A new Swiss study has found that there is a way for allergic people to be able to be with cats. The article I will be referencing to is from fox 13 and is here. The scientists at Zurich have found that if a cat is given a special sort of vaccine can help humans not have as bad reactions. According to Fox 13, there are proteins found in a cats fur and dander which are the main cause of the triggering of histamines within the body. The product will be called “Hypocat” and it kills the proteins by having the cats own immune system kill it. They hope that the product will come in the next three years.
So my opinion on this is that it is amazing and hope it works for allergic people. But I also hope it won’t hurt the cats’ immune system or damage the cat in any way. I especially want this because I have a cat and if we would give this to our cat-because we frequently have visitors who are allergic-I hope it wouldn’t hurt him. But I guess we will have to wait and see how it all turns out.
Valerio, Kelvin. “Brown Cat with Green Eyes.” Pexels, www.pexels.com/photo/adorable-animal-blur-cat-617278/.
Recently I found an article on the BBC where they discuss the future of neuroscience and AI. The article begins with a plot of a science fiction book where a man is a quadriplegic and gets a chip in his mind that lets him do more than he is currently capable of. The article transitions this story from the book to mind control where they said that a woman was able to control a robot arm with only her mind. Even later she was able to fly a fighter aircraft simulation.
But now people want to be able to control thing without electrodes, cables, and brain surgery. Al Emondi who is managing the project of improving this technology has set scientists the task of creating hardware that can read your thoughts through things like a baseball cap or a headrest. It also has to go both ways, giving the mind information that it is capable of understanding and transmitting information back to a computer. The scientists have 4 years to work on this.
This mind control is most common for people who are unable to use their limbs and have robotic ones. The article also paints a picture of how humans could utilize this technology by communicating with our computers and it being faster than normal communication. The article says that this technology is also being used by many other people and companies, this is probably because the industry is worth an estimate of $13.3 billion and the company who cracks the code first will get a large chunk of that. Another story that the article writes about is that a paraplegic was able to play ping pong on the computer. Emondi’s team is going to read and transmit thought through a variety of ways, the ones said in the article are ultrasound, electric and magnetic fields, and light. Some problems with this are that the brain apparently sends out useless information that has to be distinguished with relevant information. Aswell the signals have to also travel through the skull and the scalp which can be quite difficult.
Nordqvist, Christian. “Neuroscience: Overview, History, Major Branches.” Medical News Today, MediLexicon International, 26 June 2018, www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/248680.php.
Some of Emondi’s teams have also tried to do things without surgery while putting things in the body, such as eating something, injecting, or putting things up a persons nose. One team is apparently using microtransducers using magnetic energy and turning that into an electric signal. According to the BBC if this works then it would match the invasive interface of an implanted chip within the body. One more problem with this is that the response to a computer has to be instant and have the bandwidth to fly a drone. Later the article states that we don’t know what is allowed because there are no rules yet.
The article states that there is already technology with most interfaces understanding how detailed movement works. We are also able to detect if we want to move an object and where, also we know how to detect the closing of a hand from signals sent by the brain. The rest of the article is about how this technology is far from perfect.
Now to give my thoughts. I think that this is a great future that can help people who need it, such as a paraplegic or the countless other applications that it can be used in. I think that this could also be something cool used by game developers with a VR headset and make a game even more immersive. I do think that the technology has to undergo some improvements before sent out to the public because we can’t do many things with it yet. But I want to keep my hopes high because I think that this is amazing and will be the future of technology.
Walmart has recently removed 1,000 third party items from its website because of the recent mass shootings. The article that I am referencing in this post is from CNN and the link is here. The article says that Walmart has banned violet video games from their market. In my opinion this is outrages, I play video games quite often most being violent because that is either what is cool or something that I find interesting, I don’t think that video games have made me more violent in anyway. The article has also pointed out that Walmart still has t-shirts that are pro gun and they have gotten quite a lot of flack for that, especially after the banning of violent video games.
One of the mass shootings that the article brings up quite a lot is the El Paso shooting where it was in the El Paso Walmart where it took place. Later in the article CNN says that the CEO of Walmart Doug McMillon responded to the shootings by saying that the company will respond “thoughtful and deliberate”. Which doesn’t tell us anything about what they are going to do. But all we can do is hope that they make the correct decision that will be best for the future.
The New York Times has recently published an article about J.D. Salinger’s books becoming e-books to reach a wider audience across the world. This pursuit is led by J.D. Salinger’s son because J.D. died 10 years ago to the age of 91 years old. J.D.’s son wants to publish works of his fathers that haven’t been published and the already published books and make them into e-books. Mr. Salinger (J.D. Salinger’s son) now has to go through many handwritten books and documents and making them digital. J.D. Salinger was quite against computers and technology so all his works are handwritten or made using a typewriter, making the conversion to a computer quite difficult and time consuming. Later in the article Mr. Salinger expresses how he torn because his father always wanted privacy and control, but he wants a larger audience to be able to read his works.
J.D. Salinger in 1950.CreditLotte Jacobi/Gado Images, via Alamy
I agree with Mr. Salinger wanting to get J.D. Salinger’s books into e-books and how it would be better for the Salinger brand. I also see why Mr. Salinger might not want to release the books, for privacy. Furthermore some of J.D. Salinger’s most famous books are already online with a simple google search (at least catcher in the rye) showing that it might not be so useful.
To summarize I really liked Catcher in the Rye and there must be other books that J.D. Salinger has written that were also very good. In my opinion the making of old J.D. Salinger books electronic is a good thing and it will hopefully reach the masses of people who haven’t read the good books of Salinger.
