Brave New World Ahead

"We live in the most extraordinary time in history. The next ten years will see more changes than occurred in the past one hundred years."
"In 1920, we could only find four innovations; the first commercial radio station, the handheld hair dryer; the Band Aid; and traffic lights. By contrast, last year saw tens of thousands of technological and scientific breakthroughs."
"As more people have access to technology, more problems can be solved and the more capital is available to find those solutions."
"To be clear, there will still be terrorism, war, and murder. Dictatorships and disease won't go away. But the world will quietly continue to get better."
Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur, M.D., aeronautical engineer, founder XPRIZE Foundation

Peter Diamandis on a weightless flight launched by his Zero Gravity Corporation: ‘Every powerful technology is used for good and for bad.’ Photograph: XPrize/Steve Boxall

We have it then on the impressive authority of this man that the world we inhabit is on the cusp of accelerated innovation so profound it will leave our heads spinning. After all, this is a man who invents, innovates, creates, reasons, researches, and envisions no end to humankind's stretch into a remarkable future. He is engrossed with the fields of Human Longevity, Planetary Resources, Space Adventures and biotech Celularity, founder of Singularity University. He is no cerebral slouch.

Artificial neuron in its protective casing on a fingertip © University of Bath/PA

He is as well, as might be expected, a writer, his latest book just released, The Future is Faster Than You Think, a careful inspection of how the reinvention of the world will progress through innovative technology, industry after industry, with historical comparisons, leading to an aura of complete optimism that a better world lies just over the horizon of transformative goods, devices, services, business models and human behaviour.

But not, sadly that much a change in human behaviour, such that we can serenely contemplate an end of strife and any diminishing of pathological capital offences against humanity. On the other hand, people in developed countries will be graced with savings of time and funding as when, for example it began with the invention of the Google search engine, of iPhones and massive data storage capacity; time and money better used to invest in other innovations.

geralt / Pixabay

The science world has moved forward in great leaps and bounds to the present where the cost of sequencing the genome was $100 million in 2001, whereas it now can be done for a mere $100; before that the prototype computer of today took up an entire room, and today's computers are the size of a human hand with infinitely more capability and storage and communicability. Today's technologically advanced cameras, the advances of storage, facial recognition, telephones, laptops, and artificial intelligence; all great leaps forward.

Blockchain technology supported by crowdfunding that raises billions for research and development; brain enhancement techniques boosting concentration and memory to accelerate research outcomes. Before long, consumers will be enabled to play, learn and shop through headsets, glasses or implants and robots and appliances will recognize our faces and voices and preferences. Voice commands on the cusp of replacing typing.

Artificial intelligence will be smarter than the human brain, according to the co-founder of Singularity University who gives that advance to 2029. This innovation will ensure intelligent collaborative tools are available for workers, professionals, analysts and leaders so they can discover smarter solutions to challenges before them. Renewable energy enhancements, batteries and local power grids to accelerate with lower costs and higher performance, globally.

The tourism potential of space travel and the prospect of space colonization lies ahead. Food production, superior education, shopping variations and ideas in real estate all to change profoundly. The dark side of the optimistic view is that technology will not always remain securely in control of responsible agents. New problems can arise when the wrong hands grasp the potentials for global disruption inherent in new technologies, neutral in themselves, dangerous when manipulated that way.

Science Focus

Getting Past the Patent-Profit-Problem in Favour of Repurposing Drugs for Effective anti-Cancer Therapies

"We found that a surprising number of non-oncology drugs are able to kill cancer cell lines in the lab."
"We tested 4,518 compounds in this experiment in total."
"We found 49 non-oncology drugs that were able to selectively kill cancer cell lines -- killing some but not other cancers, which is an ideal property."
Dr.Steven Corsello, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard University

"[The newly-published paper] highlights the struggle to balance transparency and sharing of discoveries, with heavily patent-dependent commercialization requirements for therapies to make it to market."
Dr.Bruce Bloom, Healx, Cambridge, U.K.

Scientists at the Broad Institute and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute identified 49 existing drugs that hold anti-cancer potential and uncovered novel targets that could direct the development of new oncology drugs. (Pixabay)

American researchers have published a paper in Nature Cancer representing research work seen to be the largest to use the Broad Institute's Drug Repurposing Hub of which Dr.Corsello is the director and who led the research. Comprising a collection of over 6,000 sample drugs and compounds either approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or they have been through early-stage clinical trials to prove they are safe for use in people.

In the testing carried out by the researchers to determine whether there are cancer-fighting properties in the drugs, close to 50 drugs meant to treat conditions other than cancer, out of a total of 4,500 non-cancer drugs were found to have some cancer-killing capabilities. The drugs were tested by the researchers on over 550 different cancer cell lines. This type of testing was previously done at a time when researchers grew cell lines one at a time to test each drug individually.

Thanks to new research and technical advances in the use of DNA bar codes -- introducing unique snippets of DNA with a virus to label the cell lines -- used, a technique that enabled the researchers to pool the cell lines with the effect of cutting short the time required to screen, the process was vastly expedited. Four of the drugs were selected for the purpose of more testing, in an effort to fully understand just how they are able to attack and destroy cancer cells.

Of the drugs, one included a diabetes treatment drug, another for inflammation, and a treatment for alcohol abuse, and finally, one for treating canine arthritic pain. The drugs proved to attack cancer in various ways; with the drug tepoxalin developed for use in people but later approved for treating osteoarthritis in dogs attacking a target called MDR1 expressed on the surface of cells that protects them from the effects of chemotherapy.

High levels of this protein often show up in cancer patients who develop resistance to chemotherapy. Chromosome 16, which commonly occurs in some breast cancers showed activity in cancers lacking a portion of chromosome 16 when exposed to Antabuse, a drug approved for the treatment of alcohol dependence. A compound originally developed for the treatment of diabetes, vanadium -- and levonorgestrel, a  hormone used in contraceptives also showed anti-cancer properties.

Animal studies on some of the drugs to determine which have the best chances of success in a clinical trial are being planned by Dr.Corsello's research team. An even greater number of drugs are bent for future testing for possible anti-cancer properties. In limited instances where the drug appears sufficiently promising, the treatment could be brought speedily into clinical trials on cancer patients, suggests Dr.Corsello, but he believes it likelier that identification of new and unexpected molecular targets leading to cancer treatments will be revealed.

Dr.Bloom, representing Cambridge, U.K.-based Healx, a company using artificial intelligence to discover drugs for rare diseases, agrees that new drug targets and the mechanisms of action identified by the researchers in their paper published in Nature Cancer, could be valuable, both for new treatment approaches and for repurposing older drugs.

There is a reminder in all of this of the patent-protection and profit side of researching and producing new drugs, according to Dr.Bloom, that while the data support non-oncology drugs to be repurposed to oncology and even more discoveries could result, the disclosure of specific drug names and targets might complicate pharmaceutical companies in protecting future repurposed and new treatment discoveries.

Illustration of a tumour cell being obliterated by drug therapy. Researchers found diabetes medicine is a cancer killer. Photo: Getty

Avoid a Sedentary Lifestyle, Avoid Processed and Convenience Foods

"The health benefits of a low-carb diet may not only depend on the types of protein and fat, but also the quality of carbohydrate remaining in the diet."
"Our findings show clearly that the quality rather than the quantity of macronutrients in our diet has an important impact on our health."
"The debate on the health consequences of low-fat or low-carbohydrate diets is largely moot unless the food sources of fats or carbohydrates are clearly defined."
Dr.Zhilei Shan, post-doctoral researcher, Department of Nutrition, Harvard University

"In this study, overall low-carbohydrate-diet and low-fat-diet scores were not associated with total mortality. Unhealthy low-carbohydrate-diet and low-fat-diet scores were associated with higher total mortality, whereas healthy low-carbohydrate-diet and low-fat-diet scores were associated with lower total mortality."
"These findings suggest that the associations of low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets with mortality may depend on the quality and food sources of macronutrients."
Study researchers

"It's more about selecting whole natural or minimally-processed foods, regardless of the amount of carbs or fat."
"This would translate into a diet that may include a variety of whole foods in various combinations including fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts and fish as well as whole fat dairy and unprocessed red meat and poultry."
Andrew Mente, associate professor, Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact. McMaster University, Hamilton

Exchanging carbohydrates for plant-based fats and proteins might promote healthy ageing  Getty Images

A newly-published study out of Harvard University where researchers followed 37,233 adults for two decades published in JAMA Internal Medicine, posits that people who follow low-carb or low-fat diets may not live longer than others, unless they also take care to avoid junk food and sweets in their daily diet. Study participants were 50 years old on average, when the study began. During the period of the study 4,866 people died, representing about 13 percent of participants.

The researchers reported that overall, mortality rates for people who followed low-carb or low-fat diets and those who did not, had similar outcomes in longevity. Still, risk of premature death for people on these diets who consumed healthier foods such as plant proteins --  unsaturated fats and good quality carbohydrates such as vegetables, fruits, legumes and whole grains -- did appear to be lower.

Mortality, on the other hand, was higher for people who included a lot of saturated fats and animal protein in their diets. Those who received most calories from unhealthy foods were 16 percent likelier to die during the study period, among low-carb dieters than those people who followed the healthiest diets. People were 12 percent more likely to die who took most of their calories from unhealthy foods with low-fat diets.

National dietary surveys conducted between 1999 to 2014 provided data leading to the findings when participants were asked to recall everything they had eaten in the previous 24 hours. 849 people died from heart disease and 1,068 of cancer, during the study period -- with several types of cancer and many cardiovascular diseases associated with unhealthy diets.

The analysis sees a limitation in that researchers were able to score participants' diet quality based solely on their recollection of a single day's intake of food. Without viewing the possibility that some of those same people might have altered their eating habits over time. What occurs in the body when people consume various types of carbs or fats that might impact longevity is not really known, points out Kevin C.Maki, researcher at Indiana University.

Getty Images

The Disease of Old Age : Defying Death

"One hundred will be the new 60."
"The average human health span will increase by ten-plus years this decade."
"The age of one hundred is easily in sight now. And kids born today can expect to live to 105."
Peter Diamandis, space, technology, aeronautics and medicine pioneer

"Aging is a disease, and that disease is treatable."
"You should feel hungry regularly [to slow down the aging process or avert damage]."
David Sinclair, professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School

istock

The Abundane360 conference held in Los Angeles last week revealed quite a few very interesting aspirational research programs along with plans to proceed at a fast pace to introduce a new kind of medicine in the treatment of humans suffering from the malady of aging. Mr. Diamandis outlined some fascinating facets about the new direction of medical treatments, in line with his belief, shared by others in Silicon Valley that aging is a "disease"; the result of "planned obsolescence".

If so, that planning can be attributed to our maker. God, science, nature, whatever you choose to believe in. And the novel sciences of human intervention are set to second-guess biology. The damage to certain critical bodily mechanisms, sensors and functions within the human body as they wear down and bring us ever closer to death, can all be ameliorated, and will, according to his prognosis of future health treatments.

This describes longevity research whose purpose is to identify core issues, then reverse or mitigate them. With the inestimable assistance of artificial intelligence, machine learning and computational heft breakthroughs and clinical trials are literally just 'around the corner' in terms of several years before they can be lunched on human subjects.

The research issues include stem cell supply restoration, regenerative medicine to regrow damaged cartilage, ligaments, tendons, bone, spinal cords and neural nerves, along with vaccine research against chronic diseases like Alzheimer's; and lastly United therapeutics, developing technology to solve organ shortage for humans through genetically engineering organs to be grown in pigs.

Courtesy of Thomas Leuthard

Ambitious? Yes! Feasible? Time will tell. The development of new, tailor-made medicines is being accelerated with the aid of new tools at a fraction of costs seen today. The conference was informed by Alex Zhavoronkov of Insilico Medicine that drugs that today take ten years at a cost of $3 billion to research, see a failure rate of 90 percent. His company, however, is able to test in 46 days with the use of human tissue, then model, design and produce with the aid of advanced computing, in mere weeks.

Diamandis asked his audience whether there was anyone awaiting a knee replacement operation among them. They could be wise to hold off on that operation until perhaps 2021, he suggested, when regenerative medicine innovator Samumed LLC of San Diego is prepared to complete phase three clinical trials of cartilage regeneration.

The company, according to its founder Osman Kibar, has been successful in injecting a protein to activate nearby stem cells to produce new cartilage in a knee or a new disc in a spine. Preliminary success to regenerating muscle and neural cells, retinal cells, skin and hair has also been completed. These near-miraculous manipulations of nature's creaking elderliness (senescence) in human bodies has seen the private company raise $15.5 billion for continued research and product development.

There is another emerging discipline called "epigenetic reprogramming"; identifying how reversal of deficiencies in proteins, stem cells, chromosomes, genes to repair DNA and damaged cells. David Sinclair, professor genetics at Harvard Medical School is a leader in this field. His book, Lifespan: Why We Age -- and Why We Don't Have To, offers advice, while it explains the science.

According to Dr. Sinclair, lifestyle habits can slow the aging process. Humans need to exercise and to sleep -- and to eat judiciously and less frequently.

Stressing our bodies with temperature changes by going from a hot sauna to rolling in snow invigorates the body's processes and cells, he explains. Eating plants that have been environmentally stressed, called "xenohormesis"; gaining benefits from consuming stressed plants that contain more beneficial nutrients such as wild strawberries enhanced with added antioxidant capacity and phenol content....

“Aging is a disease, and that disease is treatable,” says David Sinclair, professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School.Getty Images/iStockphoto

Everything Old is New Again

"From building on your cardiovascular engine to improving your hand-eye co-ordination, skipping is a great workout for all fitness levels as you can attack it at a pace that suits you."
"By using your muscles in both your upper and lower body throughout, the time spent doing alternative low-impact cardiovascular work isn't going to match the potential calorie burn achieved during a 20-minute [skipping] session."
Alex Rennie, instructor, Third Space studios

milan2099Getty Images

"[It's harder than it might seem, but it builds] endurance, stamina and agility [while incorporating the added benefit of being] less detrimental to the knees than other calorie-burning workouts like jogging."
John Odametey, 29, architect

"[I was] frustrated that I couldn't seem to remember the basics of spinning the rope round with  your wrists [but] pretty impressed at how many different exercises could be done."
Polyanna Ward, 26

Was a time when it was pretty standard for male high school athletes taking part in their school's phys ed and sports teams to become familiar with a simple rope used by children -- mostly girls -- in the playground. Before-game-practise workouts usually featured skip-rope bouts to warm up and hone nimbleness and timing. That rope would just whiz about the muscled teen in preparation for a game as part of a regular exercise routine.

Calorie-burning is said to be maximized when all of the major muscle groups are worked at the same time. The measure of the workout, whether a steady pace or turning to one of higher intensity, is up to the skipper and what is meant to be accomplished; toning the body and burning fat, or consequently focusing on training the body reflexes to peak performance. Or both, since both, after all, will fall into place.

Jump rope workouts     Men's Journal

Treadmills, bikes and cross trainers have long since taken the place in exercise routines of the once-lowly skipping rope, mostly the use of which is considered a child's game, and consigned to the primary school playground. In boxing it is another matter altogether for its health benefits. There are classes dedicated to rope skipping led by boxing coaches, and popular enough that they'll remain a mainstay in the fitness itinerary.

Skip-rope jumping isn't for those experiencing joint aches. A 45-minute class will typically utilize a number of techniques. For those tired with the lower-intensity alternatives to running, however, including spinning, rowing, etc., jumping on reinforced floors wearing supportive shoes lends to skipping, a less knee-destroying opportunity; straightforward, with no need to attend specific classes to re-acquaint with a rope.

Women's Health

Participants who skipped for ten minutes daily experienced equal cardiovascular improvements as compared to those who ran for 30 minutes instead, according to a 2013 study. Rope-skipping becomes a rapid calorie-burner. Aside from the ordinary skipping rope there are quite a few alternatives. Some of which track the number of turns, minutes of activity and calories burned. As well, there are high-tech-end of the spectrum ropes that link to  smartphones, offering recommendations for workouts.

Fitness skipping transcends playground jumping, including double-unders to crossovers and side swings. Skill boosting to acquire a flexible set of skipping workouts is a challenge in and of itself.

"The skipping rope is small but mighty. It may look simple, but, when used in the right way, it can provide a full-body cardio and strength session that targets your biceps, triceps, deltoids and chest, as well as toning your thighs, hips and glutes."

Mark Reigate, head trainer, Fitzroy Lodge Amateur Boxing Club, London

Vaping Advertisements and Anti-Vaping Campaigns

"The FDA campaign on social media, it's great that it's there, but it's not changing the trend of high prevalence of pro-vaping content [on Instagram]."
"The FDA campaign just becomes a drop in the ocean, practically, because it's so hard to compete with the enormous volume of pro-vaping advertisements."
"That's one of the dangerous things, youth are very susceptible to any type of influence that is so well advertised. Their brains are still developing, it's hard to resist. They want to fit in and they want to be cool. All the marketing strategies are so well crafted in the pro-cigarette message."
Julia Vassey, researcher, UC Berkeley Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment

"It's really concerning because we're worried about a new generation of young people who could become addicted to nicotine."
"We have faith that society and government overall will put the health of young people ahead of the interests of corporation and we'll see regulation in the near future to protect young people."
Lesley James, senior manager, policy, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada

A post from British e-cigarette Instagram influencer @elysiaalessia on the #vapenation hashtag page. elysiaalessia/ Instagram

E-cigarettes were originally marketed as a novel invention whose purpose was to help smokers break their addiction to cigarettes. It was advertised as a successful mechanism that, though using nicotine, was less harmful and would help smokers succeed in weaning themselves away from the infinitely more threatening habit of cigarette smoking. Since its introduction to the consumer market its popularity has risen exponentially, particularly among an audience not initially targeted; teens and young adults.

When manufacturers began flavouring e-cigarettes, their audience was definitely not mature adults. Teens were attracted to the fruit flavours, the catchy names and the attractive containers. And Instagram, a popular social web-posting platform, is rife with marketing advertisements, many of which show models and some celebrity figures soft-peddling vaping products. Awareness campaigns launched to warn young people and particularly teens of the injurious aspects of vaping languish in relative obscurity, against the huge proliferation of vaping advertisements.

The products still contain nicotine, a highly addictive substance known for its negative health consequences. The number of high-school students who responded to a recent U.S. National Youth Tobacco Survey, revealed their use of e-cigarettes over-doubled from 12 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2019. Repeated e-cigarette use has been shown through research to lead to lung and brain damage, spurring the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to launch a youth-oriented awareness campaign, The Real Cost.

Researchers from the University of California's new study published in Frontiers in Communication, analyzed hundreds of thousands of Instagram posts between 2017 and 2019 to determine whether the FDA campaign made an impact on social interactions with vaping. Lead author Julia Vassey explained that the study discovered the average amount of likes on pro-vaping Instagram posts rose in fact, since the FDA campaign began.

The UC Berkley team placed their focus on Instagram when they were informed from e-cigarette 'influencers' of their growing followers, with some of the influencers sharing their analytics data with the research team which then understood that around 15 percent of followers of pro-vaping accounts were of the ages between 13 to 17. Each pro-vaping hashtag published over 500,000 new posts monthly while #The Real Cost published a mere 50 a month in a like time frame.

Using a "deep learning" software, the research team analyzed over 40,000 vaping posts on Instagram enabling the identification of each image's contents, to discover that the most popular e-cigarette marketing posts featured female models using vapes or alternatively, male models doing tricks with the vaping products.

Add caption

In Canada, Health Canada advertises risks related to vaping on their own website, but in addition hosts seminars in high schools, engaging with teens aged 13 to 18 through activities. Where, since 2018, their advertisements on the dangers in vaping have also appeared on social media sites like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitch. After viewing ads from Health Canada's outreach program, 26 percent of youth responded they would stop vaping, while 72 percent of teens who took part in the in-person school activities stated they were less likely to start using vapes and more likely to stop if they were already vaping.

Its a steep uphill battle in a social media world inhabited by teens, where 11 million posts confront them on line, produced by e-cigarette marketing teams and influencers, purposed to lure them into the vaping market, when posts published to inform the same demographic of the dangers and risks inherent in vaping number 3,000. The odds are 10,000 to one, which goes quite a way to explaining how marketing has made such inroads in the youth population, while health regulators continue to explore avenues to counteract their advertising successes and help teens realize the larger picture and their choices, gambling with their health.

Heading Toward a New Pandemic?

"There are still many gaps in our understanding. The pieces of the puzzle that is 2019-nCOV are only now beginning to come together."
"The exposure and possible infection of health workers remain extremely worrying."
Lancet medical journal editorial

"[People might be infected without knowing it] really tracking and containing this thing could be very difficult, because lots of people are capable of spreading it even if they don't have symptoms themselves."
"[The next one to two weeks] will tell the tale of whether this becomes a real global problem or stays mostly geographically isolated."
Matthew Miller, associate professor, Michael G.DeGroote Institute for Infectious Diseases Research, McMaster University

Workers manufacture protective face masks in a factory in Hubei Province, January 23. Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.

This is a fast-moving public health situation, the Wuhan novel coronavirus was detected in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people mere weeks ago when the first victims were seen with a puzzling new virus resembling SARS, whose cause baffled health professionals in the city. It was soon recognized in the coronavirus family like SARS, but different, and those differences are still revealing themselves. So far, the virus has been diagnosed in people in various parts of the globe, and spreading rapidly.

Most of its victims have been diagnosed in China, from Wuhan primarily, the epicentre of the epidemic, said to have been seen first among workers from the Wuhan open air live market, since closed down. Details are slowly emerging, but updates are continuous and it is now known that diagnoses have been made beyond China, in Nepal, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, France and the United States.

China is rapidly going into lockdown; many of its megacities are now in quarantine condition, public transportation is at a standstill, and people are advised they may not leave their cities to enter others and nor may any others from outside enter theirs. It has been seen that the infection causes clusters of fatal pneumonia mostly among the elderly who contract it. Of the original 41 cases, six people have died. Five of that number of 41 developed acute cardiac injury; four required mechanical ventilation.

Medical staff of Union Hospital affiliated with Huazhong University of Science and Technology form an "assault team" on January 22 to tackle Wuhan novovirus.

The Lancet journal published a number of papers. One study by Chinese scientists tracked a family of six from Guangdong province who visited Wuhan in late December and early January of whom five were infected along with another member of the family who hadn't travelled with them to Wuhan. Indicating to scientists the first evidence of human-to-human transmission. A child of ten, who wore a face mask during the visit was infected as well, but was without symptoms.

Medical staff transfer a patient of a suspected case of a new coronavirus at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong, China Jan. 22, 2020. cnsphoto via REUTERS

The disease is seen to have a three-to-six-day incubation period, with the troubling onset of fever, cough and muscle pain. Some who become infected experience the disease mildly, while older people develop severe infections requiring intubation and intensive care. Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization feels "it has not yet become a global health emergency", with WHO closely tracking ongoing events to be prepared to rule otherwise.

Since the first alert of December 30 of four unexplained cases of pneumonia in Wuhan linked to the seafood market known to sell live animals for slaughter and human consumption, over 835 cases have been confirmed in China, 41 of them fatal, with a total of 1,400 cases seen globally. Although mystery remains about the source of the infections, the virus is most closely recognized as related to coronaviruses from Chinese horseshoe bats. Chinese cuisine is comprised of a range of exotic beasts; speculation is that the Chinese cobra which is a bat predator might have been the vector in this case.

Sixteen health-care workers, mostly working in the same wards as those infected, contracted the virus. The published studies are an early start in understanding as much of the details as are needed to help cope with this new virus that is already proving able to mutate to other strains. That most people who contract the novel coronavirus fail to experience classical symptoms such as a running nose or sneezing may complicate the spread of the virus.

"Sneezes and runny noses are a prime way for people to spread infections", noted Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at Norwich Medical School,University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.

China's Insatiable Appetite

"Between 1996 and 2011, the number of countries supplying the Chinese sea cucumber market expanded from 35 to 83. Over 90% of the world’s tropical coastline now lies within countries that export sea cucumbers to Hong Kong, a large proportion of which are traded on to mainland China."
"In many cases, finance extends from importers in China all the way through the supply chain to individual catchers."
Michael Fabinyi, Kate Barclay, chinadialogueocean

"The sea cucumber has been used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat everything from high blood pressure and fatigue to constipation and impotence."
"The sea cucumber is low in fat and cholesterol while being high in protein and B vitamins. It is also rich in antioxidants."
thespruceEats

In China, sea cucumbers are considered a luxury food and are used to treat kidney problems and impotence. Some species can sell for more than US$600 per kilogramme or 3,765 yuan (Photo: treetstreet/Thinkstock)

At one time in traditional Chinese cuisine culture, sea cucumbers were reserved for the wealthy, who could afford what has been viewed by the Chinese community as a luxury edible. China's economic boom has seen millions of people leaving poverty to become part of the growing Chinese middle class. With that rise in financial status, the voracious appetite for table delicacies has seen the popularity of sea cucumber soar among people who can now afford the expensive treat.

The creatures have a reputation in Asia for their nutritional value, along with their unusual texture; believed to have medicinal properties to treat medical conditions ranging from arthritis to impotency. There are, needless to say, many other wild creatures that Chinese cuisine values for their purported pharmaceutical properties, in a long tradition of Chinese medicine. Chinese are known to pay astronomical sums for creature delicacies to which they ascribe miraculous health properties.

It is why donkey populations worldwide have declined, through export to China in such unsustainable numbers as to threaten the species, from Brazil to Pakistan. It is why wild animals such as rhinoceros, tigers, antelopes, snakes buffaloes, deer, bear, sharks, elephants, monkeys ... the list goes on ... and on -- are similarly under threat. Threatening the very existence of many animals whose numbers are increasingly precarious.

Because of the huge popularity of sea cucumbers, the oceans have been literally vacuumed of their presence around China, leaving the animals to become a rarity in their wild state because of the demand increase of the last several decades. Natural stocks of local species have been depleted. Leading to aquaculture, raising sea cucumbers in pens or ponds. Others are raised in the sea in conditions approximating their natural habitat, and these are considered to be free-range.

The local economy on the Liaodong Peninsula has undergone a transition where tidal flatlands have been transformed to a patchwork of ponds, the entire area so huge, they appear in satellite maps. Fed by ocean water, the ponds are seeded with the young and in a year's time they'll have grown sufficiently large to harvest. Huge structures that breed sea cucumbers destined for the ponds are located further inland.

"People here all rely on this", explained Liu Aiqing, while weighing sea cucumbers pulled by divers from a nearby pond. With a value of over $8 billion annually, sea cucumbers are now the most valuable of farmed sea products in China, according to Bao Pengyun, marine biologist who helped contribute to the development of the industry in China through his research at Dalian Ocean University.

The animals feed off the rocks and sand where they thrive while purifying surrounding water. Total eradication of the creatures would have a devastating result through the food chain, from either end. Some estimates place 70 percent of the world's edible species of sea cucumbers as over-exploited, from the South Pacific, to the Mediterranean, to the Gulf of Mexico.

As far as Mr. Bao, the marine biologist is concerned, little difference exists between sea cucumbers raised in pens or those raised in free range, and those from the wild. "Very much the same", he insists. "The difference is tangible", contends Mou Jie, a woman who set out with friends to drive up the coast to take a ferry to deposit her on Guanglu, where she plans to buy the delicacies.

South China Morning Post

Sea cucumbers from cold waters grow more slowly than others, taking three years to reach maturity, rather than one, giving them the reputation of being more nutritious. Whether fresh, partially processed or dried, wild sea cucumbers are priced at two to three times the penned versions. Dried, the most expensive can cost close to $1,000 a kilogram.

And then there are those who claim sea cucumbers to be flavourless, with the texture of cartilage or rubber. Actually, they have little taste of their own; like another Eastern food product that some swear by and others swear at -- tofu -- sea cucumbers pick up flavour from whatever it is they are cooked in, or with. Plucked alive from the sea, lightly blanched, then bathed in a sauce of garlic, cilantro and chili oil, their taste then assumes that of a rubbery piece of cartilage flavoured by a sauce of garlic, cilantro and chili oil.

Takers, anyone?

Sea Cucumbers are being eaten to death : National Geographic

Ricocheting Tweets of Impulse

"What kind of multi billion dollar company gifts it's (sic) Canadian employees barbecue sauce as a holiday gift? Yet the USA employees stuff their face with an actual holiday gift box!"
In previous years, Mehaidli complained, Fastenal doled out gift boxes filled with candy, beef jerky, cookies and M&Ms. 
"We always really appreciated that [When previous years' gifts contained candy, beef jerky, cookies and M&Ms]. I work really hard. We get pushed really hard to reach our sales goals. I felt I gave this company so much and I felt really disrespected when I was given barbecue sauce as a holiday gift."
"Well, it’s always kind of good to hear someone admit they’re wrong, or somewhat wrong. It definitely could’ve been handled a different way."
"I’d been with the company for six-and-a-half years and I’d never been written up once."
"There was nothing, no one had seen it, [his complaining tweet on his anonymous account with not one follower] no one liked it, no one commented. It was just a dead tweet floating around Twitter."
"The company has already admitted to wrongful dismissal. They said this could’ve been handled in a different way."
"I wouldn’t say it’s regret … I let my emotions get the best of me at first. That’s all I’ve got to say."
Hussien Mehaidli, former Fastenal Co. Canada employee, Burnaby, B.C.

Hussien Mehaidli, a 27-year-old from Burnaby, B.C., said he was fired from his job after complaining over Twitter about a bottle of barbecue sauce given to him as a holiday gift.

"I am not going to deny it. We did terminate an employee."
"Calmer heads didn’t prevail over this. Nobody reached out to me to say, ‘Really? I am getting fired over a tweet?’ It’s an incredibly unfortunate event."
Fastenal CEO Dan Florness

"[The response to the article was] a little shocking [with some readers falsely accusing them of being involved in the employee’s firing]."
"Most everything has been positive defending the company. Except for a few people who didn’t read the article."
"And that’s what concerns us the most. We had nothing to do with what transpired with the gentleman. And if people would just take the time to read the article: we just sold the product."
Gary Lalonde, owner, Get Sauced

Ah, social media and that twitchy Twitter trigger-finger. It's come back to haunt the 27-year-old branch manager of Fastenal Canada, a branch of Minnesota-based Fastenal Co. who was outraged at Christmas when Canadian employees were given a grill scraper and a bottle of barbecue sauce as their Christmas gift, when they had been accustomed to a grab-bag of edible goodies which they knew the American employees were gifted with. Both the Canadian and Mexican branch employees were out of luck; grill scraper and barbecue sauce it was.

The company explained in its defense over the issue of the varied gifts to its employees that as a result of customs concerns they found it easier this year to just supply each branch with equal funding and let the managers decide what they would buy to dole out to their employees. Who might have thought that as a result some would be offended and wreak their frustration by posting a complaint on Twitter?

The astonishing thing is that this man's Twitter account is rather moribund; it is anonymous, it has no followers and even fewer to view the tweet; no one 'liked' it, and it was speedily deleted by the man who after a few  hours of airing his disgust 'sobered up'.

But someone saw it. 'Someone'? The employer, that's who. The Twitter account boasted no picture of its owner and he hadn't identified himself on it as an employee of the company. Someone at head office, however, tracked his feed when he bought World Wrestling Entertainment tickets at his workstation, and identified the employee in question. The result of which was that he was summarily let go.

He's now more than ever aggrieved over the 'unfairness' of it all. The company is not exactly delighted that an employee they fired is now preparing to sue them for unlawful dismissal. And the manufacturer of the sauce is uber-annoyed that they and their product have been dragged into a social media frenzy of people taking 'sides', pleading that they had nothing to do with the contretemps that has embroiled them.

Is calling your employer the Grinch on Twitter dismissal-worthy? Mike Blake/Reuters

Had the company head simply called the errant employee in to discuss the situation, to express the company's disappointment and dissatisfaction with his choice of protest in a very public forum and reached an agreement with the employee that it was an unwise performance and one that wouldn't be repeated, no blow-up on social media would have occurred. Now that embarrassment to the company resulted in a firing over a briefly-posted tweet, and an impending lawsuit looms, the publicity surrounding the company is far more injurious to its reputation than the mere tweet might have been.

As for the employee himself, he has done himself few favours. On the one hand, he believes he was a loyal and hard-working employee of a company that failed to appreciate his efforts -- he later discovered that irrespective of what the gifts given out for Christmas were comprised of to the company's U.S., Canadian and Mexican employees, the cost was equal for all; $27, leading him to express his pique, which cost him his employment.

But his rash action in posting the tweet, and his latest action in putting together a lawsuit to bring the company to account for his firing over such a slight error in judgement, will certainly fail to impress future employers when Mr. Mehaidli goes out into the employment market to peddle his talents in the workforce. Interestingly enough, Canadian arbitrators have confirmed in the past that disparaging  your superiors and company on Facebook is cause for discharge from employment.

Fastenal in Winona, Minn. recently fired a Canadian employee after his tweet complained about the company’s Christmas gift

Bite the Cucumber: Eat Your Fruits and Vegetables!

"What we know is that people tend to eat less healthy when they are stressed."
"So, if you see a carrot less as something like, 'Ugh, gosh, I have to eat a carrot' and more, 'I get paid to eat a carrot', does that mitigate the effects of stress on healthy eating?"
"Obviously, we had the hypothesis that incentives might buffer the effects of stress and diet, but I didn't think it would be this clear."
"I thought there might be a glimmer of something going on, so when we actually saw the effects and the size of the effects, I was pretty stunned."
Angela Bryan, professor of psychology and neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder

"Where there is most evidence for effectiveness for incentives is in those who tend to be poor, and have mental health problems ... including addiction."
Theresa Marteau, director, Behaviour and Health Research unit, University of Cambridge

Photo by Getty Images

So, is it bribery to 'pay' someone to eat whole foods like fruits and vegetables that are good for them; nutritious and delicious which they would otherwise not include in their daily diet? And if it does qualify as bribery, is that a bad thing? The very word has illicit connotations. Is that a contrivance of sneaky do-goodism? And does it matter? Before even getting to that stage, would it work? That's what researchers at University of Colorado Boulder set out to determine.

And according to their findings published in the Journal of Health Psychology, busy people will respond positively to the notion that someone will pay them to eat healthy food. Their ploy to entice people to eat daily servings of fruit and vegetables if for no other reason than to scoop up a financial reward, appears to have worked handsomely. The study resulted in the conclusion that a financial incentive can impact on eating habits and stress levels.

According to Dr. Bryan, her team began the study for the purpose of determining whether incentivizing healthy behaviours could reduce people's feelings of pressure and stress in their daily lives. The researchers tasked 128 study participants to track their daily stress levels, along with fruit and vegetable consumption for a period of three weeks during which one group was given a dollar for each time they ate a serving of fruit or vegetables and the control group received nothing as compensation.

For days when test subjects reported they felt stressed, those in the group being paid maintained their consumption intake of fruits and vegetables in contrast to whose who received no payment who consumed fewer servings of fruits and vegetables.

In acknowledgement that the researchers based their findings on self-reporting, seen to be subjective and unreliable, they recommended that any additional investigation might build on their findings through the use of "a more objective method of measurement", as well as tracking subjects over a longer term to understand how enduring new eating habits could be.

There is a bit of self-defeating irony both in the study and its outcome. With the impression that if you have to pay someone to eat something that is good for them the food in question must be fairly nasty in taste, when nothing could be further from reality. Not all vegetables are the dreaded broccoli and brussels sprouts; most fresh market vegetables taste quite wonderful, and it's hard to think of any fruit that doesn't make anyone's appetite tingle with anticipation.

Other studies in the past viewing the effectiveness of health-related incentive programs discovered they are most productive when they address "simple, discrete and time-limited" actions such as getting vaccinated or visiting the doctor. When it comes to "complex and entrenched" behaviours such as quality of diet and exercise, as well as smoking, they've proven to be less useful to the purpose underlying the attempted incentive-inducing behaviour.

Finally, in the view of Dr. Marteau of the behaviour and health research unit at Cambridge, whether an incentive program works or whether it doesn't will ultimately depend as much on individual circumstances as it will the nature of the behaviour that has been targeted for alteration.