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-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Once reliant solely on buses and subway systems, our nation's seniors may soon have new choices on how to navigate their communities, including to their doctor's appointments. In March, the National Hispanic Council on Aging (NHCOA) released a poll indicating that Hispanic older adults felt that affordable and safe driverless cars could improve the lives of themselves and their family members. Although approximately 70% of senior surveyed live within an area with mass transit, they still felt that driverless cars could provide significant value, highlighting an opportunity for innovative transportation options to address the needs of a population that will reach 20 million by 2060.
This poll comes at a critical juncture as our transportation landscape continues to shift towards ride-sharing and health disparities persist among older Latinos and African Americans. Zhai Yun Tan reports in an August 2016 article in The Atlantic that hospitals nationwide are now starting to partner with ride-sharing services such as Lyft and Uber to help patients get to their appointments on time. In some cases, these rides are even being paid for by Medicaid and other insurance plans. According to a 2013 Journal of Community Health review by Samina Syed, Ben Gerber, and Lisa Sharp, patients with lower socioeconomic status, particularly those lacking a vehicle, report higher barriers to accessing health care and are more likely to miss their appointments. These ride partnerships could help fill in the gaps for patients who struggle to make it to appointments; although many hospitals provide transportation services, these typically need to be planned in advanced and may not offer a direct route to the hospital.
Patients with lower socioeconomic status, particularly those lacking a vehicle, report higher barriers to accessing health care and are more likely to miss their appointments.
In addition to providing quick and reliable rides for routine medical care, ride-sharing services may also help improve access to medical research opportunities for communities of color that often cite transportation as a barrier to participation. Despite a higher prevalence for diseases like Alzheimer's, Latinos and African Americans are chronically underrepresented in clinical research for life saving drugs. According to the FDA Office of Women's Health, Latinos make up less than one percent of clinical trial participants despite making up 17 percent of the U.S. population. However, polling data has demonstrated that Latinos and African Americans are willing to participate in these trials. A recent poll from the Global Alzheimer's Platform Foundation found that 39% of Americans said they would consider taking part in an Alzheimer's clinical trial, including 34% who are African American, 41% who are Hispanic. This diversity gap has real consequences for public health and both the FDA and NIH agree that minority inclusion in medical research is vital to ensuring drug safety and spurring medical innovation.
Yet transportation is a persistent issue. The Eliminating Disparities in Clinical Trials Project (EDICT) named unreliable transportation among the key socioeconomic obstacles working class individuals face when participating in medical research. Ride-sharing, and eventually driverless cars, could offer new avenues for addressing these transportation issues.
We need Uber for Clinical Trials -- why can clinical trials go to the patient. #bcsm
— Alicia C. Staley (@stales) June 14, 2016
Data released by Uber reveals that ride-sharing services are uniquely positioned to serve diverse communities. A March 2014 Uber study concluded that in Chicago, four in ten rides begins or ends in an underserved neighborhood, and the average wait time and likelihood that a ride will be completed has no relationship with the median neighborhood income. Further, ride-sharing company Lyft recently partnered with Axovant Sciences to provide transportation to seniors enrolled in an Alzheimer's clinical trial in California. If successful, this novel partnership model should be further explored with minority communities in mind.
Ride-sharing may not be a panacea for eliminating health disparities or for the exclusion of minorities in clinical research, but it is an example of a fresh approach that could help bridge the divide today.
While promising, these services have their own set of challenges that must be addressed. For example, advocates have noted that ride-hailing services have mixed success serving individuals with disabilities. Additionally, these services rely heavily on electronic payments and smart phones, which can be a barrier for individuals of lower socioeconomic status. Despite these challenges, innovative transportation options have the potential to improve mobility while increasing access to care and treatment for many communities.
Ride-sharing may not be a panacea for eliminating health disparities or for the exclusion of minorities in clinical research, but it is an example of a fresh approach that could help bridge the divide today while larger fixes are developed. As our population ages and diseases like Alzheimer's become more prevalent, demand for these types of innovative solutions will only grow.
Jason Resendez, executive director of the LatinosAgainstAlzheimer's Network and Coalition - a network of UsAgainstAlzheimer's - with contributions by Beth Moretzsky, The George Washington University.
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On Monday the International Geological Congress was advised to declare the start of a new geological era, the Anthropocene, which means that our tribe of “bloody ignorant apes” in Samuel Beckett's pithy appellation has officially taken control of the planet.
The very next day, the Guardian reported on the impending extinction of the Asiatic cheetah (farmers, cars and hunting are among the causes cited for their decline to just two females now known to be living in the wild). Time to despair? If you're an Asiatic cheetah or any number of other endangered species it doesn't look good. But can the humanity that drove, starved and hunted them to extinction also be their salvation?
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Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a supernova explosion that occured over 300 years ago in our Galaxy, at a distance of about 11,000 light years from us. Its name is derived from the constellation in which it is seen: Cassiopeia, the Queen. A supernova is the explosion that occurs at the end of a massive star's life; and Cassiopeia A is the expanding shell of material that remains from such an explosion. This radio image of Cassiopeia A was created with the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico. The image was made at three different frequencies: 1.4 GHz (L band), 5.0 GHz (C band) and 8.4 GHz (X band). Cassiopeia A is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky and has been a popular target of study for radio astronomers for decades. The material that was ejected from the supernova explosion can be seen in this image as bright filaments.
Image credit: L. Rudnick, T. Delaney, J. Keohane, B. Koralesky and T. Rector; NRAO/AUI/NSF
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Image credit: Princeton University, Office of Communications, Denise Applewhite
Writing in the fourth century, the theologian Athanasius explained the incarnation thus: “He became human so that we might become divine.” In other words, God's purpose is to make us like him, to shape us into mini gods. Called divinisation, and still popular with the Orthodox church and also with Mormons, this theology was not the direction the mainstream western church would take. It offended too much against monotheism, the basic source code of the Abrahamic religions. But according to Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, divinisation is precisely the direction in which we are now heading not through the work of the divine, but because of technology. Thus the title of his new book, Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow. Technology, argues Harari, is going to transform some of us into gods: powerful, super-intelligent, ageless. The product of evolution, yes but not through natural selection but through our own super-fast intelligent design.
My own idea of human advancement hasn't changed much since 1973 when Colonel Steve Austin had a bit of trouble on a runway in The Six Million Dollar Man. “Man barely alive. We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” Over 40 years later, the projected technology has been transformed, and you wouldn't get a decent Premier League footballer for $6m, let alone a new sort of human being. Nonetheless, the basic idea is pretty much the same. Take human powers and enhance them. Take human intelligence and multiply it. These gods are like human beings, except more so.
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Rivers of lava from the volcano Kilauea leave a lava tube at a bench of new land at the Ka`ili`ili sea entry. The steam in the background is right at sea level and is caused by the boiling hot lava meeting the cool ocean water. With each wave, parts of these flows are covered by water, generating a blinding cloud of hot steam. Kilauea is the youngest and southeastern-most volcano on the big island of Hawaii. Topographically Kilauea, which is located on the southernmost flank of Mauna Loa, was thought to be an extension of its giant neighbor. However, research over the past few decades clearly shows that Kilauea has its own magma-plumbing system, extending to the surface from more than 60 kilometers deep in the Earth.
Image credit: ©Tom Pfeiffer
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Tasmanian devils are evolving in response to a highly lethal and contagious form of cancer. A National Science Foundation-funded researcher and an international team of scientists discovered that two regions in the genomes of Australia's iconic marsupials are changing in response to the rapid spread of devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), a nearly 100 percent fatal and transmissible cancer first detected in 1996. The Washington University study suggests some Tasmanian devil populations are evolving genetic resistance to DFTD that could help the species avoid extinction. Additionally, the genomic data will support future medical research exploring how animals evolve rapidly in response to cancer and other pathogens.
Image credit: Menna Jones, University of Tasmania
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Joe Moran, like many of us, is shy. He is hopeless at small talk and feels he “should probably wear a badge that says: ‘Please do not expect sparkling conversation'”. Like most shy people, he has a dread of being boring. Thankfully Shrinking Violets, his “field guide” to shyness, exhibits all the sparkle and fluency on the page he might lack when chatting to strangers. Though he touches on his own experience, it's not a memoir, full of shaming revelations (of course it isn't): Moran says he prefers to hide “behind the human shield of people more interestingly and idiosyncratically shy than me”.
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