On rapproche souvent le terme humaniste et philanthrope. Mais l’humain, au delà de notre voisin ou de notre collègue de bureau, c’est aussi celui qui vit dans la jungle à l’autre bout du monde.

Pour essayer de sortir de la condamnation systématique associant le transhumanisme à l’eugénisme, notamment totalitaire, certains ont proposé de le décrire comme un “eugénisme libéral”. Mais, au sens strict, le transhumanisme démocratique n’est pas un eugénisme du tout.

Headlines and hype can leave women wondering what’s real and how best to take care of their health.

About one in nine engineers in the US is a woman, which makes some men infer from this that they are “naturally” bad at it. Many data-driven algorithms would conclude the same thing; that’s still the wrong conclusion, but, dangerously, it seems blessed by the impartiality of algorithms. Here’s how bias creeps in.

She’s scared all the time. But is her fear the reason why her heart suddenly speeds up a dozen times a day, shifting in a second from the dull ticking of dread into the accelerating staccato of runaway panic? The diagnostics in her peacemaker’s app say that everything is normal, but perhaps they can be faked by somebody with maintenance access to the device. She doesn’t have it, she’s only the patient.

Incubators and ventilators are invaluable when treating extremely premature infants, but they’re a far cry from the cozy confines of a mother’s womb. In an effort to create an environment that more closely approximates the real thing, researchers have now developed an artificial womb that could dramatically reduce mortality and disease in preemies.

In coming decades, better birth control like long-acting IUDs and implants may make elective abortion virtually obsolete. But for now, unsought pregnancy is still painfully common; over a million American women have an abortion each year.

[Note: This is (roughly) the text of a talk I delivered at TEDxWHU on the 4th February 2017. A video of the talk should be available within a few weeks.]

There is a cave about 350km from here, in the Swabian Jura. It is called the Hohle Fels (this picture is the entrance to it). Archaeologists have been excavating it since the late 1800s and have discovered a number of important artifacts from the Upper Paleolithic era. In June 2005, they announced an interesting discovery.