CBS Local - A revolutionary new stem cell treatment is giving doctors hope of developing a cure for blindness within the next five years. The experimental therapy has reportedly given two patients, who were both losing their sight, the ability to read again.
From article, (A revolutionary new stem cell treatment is giving doctors hope of developing a cure for blindness within the next five years. The experimental therapy has reportedly given two patients, who were both losing their sight, the ability to read again.
Doctors in London say they have successfully treated two people who were suffering from age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a condition that can destroy a person’s vision center in multiple ways. “In the months before the operation my sight was really poor and I couldn’t see anything out of my right eye,” 86-year-old Douglas Waters told the BBC. “I can now read the newspaper.”
Waters and a woman in her early 60s were both part of the experimental treatment created by the London Project to Cure Blindness. According to their report, published in Nature Biotechnology, the procedure involved implanting a “patch” of stem cells over the damaged areas of each patient’s eyes. The stem cells worked to repair the leakage of blood vessels around the retina, which is known as the “wet” version of AMD.
The “dry” version of the sight-destroying condition is a slower deterioration of the retina itself, which Prof. Pete Coffey says may be treated by the same procedure but has not been tested yet. Both patients receiving the stem cell patch had “wet” AMD. “We hope this will lead to an affordable ‘off-the-shelf’ therapy that could be made available to NHS patients within the next five years,” the professor from University College London added.
Prof. Coffey added that his patients are having better results than expected. Both patients are able to see about twice as much as the London researchers predicted. “The first patient has got six lines improvement, which is astounding, and the second has five lines and he seems to be getting better as the months go by,” Coffey said, via The Guardian.)
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The future of Google revolves around Assistant. That much is apparent - and the company's ongoing focus on its virtual assistant above everything else (and as a thread connecting everything else) serves as a constant reminder. The unanswered question, though, has long been how Google will make money off the spoken inquiries so many of us are slinging into Assistant's ears.
From article, (The future of Google revolves around Assistant. That much is apparent — and the company's ongoing focus on its virtual assistant above everything else (and as a thread connecting everything else) serves as a constant reminder.
The unanswered question, though, has long been how Google will make money off the spoken inquiries so many of us are slinging into Assistant's ears. After all, whether we're talking to our phones or shouting at smart speakers like Google Home — the latter of which are exploding in popularity, by the way, with IDC estimating a whopping 184% growth from 2016 to 2017 — no one wants to hear ads sprinkled in with their answers.
Google's in an unusual position with this conundrum, as I laid out a few weeks back. For Amazon, the current smart speaker market leader, the benefit of getting you in the habit of using its virtual assistant is simple: It makes it meaningfully easier for you to order stuff from Amazon — and encourages you to do so without any comparison shopping, no less. It's all about "minimizing friction," to use the cringe-inducing industry lingo.
Let's set the scene first, shall we? Google's core business has always been about ads, and everything it does has ultimately served to support that business. It's a pretty straight-forward arrangement: The more time you spend online and using various Google services, the more data the company can collect about you — and the more effective ads it can serve you across the internet.
Getting you to use Google hardware lets Google provide you with a better ongoing user experience, with Google services at the center. That, in turn, gets you to use the internet and Google services more frequently, which means Google can collect more data about you and...well, you know the rest. Even when it's about hardware, for Google, it isn't ever truly justabout hardware.
The problem is that all parts of this model depend upon Google's ability to show you ads. Without that element in place, none of it adds up. And if you're doing more and more of your searches through nontraditional venues — like speaking into a phone or smart speaker — there's no great way to get to that point of payoff.
[So,]Google will let retailers have their products listed in both regular search and within Google Assistant — not for the typical advertising fee but in exchange for giving Google a cut of each resulting sale. Google will use its Google Express platform to make the actual act of purchasing pain-free, consistent, and seamless for customers. Retailers ranging from Target to Walmart, Home Depot, and Costco are already on board.
The effort is being framed as a way to let retailers better compete with Amazon: As it stands now, Google tells Reuters, "tens of millions" of shoppers are asking Google questions about products — and then ending up at Amazon when it's time to make a purchase. The hope is that this new program could provide the enticing last-step detour retailers have struggled to establish on their own:
There's another layer at work here, and it's where the grander narrative resides. While simultaneously helping retailers compete with Amazon for buying dollars, this move will help Google compete with Amazon by giving it a way for its ad business to stay viable in a voice-centric realm. In this model, the "advertisers" will still be paying to reach you — just in a different manner than they did in the past. And in doing so, they'll position Google as the guardian and gatekeeper of a new "everything store" — one that offers already-established direct lines into countless shoppers' lives.
The company is effectively creating its own Amazon right within its search results, in other words, and it's doing so in a way that's designed to work as effortlessly from a smart speaker as it does from a browser page.)
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