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Part funded by King’s College London, the study is a meta-analysis of three decades of research in Austria, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, UK, Japan and USA. It concludes that lithium’s “protective” abilities could be further tested by “randomised community trials of lithium supplementation of the water supply” in communities with high prevalence of mental health conditions and risk of suicide. Deliberately lacing the water supply with a mind-altering chemical in some zones might seem like something out of a science fiction novel [duh], but the authors of the report...think it’s an idea worth experimenting. You cannot blame scientists for thinking outside...

Ready for a thought experiment? Imagine a society that has solved the problems of overpopulation and environmental collapse. Crime is a nonissue, as are homelessness and hunger. Racism? Sexism? Homophobia? Sorted. Science has conquered disease and disability. Everyone has useful work, perfect skin, total emotional equilibrium. Every day is a pleasure. Every night is a party.

Brave New World is an adaptation of the classic Aldous Huxley novel and will broadcast on NBC's streaming service, Peacock which launched in the US this week. The dystopian story is centred around the futuristic New London where people are sorted into an intelligence based hierachy. Demi, 57, plays Linda who moved from New London to an outlying reservation with her son John. Peace has been achieved in the seemingly utopian New London thanks to prohibiting monogamy, privacy, money, family, and history itself. Other cast members include Jessica Brown Findlay (Downton Abbey), Harry Lloyd (Game of Thrones), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo),...

"The updates will come to Android 6.0 Marshmallow phones and above"... Freeper Mobile Developers - This is what you trained for. Make us proud.

When Jennifer Gobrecht was 17, doctors told her that she would never carry her own child. But Thursday, researchers at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia announced that Gobrecht had delivered a son by cesarean section in November, the second baby in the United States to be born using a transplanted uterus from a deceased donor. “We were beyond lucky,” Gobrecht said. Gobrecht, now 33, was born with a congenital condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, meaning she was born with ovaries, but without a uterus. In 2017, she and her husband were exploring the possibility of implanting frozen embryos into a surrogate when...

The DNA test claims to let prospective parents weed out IVF embryos with a high risk of disease or low intelligence. Anxious couples are approaching fertility doctors in the US with requests for a hotly debated new genetic test being called “23andMe, but on embryos.” The baby-picking test is being offered by a New Jersey startup company, Genomic Prediction, whose plans we first reported on two years ago. The company says it can use DNA measurements to predict which embryos from an IVF procedure are least likely to end up with any of 11 different common diseases.

Scientists have invented a device that can quickly produce large numbers of living entities that resemble very primitive human embryos.Researchers welcomed the development, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, as an important advance for studying the earliest days of human embryonic development. But it also raises questions about where to draw the line in manufacturing "synthetic" human life.Other scientists have previously created synthetic embryos, which are also known as embryoids. These entities are made by coaxing human stem cells to form structures found in very early human embryos. The research has raised questions about how similar to complete embryos they could and should be...

Legalizing pot does not appear to encourage teen use and might actually discourage it, a study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics suggests. Researchers analyzed data from more than 1.4 million high school students between 1993 and 2017, collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its Youth Risk Behavior survey. The results show teen pot use both before and after medical marijuana laws were adopted in 27 states, seven of which also legalized recreational marijuana during the survey period. Teen marijuana use didn’t change much after medical marijuana was legalized, they found. In states that legalized recreational use,...

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social media giant. The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of “signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform. Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior. If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate...

A meme posted to Facebook claimed that “nearly every state that has legalized [marijuana] has also legislated that you lose your right to own a gun if you are prescribed it, or buy it recreationally.”“Pot legalization is turning out to be a back-door way for the government to get you to voluntarily give up your gun rights,” reads the image.

Some of you need to cease the denial and accept the harsh reality that the left hates you. It’s a fact, as much as the liberal gaslight gang and the conserva-sissy weakhearts deny it. You can tell that leftists hate you by the way that leftists tell you that they hate you.Take Sarah Jeong, please – hey, the New York Times was happy to get this bitter creep onboard because of her history of virulent racism. The Times saw her hate as a plus, not a negative, an asset, not a liability. You can’t draw any other conclusion – if you...

Scientists today revealed they are 'extremely close' to creating artificial embryos after a huge breakthrough. Researchers used mouse stem cells to produce artificial embryo-like structures capable of 'gastrulation' - a key life event. Gastrulation occurs when embryonic cells self-organise themselves into the correct structure for an embryo to form. The breakthrough offers hope of shedding light on one of the biggest causes of infertility - embryos failing to implant in the womb. Biologists have for years tried to create embryos from stem cells in order to create an unlimited supply that could be used for medical research.

By Noah Shachtman It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program! The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable. What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing? The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone...

By Philip Cottraux When I reviewed 1984, at least a dozen people told me that I should read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World next. The two novels apparently serve as twin companion pieces in the “negative utopia” genre, where the ideal of a hopeful future for man is turned on its head into a dark dystopian warning for us all. 1984 was published in 1949 as the world was still reeling from the Second World War. Orwell’s totalitarianism was a combination of Soviet Russia mixed with the fear of the kind of power emerging technology would bring. Brave New World...

Inside what look like oversized ziplock bags strewn with tubes of blood and fluid, eight fetal lambs continued to develop — much like they would have inside their mothers. Over four weeks, their lungs and brains grew, they sprouted wool, opened their eyes, wriggled around, and learned to swallow, according to a new study that takes the first step toward an artificial womb. One day, this device could help to bring premature human babies to term outside the uterus — but right now, it has only been tested on sheep. It’s appealing to imagine a world where artificial wombs grow...

Doctors have been told to refer to expectant mothers as “pregnant people” so as not to offend transgender people, in official guidelines issued by the British Medical Association (BMA). The controversial advice appears in a 14-page booklet on “inclusive language in the workplace” which also rules that the terms ‘biologically male’ and ‘biologically female’ are problematic, and instructs doctors to instead say that the individual was ‘assigned’ male or female at birth. The union’s new guidelines come just weeks after it emerged that a British woman in the process of ‘transitioning’ gender put her operation on hold to have a...

Despite Impossible Odds M-Vac Succeeds January 24, 2017 • 5 Likes • 0 Comments Collect touch DNA from a rock. Collect male touch DNA that is mixed into a shirt soaked with female victim blood. Collect DNA from a brick. Collect touch DNA from a rope. Collect DNA from clothing that has been submerged for 8-10 hrs. Collect DNA from clothing that is decades old. Collect skin cells from a cement block. Collect DNA from the edge of a burnt blanket. Collect touch DNA from a victim's pillowcase. These are all scenarios in which investigators have applied the M-Vac System...

In this collection of potential reading, Mark Yon suggests books that you may appreciate whilst considering your vote. It may have escaped your attention that during this week there are elections in the US. Whilst we do not endorse any particular candidate or party at SFFWorld (and the person mainly writing this is non-US anyway!)  but on behalf of SFFWorld we thought we would compile a list of ten SF books that use politics as an important part of their world. Be warned – not all of these are future visions you may like…

Many science-fiction television series and films—for instance, the Keanu Reeves-starrer "The Matrix" series—have depicted how certain knowledge and skills can be uploaded to the human brain, much like how information can be stored into computers. Thanks to science, this feat is slowly turning into reality. Researchers from the HRL Laboratories in California have successfully fed data directly into the brain of human test subjects, enabling them to somewhat learn a very complex skill: flying a plane.

In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.