Tag: big tech

Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will

The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.

Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called geroscience that “seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of older adulthood,” according to the National Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Alkahest and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging. Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process, delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated with growing old

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YouTube Censors Coronavirus Roundtable Hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

Google-owned YouTube took down a video of a roundtable conference hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), featuring former White House coronavirus task force member and medical scholar Scott Atlas, and the three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

The Great Barrington declaration argues that blanket lockdowns and mask mandates are counterproductive, instead advocating for a targeted approach focused on protecting vulnerable segments of the population.

The three co-authors, who attended Gov. DeSantis’ roundable, are Harvard professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff, Oxford professor of epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford professor of medicine and epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya.

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Facebook, Twitter Campaign Donations Overwhelmingly Go to Democrats on Oversight Panels, Group Finds

A conservative non-profit advocacy group monitoring Big Tech claims almost all Facebook and Twitter employee and committee campaign contributions went to Democrats on House oversight committees.

The Internet Accountability Project (IAP) said in an April 1 statement that, based on campaign finance data compiled by opensecrets.org, Facebook and Twitter (employees and PACs) combined “contributed more than 12 times more money to Democrats (more than $5.5 million) than Republicans (less than $435,000) in 2020.”

The group cited a leading self-proclaimed socialist in the House of Representatives as an example of the extreme bias in favor of Democrats in political giving by employees of the two Internet giants.

“As just one example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received a combined $36,346 in 2020 compared to less than $1,950 for all Republicans on the House Oversight Committee combined. Twitter employees did not give a single dollar to Republicans on the Oversight Committee,” IAP said in its statement.

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YouTube bans independent Italian media outlet Byoblu

In yet another crackdown on independent media and creators, YouTube has removed the channel of Byoblu – an independent Italian media outlet that had more than 525,000 subscribers.

The popular channel had uploaded more than 2,000 interviews to YouTube in its 14+ years on the platform and racked up over 200 million total video views. It featured interviews with magistrates, presidents of the Constitutional Court, politicians, lawyers, scientists, and more.

YouTube deleted Byoblu’s channel after targeting it numerous times over its coverage of protests and interviews with scientists.

According to Byoblu, YouTube had removed several unpublished videos of demonstrations in Cesena and Milan, removed a video discussing a leading British Medical Journal columnist’s thoughts about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, removed a months-old video featuring an interview with a senior scientist from the University of Siena because he talked about the benefits of vitamin C, demonetized the channel, and removed 5,000 of the channel’s subscribers before it was permanently suspended.

Byoblu added that YouTube’s final action against the channel before permanently suspending it was to remove a September 2020 video of a street demonstration where the Pan-African activist Mohamed Konare spoke.

In a post about YouTube’s takedown of the channel, Byoblu suggested that it was targeted by YouTube because of its obsession with wanting ordinary people to speak and showing the news from an alternative point of view.

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Twitter Censors Official Coronavirus Adviser and Renowned Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff

Twitter censored Harvard professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff, a member of the COVID-19 vaccine safety subgroup that advises the CDC, FIH, and FDA, because he challenged the notion that children and young people require COVID-19 vaccination.

The platform applied a warning label to Kulldorff’s tweet about the matter, and prevented users from liking or retweeting it.

“Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should,” said Kuldorff in his now-censored tweet. “COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.”

Kulldorff is one of the most cited experts on infectious diseases alive today, with over 25,000 academic citations. In addition to his role as a Harvard professor, he is a biostatistician and epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

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YouTube To Remove ‘Dislike’ Feature As Biden WH Content Continues To See Likes Massively Trail Dislikes.

As President Biden’s White House YouTube channel continues to see videos’ “dislikes” massively trump “likes,” the video platform announced it is testing a new design that obscures a public dislike count.

The move was announced via Twitter on March 30th, with YouTube explaining “in response to creator feedback around well-being and targeted dislike campaigns, we’re testing a few new designs that don’t show the public dislike count.”

As a result, only the accounts publishing videos will be able to see the dislike to like ratio.

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Google and the CIA: How Independent Are Multinational Giants?

How independent are the largest corporations in the world? It is often portrayed that companies such as Google are simply private corporations that have very few connections to the establishment. Yet, as It turns out, there are endless connections between many corporate giants and the military-intelligence complex.

We got a glimpse into this relationship back in 2016, when the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who, at the time, was Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc, became the head of a new innovation board at the Pentagon. Later that year, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, joined the same board at the Pentagon.

Google and DARPA

The ties between Google and US government agencies run much deeper than this, however. The relationship started even before the tech company was founded in the late 1990s. In 1994, the US government launched the Digital Library Initiative (DLI). This initiative awarded research grants to various university projects, mostly those who focused on developments in the early and emerging internet, with the overarching aim of this initiative being the creation of a global digital library.

Multiple organizations were involved in selecting projects for DLI funds. Three of these organizations were the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is the arm of the US Department of Defense that funds and develops emerging technologies.

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DHS PREPARING TO USE PRIVATE CONTRACTORS TO “SCOUR PUBLIC DATA AND SOCIAL MEDIA” TO COMPILE DISSIDENT CITIZENS FOR WATCH LIST AND NO FLY LISTS

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now getting ready to hire public companies, individual contractors outside government, to scour public data and social media in order to provide information for the new “domestic terror watch lists.”  From the description it appears DHS is going to pay “big tech” (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, etc.), via contracts, to hire and organize internal monitoring teams to assist the government by sending information on citizens they deem “dangerous.”

Gee, what could possibly go wrong with this?…

NBC is reporting on these new developments as the U.S. intelligence apparatus is preparing to go live with the assembly of lists of Americans who “could be” potential threats to the government; and need to be watched.

However, even NBC is beginning to realize the consequences: “DHS planning to expand relationships with companies that scour public data for intelligence and to better harness the vast trove of data it already collects on Americans. The department is also contemplating changes to its terrorist watch listing process.”

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