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Election
First off, former biotech CEO and general slimeball, Vivek Ramaswamy, lost his attempt at the Ohio governorship, mostly because he is a loser and that's what losers do. Further bolstering his reputation for being a general piece of crap, he decided to run an ad featuring his opponent's estranged mother who proceeded to talk trash about her. Can't wait to see what this guy chooses to fail at next.
More generally, with Democrats taking control of Congress, the question is what will happen in terms of healthcare, life sciences and health policy.
The answer: nothing dramatic. Any impactful legislation will surely be vetoed, though it’s conceivable a bipartisan group could tweak some healthcare laws for the better and maybe try to pass some drug pricing legislation, since everyone hates Big Pharma.
Beyond that, not much is likely to happen to the health/biotech industries as the executive branch still runs HHS, CDC, FDA, NIH and all that. It will be tougher to confirm replacement heads of these departments, but vacancies can be left unfilled for extended periods as has become common lately.
To a Moon. And Back
Japan's national space agency launched a Martian moon mission to Phobos, with a plan to return samples from the surface. If all goes well, 10 grams of regolith will return in 2031.
If they're going all that way, why not land on Mars itself and get some red dirt? Easy – it’s extremely difficult to leave once you get there, thanks to gravity.
The amount of fuel required to escape Mars’ gravity would take up an enormous amount of space on whatever craft landed there. In fact, it would represent about 82% of the mass of the craft launching from Mars.
This is the primary reason space travel utopians talk about using resources already present on planets and moons to create fuel - that's the only promising way to depart with a large craft.
Manufacturing even small amounts of fuel in situ using only the equipment packed in a space vehicle is currently not even reasonable to do on Earth, let alone tens to hundreds of millions of miles away on Mars.
And doing so at scale for full size spaceships with lots of materials and people? Forget about it.
We will have to be ok with 10 grams of a small Martian moon in 2031. That is, if all goes well.
Mummiflucation
Before "research" peptides, powdered mummies were a trendy cure-all.
Thankfully, not so much anymore. Those mummies can rest in one piece again.
But someone didn't let it rest totally and investigated whether mummy flakes had any beneficial effect. Turns out powdered mummy does have anti-influenza properties.
How'd this grant get approved when they weren't even using American mummies??
AI Death Clock
Measuring and monitoring our lives has never been easier. You wear a ring, get a blood test, lay on a sheet, wear a watch, hire a scribe to follow you 24/7. It's a downright data deluge
And when you have all this data, how do you process it?
You know the answer to that - AI!
Consumer apps are now out there crunching all the numbers to tell you when you're going to die.
Not that these apps are accurate, but there is no shortage of fiction writings dealing with the idea of knowing exactly when you will die, most recently The Measure.
The apps are guessing. And you are stressing.
Rise up! It's all bulls**t! Don't fall for it.
Worrying about how well you sleep makes you sleep worse. Worrying about dying makes you die sooner. Stop! Live!
But before you do that, make sure to read that article because it does mention "salmon sperm scalp injections”.
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