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U.S. credit spreads
Consumer price index
US sharply raises tariffs on Chinese EVs and semiconductor imports
President Joe Biden is sharply raising tariffs on Chinese imports, ranging from electric vehicles to solar cells, in a pre-election effort to protect US jobs.
The White House said $18bn of Chinese goods would be hit by the rises, which were “carefully targeted at strategic sectors” and designed to buy time for US companies to catch up with Chinese rivals in green technology.
In one of the biggest moves, the US will quadruple the tariff on Chinese EVs to 100 percent this year.
Only 2 per cent of US imports of EVs come from China, according to the CSIS, a think-tank. But the higher tariffs are designed to make it even harder for the Asian country to gain a real foothold.
A ‘Digital Twin’ of Your Heart Lets Doctors Test Treatments Before Surgery
Patients diagnosed with heart disease, cancer and other ailments face myriad decisions: Which drug will be most effective? Will the side effects outweigh the benefits? Will surgery be enough?
Determining the best path forward may be far easier in years to come. Instead of trying a therapy and hoping it works, researchers are creating so-called digital twins to predict how a patient will respond before ever starting treatment.
In a Baltimore lab, Natalia Trayanova and her team at Johns Hopkins University are creating computational models of hearts. Each one mirrors the heart of a real patient with a potentially fatal arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat that is often a result of scarring from heart attacks or other conditions.
The replicas, or “digital twins,” appear as personalized 3-D hearts on computers, with areas of scarring shown in white. The team can use them to model how and where to make new tiny scars through a procedure called ablation to fix the arrhythmia.
Digital twins for all?
Clinicians envision a tomorrow where nearly everyone could have a digital twin created by artificial intelligence, using information from medical exams, wearable data devices and medical records. AI could search through data of others with comparable issues and run simulations while providing continuous monitoring of a patient’s health.
Like a crash-test dummy, a digital twin could be used to test drugs and conduct trials without harming the actual patient. A digital twin of a heart could allow surgeons to visualize the procedure and the patient’s specific vessels before an operation. The technology could be used to design highly accurate prosthetics or determine the most effective rehabilitation exercises. Digital twins of a patient’s uterus and cervix could help predict pregnancy outcomes.
While the concept has been used for decades in other industries such as mechanical engineering, digital twins are still relatively new in healthcare because modeling a human organ or body—at times to the cellular level—is so complex. Collecting personal data with wearable devices and sensors also requires addressing concerns about how to preserve privacy. Machine learning, or artificial intelligence, is still evolving and can at times produce biased results.
Tackling tough questions
But the potential has generated enthusiasm from doctors and researchers who describe a not-too-distant future where digital twins could answer difficult medical questions. What side effects will a specific patient get from cholesterol-lowering drugs? How likely is a patient to get asthma or diabetes, and if so, how soon? How might a woman’s specific pregnancy progress?
Researchers are already working on these ideas and, in some cases, putting them into novel use.
This week’s fun find
In collaboration with artist Yiyun Kang and NASA, learn about freshwater availability and engage with possible solutions to avoid a water crisis.
