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Mark Zuckerberg wants to eliminate all screens from your life with special glasses.

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If Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his way, you’ll never have to buy a gadget with a screen again.

Instead, you’ll be using a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses or even contacts in the future in order to place digital content on top of any surface.

facebook glasses

At a keynote speech at Facebook’s annual F8 developers conference Tuesday, Zuckerberg said that while the company is kicking off its AR efforts with the smartphone camera and screen, the ultimate goal is to just have one gadget that rules them all.

“We all know where we want this to get eventually,” Zuckerberg said during the keynote. “We all want glasses or eventually contact lenses that look and feel normal but let us overlay all kinds of information and digital objects on top of the real world.”

To be clear, Zuckerberg didn’t come out and say Facebook is building a glasses or contacts right away since the technology is so far off. Facebook isn’t the only company exploring AR glasses either. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Snap and the startup Magic Leap are all focused on developing similar types of products.

But the all have the same goal: to eliminate screens from your life and give you that one gadget to trump the rest.

Source:http://www.businessinsider.in

The 15 most-wanted types of employees on LinkedIn

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Are you looking to change jobs, or even industries?

Then it helps to know which positions recruiters are trying to fill.

LinkedIn collected data from a survey of 4,000 recruiters around the world to find out who, exactly, recruiters are looking for.

Below, find the top 15 types of roles recruiters are trying to fill, as well as the current number of job openings for each occupation, taken from the number of open listings on LinkedIn as of March 31, 2017.

Read more. URL:http://www.businessinsider.in/the-15-most-wanted-types-of-employees-on-linkedin/articleshow/58170650.cms

Depression may be our brain’s way of telling us to stop and solve a problem.

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At any given time, about 5% of Americans report symptoms of moderate or severe depression. Major depressive disorder is so common that at some point in life, one in six Americans (15%) will suffer from it.

The prevalence of depression presents economic problems as well – it’s one of the most common causes of disability, it has effects in the workplace, and it’s responsible for a host of suicide-related costs. In 2010, the economic burden of depression in the US was estimated to be $210.5 billion.

crouching subway sad stressed

So why does such a debilitating condition strike so many people?

The traditional understanding is that depression is just a breakdown in the way things are normally supposed to work in the brain – chemical imbalances that can be righted through a combination of medication and behavioral shifts.

But there’s also a theory that instead of being purely a disorder, depression might be a specific behavioral strategy that we’ve evolved, a biological adaptation that serves a purpose. As Matthew Hutson explains in a Nautilus feature on the potential evolutionary roots of depression and suicidal behavior , that purpose might be to make us stop, understand, and deal with an important problem.

Hutson explains that evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews and psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson first elaborated on this idea, called the “analytical rumination hypothesis,” in an article published in Psychological Review in 2009.

The basic concept is that what we think of as a disorder is actually a way our brains analyze and dwell on a problem in the hopes of coming up with a way to deal with it. The researchers suggest it’s possible that a difficult or complex problem triggers a “depressive” reaction in some people that sends them into a sort of analytical mode.

With depression, Hutson writes, “[t]here’s an increase in rumination, the obsessing over the source of one’s pain,” along with increased analytical activity in the brain and REM sleep, which helps with memory processing. A major symptom of depression is anhedonia, the inability to take pleasure from normal activities. According to this approach, those activities could be seen as disrupting this “processing” phase.

This hypothesis would account for the fact that the majority of depressive episodes occur after a significant life event like a death or the end of a relationship.

In their 2009 paper, Andrews and Thomson even suggest this idea could explain why depression and anxiety so frequently occur together.

“We hypothesize that depression and anxiety often co-occur because some problems require both analysis (promoted by depressed affect) and vigilance (promoted by anxiety),” they write. Analysis allows someone to understand the inciting factor, vigilance is a way of trying to prevent it from happening again.

addict rehab counselor therapist therapy

Implications for treatment

As fascinating as evolutionary explanations are, it’s hard to prove they are correct, especially if they haven’t yet been reinforced by other research.

The idea that depression might be a biological adaptation rather than a mental disorder is not the main consensus of the mental health community. And even if the hypothesis is correct, it’s likely incomplete and doesn’t explain all of depression.

Complex problems usually have a number of causes. About 20% of depression cases aren’t preceded by a major life event – there may be some cause in the past, but we don’t know for sure. We also know thatgenetics can play some role in a person’s susceptibility to depression. As Andrews and Thomson point out, there are different types of depression, some of which may have different causes. They also write that there are alternative evolutionary explanations that could co-exist with their hypothesis.

But if the analytical rumination hypothesis can be further validated, it could have major implications for how we treat this kind of mental illness in the future.

In that case, the approach to treating depression could shift to deal more with the underlying cause, rather than just treating symptoms. One anthropologist told Hutson that if the theory is right, treating depression with antidepressants might be like treating a broken bone with painkillers (instead of providing both painkillers and a cast to help the break heal). By that logic, therapy could be seen as an important part of treatment, since it can help people better understand and cope with whatever caused their depressive episodes.

Traditional antidepressants have been very effective , even life-changing, for some. But those approaches don’t work in the long term for everyone, which is why researchers are investigating all kinds of different therapies.

Even if depression is found to be some sort of evolutionary “tool” or adaptation, it clearly doesn’t necessarily help people solve the problem that causes it. But new understandings may help us think about new or better forms of treatment – something that’s always welcome.

Source:http://www.businessinsider.in

Elon Musk has launched a company that hopes to link your brain to a computer.

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Elon Musk has already launched a new company dedicated to linking human brains with computers, The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winklerfirst reported Monday.

elon musk

Internal sources tell the WSJ that the company, called Neuralink, is developing “neural lace” technology that would allow people to communicate directly with machines without going through a physical interface. Neuralink was registered as a medical research company in California last July.

Neural lace involves implanting electrodes in the brain so people could upload or download their thoughts to or from a computer, according to the WSJ report. The product could allow humans to achieve higher levels of cognitive function.

Representatives for Tesla and Elon Musk did not immediately return Business Insider’s request for comment.

Musk has expressed his interest in “neural lace” technology before. Muskfirst described the potential product at Vox Media’s Code Conference in 2016, saying it would allow humans to achieve “symbiosis” with machines.

He said the “neural lace” could prevent people from becoming “house cats” to artificial intelligence.

“I don’t love the idea of being a house cat, but what’s the solution? I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer,” Musk said at the Vox Code Conference. “A third, digital layer that could work well and symbiotically.”

Musk said he was preparing for an announcement regarding his neural lace concept on Twitter in January.

Facebook is also exploring similar technology through its secretive hardware division Building 8. The group is developing non-invasive, brain-computer interface technology that would allow people to communicate with external hardware devices.

elon musk

Musk is already attempting to set up safety standards for artificial intelligence through his nonprofit, OpenAI , which he co-founded with Y Combinator’s Sam Altman in 2015. OpenAI’s mission is to advance”digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.”

But Neuralink’s first products could involve using implants to treat disorders like epilepsy or major depression, the WSJ reports.

Researchers at universities like the University of California and Duke are also developing brain-computer interface technology that would allow paralyzed people to walk again .

Musk also plans to launch the Boring Company , a tunnel venture dedicated to building an underground transportation network to reduce traffic.

Source:http://www.businessinsider.in

If a nuclear bomb is dropped on your city, here’s where you should run and hide.

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  • People who survive a nuclear blast may be exposed to radioactive ash and dust called fallout.
  • Finding a good shelter as soon as possible and going inside is critical to surviving fallout.
  • A scientist has come up with a strategy for when and whether to move to a better fallout shelter.

President Trump has egged on a new arms race . Russia violatedweapons treaties to upgrade its nuclear arsenal . North Korea is developing long-range missiles and practicing for nuclear war – and the US military is considering preemptive attacks on the isolated nation’s military facilities.

Meanwhile, nuclear terrorism and dirty bombs remain a sobering threat.

Though these events are unlikely to trigger the last-ditch option of nuclear war, let alone a blast in your neighborhood, they are very concerning.

So you might be wondering, “If I survive a nuclear-bomb attack, what should I do?”

Michael Dillon, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher, crunched the numbers and helped figure out just that in a 2014 studypublished in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

Likewise, government agencies and other organizations have also explored the harrowing question and came up with detailed recommendations and response plans.

The scenario

New York

You are in a large city that has just been subjected to a single, low-yield nuclear detonation , between 0.1 and 10 kilotons.This is much less powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – about 15 kilotons. However, it’s not unlikely when looking at weapons like the new B61-12 gravity bomb , which is built by the US, maxes out at 50 kilotons, and can be dialed down to 0.3 kilotons . (Russia and Pakistan are working on similar so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons.)

Studies have shown that you and up to 100,000 of your fellow citizens can be saved – that is, if you keep your wits about and radiation exposure low enough.

One of your biggest and most immediate goals is to avoid nuclear fallout.

How to avoid fallout radiation

Fallout is a mess of bomb material, soil, and debris that is vaporized, made radioactive, and sprinkled as dust and ash across the landscape by prevailing winds. (In New York City, for example, a fallout zone would spread eastward.)

radioactive fallout zones

The best thing to do is to find a good place to hide – the more dense material between you and the outside world, the better – then wait until the rescuers can make their way to help you.

The US government recommends hiding in a nearby building , but not all of them provide much shelter from nuclear fallout.

Poor shelters, which include about 20% of houses, are constructed of lightweight materials and lack basements. The best shelters are thick brick or concrete and lack windows. Like a bomb shelter.

This infographic from a government guide to the aftermath of nuclear attacks gives a rough idea on what makes a building a good or bad place to hide from fallout:

nuclear fallout shelter protection

Hiding in the sub-basement of a brick five-story apartment building, for example, should expose you to just 1/200 of the amount of fallout radiation outside.

Meanwhile, hanging out in the living room of your one-story, wood-frame house will only cut down the radiation by half, which – if you are next to a nuclear explosion – will not do much to help you.

So, what do you do if there isn’t a good shelter right near you? Should you stay in a “poor” shelter, or risk exposure to find a better one? And how long should you wait?

Should you stay or should you go?

nuclear fallout escape dillon prsa

In his 2014 study, Dillon developed models to determine your best options. While the answer depends on how far away you are from the blast, since that will determine when the fallout arrives, there are some general rules to follow.If you are immediately next to or in a solid shelter when the bomb goes off, stay there until the rescuers come to evacuate you to less radioactive vistas.

If you aren’t already in a bomb shelter, but know a good shelter is about five minutes away – maybe a large apartment building with a basement that you can see a few blocks away – his calculations suggest hoofing it over there quickly and staying in place.

But if the nice, thick-walled building would take about 15 minutes travel time, it’s better to hole up in the flimsy shelter for awhile – but you should probably leave for a better shelter after roughly an hour (and maybe pick up some beers and sodas on the way: A study in the ’50s found they taste fine after a blast ).

This is because some of the most intense fallout radiation has subsided by then, though you still want to reduce your exposure.

Other fallout advice

Below are some other guidelines that Dillon compiled from other studies and are based on how decent your first and second shelters are:

ideal shelter nuclear fallout moving times dillon prsa

One of the big advantages of the approach that this paper uses is that, to decide on a strategy, evacuation officials need to consider only the radiation levels near shelters and along evacuation routes – the overall pattern of the radioactive death-cloud does not factor into the models. This means decisions can be made quickly and without much communication or central organization (which may be spare in the minutes and hours after a blast).

Other researchers have analyzed other similar scenarios in papers, whose findings are summarized in the chart below:

nuclear fallout guidelines dillon prsa

Source:http://www.businessinsider.in

Google Maps will soon let you share your real-time location – here’s how it works.

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Google Maps

If you’re the type of person who texts your friends “I just left, I’ll be there soon” when you’re really about to step into the shower, you’re not going to like this news: Google is updating its popular Maps app  with new features let friends view each other’s location in real-time.

The location-sharing feature only works if you decide to share your current location with a specific person, and you can limit how long a friend sees your location. Ideally, this will provide Google Maps users with a handy way to let their friends know how close, or far away, they are from a rendez-vous – and just how late they really will be.

Google said the update is coming “soon,” though it did provide an exact release date.

While you wait for the update, here’s a look at how it works:

The new feature looks simple enough to use, requiring only that you tap the blue dot that indicates your location and then select “share my location.”

You can share your location with anyone in your Google Contacts list, regardless of whether they are on iOS, Android or on a computer. You will also have the option to bypass Google Contacts and copy a link to send to any recipient.

You will be able to set a time limit on how long you are sharing your location, and the app will notify you that your location is being shared whenever you are in it, so that you don’t inadvertently forget.

And if you’re using Google Maps for driving directions, the update will allow you to share your location and route with whoever you want, providing them with an up-to-date ETA.

These features come on the heels of a Maps update that makes sure you never forget where you parked your car again. Interestingly enough, Google envisions these updates being most useful when planning a surprise birthday party.

Watch the video. URL:https://youtu.be/u62nPKgLJeg

Source:http://www.businessinsider.in/

A new painkiller is being designed that won’t get users high, and it could save thousands of lives

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  • Thousands of Americans are dying from opioid overdoses , but patients with chronic pain are finding it hard to get medications they need.
  • Recent solutions to the problem have focused on making pain pills tougher to abuse, but research suggests that’s not enough.
  • Scientists are now focused on creating painkillers that don’t cause feelings of euphoria.

In the last 16 years, more than 183,000 Americans have died from overdoses related to prescription opioids. As a result, policymakers have tried to make the medications harder to get.

Those efforts seem to have had a somewhat positive impact on the rate of overdoses, but have left patients with chronic pain in a tough spot. Not only is it sometimes hard for these people to get their medications, the increased public attention around opioid risk has made some of them concerned about taking the drugs in the first place – or even having them in the house.

That’s why a handful of companies are focused on creating an entirely new type of painkiller – one that won’t get people hooked. One of those companies is Nektar Therapeutics, which is currently studying a new drug candidate that enters the brain too slowly to cause the feelings of euphoria that many painkillers are known for.

“We have the possibility of being the first new opioid in almost 25 years,” Dr. Stephen K. Doberstein, Nektar’s senior vice president and chief scientific officer, told Business Insider. “I think we’ve reinvented the opioid molecule.”

A drug that enters the brain too slowly to make people feel good

While drugs like oxycodone are excellent at reducing pain, they can also produce powerful feel-good sensations that can be addictive. But recent studies of Nektar’s new painkiller, which is still in clinical trials, suggest that it wouldn’t cause any such high .

The drug is called NKTR-181, though Doberstein likes to call it just “181”.

brain

“181 is a medicine that I’m very passionate about,” he told Business Insider last year .

On Monday, Nektar released the results of a new study designed to look at how well the drug can relieve chronic low-back pain.

The findings were very positive: More than half (51.1%) of the patients who took NKTR-181 said their pain went down by 50%, as compared to less than 38% of the patients who were given the placebo.

Those results build on previous studies that found the drug did not make patients feel euphoric or high .

“Our answer there – to the question of whether we’re causing euphoria or not – is emphatically no,” Doberstein said.

Nektar isn’t alone in its quest to create a high-free opioid.

Epiodyne, a company started by a research team at the University of San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy, is designing a pain drug that wouldn’t trigger a surge in dopamine , a chemical messenger in the brain that is involved in emotions like desire and pleasure. Other companies have also been showing an interest in such research as opioid overdose deaths continue to spike.

Still, the vast majority of development has gone into making so-called “abuse deterrent” drug formulations – pills designed to be impossible to melt down and inject or smash and snort. Since 2010, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a handful of these pills, and 30 moreare currently in development.

“Everyone just wants to figure out how to lock it up in a pill better,” Doberstein said.

But there’s little evidence that those deterrents alone can stem the tide of overdose deaths. Promoting abuse-resistant drugs could encourage doctors to continue overprescribing them. And most of the new pills can still be abused when swallowed.

“I am not convinced that we can engineer our way out of this epidemic, and I would caution against over-relying on abuse-deterrent formulations to do so,” Dr. Caleb Alexander, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, told the Associated Press last year.

That’s where Nektar hopes to come in.

“Our goal here is to have a safe and effective medicine that doctors and patients can feel confident that they’re not going to get high from,” says Doberstein. “That’s something I’m excited about.”

Source:http://www.businessinsider.in

How psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD actually change the way people see the world.

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Psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – are powerful, able to transform the way that people who use them perceive the world.

Because of that, after years of prohibition, psychiatric researchers in the US are hoping to take advantage of that power to transform mental health treatment.

Psilocybin perception of the world

And as the new documentary ” A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin ” shows, the results we’ve seen so far are powerful. Perhaps most interestingly, the film shows how these substances transform the people who undergo this therapy.

“Psilocybin does in 30 seconds what antidepressants take three to four weeks to do,” David Nutt , a professor of neuropsychopharmacology in the division of brain sciences at Imperial College London explains in the film. Researchers have found that a single dose of psilocybin accompanied by therapy can have a transformational effect on mental health – like a “surgical intervention” – able to treat even cases of depression and anxiety that resist standard treatment.

The film follows the researchers and study participants that are at the forefront of this modern era of psychedelic study. Cancer patients facing distress about end of life talk about how their experience helps them overcome that distress and accept their condition. Healthy volunteers who took psilocybin for the first time to help show that it can be used safely in a therapeutic setting describe the way the “trip” changed their perception.

It’s fascinating to see.

On a basic level, a part of the brain that seems to coordinate mood and is very active in cases of depression seems to basically stop acting for a time, allowing connections to form between regions of the brain that rarely communicate with each other. This mimics an effect seen in the minds of long term meditators. Something in this experience seems to cause the “trippy” effects of the drug, which participants in this research undergo while listening to music and sitting with trained observers.

“In terms of whether these agents cause hallucinations, they’re a little bit misclassified, a hallucination is an experience in some sensory phenomenon based on a stimuli that doesn’t exist in reality, it’s internally generated,” says Stephen Ross , an associate professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, in an interview in the film. “Versus an illusion would be looking at the wall and the wall is melting, that would be an illusion, and these drugs tend to cause more illusions than frank hallucinations, they alter how we perceive real stimuli.”

In order to cause these effects, these drugs activate serotonin 2-A receptors, explains David Nichols, president and co-founder of the Heffter Research Institute.

But something about this experience – the brain activation, illusions, and hallucinations – seems to do something more profound that’s harder to understand. It’s able to reliably cause what researchers call a “mystical experience.” That experience is strongly linked with lasting effects.

“It was like you’re at the top of a roller coaster and you’re about to go down and I remember inside myself saying, ‘I’m taking my mind with me, I don’t know where I’m going but I’m taking my mind with me’ … and I felt okay and off I went,” says Sandy, one of the healthy volunteers who tried psilocybin for the first time, describing her experience.

People return from that journey changed.

“When we came back it was like someone had put on a light bulb inside Annie’s head, she was literally glowing,” says the husband of one terminally ill patient in one of these psilocybin studies at UCLA. “I felt wonderful, I think it’s an incredibly useful tool … what we did, it probably would have taken me years of therapy,” she agrees.

Source:http://www.businessinsider.in