The first prize money has been awarded in the largest XPrize competition ever held, with 23 student teams getting financial injections to further their carbon removal technology.
Among the winners are a variety of forward-thinking initiatives addressing the issue of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, as well as those that seek to address more than one environmental issue at the same time.
The US$100 million Carbon Removal XPrize was launched in February with the goal of developing technology that can remove CO2 from the seas and the atmosphere.
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EVP, patient advocacy & engagement, national patient advocate foundation.
Gwen Darien is Executive Vice President for Patient Advocacy and Engagement, at the National Patient Advocate Foundation (https://www.npaf.org/), an organization with a mission of bringing patient voices to health system delivery reform, developing and driving initiatives promoting equitable access to affordable quality health care, and prioritizing the patient voice in health system delivery reform to achieve person-centered care. She is also Executive Vice President at their sister organization, Patient Advocate Foundation (https://www.patientadvocate.org/), a national non-profit organization which provides case management services and financial aid to Americans with chronic, life threatening and debilitating illnesses.
Gwen is a longtime patient advocate who has played leadership roles in some of the country’s preeminent nonprofit organizations.
As a three-time cancer survivor herself, Gwen came into cancer advocacy expressly to change the experiences and outcomes for the patients who came after her and to change the public dialogue about cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.
In 2,005 Gwen started the first stand-alone advocacy entity in a professional cancer research organization, at the American Association for Cancer Research, launching CR magazine – a magazine for people with cancer and those who care for them. Later, she served as the executive director of the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation; director of The Pathways Project; and executive vice president of programs and services at the Cancer Support Community, where in each role, Gwen championed placing patients at the center of health system change, whether it was for research, public policy or direct services.
The Chinese economy has been hit by a perfect storm. In the third quarter of the ongoing financial year, official Chinese data revealed that GDP growth stood at 4.9 percent, down from 7.9 percent in the previous quarter. This decline in GDP growth is directly eating into profits of big Chinese companies.
Rising prices and low consumer spending create a perfect storm in the Chinese economy:
There are two broad factors that are affecting business earnings in China-raw material inflation and low consumer spending.
Rare diseases aren’t so rare. Collectively, up to 30 million Americans, many of them children, are born with one of the approximately 7,000 known rare diseases. Most of these millions of people also share a common genetic feature: their diseases are caused by an alteration in a single gene.
Many of these alterations could theoretically be targeted with therapies designed to correct or replace the faulty gene. But there have been significant obstacles in realizing this dream. The science of gene therapy has been making real progress, but pursuing promising approaches all the way to clinical trials and gaining approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is still very difficult. Another challenge is economic: for the rarest of these conditions (which is most of them), the market is so small that most companies have no financial incentive to pursue them.
To overcome these obstacles and provide hope for those with rare diseases, we need a new way of doing things. One way to do things differently—and more efficiently—is the recently launched Bespoke Gene Therapy Consortium (BGTC). It is a bold partnership of NIH, the FDA, 10 pharmaceutical companies, and several non-profit organizations [1]. Its aim: optimize the gene therapy development process and help fill the significant unmet medical needs of people with rare diseases.
The technology aims to deliver cost and power consumption improvements for deep learning use cases of inference, the companies said. This development follows NeuReality’s emergence from stealth earlier in February with an $8 million seed round to accelerate AI workloads at scale.
AI inference is a growing area of focus for enterprises, because it’s the part of AI where neural networks actually are applied in real application and yield results. IBM and NeuReality claim their partnership will allow the deployment of computer vision, recommendation systems, natural language processing, and other AI use cases in critical sectors like finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and smart cities. They also claim the agreement will accelerate deployments in today’s ever-growing AI use cases, which are already deployed in public and private cloud datacenters.
NeuReality has competition in Cast AI, a technology company offering a platform that “allows developers to deploy, manage, and cost-optimize applications in multiple clouds simultaneously.” Some other competitors include Comet.ml, Upright Project, OctoML, Deci, and DeepCube. However, this partnership with IBM will see NeuReality become the first start-up semiconductor product member of the IBM Research AI Hardware Center and a licensee of the Center’s low-precision high performance Digital AI Cores.
This company’s entry in the US; market; along with other aluminum giants is said to have caused the shutdown of a large number of Aluminum manufacturers based in the US. It seemed that local US companies were unable to compete with state backed companies which were taking advantage of the free trade agreement.
However, the trade tariffs along with recent events have in turn caused this firm to become insolvent. It’s founder is now being detained by the US under fraud charges.
China Zhongwang Holdings Limited is known as the “King of Aluminum in Asia. On October 15th, China Zhongwang suddenly announced its subsidiaries “had suffered significant losses and operational difficulties. Despite efforts from various parties, they are unable to solve the current problems on their own.” The two subsidiaries mentioned are the primary companies of the corporate business. The debt crisis of Chinese companies is spreading, which can bring about a serious financial crisis in China. For example, China’s big business conglomerate, Baoneng Group, has experienced increasing strain on its capital chain. Currently, it has defaulted on at least nine items of trusts, involving a total of about $3.1 billion US dollars. Moreover, it has seen a rising risk factor for its subsidiaries, with frequent news about equity pledges, property freezes, and legal proceedings.
There’s no question about it: climate technology is in again.
Over the past several quarters, entrepreneurial activity and investment interest in climate tech have skyrocketed. New funds devoted specifically to climate have launched at an astonishing rate in 2021: from blue-chip venture capital firms like Union Square Ventures, from large private equity players like TPG and General Atlantic, from a whole new breed of climate-specific VCs like Lowercarbon Capital. Scarcely a day goes by now without a climate tech startup announcing a major new funding round. A whopping $49 billion of venture capital funding will pour into climate tech in 2021.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink aptly captured the current ebullience when he declared last week that “the next 1,000 unicorns” will be in climate tech.
