The way we construct homes, cars, and even food is changing thanks to 3D printers. They may alter how transplant patients receive new organs in part because of researchers at Stanford University. Their innovative method might eventually enable the printing of organs from the patient’s own cells on demand.

Bioengineers Mark Skylar-Scott and his group have created a method that enables them to 3D-print living heart tissue. One day, they hope to print vital components of the heart, such as valves and ventricles, that would really develop with the patient.

In the US, one in every 100 babies is born with a cardiac problem. Even though they can receive transplants, the body may reject the transplants up to 20 or 30 years after they were given. Using a patient's own cells to bio-print a new organ could lower those incidences.

"It is ambitious, but we believe that a lot of the basic building blocks to start a project like this are in place," Skylar-Scott said.

The method is an illustration of bio-printing, a technique that uses living cells to produce structures that resemble organs. Although the idea of modern bio-printing is not new, the process is laborious. Typically, one cell must be printed at a time. A single human heart would require more than a thousand years to create, even if 1,000 cells were printed per second.

By printing with organoids, collections of tens of thousands of cells, Skylar-Scott and his team have created a technique for accelerating the process. “We take millions of those and condense them into what is essentially a human stem cell mayonnaise, that we can then print through the printer,” he said.

Once the cells are printed, they take on the general shape of tissue that can then have blood vessel networks printed within them.

The group has already created a self-pumping structure that resembles a human vein and is made of tubes. Printing a larger structure, such as a useful chamber that could be grafted onto an existing heart, would be the next stage.
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Although we're probably at least two decades away from a fully printed heart, Skylar-Scott said he believes a heart valve printed using this technique could be implanted in a human patient in as little as five years.

Even while there is rising concern about how generative AI can disrupt the world's labor markets, accountants may be able to sigh with relief, even if only temporarily. Recent studies show that my chosen profession may be spared replacement since the ChatGPT language model doesn’t do well with math!

The fastest growing and most well-known AI platform to date, ChatGPT's artificial intelligence language model, which excels at behavioral learning, storytelling, and other creative tasks, has prompted questions about its potential to enable students to cheat on assignments and exams. The bot passed the bar exam with a 90th percentile score, completed 13 out of 15 AP tests, and scored almost perfectly on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE).

"When this technology first came out, everyone was worried that students could now use it to cheat," Brigham Young University accounting professor David Wood noted. "But opportunities to cheat have always existed. So, for us, we’re trying to focus on what we can do with this technology now that we couldn’t do before to improve the teaching process for faculty and the learning process for students. Testing it out was eye-opening."

However, as a later study led by Wood discovered, the platform often has trouble comprehending mathematical procedures and frequently embellishes data to hide errors when they occur!

According to Wood's research, ChatGPT's ability to pass accounting tests was compared to that of actual accounting students. 186 academic institutions from 14 countries submitted 25,181 questions on information systems, auditing, financial accounting, managerial accounting, and taxation. Undergraduate students at BYU added 2,268 more textbook test bank questions to the repository used for the study.

A combination of multiple choice, true/false, and written response prompts were used to deliver the questions in various formats with varied degrees of difficulty.

According to the survey, students outperformed ChatGPT by almost 30%, scoring an average of 76.7% compared to ChatGPT's 47.4%.

Only 11.3% of the questions were answered correctly by ChatGPT, mostly in the areas of auditing and accounting information systems. The chatbot scored substantially worse on short-answer questions, only scoring between 28.7% and 39.1%. It also performed better while answering multiple choice and true/false questions, earning 59.5% and 68.7% on each format, respectively.
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According to a press release from Jessica Wood, a BYU student who took part in the study, "It's not perfect; you're not going to be using it for everything. Using ChatGPT alone to learn is a fool's errand,"

It's not always better to go bigger, especially when it comes to technology. The InfiRay P2 Pro thermal camera then comes into play. It promises to be the tiniest thermal camera in the world and connects directly to your smartphone's tiny USB port.

It is incredibly tiny, weighing only 9g, and about a quarter's diameter at just over an inch. So it's cool. Why do you need a thermal camera on your smartphone?


Because it uses the phone to display its photographs. One important use case is HVAC engineers and electricians who frequently require access to a thermal camera for their work.
The size of this camera doesn’t prevent it from packing a punch, however. Many thermal cameras suffer from a stutter image. However, because the P2 Pro runs at 25Hz, it can record both motion and still images. At 256 x 192 pixels, the resolution is also higher than most other thermal cameras. Compared to what photographers are often used to, this seems laughably low, but for a thermal camera, that is very good.

The P2 Pro also boasts a magnetic macro lens, which is an intriguing feature. This handy flat addition simply clips onto the device's front. It's rather ingenious and foolproof. The camera is available both with and without this lens.
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The camera's temperature range, which is sufficient for most needs, is -20ºC to 550ºC (-4ºF to 1044ºF). The camera is available for $249 or $299 with a macro lens.

According to a study lead by Li Qian, PhD, at the UNC School of Medicine, a protein that aids in the formation of neurons also functions to reprogram scar tissue cells into heart muscle cells, particularly when working with another protein.

Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have made important strides in the exciting fields of cellular reprogramming and organ regeneration, and their findings could have a substantial impact on the development of future treatments for damaged hearts.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found a more streamlined and effective way to transform scar tissue cells (fibroblasts) into healthy heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) in a study that was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

The fibrous, stiff tissue that causes heart failure after a heart attack or because of cardiac disease is created by fibroblasts. Researchers are looking into the possibility of treating or maybe one day curing this widespread and deadly illness by converting fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes.

Surprisingly, a gene activity-controlling protein called Ascl1, which is well recognized to be an essential protein involved in converting fibroblasts into neurons, turned out to be the key to the new cardiomyocyte-making approach. Ascl1 was once assumed to be neuron-specific by researchers.

“It’s an outside-the-box finding, and we expect it to be useful in developing future cardiac therapies and potentially other kinds of therapeutic cellular reprogramming,” said study senior author Li Qian, PhD, associate professor in the UNC Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine and associate director of the McAllister Heart Institute at the UNC School of Medicine.

In the past 15 years, researchers have created several methods to convert adult cells into stem cells and then drive those stem cells to differentiate into other types of adult cells. Recently, researchers have discovered strategies to reprogram cells directly from one mature cell type to another.

It has been hoped that once these techniques are as safe, effective, and efficient as possible, clinicians will provide a straightforward injection to patients to transform harmful cells into helpful ones.

“Reprogramming fibroblasts has long been one of the important goals in the field,” Qian said. “Fibroblast over-activity underlies many major diseases and conditions including heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and the scar-like brain damage that occurs after strokes.”

In the new study, Qian's team used three currently used approaches to reprogram mice fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes, liver cells, and neurons. This team also included co-first authors Haofei Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher, and MD/PhD student Benjamin Keepers. Their goal was to document and contrast the variations in gene activity patterns and variables that control gene activity during these three separate reprogrammings.

Unexpectedly, the scientists discovered that converting fibroblasts into neurons activated a group of genes related to cardiomyocytes. They quickly discovered that Ascl1, one of the master-programmer "transcription factor" proteins that had been employed to create the neurons, was the cause of this activation.

The researchers added Ascl1 to the three-transcription factor cocktail they had been using to create cardiomyocytes to see what would happen because Ascl1 activated cardiomyocyte genes. They were shocked to see that it significantly increased reprogramming efficiency—the percentage of effectively reprogrammed cells—by over ten times. In reality, they discovered that only Ascl1 and another transcription factor known as Mef2c remained from their original cocktail of three factors.

Further research revealed that Ascl1 activates the genes for both cardiomyocytes and neurons on its own, but that it shifts away from the pro-neuron position in the presence of Mef2c. Ascl1 activates a wide range of genes related to cardiomyocytes in cooperation with Mef2c.

“Ascl1 and Mef2c work together to exert pro-cardiomyocyte effects that neither factor alone exerts, making for a potent reprogramming cocktail,” Qian said.

The findings show that the key transcription factors involved in direct cellular reprogramming are not always exclusive to the cell type being altered.
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More importantly, they represent a development toward potential cell-reprogramming treatments for serious diseases. To repair failing hearts, Qian and her team plan to create a two-in-one synthetic protein that combines the active components of Ascl1 and Mef2c.

A ground-breaking group of new vaccines for a variety of illnesses, including cancer, might save millions of lives, according to researchers. A major pharmaceutical company expressed confidence that vaccines for ailments including cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, as well as others, will be available by the end of this decade.

Studies into these vaccinations are also "very promising," according to some researchers, who claim that the Covid jab's success has "unspooled" 15 years' worth of development in just 12 to 18 months.

In as little as five years, according to Dr. Paul Burton, chief medical officer of the pharmaceutical company Moderna, the company will be able to provide such medicines for "all sorts of illness areas."

Moderna, which developed a well-known coronavirus vaccine, is working on producing cancer vaccinations that specifically target certain tumor types.

Burton said: “We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world.”

He added that mRNA therapy might be available for uncommon diseases for which there are presently no medications, allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covidio, the flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) with just one injection. mRNA-based treatments function by instructing cells to produce a protein that starts the body's immunological response to sickness.

Burton said :“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology.”

Scientists caution that if a high level of investment is not maintained, the fast progress, which has increased "by an order of magnitude" in the last three years, will be for naught.

Our cells can pump out the proteins we want our immune system to attack by injecting them with a synthetic form. The immune system would be made aware of an existing cancer via an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, allowing it to attack and eradicate it without harming healthy cells.

By first identifying the protein fragments on the surface of cancer cells that are absent from healthy cells and are most likely to elicit an immune response, bits of mRNA that will educate the body on how to produce those protein fragments can then be created.

To find mutations that don't exist in healthy cells, doctors first take a biopsy of a patient's tumor and submit it to a lab for genetic sequencing.

The mutation(s) fueling the cancer's growth are subsequently determined by a machine learning system. It also gains knowledge of the regions of the aberrant proteins these mutations encode that are most likely to elicit an immunological response. The most promising antigens' mRNAs are then produced and assembled into a customized vaccination.

Burton said: “I think what we have learned in recent months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases, or just for Covid, the evidence now is that that’s absolutely not the case.”
“It can apply to many disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease. We have studies in all of those areas and they have all shown tremendous promise.”

The experimental mRNA vaccine for RSV was 83.7% efficient at preventing at least two symptoms, such as cough and fever, in adults 60 and older, according to results from a late-stage trial published in January by Moderna. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated the vaccine as a breakthrough medicine based on this information, which expedites the regulatory review process.

Based on recent outcomes in patients with the skin cancer melanoma, the FDA gave Moderna's personalized cancer vaccine the same classification in February.

Burton said: “I think it was an order of magnitude that the pandemic sped [this technology] up by. It has also allowed us to scale up manufacturing, so we’ve gotten extremely good at making large amounts of vaccine very quickly.”

Moderna is not alone in its interest in mRNA technology. Pfizer has also begun recruitment for a late-stage clinical trial of an mRNA-based influenza vaccine, and has its sights set on other infectious diseases, including shingles, in collaboration with BioNTech. A spokesperson for Pfizer said: “The learnings from the Covid-19 vaccine development process have informed our overall approach to mRNA research and development, and how Pfizer conducts R&D (research and development) more broadly. We gained a decade’s worth of scientific knowledge in just one year.”

The major effect of the pandemic, according to Dr. Richard Hackett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI), has been the acceleration of the creation of many as-yet-unvalidated vaccine platforms. “It meant that events that might have unfolded over the following ten or even fifteen years were condensed into a year or a year and a half,” he said.
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There is a real need to keep the level of research and development investment high. Prof Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) said: “If you take a step back to think about what we are prepared to invest in during peacetime, like having a substantial military for most countries. Pandemics are as much a threat, if not more, than a military threat, because we know they are going to happen as a certainty from where we are today. But we’re not investing even the amount that it would cost to build one nuclear submarine.”

Twenty years ago, the idea of smartphones and electric automobiles looked like a pipe dream, yet as of today, 86.4% of the world's population, or roughly 6.92 billion people, own their own smartphones. Governments all around the world are promoting the use of electric automobiles rather than vehicles with combustible engines to move toward a greener future.

We’re all trying to add that start-up stock to our portfolio, which will blossom into a blue chip cornerstone of our retirement. Here are four exciting innovations that seem poised to become an assumed part of our life in the next two decades.

3D Printed Infrastructure. The use of 3D printing has been quietly increasing in the background and is gradually becoming more prevalent in people's daily lives. While 3D printing is now being used for anything from electronics to shoes, it is rapidly advancing. Today, contractors can use 3D printing to create a house.

For instance, Apis Cor employs enormous 3D printers and their proprietary concrete blend to build entire homes. The company holds the world record for the largest 3D-printed building on earth.

You might not even be aware of the many creative ways 3D printing is influencing your life. Tens of thousands of 3D printers that 3DOS has installed all around the world are being used to build a global, localized, and on-demand logistics network. Hence, you may order a product online and produce it at home. Perhaps it might be produced nearby or at a local facility, then transported locally rather than internationally. The trillion-dollar logistics industry's carbon emissions and expenses will be significantly reduced if 3D printers can produce most materials on their own.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). This technology has become considerably more prevalent in daily life in only the last few months. Curriculums are being revised by ChatGPT, which is used by companies like Buzzfeed, Inc. But that's only the start. While ChatGPT has become more well-known, other facets of the subject have received less attention.

For instance, RAD AI is a start-up that makes use of generative AI to optimize marketing campaigns using the first emotion-aware AI marketing platform ever created. The firm has secured over $2.5 million from regular investors through the startup investment platform Wefunder.

Generative AI is being used to create photos, paintings, sketches, text-to-speech, and even films. Because ChatGPT is launching an internet-based plugin, it will include search engine-like features to compete with Alphabet Inc.'s Google and function similarly to Microsoft Corp.'s new Bing.

ChatGPT’s plugin page notes companies like Expedia Group Inc and Instacart are already working on solutions using generative AI

Commercial Space Exploration. The year 2021 marked a turning point for commercial space exploration, with companies like Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin LLC successfully launching commercial space travel. The first fully crewed voyage to the edge of space was also launched by Virgin Galactic in July 2021, with funding from billionaire Richard Branson.

By 2024, these businesses hope to launch the first commercial space flights. Yet, no firm arrangements have been established due to supply chain challenges and worries about a possible recession. As the macroeconomic headwinds worsened, many businesses had to postpone their plans by at least a year.

Commercial space flight is now only available to high-net-worth persons because tickets cost close to $500,000. Yet as businesses invest extensively in creating sustainable space stations and other infrastructure, you may expect a decrease in prices over the next 20 years. According to China Business Knowledge, during the next 15 to 20 years, space travel will become more affordable, and “Many people alive today will have a real chance of traveling to space in their lifetimes.”

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) & Brain Enhancements. Neuralink, a pioneer in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) founded by Elon Musk, is a well-known leader in the field. Many well-known figures in finance are also investing billions in this sector. Recently, the $75 million Series C raise for Synchron, a rival to Neuralink, received funding from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Trubrain, a firm that makes wearables and supplements for brain health, has already received over $1.2 million from retail investors. Microsoft also makes its BCI research and development efforts well known.

The multibillion dollar investments made into the metaverse by Meta Platforms Inc. are well known. While much of that is focused on developing augmented reality and virtual reality systems, this also includes extensive study into how the brain functions as it seeks to enhance the functionality of its headsets. According to some reports, Meta wants to develop its technology so that it can read your brain activity.
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To some, twenty years is a long time. They refer to it as two decades. To others, it’s a surprisingly short period for the development of life-changing technologies. As we all watch the future unfold, be sure your tray-table is put away and your seat belt is fastened!

A novel substance has been found by scientists, and it has the potential to revolutionize society.

Researchers claim to have developed a superconducting substance that operates at temperatures and pressures low enough to be used in real-world applications.

In creating a material that can transport electricity without resistance and pass magnetic fields around the substance, it achieves a breakthrough that scientists have been chasing for more than a century.

The discovery could result in power networks with flawless energy transmission, preventing the loss of up to 200 million megawatt hours because of resistance. Also, it might help with nuclear fusion, a long-awaited process that has the potential to produce endless electricity.

They propose new types of medical equipment and high-speed, hovering trains as additional applications.

The development of two somewhat less ground-breaking but similarly superconducting materials was previously reported by a team led by the same scientist, Ranga Dias, in studies that appeared in Nature and Physical Review Letters. The Nature publication was ultimately retracted by the journal's editors after the scientists' methodology came under scrutiny.

Professor Dias and his team claim they went above and beyond this time to fend off similar criticism. With a team of scientists observing live, scientists sought to corroborate that old study with new data acquired outside of a lab, and they followed a similar procedure for the new research.

 ‘Evidence of near-ambient superconductivity in a N-doped lutetium hydride,’ an article describing the novel material, was just published in Nature.

The substance has been given the moniker "reddmatter" in honor of its color and a Star Trek substance. When scientists discovered that it unexpectedly changed throughout the creation process to become a "very vivid red," they gave it that name.

The substance was created by Professor Dias and his team by combining lutetium, a rare earth metal, with hydrogen and a tiny amount of nitrogen. They were then left to react for two or three days, at high temperatures.

The chemical appeared as a deep blue, per the paper. However, it was then subjected to extremely high pressures, at which point it changed from blue to pink as it attained superconductivity, before changing back to its metallic condition and turning a rich red.

The material still needs to be heated to 20.5ºC and compressed to roughly 145,000 PSI to function. However, that is significantly less intense than other, comparable materials, such as those Professor Dias announced in 2020, that sparked both enthusiasm and skepticism from experts.

And because it is so useful, the researchers claim it will usher in a new era of using superconducting materials in practical applications.

“A pathway to superconducting consumer electronics, energy transfer lines, transportation, and significant improvements of magnetic confinement for fusion are now a reality,” Professor Dias said in a statement. “We believe we are now at the modern superconducting era.”
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Those practical applications might include using the material to speed up the development of “tokamak machines” that are being developed to achieve nuclear fusion.

Adobe has unveiled Firefly, a new suite of generative AI tools it hopes will encourage more design professionals to embrace rather than fear this cutting-edge technology.
Why it matters. As generative AI has swept the globe, artists have had a difficult time adapting to it. While some view it as a useful tool, others see it as a threat to jobs and a kind of thievery.
Adobe wants to address two obstacles that are preventing business usage of the technology with Firefly: worries about copyright issues and the absence of professional-grade tools.

• On top of Adobe's extensive font library, the initial Firefly model provides both a text-to-image engine and the ability to create visual text effects.
• Besides pictures from Adobe Stock, the model was trained on pictures that were in the public domain or distributed under an open license.
• Although Adobe hopes to incorporate Firefly into its family of creative tools, starting with Adobe Express, Photoshop, and Illustrator and the Adobe Experience Cloud, it is initially only available in beta form on the web.

There is intense disagreement within the art community about how to react to introducing generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's Dall-E 2.
A few of artists who embrace technology the most are already using generative AI in their creations, including some whose work has been on show in a San Francisco gallery.
Stable Diffusion has been sued by Getty Images, which claims that their engine was inappropriately trained on copyrighted images.
Training the AI system on stock imagery offers Adobe a couple of advantages for avoiding intellectual property infringement.

• Compared to search engines that are trained on content from throughout the Web, Adobe has more rights and control over images from its Adobe Stock database.
• Brand names and logos, as well as other forms of copyrighted content, are frequently absent from stock pictures.

According to Adobe, anyone that submits their work to Stock will be able to take advantage of generative AI's revenue opportunities. But the corporation has provided no information about how this will operate. David Wadhwani, president of Adobe's digital media division, summarized by saying, “We want it to be safe for creative usage.”

One of the best pieces of smart home hardware is the Nest Protect. Smoke detectors, more so than other household items, might benefit from being connected. They significantly contribute to your feeling of security while you're away from home. Ideally, you won't ever need it, but if you do, it might save lives.

Torch, which was established in 2020, is implementing some of these concepts in a totally new environment. Early outdoor detection for up to 10 acres is provided by the $299 device, which is fixed onto a spike put into a tree. It's a sizable addressable market that, regrettably, will expand even further in the years to come as wildfire threats rise.

Climate change is clearly to blame for this situation since it causes droughts and hotter temperatures, which are ideal conditions for destructive fires, especially in the western United States. As recently highlighted by NASA:

“Researchers supported by NASA's Earth Science Data Systems program, often known as NASA EarthData, showed that the frequency and size of fires increased in the western United States nearly exponentially between 1950 and 2019. In the 1950s, wildland fires typically covered 1,200 acres (485 hectares), but by the 2010s, that number had increased to nearly 3,400 acres on average (1,376 hectares).”

The concept for Torch was developed a few years prior to the establishment of the company, when co-founder and COO Vasily Tremsin was still a high school student.

“I developed the idea back in high school in 2017, as part of a science fair. In my senior year, there were these huge Napa Valley fires that took out half of the city of Napa,” he said. “My school closed down for a week, because there was so much smoke. It was a horrible situation. People lost billions of dollars in damage. I always did science projects solving some kind of issue, and there wasn’t any detector like this for the outdoors.”

Tremsin's co-founder and CEO, Michael Buckwald, previously worked on the groundbreaking peripheral business Leap Motion. He cites his personal experience of living in San Francisco as a key factor in his decision to join the team.

“When Vasily approached me with all the progress and the unique idea of a distributed approach to a low-cost sensor that could be placed frequently, it seemed obvious,” said Buckwald. “I guess I’m attracted to things that can be great businesses — because there’s a lot of land to cover, and it’s a problem that’s getting worse, not better — and can also have an impact on the world. So many of the deaths and so much of the damage from fires is from secondary and tertiary sources. The deaths are at least 100 times greater from pollution, the economic impact from pollution and the carbon impact. The statistics are really extraordinary.”

The on-board sensors are watching for smoke, light, and heat. The linked device of the owner will receive a wireless alert when the data reaches a particular threshold. The on-board thermal camera is currently just used for detection, but a later version might include a live feed, either directly on the device or via a linked camera (or, perhaps, drone). Power requirements have a role in the restrictions. A battery depletion would result from adding too many functions to the solar-powered gadget.

The devices form a kind of mesh network that allows for the connection of dozens or even hundreds of them to a single Wi-Fi gateway by using radio waves to interact.

According to Torch, it has been proving the technology's viability for some time with controlled burns by third parties. According to the company, “This patented approach has been tested on prescribed fire burns across California: in Sonoma, Lake, and Butte counties. Verifying results through multiple variables minimizes false positives and ensures accuracy.”
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The product's preorder window opened mid-March. Torch plans to start shipping in the first quarter of 2024.

Health systems having been hit by labor and supply chain costs and broader economic woes have another unwieldy financial problem—the soaring costs of cyber insurance.

Moody's Investors Service notes that, while it’s not sexy, the sheer size of cyber-crimes and insurers' reluctance to cover losses brought on by ransomware attacks are having a very serious impact on hospitals.

"The timing of the insurance price increase is bad for health care. There isn't much room for error, " said Matthew Cahill, a Moody's analyst. There have been double-digit increases in premiums over the past four years, often more than tripling in a single year. According to a recent analysis from Property Casualty 360, the industry's insurance costs have finally started to stabilize in the first quarter of 2023.

In an interview, Omid Rahmani, an associate director at the credit rating company Fitch Ratings, stated: "Costs are decelerating. That tells part of the story. But cyber insurance is becoming unaffordable or unavailable for a lot of small- to medium-sized issuers."

Early in the century, when cyber insurance first appeared, it was frequently incorporated into other policies. According to Rob Rosenzweig, senior vice president and head of the National Cyber Risk group at brokerage company Risk Strategies, when losses grew because of the assaults' growing frequency and sophistication, insurers were forced to develop stand-alone policies. In other words, the coverage was not priced appropriately for the level of risk assumed.

Insurance companies have been increasing the standards that health systems need to meet to strengthen their defenses and secure coverage. The new standards include strict data backup policies, the usage of tools like multi-factor authentication, personnel security training, and network segmentation.

"Social engineering attacks, such as phishing, remain one of the most effective ways to breach a hospital system. The workforce remains the weakest link," said Soumitra Bhuyan, a professor at Rutgers University and expert on heath care’s evolving cyber insurance landscape. Social engineering is often treated as a separate policy extension by insurers.

Other limitations have also been added to the coverage, such as the exclusion of cyberattacks supported by nation-states. This is being required because of a new requirement by Lloyds of London. Lloyds now requires all insurance groups that take part in its international insurance and reinsurance marketplace to exclude state-sponsored cyberattacks from their policies.

"With the increased rates and limited coverage, small independent and rural hospitals are at a significant disadvantage in obtaining cybersecurity insurance," Bhuyan said.

"The gap between those with adequate resources to protect their information systems continues to increase," Bhuyan said. "Many of these hospitals are critical access hospitals or hospitals in rural areas. They don't have enough resources to secure their IT systems and may be unable to recover if a breach happens."

Moody’s Cahill said that even though cyber insurance is becoming more expensive, the cost of a successful ransomware attack is still far worse. He pointed to an Illinois system that listed one such attack as a contributing reason for the temporary shutdown of two of its rural hospitals in January as evidence.

In January, the pro-Russian group Killnet took credit to taking down portions of systems of more than a dozen U.S. hospitals, including Stanford Healthcare, Duke University Hospital and Cedars-Sinai.

According to Fitch Ratings, these cyberattacks are unlikely to result in downgrades for not-for-profit health institutions, but the use of more advanced cyber-weapons that damage a hospital's financial profile and compromise service could.
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While some health systems are doing well, for a majority, there is still very little wiggle room to have to operate a month or two on manual records, divert services, and deny claims. And if the attack results in a closure, rural communities simply can’t afford to have no emergency services.