Lifton, meanwhile, has moved on to less privacy-threatening applications of his X-Reality expertise.

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DeCode's data "doesn't come close" to proving that Flap is involved in heart disease, says Yale University geneticist Richard Lifton.

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Lifton won't offer details of the toy but compares it loosely to a robot that "remembers" its experiences in Second Life.

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Small-scale entertainment applications like these, says Lifton, may be more realistic in the near term than Paradiso's dreams of large-scale X-Reality.

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In due course, the world-outside-of-China, even America, could start to produce more rare earths (as Jack Lifton has noted, and the Chinese have unsurprisingly suggested).

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Experiments like the one he'll perform later this month or Lifton's Shadow Lab could let outsiders track the movement of a building's inhabitants and follow their behavior.

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"We all need to be part of something larger than ourselves, " says Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and author of The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation.

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"The risk is that 20 years from now everyone gets tested and learns they have a 5% risk for developing 10 diseases and a 2% risk for 20 other diseases-- and what we do is increase neurosis instead of improving health, " frets Yale University geneticist Richard Lifton.

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