Oh, everybody knew they were coming. We could see them in the distance, grinding along at a steady pace somewhere off the coast of Alaska, waiting to catch the Ultimate Zephyr, but it was always tomorrow, the day after, maybe next week when they’d arrive.
Not any more. So rush to the garage, dust off the welcome mat and place it at the door. Put the coffee on, assemble a bouquet and whip out a new tablecloth. Did anybody hear a door slam? It must be them! Seems like we’ve been waiting forever.
Let Me Be Your Saltless Dog
All day we’ve faced the barren waste without a taste of water, but not any more. Sorek, an Israeli company, has built the world’s largest desalination plant….one capable of producing 627,000 cubic meters of water daily. Within one year, 50% of Israel’s water is expected to come from desalination. Sorek has definitively proved that large-scale desalination is not the pipe-dream scoffers have described.
The Sorek plant was built for about $500 million, but who’s counting? Although it uses the conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis, a series of engineering and materials advances has propelled the Israeli operation to new heights. It produces clean water from the sea cheaply at a scale never before achieved. Sorek will profitably sell water for 58 U.S. cents per cubic meter, which is a distinctly lower price than the current conventional desalination plants can manage. Best of all, it’s energy consumption is among the lowest in the world for large-scale plants.
Hello out there in drought-stricken California and other arid ports of call---the answer is no longer blowing in the wind.
The Solar Eclipse
Within the next year, Solarcity Gigafactory in Buffalo, New York will produce a staggering 10,000 solar panels per day, revolutionizing the alternative energy industry and making solar energy much more affordable. Renewable energy will attract companies and governments across the world as they strive to resolve the global energy crisis. China has already proposed a $50 trillion global energy grid by 2050, for starters. The innovation, in this case, is a system that quickly and efficiently produces renewable energy technologies on a global scale.
The solar panel avalanche was aided earlier this year when President Joe Biden signed a new law which boosted consumer protections and incentives for borrowers to take out solar loans, a type of financing that funds energy-efficient solar panel projects for home improvements. The federal and state governments are now helping homeowners receive solar panel loans in specific zip codes in the U.S. at no cost. The funds would go to solar panel contractors for installation and maintenance. The panels would be installed on your very own roof with zero upfront costs.
The amount of solar energy created in these zip codes is tremendous and may not only cut an owner’s electricity payment completely but also generate extra clean solar energy that is converted into watts and sold back to your utility provider. Think of it---instead of your electric company sending you a bill, you’d be sending one to them. And yeah, we know what you’re asking; can we cut them off if they don’t pay up?
Sell Your Chemo Stocks
Every day we get closer to finding the cure for cancer and leaving despised chemotherapy in the dust. Companies like Cellectis, Juno Therapeutics and Novartis are already saving lives via genetic editing and immunotherapy. Within the next 1-2 years, diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis and HIV could be treated by engineering the immune system. Genetically engineered immune cells like Killer T cells designed to wipe out cancer will save countless lives.
Ever since scientists first realized that changes in DNA cause cancer, they’ve been searching for an easy way to correct those changes by manipulating DNA. The big game-changer occurred when researchers showed that a gene-editing tool called CRISPR could alter the DNA of human cells like a very precise and easy to use pair of scissors. The new tool has taken the research world by storm, shifting the line between possible and impossible. Now CRISPR is moving out of lab dishes and into trials of people with cancer.
CRISPR is completely customizable. It can edit virtually any segment of DNA within the three billion letters of the human genome and it’s more precise than other DNA-editing tools. It’s also a lot faster. “With older methods, it usually took a year or two to generate a genetically engineered mouse model,” said Dr. Jerry Li of the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Biology. “But now with CRISPR, a scientist can create a complex mouse model within a few months. It’s very exciting, and we haven’t gotten to the bottom of it yet.”
Would You Like Kale Chips With That?
Once a small niche industry, alternative meats are now rolling down the food highway in the express lane. In almost no time, plant-based meat went from something nobody ever heard of to a product 40% of us in the U.S. have tried. Impossible Foods is now in partnership with Burger King, Qdoba and dozens of other restaurants and franchises. Beyond Meat is selling their product at Taco Bell, Subway, KFC and others. Both companies have seen their fortunes soaring, with skyrocketing stocks and millions in investor funding. This is very good news not only to the principals but also to the 9 billion animals killed in the U.S. each year on factory farms. And to the rest of us who face increasing antibiotic resistance and a climate crisis partly as a result of these dens of iniquity.
The rise of meat alternatives has been driven by one important realization on the part of food providers: that alternative meats don’t have to be a niche product just for vegans and vegetarians who make up only 3% of the U.S. population. There are plenty of Americans who will remain meat eaters but who are still up for trying plant-based products which are tasty, cheap and nutritious. These are the targets for the next generation of meat alternatives. All well and good, but what's going to happen to the Wienermobile.
Disa And Data
1. Having trouble interacting with your Swahili-speaking friends? Losing money playing poker in Swaziland because you don’t know the language? Have we got a deal for you! The fab new Mauma Enence will wrap your troubles in dreams and dream your troubles away. With just a few clicks of the button, you can quickly get your sentences translated into any of 43 different languages in no time flat. Perfect for those visits to Paris or the American ghetto.
2. Irritating mosquitoes won’t bug off? Try the snazzy new Buzz B-Gone Zap, a rechargeable portable mosquito/bug zapper you can set upright or hang just about anywhere. Just charge up the battery with the handy-dandy micro USB and you can zap flying critters til the cows come home. The BBGZ comes with a 2000mAH built-in battery and kills without the use of nasty chemicals, safe for pets, kids and dotty grandparents. It’s small and light, perfect for camping in the worst of swamps or even Florida.
3. You’ll love the new MPG Sirensafe Keychain Alarm, the perfect way to draw attention in any emergency or just for the hell of it. The MPG is small, lightweight and easy to carry, making it the ideal self-defense gadget for men, women, kids or what-have-you. Just pull the simple plug on the alarm and it will emit a bone-rattling 130DB panic alarm that will startle and scare off attackers, wild dogs, Jehovah’s Witnesses or anyone else in the neighborhood. Just remember to turn it off during church services, quilting bees and oral sex.
The Next Big Life-Extenders
From hyperbaric oxygen chambers to gene hacking to blue light blockers, biohacking has grabbed headlines in the last few years for its promise of long life and the sci-fi style treatments its proponents recommend. With radical optimization proponents like 46-year-old bodybuilder Kris Gethin claiming to have almost halved their biological ages via techniques like intermittent fasting and wearing underwear that blocks electromagnetic frequencies, it’s obvious why people are taking notice.
Longevity guru Dmitry Kaminskiy, a UK-based Moldovan multimillionaire, has no doubt he’ll reach the ripe old age of 123. His fund Deep Knowledge Ventures invests in tech’s potential to model human aging and how to slow it down in hugely profitable sectors like AI-fueled drug discovery. Thanks to advanced data modeling, Kaminskiy suggests that by 2030 longevity technology will be moving so fast “the reality will be that most people have affordable access to life extension technology.”
Richard Siow, director of aging research at King’s College London, claims “There is now a huge amount of data from maternal health, in-utero health, the first 1000 days of life, and how that impacts longevity and health trajectory over the next 80-100 years of life. The advent of tech like smart watches, wearables and sleep-tracking means the ever-growing data-sets we have on personalized health trajectories and what they can tell us about aging are now as important for longevity as the treatment of diseases.
Of Red Light Saunas And Ice Baths
Gethin the bodybuilder, speaking from behind a pair of blue-light-blocking glasses, states “So I’m 46 years old chronologically. Means nothing. My most recent biological age results came in at 25 years old. That’s what we need to focus on.”
It wasn’t until 2014, when he was diagnosed with Mold Toxicity, that Gethin went down the rabbit hole of radical health optimization and the quest for longevity. Sleeping about three hours a night on average due to his condition, Gethin decided to check into a Florida clinic for a major detox. Over a period of six weeks, doctors intricately examined his biological makeup from brain scans to blood tests, prescribing a regimen of daily intravenous therapy, colonic hydrotherapy and a host of other invasive treatments.
“That’s when I realized there was a lot more to health and fitness that what I’d previously understood,” said Gethin. For him, biohacking is a combination of modern technology and what he calls “ancestral wisdom,” essentially replicating the ways humans have historically and naturally kept themselves healthy. Starting the day at 4 a.m. with a cup of high-protein coffee, he jumps in his sauna equipped with infra-red panels. Mimicking the beneficial natural light from sunrises, he says, provides him with restorative red light that gives his cells energy and repairs damaged tissue. A committed multitasker, Gethin meditates at the same time, following this up with a three-minute ice bath for “emotional stability.”
Meticulously monitoring his nutrition stats during the day, he tops up any deficiencies with supplements, imbibing hydrogen-rich water and anti-aging oils like Carbon C60. Once a week, he’ll have a health specialist pump him full of antioxidants and high levels of vitamin C via intravenous therapy. He also tracks his blood glucose levels around the clock to ensure they remain stable on a meter most commonly used by diabetics. “This is the perfect path to longevity,” Kris claims. “The more your blood sugar is irregular, the chances of you having a shorter lifespan is heightened.”
One of the main concerns for biohackers is countering electromagnetic forces from things like Wi-Fi routers, cell phones and satellites. The World Health Organization does not attribute any major health consequences to EMFs but one of its working groups did suggest they could potentially be carcinogenic. To offset any such impact, Gethin practices “earthing”---standing barefoot on the ground “to absorb its negative ions.” Alas, he lives in Idaho so he’s sometimes forced to stand on earthing mats. He has even invested in underwear that can block electromagnetic forces.
Dotted around his property, Kris has incandescent yellow bulbs and wears his protective glasses to counter the blue light from electronic screens, which he says excessively ramps up cortisol levels and encourages age-related eyesight degeneration. If that’s not enough, an EMF-proofing specialist was called in to set up a protective tent on the biohacker’s bed to protect him from electrical fields while he sleeps. Gethin also regularly undergoes hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy, a treatment for decompression sickness that prevents the shortening of telomeres, which “basically dictate our biological age.”
“I get criticized because I do weekly coffee enemas,” says Kris. “Is there much science to back it up? No, I just like coffee enemas. Besides, I used to have high liver enzymes and now I don’t. You should just keep doing what works for you. No two people are the same.”
You are absolutely correct, Kris, and I’m going right down to my sauna provider and getting some of those infra-red panels. After that, an earthing mat and some nifty blue light glasses. You won’t mind if I skip those icky enemas for now, right? Oh, and the ice baths---I don’t think so. I made it to 80 with a shortage of emotional stability and I think I should keep doing what works for me. Let me know how that protective tent works out, I hate it when those electrical fields make me dream of Marjorie Taylor Green having sex with Kellyanne Conway. See you in the salt room.
That’s all, folks….
