climate crisis, structural poverty, conflict and the pandemic. In a recent interview with CNN, Beasley called on the 1% to “step up now, on a one-time basis” to give $6bn, which is just 0.36% the total increase in net worth of the world’s top 400 billionaires last year. Beasley then name-checked Jeff Bezos and Musk, pointing out that the latter saw a $6bn increase in his net worth in just one day last week.
Asking obscenely rich people to help prevent imminent catastrophic famine seems reasonable enough to me. Musk, however, was very prickly about being asked to chip in.
Move over, Aristotle
Ask Delphi is a bot that’s been fed more than 1.7m examples of people’s ethical judgments on everyday questions and scenarios. If you pose an ethical quandary, it will tell you whether something is right, wrong, or indefensible.
Anyone can use Delphi.
Users just put a question to the bot on its website, and see what it comes up with.
The AI is fed a vast number of scenarios – including ones from the popular Am I The Asshole sub-Reddit, where Reddit users post dilemmas from their personal lives and get an audience to judge who the asshole in the situation was.
Then, people are recruited from Mechanical Turk – a market place where researchers find paid participants for studies – to say whether they agree with the AI’s answers.
Each answer is put to three arbiters, with the majority or average conclusion used to decide right from wrong. The process is selective – participants have to score well on a test to qualify to be a moral arbiter, and the researchers don’t recruit people who show signs of racism or sexism.
Monday, November 1, 2021
An Open Letter to the Global Media by Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate
Dear media editors around the world
,
Melting glaciers, wildfires, droughts, deadly heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, loss of biodiversity.
These are all symptoms of a destabilizing planet, which are happening around us all the time.
Those are the kind of things you report about. Sometimes.
The climate crisis, however, is much more than just this.
If you want to truly cover the climate crisis, you must also report on the fundamental issues of time, holistic thinking and justice.
So what does that mean?
COP26; Sir David Attenborough urges leaders to think about the young
Naturalist David Attenborough tells world leaders that the future of young people should provide impetus to "turn tragedy into triumph" on climate change. He says carbon emissions must be halved this decade to keep warming limited to 1.5C by the end of the century.
Children surviving the climate crisis
Save the Children has been documenting the stories of children living on the frontline of the climate crisis, sending world-renowned photographers to Cambodia, Australia and Pakistan
to learn about their lives.
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