Four For Friday | April 21, 2023

LF41 | Virtual You, Biomedical Landscape, edible electronics and an upcoming lecture on social exclusion at King's College London.

Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week relating to systems change, healthy longevity and / or Web3. Enjoy!

Book of the Week: Virtual You

This intriguing new book summarizes the progress being made in building digital twins - both software based and in animal models. Potential upsides are significant: 200,000 people die each year Europe due to taking the wrong drugs that could be avoided with personalized interaction models. Already today, a digital twin of the heart is more accurate than animal models in testing the impact of different drugs on heart function.

Tool of the week: Landscape of biomedical research

This impressive piece of work, ‘The landscape of biomedical research’ maps out 21 million PubMed research papers by topic and up to 70 attributes and presents them in a cloud. It’s probably no surprise that this meta view of knowledge itself looks like an emerging living organism. Or a brain. Or a galaxy.

Gadget of the week: Edible electronics / seaweed wearables

If you get hungry during your workout, you’ll soon be able to snack on your wearable monitor. Sussex University have developed a new wearables device using rock salt, water, and seaweed combined with graphene. The sensors are biodegradable, and even edible should you feel peckish.

Event of the week: From Exclusion to Inclusion in Later Life

Flagging this hybrid event on May 10, ‘From Exclusion to Inclusion in Later Life: A Way Forward’ by Prof Thomas Scharf from Newcastle University, who is co-director of Newcastle University’s Centre for Ageing and Inequalities. This sounds like it will be very much inline with the Looking Forward Systems Change agenda: “Given the remarkable absence of a co-ordinated policy response to [the issues of social exclusion of older adults], this lecture makes the case for a strategic commitment to reduce social exclusion and improve wellbeing in later life.”

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P.S. Apologies, publishing a bit late this week as am travelling - just arrived in the Bay Area for a week and will be in London next week until May 7th, then LA briefly. Ping me if you’re around, happy to do a Looking Forward catch up if there’s interest…

That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.

- Stephen