Bitcoin News Australia

Feeling old? You and the rest of humanity.

With the global geriatric population set to double to 2B+ by 2050, one industry prepares to double with it: air ambulances.

Market researchers identify US air ambulance services as a fast-growing sector, expected to rise 10.6% annually and reach $32.9B by 2030.

More medics will save lives…

… especially if there are more advancements in the sky with them. Want to see what the future of medical transport looks like? Go to Norway, per Vertical:

• The Norwegian Air Ambulance Foundation is testing CT scanners in its helicopters.
• … uh, wouldn’t a CT scanner be too heavy for a chopper? Yes, which is why the NAAF is using nanotechnology to develop lightweight scanners that require fewer parts.
• NAAF is also a testing partner for Airbus’ automated eVTOL aircraft. The first flight-test is planned for 2024 — sans pilot.

Air ambulances may not have sirens, but…

… alarm bells will still be going off around them. Growth isn’t a given in an industry with major limiting factors:

• Staffing: Trained medical personnel can be expensive and hard to find.
• Weather: Fleets may be unable to fly in bad weather, limiting adoption.

Perhaps the stickiest issue is cost: Who gets stuck with the bills? Families, insurance providers, and medical transport operators have already spent years duking that out in courtrooms.

Airlifts run up to ~$40k per flight today, per Bloomberg. Maybe someone in Norway can run some nanotech experiments to bring those down in size, too?

It’s not unusual for lottery winners to take some time to claim their prizes.

After all, conventional wisdom suggests strategizing with financial planners and lawyers before collecting a life-altering fortune.

But there is a deadline for redeeming a winning ticket, and it’s truly wild how regularly those dates pass without anyone turning up.

• An estimated $2B/yr in winnings go uncollected in the US.
• Lucrative unclaimed tickets this century include $77m, $68m, $51.7m, and $46m jackpots.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. And ouch.

What gives?

Lottery execs told Parade how most winnings go un-won:

• Tickets are lost.
• Results are misread.
• Winners forget to check results — or that they bought a ticket.

A Missouri man advanced the “not realizing they’ve won” narrative last month, sitting on a $1m Powerball ticket three whole months after his numbers were drawn.

(Don’t even get us started on the Michigan man who forgot to check his ticket, eventually found out he won — then forgot to check how much before pocketing the $390k he left on the shelf for nine months.)

What happens to all that unclaimed money?

If you’re asking, “So, can I have it?” the answer is… kind of, yeah? At least in a broad, civic sense.

• Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots are returned to state lottery funds relative to tickets sold.
• Every state handles things differently, but most have public causes earmarked for surplus lottery funds, ranging from school aid to environmental projects.
• Ten states use funds to support compulsive gambling programs.

Note: None of the info about winning lottery tickets comes from personal experience, despite very much wanting that to be the case.

1) Hold on to your yarmulkes, folks — Sotheby’s is set to hold an auction of biblical proportions this week with the private sale of the Codex Sassoon, considered the earliest, most-complete Hebrew Bible in existence. Owning it will be a testament to one’s wealth, with the ~1.1k-year-old, 26-pound bible expected to go for $30m-$50m.

2) Taco ‘bout riding trends — with Mexican food sales projected to grow by $113.8B through 2026, hot sauce aficionado Cholula is, quite literally, turning up the heat on competition. The company, bought by McCormick & Co. for $800m in 2020, is expanding beyond hot sauce for the first time with new salsas and seasoning blends.

3) During Google’s I/O developer conference, the company amped up the volume on its AI love song 143x — in the form of mentions of the word “AI.” CEO Sundar Pichai led the charge by saying “AI” 1.15 times per minute during his keynote. The term “generative” got 30 mentions (probably generating some eye rolls in the process); meanwhile, OpenAI only mustered a single, byte-sized mention.

4) Looks like job satisfaction is reaching new heights, leaving employees on cloud nine-to-five. According to the Conference Board’s latest survey, 62.3% of US workers said they were satisfied with their job last year, the highest number since 1987 when the organization began surveying. Satisfaction has been steadily rising since it bottomed out in 2010 at 42.6%.