What will the year 2020 be like

The player's "remade" heart was restarted and the artificial heart removed. The advance marks a new frontier for medicine and a world first for the IRM, which has led stem cell science and transplant medicine for more than two decades. Its first breakthrough came in , when it announced the successful transplant of new bladders grown from stem cells in the laboratory into seven patients.

The institute's latest success came as a bitter disappointment to British experts from the University of Bristol who, as part of an international team, were responsible for "Claudia's trachea", the world's first successful transplant of a windpipe, grown using stem cells taken from the patient, a year-old mother of two children, from Barcelona in The British specialists predicted at the time that their advance would "transform the way we think about surgery" and that "in 20 years the commonest operations will be regenerative procedures to replace organs and tissues" with ones grown from stem cells.

But their research foundered after due to a lack of funding during the squeeze on universities and cuts in NHS spending. The potential of stem cell science has given a boost to the growing number of patients suffering organ failure. But their hopes of life-saving surgery have been dashed by a shortage of funds. The introduction of presumed consent for organ donation in failed to produce the expected boost to transplants.

Adults are presumed to consent to the use of their organs after death unless they have registered their objection beforehand on a national database, but there has been no increase in transplant operations. It is January the leaders of the main parties have set themselves an exhausting schedule of public meetings where, in a throwback to the early s, they will make speeches, in person, in front of live audiences.

The forthcoming general election is being billed the "back to the future" election. Or, as some pundits are saying, it will be the first post-internet campaign. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, text messages and email are now seen as middle-aged obsessions. People under the age of 25 like to talk to their friends directly, not via a digital machine. That is why voters in that age group, who are more engaged in politics than their elders, are unwilling to vote for anyone they have not seen or heard in person.

Excessive concentration on digital campaigning is thought to have been a factor in the surprise defeat of David Cameron's government in , which brought the Labour Party, under its veteran leader Peter Mandelson, back to power. The Conservative spin machine has dropped the idea of making Lord Mandelson's age — he will be 67 this year — an election issue. The long recession of a decade ago has left voters permanently suspicious of young, untested prime ministers — except of course in China, the world's biggest economy, where the cult of youth seems to have taken hold.

Even the Conservative leader, Boris Johnson, looks too young, at 55, alongside such respected statesmen and stateswomen as year-old President Schwarzenegger, year-old President Putin, or Chancellor Merkel, who is But those who think the blogosphere is dead as a political force should note the lively online campaign for an increase in MPs' pay and allowances. The campaign website, which registers almost one million hits a day, points out that British MPs are now the least corrupt, most highly respected, and lowest paid of any Western democracy.

The new intake of MPs this year is expected to be the first in more than a decade to receive an above-inflation pay award. The Culture Secretary Sir Simon Cowell has announced that funding for the arts will be cut for the 10th year in succession. But the lack of money has not deterred the arts world from taking a number of initiatives likely to dominate the cultural landscape of the Twenties.

Foremost among these, the apology culture has now spread to the arts. Bad reviews are routinely followed by an artistic director saying sorry from the stage before subsequent performances. Outside theatres, "booking fee riots" have to be broken up by mounted police. The exciting young female playwrights lauded at the close of the Noughties are all in their mid-thirties, and audiences are growing tired of the seemingly never-ending stream of works about childbirth, childcare and primary schooling.

But there is something very different to be found at the National Theatre, where the indefatigable David Hare has full houses for his Britain Had Talent trilogy, a nine-hour diatribe against the colonisation of culture by reality TV. A decade of economic woes finally leads to the collapse of free admission to national museums and galleries.

There is surprisingly little public protest, certainly not as much as there is about Zaha Hadid's extension to Tate Britain to house the Dame Tracey Emin sex and celebrity galleries. Hadid's idea of building it in the shape of a carbuncle an allusion, apparently, to some old architectural dispute even has King Charles joining the demonstration along Millbank. It was small consolation that the demise of the record shop was to be the subject of the annual Damon Albarn Christmas TV musical, and the latest Nick Hornby on Kindle volume.

Unfettered media consumption skews our perception of the present. In the year , Jenny Eastwood became addicted to bad news. Every 10 minutes yielded another dire post on Reddit or Instagram. Stories of fear and peril pique our anxiety. Our hearts race, and our minds keep constant vigil for the next perceived catastrophe. We yearn to feel prepared, so we become addicted to the updates, coming back for more until the world seems far worse than it ever has before.

Plenty of tragedies are happening to keep us glued to our screens. The pandemic has killed more than , people around the world as of early September —and that number continues to rise even as the crisis calls attention to rampant social and economic inequality. Protests against police brutality and symbols of Confederate- and colonial-era oppression have brought millions of people to the streets the world over.

Telemedicine is making healthcare more accessible than ever. Anti-racist books are topping bestseller lists. Way more people are washing their hands. Americans have adopted hundreds of thousands of shelter pets, and now it seems as if everybody has a dog.

Unfettered media consumption skews our perception, and it becomes easy to slide into unhealthy patterns of belief. Our ancestors might disagree that is the worst year on record. Sure, frightening things are happening, but many of those things happened in the past, too, including the flu pandemic, during which 50 million people died. Plus, the belief that civilization is on the decline is a tradition as old as civilization itself.

Even Ancient Athenians complained in the fifth century B. Before the pandemic, a majority of Americans already believed the country was going downhill. In Western culture, people already have a propensity to interpret present events negatively and tend to prefer the past, according to the research of Carey Morewedge , a professor of marketing at Boston University. That is because our autobiographical memories are biased toward positivity.

When we think about the past, we tend to remember positive experiences. Even historians have often fallen into the trap of venerating unrealistically positive versions of the past. In American history, the Gilded Age refers to the period between and , when the Industrial Revolution gave rise to great leaps in technology, culture, and the arts. Nonetheless, the term Gilded Age paints the period in an undoubtedly positive light.

Enter social media, which gives us never-ending dollops of our messy, nuanced, seemingly dire present. Shocking almost no one, excessive news consumption causes stress. According to a survey by the American Psychological Association , respondents who kept up with the news cycle reported lost sleep, stress, anxiety, fatigue, and other negative mental health symptoms. The same survey found as many as 20 percent of Americans constantly monitor their social media feeds for updates, and one in 10 check the news every hour.

Although it seems like the news today is more shocking than ever, the idea that media consumption negatively affects our perception of the world is nothing new. In , an ambitious investigation kicked off at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The coverage you need. The prices you want. See Medicare Supplement quotes now. Popular Reads 6 simple ways to cut your dementia risk The dangers of Medicare Part B excess charges The 5 worst things to say after someone dies.

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