Apple’s financing a study to see whether irregular heart rhythms can be detected with an Apple Watch. But that’s just the beginning, according to a New York Times article shared by Templer421:

As consumers, medical centers and insurers increasingly embrace health-tracking apps, tech companies want a bigger share of the more than $3 trillion spent annually on health care in the United States, too… The companies are accelerating their efforts to remake health care by developing or collaborating on new tools for consumers, patients, doctors, insurers and medical researchers. And they are increasingly investing in health startups. In the first 11 months of this year, 10 of the largest tech companies in the United States were involved in health care equity deals worth $2.7 billion, up from just $277 million for all of 2012, according to data from CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture capital and startups.

Each tech company is taking its own approach, betting that its core business strengths could ultimately improve people’s health — or at least make health care more efficient. Apple, for example, has focused on its consumer products, Microsoft on online storage and analytics services and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, on data… Physicians and researchers caution that it is too soon to tell whether novel continuous-monitoring tools, like apps for watches and smartphones, will help reduce disease and prolong lives — or just send more people to doctors for unnecessary tests. There’s no shortage of hype,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a digital medicine expert who directs the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego. “We’re in the early stages of learning these tools: Who do they help? Who do they not help? Who do they provide just angst, anxiety, false positives?”
The article notes Amazon’s investment in cancer-detection startup Grail, Apple’s investment in the Beddit sleep monitor, and Alphabet’s acquistion of Senosis Health, “a developer of apps that use smartphone sensors to monitor certain health signals.”

Alphabet also has a research unit developing tools to collect health data, and it’s already financed “Project Baseline,” in which 10,000 volunteers have agreed to testing of their blood, mental health, and DNA, as well as monitoring of their skin temperature, heart rate, and sleep patterns.

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Source: Slashdot – How Big Tech is Getting Involved in Your Health Care

“Wouldn’t it be nice if advances in technology stopped throwing new problems at the world? No such luck,” writes Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Several emerging technological threats could — soon enough — come to rival nuclear weapons and climate change in their potential to upend (or eliminate) civilization.” Lasrick writes:
In 2017, the cyber threat finally began to seem real to the general public. Advances in biotech in 2017 could lead to the deliberate spread of disease and a host of other dangers. And then there were the leaps forward made in AI. Here’s a roundup of coverage from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on advances in emerging technological threats that were made in the last year.
One article even describes the possibility of malevolent brain-brain networks in the future, warning scientists (and the international community) to “remain vigilant about neurotechnologies as they become more refined — and as the practical barriers to their malevolent use begin to lower.”

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Source: Slashdot – Neuro, Cyber, Slaughter: Emerging Technological Threats In 2017

A new study in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems mathematically suggests that if you and everyone else on the road kept an equal distance between the cars ahead and behind, traffic would move twice as quickly. From a report: Now sure, you’re probably not going to convince everyone on the road to do that. Still, the finding could be a simple yet powerful way to optimize semi-autonomous cars long before the fully self-driving car of tomorrow arrives. Traffic is perhaps the world’s most infuriating example of what’s known as an emergent property. Meaning, lots of individual things forming together to create something more complex. Emergent properties are usually quite astounding. You’ve probably seen video of starlings forming a murmuration, a great shifting blob of thousands upon thousands of birds. Bats flying en masse out of a cave is another example, swarming sometimes by the millions through a small exit. And scientists are just beginning to understand how they do so.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Math Says You’re Driving Wrong and It’s Slowing Us All Down