SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and had “statistically significant improvements” in emotional health, according to a study released Wednesday.
The program was the nation’s highest-profile experiment in decades of universal basic income, an idea that was revived as a major part of Andrew Yang’s 2020 campaign for president.
The idea is to bring people out of poverty with a guaranteed monthly income. Supporters say it gives people needed financial security to find good jobs and avoid debt. But critics have argued free money would eliminate the incentive to work, creating a society dependent on the state.
Integrated circuits, brain sciences, genetics and biotechnology, clinical medicine and health care, and deep Earth, sea, space and polar exploration were named as the other five sectors that will be given priority in terms of funding and resources, according to a draft of the government’s 14th five-year plan for 2021–25, and its vision through 2035.
‘Basic research is the wellspring of scientific and technological innovation, so we’ll boost spending in this area by a considerable sum,’ Premier Li Keqiang says.
The Future Of Food And Beverage Innovation And Venturing — Dr. Ellen De Brabander, Ph.D. — Senior Vice President, R&D, PepsiCo
Dr. Ellen de Brabander, is Senior Vice President, Research and Development, at PepsiCo, the American multinational food, snack, and beverage company.
Dr. de Brabander has broad set of responsibilities at Pepsico and currently leads their global R&D functions including the Food Safety, Quality, Strategy & Portfolio Management, and their Sensory and Regulatory Affairs teams. She also leads their R&D Digital Transformation initiatives to transform the innovation process to bring new, innovative products to the market.
Dr. de Brabander is also a member of the board of governors at the New York Academy of Sciences and has served as Treasurer and board member International Life Science Institute of North America, an organization that brings together scientists from government, academia and industry to uphold the scientific integrity and objectivity of nutrition and food safety science in order to ethically improve food systems for the betterment of public health.
Additionally, Dr. de Brabander has also served as the interim and founding CEO of EIT Food (part of the EU’s European Institute of Innovation and Technology), which is a unique $1.5 Billion Euro innovation consortium with more than 50 partners from industry and academia, focused on transforming the food sector by designing and delivering unique and high impact research, innovation, business creation and education programs.
Dr. de Brabander has worked in a variety of industries, including pharmaceuticals, health/nutrition, coatings and chemicals.
Prior to joining PepsiCo, Dr. de Brabander was chief scientific officer and global head of research, development and regulatory affairs for Merial Limited, where she led a global team to discover and develop innovative animal health products for companion and production animals. Prior to her role at Merial, she held executive R&D, regulatory, business strategy and program management positions at Intervet, and specialty chemical company DSM.
Dr. de Brabander earned her PhD cum laude in bio-organic chemistry from Leiden University in The Netherlands and completed post-doctoral work in molecular biology at MIT with Nobel Laureate H.G. Khorana. Her PhD was awarded as best PhD for natural sciences from Leiden University (1990; Kock award); she has also been awarded a Golden Medal from the Royal Dutch Chemical Society. In 2020 she was given the US Power 50 award.
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a soft, stretchy skin patch that can be worn on the neck to continuously track blood pressure and heart rate while measuring the wearer’s levels of glucose as well as lactate, alcohol, or caffeine. It is the first wearable device that monitors cardiovascular signals and multiple biochemical levels in the human body at the same time.
“This type of wearable would be very helpful for people with underlying medical conditions to monitor their own health on a regular basis,” said Lu Yin, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego and co-first author of the study published on February 152021, in Nature Biomedical Engineering. “It would also serve as a great tool for remote patient monitoring, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when people are minimizing in-person visits to the clinic.”
Such a device could benefit individuals managing high blood pressure and diabetes — individuals who are also at high risk of becoming seriously ill with COVID-19. It could also be used to detect the onset of sepsis, which is characterized by a sudden drop in blood pressure accompanied by a rapid rise in lactate level.
People often complain about both the high cost of energy and the fact that “they don’t have time to exercise.” This invention certainly solves both problems.
Monitoring your vital signs is becoming easier and easier these days, critical if you want to keep track of your general health and well being, and incredibly useful if you want to see how a life style, or dietary, change is playing out. In this video I look at two new companies that are utilising mobile phones to measure a whole raft of biometric data, simply and easily, and clinically tested to deliver medical-grade accuracy. And these are just first generation versions, who knows where this will take us, and what we will be able to monitor quickly and easily in the next few years.
Medical Diagnosis Software With Just A Smart PhoneIn the near future, your phone or a wearable of some description, will constantly be able to monitor all your health signs continuously ready to alert you to any worrying signs, and what they can do today is just the beginning of where we are heading.
With AI powered deep learning and other computing techniques, more and more analysis will become easily and quickly measured at home, so you can track all your biomarkers and vital signs so you can see how you are reacting to a new treatment, or a lifestyle change, or anything else you wish to know about.
If you haven’t already seen it why not check out this video on the other technologies that are set to revolutionise our lives in the next decade.
Hallucinogens, neuro-immunology and the microbiome — convergent approaches in mental healthcare — mike wang, johns hopkins university.
Mike Wang, is a neuro-psychiatric researcher and adjunct teaching faculty in neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Mike is one of the youngest principal investigators at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and currently leads a clinical trial examining how hallucinogenic levels of over-the-counter dextromethorphan might serve as the world’s first rapid acting oral antidepressant. (Those interested in the clinical trial for dextromethorphan can.
Mike’s work has been featured in academic journals like the American Journal of Psychiatry, as well as popular outlets like Psychology Today and VICE.
Mike received his graduate training in immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health studying rare viral encephalitides and neuro-immune determinants of depressive disorders.
Outside of neuro-psychiatry, Mike serves as an educational reform advocate and board member of the educational nonprofit makeLAB.
Planting greenery is often touted as one solution to the threat of air pollution, but which species are the most effective against this major public health hazard? Researchers at the Royal Horticultural Society in the UK set out to answer that question and in the process discovered a “super plant,” Franchet’s cotoneaster, or Cotoneaster franchetii.
IBM spent several billion dollars on acquisitions to build up Watson. Former senior IBM executive John Kelly once touted the initiative as a “bet the ranch” move. It didn’t live up to the hype. Watson Health has struggled for market share in the U.S. and abroad and currently isn’t profitable.
The decision to put its flagship Watson Health business up for sale underscores the wider challenge tech companies face in healthcare.
