Scientists have been able to keep a liver alive outside a body with a new machine designed to promote successful liver transplants. Somehow, it seems to improve the quality of the organ as well.
The machine mimics the conditions of a natural body, relying on algorithms to make sure all the proper conditions are met without the need for human supervision. It was tested on pig livers first, then on human livers deemed too risky for transplants.
This technology could revolutionize the market for liver transplants by extending the window from 24 hours to a full week. Average wait time for a liver is up to a year.
If the technology works, it could set the stage for a story in which organs are kept in storage for up to a year. Would this much time be enough to allow all people waiting for transplants to receive one? If so, what would happen without a wait list? Would people not have the same aversion to common behaviors which affect the liver, like alcohol consumption? The world could be a bunch of drunks, a wild west of sorts. Out of this world could rise a lone western hero, one who refuses to partake, rises to fame, then becomes the leader of a group of counter-culture individuals, like a reverse Joker.
Elvis didn’t drink, and met Nixon about promoting a sober agenda.
Taking another route, what if all organs could be transplanted after an indefinite amount of time? Or multiple organs? Or bodies? If someone was about to die, could they receive a new body, choosing from a freezer full of potentials?
This could be an interesting series, where the hero of the story explores what it’s like to live his final days, doing whatever his heart desires, unaware of the possibility to receive a new body. Or maybe it's a contest to receive the new body, with only one winner in a death game, and his decision early on forced his participation. In the end its revealed there is an entire bunker full of bodies waiting to be transplanted, and in subsequent books the hero works to unravel 1) a lingering problem the previous owner of the body got his or her self into and 2) the repercussions of being the reason he was forced into the death game in the first place, maybe the revenge of a loved one.
According to scientists, the planet wouldn’t be able to handle everyone on Earth eating like an American. It isn’t close either; the planet would need an entire extra third of the surface area of Earth to produce enough food.
It comes down to the amount of meat prevalent in a Western diet and the costs to produce the vast quantities required if all humans could afford to eat the same way.
Researchers in Poland came to this conclusion after measuring the carbon footprint required to produce meat, taking air, land, and water pollution into account. Their suggestion: everyone cut back on their meat consumption.
As a meat eater myself, I don’t understand vegan/vegetarian diets unless they are undertaken for ethical reasons, both animal welfare and reduction of carbon footprints. Otherwise, it’s a suboptimal way to eat for health.
They say beef production is the most expensive, from an ecological point of view.
In a related article, news has surfaced that our current food systems can only handle a population of 3.4 billion people. This is a problem, since the Earth is home to 7.5 billion humans.
According to the article, there would have to be a major restructuring of diets (limiting meat intake) and food development, in which case approximately 10 billion people could be fed. This population is projected to be reached in 2050.
These two articles imply a future in which humans are forced to ration meat or create their own in a lab. In a dystopian future, is it such a reach that there are wars not for resources that have value themselves but for the resources needed to produce food for growing populations? The stage could be set in 2049, a year before critical mass is met.
Land would be at a premium, with the world transformed into the haves and the have-nots. Fast forward another generation or two and the richer countries could open a health gap between themselves and their poorer counterparts.
The main character of the story could be a Herbert Hoover type. During The Great War (WWI), Hoover was responsible for getting food to starving Europeans. He rode these humanitarian efforts into prominence and was eventually elected to be President of the United States without having voted in a single election during his previous life.
A fictionalized version of Hoover, set in a food-scarce future, where he rises to fame helping inhabitants of food deserts. The same trajectory, maybe with a tragic ending so he can die/retire a hero.
The intern was 17, still in high school, and had been on the job for less than a week.
He was analyzing a series of data and found a system that looked like it had two strangely behaving stars. After bringing his finding to the attention of his mentor, the process to confirm the finding began.
While this article doesn’t provide much for an series, this could be a good beginning of a story. What if alien life chose this young man to find their planet, knowing he would be the one who could save them. Or bring about Earth’s destruction.
This could bring about a race between two factions, similar to The Three Body Problem, with one group thinking we should contact the aliens and the other wanting to hide.
The one assumption I would want to throw into this concept is how time isn’t linear for the alien civilization. If they can see the future and the past the same way humans can look into the horizon, the selection of this student would bring about their desired future.
This brings in another idea I’ve been playing around with: what if there are alien ships surrounding the Earth in the future, or the past, and they’re just waiting for humans to be able to see through time? their existence would be in another dimension, and humans either would learn to travel through time and meet them OR they would get their at the slow pace of their own time and show up immature, by alien civilization standards.
It all comes down to humans hatching from the egg of their existence, the shell being time itself.
This concept has gotten off course but if this young man was chosen, by aliens or an AI, to find the planet I’m curious as to what will happen to him. I might have to write his story to find out.
Oh yeah, if it’s an AI, it would have to be a calculation to bring about the most probable future instead of aliens who can see through time.
In auctions across the United States, modern farmers are opting to purchase tractors built before 1980, foregoing the latest computer technology. Their logic? By equipping their farms with the older machines they can save on repair costs.
Modern tractors are filled with computers, monitoring all the moving parts and telling users when repair is needed. However, if these machines DO break, farmers are dependent on repair specialists, instead of being able to fix it themselves.
This got me thinking. What if everyone trended towards older machines? Personally, I often find myself wishing my 2006 car had less computerized parts. Repair costs go down with less complexity so these machines are a better option over the long haul.
There could be a series of stories following small-town Americans. Initally, they are enchanted by the prospect of mechanical tractors, and in the end of the first book these mechanical parts could save the farm against a larger, more modern operation. Like Dodgeball, for farms instead of gyms.
Then, in future books, this logic could be applied for other parts of the lives of the main characters. Older cars, a shunning of computers.. the pull of the farm and Amish lifestyle has a large pull in today’s fast-paced society, with shows dedicated to a return to a simpler way of life. These shows highlight the relationships between people and their struggle to fit into the rest of the world around them.
To make this into a more sci-fi concept, and therefore something I could write and add to my catalogue, the main characters could choose to use current technology in an advnaced society: preferring to cook their food instead of have it instantly cook (like in the Fifth Element) and wanting to use normal cars when the rest of the world has hovercrafts.
The use of cars when the rest of society uses hovercrafts would provide an interesting backdrop for a series, with the twist being that hovercrafts are taken offline while the cars still run. To furhter the sci-fi nature there could be an overarching AI, one that the main character and his family never plugs into, and since they havent been analyzed they are the only ones who can save the world.
In Great Britain, the gray squirrel is an invasive species. It was brought over in the 1800’s and quickly reproduced.
The problem? They carry a disease that kills native red squirrels.
The plan? Scientist plan to implant a gene into male gray squirrels to make sure female offspring are infertile. This way, no squirrels need to be killed, they’ll just never be brought into existence.
If their plan works, it could be a model for other invasive species across the globe. Invasive animals, I should say. I don’t think this model will work on plants, like kudzu in the American Southeast. Or fish, because of the inability to monitor all waterways.
This could be a model to control other invasive land-dwelling animals. More humane than Australia’s attempts to cull feral cats.
Not sure what kind of story could play out with this news article, but any futuristic dystopia could feature a curated environment. Any outdoor scenes could present with just the right amount of wildlife, calling into question if it can even be called wildlife at all.
Thinking in more fantastical terms, there could be a scenario where humans are treated this way on other worlds. There could be a massive collection of planets and civilizations, each of them affected by the invasive species known as humans. The story could highlight two humans from different planets who have been edited to make the female infertile, and the male could determine he would stay with her even though there are rumors of fertile women on another planet. The series aspect could either be other couples, on other planets, like common romance series, or it could follow these two as they visit different planets trying to find a scientist rumored to be able to reverse her condition.
It could be a sci-fi western, where the couple drops into various planets, helps the local population, then leaves on their search.
The astronaut suffered from a blood clot in their leg, and doctors on Earth were able to treat the condition from more than 200 miles away.
The blood clot was found during routine ultrasound exams of the astronauts veins. The astronaut had no family history of blood clots but two months into their mission one was found to be forming in their jugular vein.
The doctors on Earth faced a decision: whether to leave the blood clot alone and hope it didn’t travel or administering anticoagulation drugs in the microgravity of space. The administration of drugs poses its own unique challenges, since there is a limited supply of syringes and drawing liquid from vials isn’t straightforward in space. There also wasn’t anticoagulation-reversal drugs onboard, in the event the astronaut’s blood became too thin.
In the end, they administered the drugs and the astronaut turned out fine.
This news highlights the fact that scientists still don’t understand all of the challenges the human body might pose in microgravity. Thankfully they were being screened but with more aggressive missions there could be even greater challenges.
News of the treatment came out around the same time a female astronaut broke the record for the longest space mission by a woman.
Switching to story mode, and specifically trying to come up with ideas for a series, what if there was an Earth-bound doctor for the astronauts? Think House, but in space, and from a distance.
There could be 3D-printed casts and shunts, organs grown in space, robotic arms for performing surgery from miles away. There would be a built in time-demand, just like in House, where the patient might die without proper treatment. Some challenges could be a change in internet access and speed, attacks on Earth and in space, and potentially personal conflict, if a family member or loved one happens to be the patient. These would be shorter books, 30-40k words each, but could be devoured quickly.
An interesting one would be to train an algorithm for deep-space missions, where the lag would make direct treatment impossible. If every particular surgery performed in a sample of sufficiently modern cities was recorded and fed into an algorithm, the AI could control the robotic arm and perform the surgery itself. This could be in the final book of the series. The AI begins to take over for Earth doctors, making the main character obsolete until they are required to come back and solve the problem the robot cannot, or will not, because the resources used to save one life would put others at risk.
Their recommendation is for active military members. It comes around the holidays, when family might give a military member one as a gift.
Military members are required to disclose medical problems, since they aren’t covered by the same labor laws as civilians, and these recreational genetic testing kits could provide inaccurate information. This could put the military members in a tricky situation and result in ruined careers.
The Pentagon recommends that military members contact a licensed professional for genetic testing, instead of the at-home kits.
The warnings have been received with their fair share of scrutiny. Conspiracy theorists wonder if there could be a genetic surveillance situation. If a large surveillance state ever got hold of the information it could be used to persecute a specific ethnic group.
Plus, genetic information could always be stolen, or sold on the black market.
This information could be turned into a series of thriller with little effort. First, a military member is murdered, then in the hunt for the killer it could turn out that there have been a string of eliminations of people who recently took an at-home genetic test. The data could be tracked, and the upload stopped at the final second.
In the second book, a copy of the data has survived and turned up sold to the highest bidder. It turns out to be a group based in the United States, and the protagonist is forced to infiltrate the group and find out about where the data went.
But, in a Fast and the Furious style twist, the group who bought the data live by a code of ethics, and they are using the data to flush out an international organization.
Book three could be the exchange, book four could be a new technology which takes samples of DNA from unknowing soldiers and sequences them, and book five could be a bigger, badder bad guy, maybe even the original government.
The problem with series like this is the requirement for the antagonist to become more and more evil with each book. Nobody cares if the hero goes from saving the world from a rogue secret agent to stopping the neighbor from throwing her trash into the wrong trash can. That’s why the Fast & the Furious movies are starting to get ridiculous, but as long as tickets continue to sell who cares?
The logic is this: if the sun gets moved then the rest of the solar system will follow. Of course, it’s just in case we need to get out of here in a hurry.
Ever seen Armageddon? Asteroid, heading for Earth… well, what if there is a whole field of them in the future. If humans are able to detect the threat early enough, the entire solar system could be moved, instead of trying to relocate the human species.
Benefit: we’d still have our star.
The idea is basically a tugboat. Using fuel gathered from the sun, two streams would be created: one used to push the sun forward and, since this would occur in space there must be something to push against, another stream to propel the thruster/sun system forward.
This would require so much energy, a Dyson sphere would be needed. A dyson sphere is a structure that surrounds a star and harvests it’s energy.
If this plan, to move the solar system across the galaxy, was to be enacted, it would take millions of years to develop the necessary technology. But thanks to forward-thinking scientists, a rough outline of what needs to happen has already be sketched.
This brings to mind both Seveneves by Neil Stephenson and the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series by Cixin Liu. Both of these deal with space travel and the type of threat it would require for humans to leave Earth behind.
Really, I think this could be a great series similar to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Each book could take place in a new era, describing the development of the technology that will prople the solar system across the galaxy. The implications from nuclear fusion, a dyson sphere, space-building capabilities could all be explored, centered on a local who, for whatever reason, finds himself affected by the new technology while trying to resist the change. I’m thinking a Murakami-esque character, loner male, who wants to live the “old way” but who finds himself pulled forward by the future, maybe a femme fatale type character. But each book could introduce a new version of the same person, like a reincarnation.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company, is scheduled to bring hemp to the International Space Station (ISS) in March 2020. The goal is to see what effect space, and the associated microgravity, have on the plants.
2019 was the year of CBD (cannabidiol), a non-psychoactive compound which is derived from hemp. Any mutations created by the plants trip to space will be studied to see if any of them have commercial applications.
SpaceX also brought 40 mice to the ISS, eight of which were genetically edited to have twice the muscle mass of normal mice. The goal of the study is to find out what happens to bone and muscle in space.
These two stories bring to mind a story world where everything can be brought to a habitat in orbit… for a price. Think Han Solo and Chewie, a rogue smuggler and his companion travel between Earth and space, experts at bringing cargo through which nobody else can pull off.
It also brings to mind a book by my friend Mike Giglio, Shatter the Nations, where he talks about the oil smuggling that occurred at the border between Turkey and Syria. If there was ever a situation where the habitats in orbit are at war with each other, smugglers from Earth could find themselves in a position to make a large chunk of money.Combining the lessons/stories from the border between Turkey and Syria, shown from the viewpoint of “Han and Chewie,” there’s material for a never-ending series of books.
