Scientists Are Trying to Bring Dead People Back to Life: Here’s What’s Happening Today
The Daily 5 is Sharp’s essential reading list for what’s happening in the world today. Make sure to follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the Sharp Insider newsletter to stay up to date.
Here’s what we’re reading:
1. Scientists are trying to bring dead people back to life
“A biotech company in the US has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life.
Scientists will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out of comas.”
+1: Why did the genetic code of all life on Earth stop evolving?
2. Traffic to this YouTube video can predict ISIS attacks
“Narrated in English, the 26-minute video calls to ‘soldiers of Allah’ and promises ‘killing upon killing upon killing.’ For some ISIS fighters, it’s their ‘version of listening to AC/DC before weight-lifting,’ said Scott T. Crino, a managing director of Predata, a predictive analytics company. ‘It gets them psyched up. So, often there’s a big spike in that particular , prior to an event occurring.'”
3. After a decade of censorship, Canadian scientists are free to speak again
“And with the newfound freedom to speak, the full impact of the former restrictions is finally becoming clear. Canadian scientists and government representatives are opening up about what it was like to work under the former policy and the kind of consequences it had.”
4. Netflix knows what pictures you click on – and why
“It’s still one of the great mysteries of the Internet: with the millions of images that bombard us on the web every day, what makes us click on one instead of another? Are some pictures universally appealing, or is art always a matter of personal opinion?” Recent experiments conducting by Netflix offer some interesting insights into the psychology of why you binge what you do.
+1: Tim Cook is pretty high on the next iPhone right now: “We are going to give you things that you can’t live without, that you just don’t even know you need today…You will look back and wonder ‘how did I live without this?’” He told Jim Kramer on Mad Money last night.
5. Has instant replay taken the fun out of sports?
“Nobody, save gamblers and the suffering fans who mortgage their happiness on their team’s success, really wants such a stripped-down, efficient game. Nobody wants to lose the edifying and necessary knowledge that in the aftermath of a crushing defeat there is always someone else to blame.”
