Yes. I like to look at the really big issues, which in my opinion are climate change and medicine right now, at least two of the kind of scientifically oriented areas. There's tremendous activity there. In the climate change area the U.S. federal government has mandated that anyone who gets federal money for scientific research has to release their data within a year. That's fairly recently. Informally it has been going on for a couple of years now, but people haven't adhered to that policy particularly well. From now on, I think they're going to adhere and that is going to accelerate the pace of scientific research, including on climate change which, at least for people who believe climate change is happening, is extremely important.
We see a tremendous amount of energy also in medicine. Silicon Valley is now “disrupting”—an overused word—medicine in many ways. The federal government and even some drug companies are sharing data about their drug studies. A couple of companies have committed to releasing all of their data related to the drug studies they've done, which could help treatments and could also help better figure out what medicines actually work and what medicines don't work.
There's an effort in the U.K. where half a million people have agreed to have their genes analyzed so they can combine the genomic data with their electronic medical record data. Kaiser Permanente in the bay area has a million of their patients agreeing to have their genes analyzed and combined with their EMR data. They're opening that data up to qualified researchers who follow privacy procedures.The promise in that area is simply tremendous.
There's also crowd-sourced medical data which is really interesting. For instance, some researchers and doctors in California have created a mobile phone app where, if you have what you think might be a cancerous mole, you can take a picture, and that picture goes into a database and then when the mole is removed and analyzed, you come back and the application tells you whether it was cancerous or not. They've accumulated enough data now that by simply taking a picture of a mole, you can get a pretty good probability as to whether you should have it analyzed or not. They're using artificial intelligence to analyze the colour, the pattern on the outside, the size, all that kind of stuff. They're building up crowd-sourced ways of doing this.
A lot of people have lots of moles, but if you have a mole you're worried about and think you should get it tested, you're much more likely to get it tested. Every time you test, it's another $1,000.