Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- Mining mobile phone data enabled researchers to draw more efficient bus routes in Abidjan, the largest city of Ivory Coast.
- When maternal rats are fed a high fat, high sugar diet during pregnancy and lactation their offspring have a higher preference for junk food. A recent study in The FASEB Journal describes a possible mechanism underlying the observation, which suggests that poor diet in one generation can predispose the next generation to similar dietary choices.
- Results from a multi-year study by the State of Oregon hints that expansion of health insurance may not improve health care outcomes. According to the study, giving Medicaid to the uninusured reduced the financial impacts of sickness, but had no effect on improving measures of health and wellness.
- Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have found that a region of the hypothalamus appears to control aging throughout the body. Their work showed that they could speed up or slow down aging in mice. If it works the same in humans, it could be a way to treat age-related diseases in people.
- Researchers from MIT’s Media Lab have developed a process that allows physical objects to be programmed and controlled via a graphical user interface. The work uses a simple processor and WiFi chip mounted on the device and links the object to an augmented reality app on a tablet computer. The work demonstrates the potential deeper integration of digital and analog functions and devices.