Donating for Dollars
Already, healthy people can donate blood, sperm and eggs, but now the nonprofit OpenBiome offers donors $40 for bowel movements to supply “fecal transplants” for patients with nasty C. difficile bacterial infections. (“Healthy” contents are transplanted into the infected gut via endoscope or frozen swallowed capsules so that the good bacteria drive out the antibiotic-resistant bad.) More than 2,000 transplant units have been shipped to 185 hospitals so far and OpenBiome allows daily “donations” so that, with bonuses, a donor could earn $13,000 a year. However, extensive medical questioning and stool-testing is required, and only about 4% of potential donors have exquisite-enough feces to qualify.
The Job of the Researcher
California State University, Los Angeles researcher Marc Kubasak spent about 2,500 hours (sometimes 12 hours a day) training 40 rats with spinal cord damage to walk on a treadmill, after sewing little vests to tether the critters, suspended, to a robotic arm. His work paid off, though, according to the February Popular Science magazine, as doctors in Poland and University College London used his procedures to help a man with a damaged spine. (In the middle of the project, Kubasak developed a rodent allergy and was forced to wear a body suit every day with a respirator.)
Ironies
U.K.’s Bedfordshire Police were searching in April for the thief who ran off without paying for his Jesus arm tattoo at the RedINC Luton studio (to go with his “Only God Can Judge Me” inking on the other arm). In fact, the shopkeeper also believes the man swiped the equivalent of $1,548 from a cash drawer when he was momentarily alone in the studio.
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Remembrance Technology
In March, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved Google’s application covering robot software that mimics human personalities (voice, mannerisms) using a variety of moods (happiness, fear, surprise) with a notable use that family members might employ it to continue to “interact” with a loved one after he or she has passed. One disquieting possibility might allow a deceased person to be directed to act in ways that the person never acted while alive.
Suspicions Confirmed
The controversial ex-Greenpeace campaigner who years later turned against the environmental group’s program walked out of an interview in March for a French documentary in which he assured viewers that Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer was safe for humans. “You can drink a whole quart of it, and it won’t hurt you,” Patrick Moore told the interviewer for Canal+. The interviewer then offered Moore a swig of Roundup he had on hand. “I’d be happy to, actually,” Moore reportedly said on camera, but then quickly changed his mind. “No, I’m not an idiot.” At that point, Moore declared, the interview was “finished.”
Is This a Great Country or What?
The owner of a New York City condominium apartment that sold for $100.5 million recently received a property tax reduction of $360,000 last year—and is likely to keep receiving reductions over as many as 25 years, based on “Section 421-a” benefits the state enacted to encourage “affordable” housing in the most desirable parts of New York City. The tax abatements are available to developers that promise to create “affordable” units in the same zones (“affordable” to families making less than about $40,000 annually), but in recent years, the new “millionaire” units (with tax breaks) have outnumbered the new affordable units by about 11-to-1, according to a February New York Times report, costing the city more than $1 billion a year in revenue.
Bright Ideas
Wall Street Miracle: Two March instances of gleaning insight and using it to buy stock “options” were executed so quickly (1 to 3 seconds each) that experts consulted for a slate.com analysis said they couldn’t possibly have been made by human securities traders. Their conclusion: A robot so intelligent exists that it can “read” a news wire report, “analyze” it for hints on whether to place bets on a company’s future price and execute the order—before human traders even finish reading the news report. Profits on the seconds-long trades: $2.4 million on one and “between $1 million and $2 million” on the other.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CHUCK SHEPHERD
