a

There are some things in life we just take for granted and feel are absolutely necessary. Life insurance is one of them. No one would take the chance of leaving their family in financial difficulties should something happen to them.

But where does the concept of life insurance originate?

Apparently, the first form of life insurance was developed in ancient Rome and in ancient India. People would form what they called “burial clubs”, which, in the event of any unexpected death of one of their members, would pay for the funeral expenses and help the family with some money. After the fall of the Roman empire in 450 A.D., life insurance was long forgotten, most likely because it was incompatible with the religious fanaticism of the time and because of the lack of a solid social structure. Nevertheless, some forms of insurance were in existence during the Middle Ages to cover risks like fire, flood, theft or imprisonment.

Modern life insurance was developed in Britain in the 17th century, as it was the only European country where this activity was legal. Lloyd’s of London, or as they were known at the time, Lloyd’s Coffee House, was the place where merchants and ship owners met to discuss business. And it was where the concept was developed.

The subsequent US life insurance business was built on the British model. The Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia sponsored the first life insurance corporation in America in 1759, benefiting its ministers and their dependents.

The many American religious groups strongly opposed life insurance until about 1840. After that date the market flourished. Disasters such as the 1835 New York fire or the 1871 disaster in Chicago raised awareness for the need for a strong insurance system.

But what about an insurance on afterlife? What about insuring not only your financial possessions, but also you entire life’s experience? Today you pay a regular monthly policy and you know that one day your heirs will benefit from a certain amount of money. But another very important thing we risk is losing is all the knowledge that we have gained over time, all the pictures of the places we have been to, all the experiences we have lived.

These are very important and valuable assets that you will want future generations to benefit from.

Swiss DNA Bank service is the ultimate life insurance. You can literally store your entire life in Swiss DNA Bank’s secure server, knowing that the subscription fee you initially paid is invested in order to generate annual revenue which will cover  the expenses…Forever.

What is experience? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, experience means the conscious events that make up an individual life, the events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally, the direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge or the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation.

These are the most significant definitions of this everyday word that we often use, not being truly aware of the amount of knowledge, emotions and memories it refers to. Huge amounts of data that we store in our head as we live our lives.

Each and every one of us has a constant need to share his or her experiences and memories with the people around us, our beloved ones or just someone we happen to connect with for whatever reason. Books, movies and music are the most common and oldest means with which humans have shared their experiences and thoughts with others.

Browsing the Internet, one comes across thousands of blogs, a little window we decide to open to the world to let everyone know what we did yesterday or show our the pictures from our vacation.

Because what we need to remember is that our need to express ourselves and tell our story applies to little everyday things as well.

I came across an interesting website called Experience project, where anyone can subscribe and write a down a moment of their life, share a secret or a thought over a random topic. At humanexperience.stanford.edu, people’s lives and stories are told with a different, more academic approach, but with the same deep-down need to tell, remember, teach and learn from others.

But where does this need to share and perpetuate our experience actually come from? As doctor Robert Firestone, from Psychology Today, states that “human beings, unlike other species, are cursed with a conscious awareness of their own mortality.”

Knowing that we are on this planet for only a limited period of time, we feel a need to leave traces of our passage. Often we don’t get enough time with our children or grandchildren or friends to tell our story in the way we would like to, to show them all our pictures, to read aloud all our notes.

Tools like Swiss DNA Bank, a secure data storage that provides a will service in order to pass on all information to generations to come, is the ultimate answer to human fear of disappearing and being forgotten.

The US House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations just concluded the hearings on how technology can be the ultimate tool to improve financial services and TARP, the American government program to purchase assets and equities from financial institutions in order to strengthen a crippled financial sector.

The focus of the discussion was on the need for a stronger database and transparency. “All around us, we see evidence that the proper use of technology can generate immensely valuable results while at the same time improving efficiency and reducing costs,” said Dilil Krishna, a specialist in risk and financial management for Teradata financial services, during his testimony. “Technology has advanced to the point where the oversight of large, complex financial enterprises is now feasible,” Krishna said. “In fact, large organizations around the globe routinely use technology for financial risk management. One of the key areas in this regard is in the management of risk data and analytics.”

Unfortunately, strong data management skills were not enough. Financial institutions and data recovery firms must guarantee another key factor in the game: transparency and trust. Without these two elements, there is no way financial data can be put to good use. What happened in the 2008 financial meltdown was that banks stopped trusting each other because of the unveiling of plies of fake analytic results, of fake or blown-up financial data and information. At the height of Lehman Brothers’ collapse, no one trusted the financial products of others any more. Every bank, every find, every asset manager was just trying to sniff out what other surreal inventory or toxic asset they will have to face around the next corner. Credit stopped flowing and the whole system basically seized, and licked its wounds.

By employing technology that can deliver greater transparency, financial regulators will be able to have a better feeling and stronger monitoring over the real situation, and spotting irregularities and scams will eventually become easier.

Krishna adds that building greater transparency is not as far away and unachievable as it sounds: “Examples of relative transparency are all around us. Every day, financial analysts and ordinary investors rely on financial reports issued by companies. An even more practical example is the implicit belief we all have that the account statements we receive from our bank accurately reflect the balance of all our transactions.”

Keeping up with issuing and demanding clear statements and balances is every player’s right and responsibility. And will always be cheaper and easier to handle than multi-billion dollar cracks and hundreds of people being fired overnight. Again, proper data management seems to become the focus of more and more core fields of today’s world.

Just when you thought the over 70,000 phone apps on the market covered every single entertainment, scientific or news-spreading purpose possible, the need for new applications grows.

Last week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a scientific convention focused on a new field: the human-environment mobile-based interactions.

Cell phones, iPods and any other portable computing device are about to become the ultimate low-budget environmental monitoring tool for researchers worldwide.

Dale Joachim, a visiting scientist at MIT’s Media Lab, organized the event, with funding from the National Science Foundation. “How do we rethink human-environment interactions in light of these mobile devices?’’

For instance, Carlos Corrada-Bravo, director of the Computer Science Program at the University of Puerto Rico, programmed his iPod Touch to record birds and frogs in remote areas of Puerto Rico and Hawaii. He modified the consumer device by adding an extra battery and an off-the-shelf microphone. A less than $20 investment allows professor Corrada-Bravo to record the sounds of the forest and study the fauna.

Richard Fletcher, a Media Lab research scientist, envisions instead a cheap low-wattage system incorporating sensors in order to detect soil moisture or pH, wired to data-storage hubs with Bluetooth radios. Field assistants will be able to collect and forward scientific data using just a cell phone.

The era of scientific expeditions with porters carrying heavy machinery deep into the forest may soon come to an end.

As fascinating as the new technological frontiers may seem, the scientific community raised some concerns, such as a potential lack of bandwidth in remote areas, battery supplies, waste of electricity, etc.

Joachim, one of the strongest supporters of this direction, does not dismiss the challenges, but believes they can be overcome. In this new “digital ecology’’ approach, millions of cell phones can interact with powerful servers and provide a never-before-seen flow of data. “Now we have a different beast,’’ Joachim said. “We have a beast with a thousand eyes.’’

After the beloved family dog passes away, after the crying and the pet cemetery in the garden, after looking and sobbing at playtimes pictures hanging on the fridge, new puppy or kitten sooner or later follows its predecessor.

New pet, new smiles, new experiences.

But some people really cant cope with the loss. And here is where technology comes in: dog cloning. Yup: if you believe that Spot, Fifi or Runner were so special no other pet will ever be able to top them, you can actually take a sample of their DNA to a specialized clinic and take them back from dog heaven. Well, not really back, but a animal with the exact same DNA coding will be the exact copy of the mourned one. Also personality-wise? Apparently, but that’s still all to be figured out.

The story of Laneclot Encore is one good example of how far you can go for love.

Edgar and Nina Otto, a Florida couple, had their yellow Labrador retriever, Lancelot, cloned after he died of cancer.

The procedure costed the Otto family US$155,000 and raised lots of eyebrows among not only the general public but also the pet-caring community. “We have gotten some negative feedback from people on the price.” Yet, as Lancelot Encore squirmed in his arms, he added, “But we feel it is worth it.” Said Mr. Otto. Most of the negative comments regard the county’s critical economical situation opposed to getting a new pet for such an amount of money.

Dr. Sara Pizano’s opinion, of Miami-Dade County’s animal services department, focused also on the financial aspect but from another point of view. She said that for the price the Ottos paid for having Lancelot cloned, “we could do spays and neuters for six months.”

The company in charge of the procedure was the Northern California biotech firm BioArts International. BioArts partnered with Dr. Hwang S Woo-Suk, of the South Korea biotech research firm Sooam. An egg containing the late Lancelot’s DNA was placed in a Korean dog to create Lancelot Encore. Once the pup was able to leave his birth mother and go out on his own, he was flown from South Korea to San Francisco before finally making his way to Miami.

South Korea appears to be one of the world’s cloning center. Last August a Seoul-based biotechnology firm said it will open a dog cloning centre capable of cloning eventually up to 1,000 dogs annually early next year.

“We need this new facility to turn dog cloning services into a full-fledged business,” Cho Seong-Ryul, director of RNL Bio, told AFP.

On-line archives are just blossoming and increasing in number. Since the Internet became the number one source of information on the planet, new web sites telling us fascinating stories are continuously flourishing.

The latest on-line historic archive was made in the UK and features the names of over 100,000 British prisoners of war during WWII.

The details of the Brits captured by the Nazis where until now held at the National Archives in London, after being compiled by the Germans under the 1929 Geneva Convention.

The name of the web site, specialized in family trees, genealogy and census records, is Ancestry.co.uk.

Daniel Jones from Ancestry.co.uk comments: “The unwavering spirit of British Prisoners of War was astounding, with many trying to escape their captors at every opportunity in order to rejoin the war effort. This collection of records will be a way for people to find out more about the heroes in their family.”

The list includes some well-known names, such as Welsh actor Lieutenant Desmond Llewelyn, better known for playing Q in the James Bond movies. He was imprisoned from 1940 to 1945 at Oflag IX-A/Z in Rotenburg, Germany.

Other notable prisoners whose records are now online include, blue blood George Henry Hubert Lascelles. Lascelles – known as Viscount Harewood – was seventh in line to the throne when he was caught in 1944. He was sent to Colditz until the end of the war. He is now 40th in line.

Ancestry.co.uk is now offering a 14 day free trial to the service to get the general public to know more about the fascinating stories on WWII and its soldiers. The site claims to be the first-ever to open such archives to the public.

The Ancient Library of Alexandria was the largest and best-known human knowledge magnet of all times. It was built under the Ptolemaic dynasty around III century BC and destroyed under mysterious circumstances under the Roman ruling. Some say that maybe it was Julius Caesar itself who burned the library down.

The loss was of catastrophic proportions: something between 40.000 and 100.000 books have been destroyed, turning into ashes thousands of years of history, literature and world facts.

In the early Seventies the idea of reviving the old library started taking place and a specific committee was set up to discuss the project. The new Library of Alexandria was to rise exactly on the same spot where its predecessor was burned down centuries before: between the University’s campus and the seafront.

UNESCO, together with the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak gave the project full support. The Mediterranean was to be endowed with a new and great cultural center.

The library was inaugurated in 2002 and hosts approximately eight million books and features a 70.000 square meter reading room.

The rise, fall and rise again after so many centuries of the Library of Alexandria is probably the greatest, even though it is just one out of many, of the examples of the strong link that runs between humans and their culture, their heritage.

As soon as writing was invented life and its events have been registered. The supports have changed dramatically over time: rocks, wax boards, animal skins, paper…

Techniques have changed, but the aim was always that of preserving our memories.

Today computers are the evolution of the ancient papyrus that once filled Alexandria’s library. Producing and recording data has become technically faster and easier, flooding hard drives world round with information.

It is often difficult to understand the importance of a secure back-up of all these files, pictures and documents, of our life’s record.

Swiss DNA Bank is the ultimate tool for data recovery: a 21st century Library of Alexandria safely embedded in the Swiss Alps in a nuclear-proof shelter.

No modern Julius Caesar will break into this data storage facility!

On September 11th, 1984 Alec Jeffreys, now Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, discovered something called “genetic fingerprinting” in a laboratory in the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester. His discovery was to become the turning point for forensic DNA analysis, paternity tests and DNA cloning.

Professor Jeffreys and his team were working on DNA patters, overwhelmed by the number of variables present even between mother and son or identical twins. “This is too complicated”, thought Jeffreys, but then came came what he calls his “eureka” moment and realized that every DNA strain contains not only the information the organism has inherited from parents, but also its unique “fingerprint” trace which repeats itself in its every single cell. What initially appeared to be a random and confusing bulk of unlinked information information, was actually the individual’s distinctive feature.

This accidental discovery opened up a new area for science, making DNA analysis crucial for criminal investigation, paternity tests and diversity analysis also among non-human species. The first real legal case involving DNA fingerprints analysis came in March 1985. A family of UK citizens originally from Ghana was accused of child swapping because the youngest one flew back to Great Britain after a trip to their hometown on a damaged passport. Blood typing analysis concluded that the boy was part of the family but couldn’t be determined if he was the son or a nephew with no residence rights. This is where Professor Alec Jeffreys got involved and scientifically proved he was a full member of the family.

Another headline-making investigation, successfully concluded thanks to Professor’s Jeffreys work, was the identification of the remains of the Nazi criminal Josef Mengele. After the Second World War he fled from the Allies and escaped to South America, where he lived for the rest of his life without ever being caught. In 1996 the German government, keen to close the case, asked professor Jeffreys together with professor Erika Hagelberg, an expert in extracting DNA from bones, to analyze the remains of Wolfgang Gerhard, a man of German origins buried in the cemetery of a small Brazilian town. The man, who drowned some years earlier in a swimming accident, was proven with a 99.94% certainty to be Mengele.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the discovery, the University of Leicester has organized various events and conferences to stretch once more the importance of Professor’s Jeffreys work. To read more about this, visit http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/genetics/jeffreys/

As paperwork quickly disappears from our drawers and digital data storing becomes increasingly crucial in everyday personal and business life, not everyone realizes how important could be to know where your back-up servers are physically located.

Think about all those letters you have on your web-mail provider account.

What happens if the service disappears for one reason or the other. Where or who can you turn to to recover them?

This might not be an issue one thinks about every day, but many Aussies might have had the taught last wednesday.

On Sept. 2nd, Australia disappeared from the www for a whole hour, between 7.50 and 8.50 am local time reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Telsta, by far the country’s number one ISP, suffered from a major crash which affected home, business and mobile  internet customers.

Telstra customers could not access any international sites or Australian sites containing international links. Since Telstra’s customers also include most down under ISPs, most of the country was affected.

The problem apparently was caused by Telstra’s international gateway, which lost the ability to find the domain names of international websites.

The technical difficulty was most likely solved with the classic home-style turn-off-turn-on-the-switch procedure.

No damage done, but we should all stop and think that even though our stuff feels like it’s on our computer, it’s actually not. Thousands of miles usually separate us from our mails, documents or pictures.

A safe data storage provider should be able to indicate precisely the server’s location and be transparent on panic data recovery procedure.

Sixteen years after the discovery of  the APOE4 gene, who’s mutation is the focus of Alzheimer’s research and treatment, two more genes have been pinpointed as implicated in the disease’s development.

Alzheimer’s disease - a degenerative disease, which slowly and progressively destroys brain cells. It is named after Aloïs Alzheimer, a German neurologist, who in 1907 first described the symptoms as well as the neuropathological features of Alzheimer’s disease such as plaques and tangles in the brain .

A UK team discovered that mutations in the CLU and PICALM genes, both known to have protective roles in the brain, increase by 20% the chance of developing Alzheimer’s. They basically turn from protectors into enemies of the brain’s health, even though the studies are still at an initial stage and the links between the genes and the disease are not quite clear yet.

Philippe Amouyel, an epidemiologist at the University of Lille in France and an author of one of the studies, says “that they may be involved in the elimination of the major component of amyloid plaques.” Buildup of these plaques is a major cause of Alzheimer’s.

The results of the study have been associated with the research on another genetic marker of the brain, responsible for the clearance of amyloid plaques. According to Julie Williams, professor of neuropsychological genetics at Cardiff University in Wales, this combination of discoveries forms an important breakthrough in the current impetus to discover the causes of Alzheimer’s disease”.

Today Alzheimer’s figures are increasing world-wide. According to the American 2009 Alzheimer’s report, in the US alone 5.5 million people suffer from this disease, growing at the speed of one new diagnosis every 70 seconds. Alzheimer recently became the 6th cause of death, surpassing diabetes.

In Europe, the estimated number of affected people, according to the Alzheimer Europe web site, is 7.3 million. These figures sets important challenges for all European health care systems, since the oldest old is one of the fastest growing sectors of European societies.

As for any other disease, an early diagnosis is the best way to treat and learn how to live with Alzheimer’s.