Friday Futures: porn cryptocurrency and gene-doping athletes

gene doping athletes
Image credit: vchal / Shutterstock.com

Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of The Future from around the web. This week: altering the genetic code of athletes; the next pandemic; fake clinical trials; porn and cryptocurrency; AI and entrepreneurs and Google’s new AI Chief.

A new way for athletes to cheat – alter your genetic code

Officials eventually figured out that Armstrong, Ramirez, and Johnson used prohibited performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and penalized them accordingly. However, countless others get away with it. And in the not-so-distant future, athletes could cheat in a way that’s even harder, if not impossible, to detect. Read more…

Finding the next pandemic, before it finds us

The pig virus, since dubbed swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, is just one example of the viral threats that develop where humans bump up against the fringes of the nonhuman world – along roads that have been paved into forest, or farms that have pushed out from existing cities. Read more…

Fake news is yesterday’s news – here are some fake clinical trials

Want to get rid of your herpes? Get this vaccine. That’s what convinced participants on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and in the state of Illinois to enter a series of research trials, run by a Southern Illinois University (SIU) professor. Read more…

Pornhub accepts cryptocurrency because of course it does

A wise person once said: “as the porn industry goes, so goes the world.” OK, maybe we’re using a bit of creative license here. But we might be saying it in the future. Pornhub, the world’s largest publisher of pornographic content, just announced plans to accept the Verge (XVG) cryptocurrency as payment. Read more…

Buzzword soup – creating a billion entrepreneurs, using AI, blockchain and who knows what?

ORS envisions “a planetary network of entrepreneurs and independent companies empowered by the new digital alphabet: ABC – Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency.” Read more…

Google’s new AI chief was made using AI (possibly)

Google’s heavy investment in artificial intelligence has helped the company’s software write music and beat humans at complex board games. What unlikely feats could be next? Read more…

(Compiled by Alex Leslie; Edited by John C. Tanner)

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