There ’s greentech and then there’s Martian greentech. A group of Japanese companies unveiled plans to build a 1-gigawatt solar power collector in space, according to Earth2Tech. The system would beam the power back to Earth using radio waves. This sort of system has been discussed in the past, but deemed too pie-in-the-sky. I mean, power stations in space? That’s science fiction, right.

Apparently, not any longer. The consortium of dozens of Japanese companies will be led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, says Bloomberg. They plan to spend $21 billion on R&D over four years before hitting launch dates for the first stage of the project in 2015. The target completion date is 2030 or beyond. To put this in perspective, 1 gigawatt of power would be enough to power up to 750,000 U.S. homes for a year at current consumption rates.

Big solar panel makers Mitsubishi Electric and IHI would supply the necessary photovoltaic arrays. The initial launches of equipment could happen as soon as 2015 — if this project ever takes flight. Obstacles that remain are enormous. For starters, with current rocket technology, transporting the necessary solar panels into space would be prohibitively expensive.

The technology for capturing solar power as electricity remains beyond the bleeding edge. The process would work this way: First, a satellite equipped with photovoltaic cells would capture the sun’s rays and convert them into electricity. Then, the satellite would convert that electricity into radio waves to transport it to earth, where the radio waves would then be converted back into electricity.

Two years ago, a government-funded think tank, the National Space Society, laid out a plan to generate 10 megawatts of space-based power with an outlay of $10 billion. Several firms have filed patents in the area, but no working demonstrations have been performed to date. One of the companies, PowerSat, is planning to raise $100 million to launch a 10-kilowatt power generation satellite within the next three years.

Regardless of the obstacles, producing power in space has been a pipe dream for both power hounds and astrogeeks for decades. Outside the earth’s atmosphere, the sun’s energy is several times stronger. Satellites that capture power would never be in the dark, either, as opposed to solar power installations on terra firma. And carbon emissions is not an issue, nor are zoning, real estate prices, or environmental impact assessments.

At least one large public utility, California’s PG&E (PGC), is taking the idea very seriously. In April 2009, PG&E petitioned state regulators for a 200-megawatt power purchase agreement with SolarEn, one of the three startups that are seeking to build space-based power generation capabilities. The Japanese plan would be five times as large as the Solaren-PG&E deal and would likely pave the way for a new generation of space-based power plants. Should it happen, the completion of this massive orbiting power monster would be a giant step for man and mankind alike.

A Drug That Can Extend Life as Effectively As Dieting Many studies have shown that rigorous caloric restriction, or strict dieting, can increase longevity dramatically in lifeforms from yeast to humans. But a study released today shows one way to mimic the life-extending effects of food deprivation – using drugs. A team of researchers in the UK explored the role of a protein known as S6K1, which turns out to play an extraordinary role in aging and age-related disease. When the researchers grew mice lacking the gene to produce S6K1, their mice lived significantly longer (see chart – the red lines are mice without S6K1). They also developed fewer age-related debilitating conditions. Female mice without S6K1 lived slightly longer than their male counterparts, and over 160 days longer than the control group. That means the female mouse lifespan increased by twenty percent. Mice without S6K1 also lost weight, even if they ate more than ordinary mice. In other words, a substance that could block the expression of S6K1 would trick the body into thinking that you’d gone on a very rigorous diet. And it would make you healthier into an older age. The best part? In their paper, the researchers conclude: It might be possible to develop drug treatments that manipulate S6K1 and AMPK to achieve improved overall health in later life. Indeed, short-term rapamycin treatment reduces adiposity in mice, and metformin treatment [often used against type 2 diabetes] extends lifespan in short-lived mice. This is good news, because often when researchers make discoveries related to longevity there is no immediate pathway to manufacturing a life-extending drug. For all of us who want to stay healthy in old age while still eating sugar and fat once in a while, let’s hope this research team starts testing a drug based on their S6K1 discovery – and soon.

The 61-year-old American, who has predicted new technologies arriving before, says our understanding of genes and computer technology is accelerating at an incredible rate.

He says theoretically, at the rate our understanding is increasing, nanotechnologies capable of replacing many of our vital organs could be available in 20 years time.

Mr Kurzweil adds that although his claims may seem far-fetched, artificial pancreases and neural implants are already available.

Mr Kurzweil calls his theory the Law of Accelerating Returns. Writing in The Sun, Mr Kurzweil said: “I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies’ stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever.

“Ultimately, nanobots will replace blood cells and do their work thousands of times more effectively.

“Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen.

“Heart-attack victims – who haven’t taken advantage of widely available bionic hearts – will calmly drive to the doctors for a minor operation as their blood bots keep them alive.

“Nanotechnology will extend our mental capacities to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes.

“If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening.

“So we can look forward to a world where humans become cyborgs, with artificial limbs and organs.”

The International Space Station has a new “engawa”—and it’s open for business.

Engawa is Japanese for “porch,” and while that might seem like a strange thing for a space station to have, researchers have been looking forward to the addition for a long time. Space shuttle Endeavour delivered the Japanese-built platform to the ISS on July 22nd and astronauts attached it to Japan’s Kibo1 science lab a day later. Now, when a science experiment requires a dose of hard vacuum or radiation, it can be set “out on the porch” for exposure.

And that’s just for starters.

“On the new ‘Japanese Exposed Facility’ [JEF for short], researchers can stage experiments to look up at the cosmos, down at Earth, or around at the environment the ISS voyages through,” says Julie Robinson, ISS Program Scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Besides resembling a porch, this structure has unique features that differentiate it from the experiment exposure points2 located elsewhere on the station.”

For instance, the JEF offers temperature control. Like the space station’s other external experiment locations, it has a warming plate for thermal control, but unlike the others the JEF includes a cooling feature.3 Another advantage is that JEF experiments can be serviced by Kibo’s robotic arm4.

“The beauty of this is that payloads can be designed to be ‘plug and play,’” says Robinson, “so the robotic arm can install them — no space walk required.”

On July 24th, Kibo’s arm deftly delivered the first two JEF experiments from the Shuttle payload bay to the porch and positioned them5. These Japanese experiments are the SEDA-AP6, short for Space Environment Data Acquisition equipment-Attached Payload, and MAXI7, or the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image.

“SEDA-AP’s sensors will measure the space environment of low Earth orbit — neutrons, plasma, heavy ions, high-energy light particles, atomic oxygen, and cosmic dust,” explains Robinson.

With this experiment, researchers can test the mettle of materials and equipment exposed to the UV light, deep space radiation, and extreme temperatures of space . SEDA-AP will monitor material degradation to help researchers choose the hardiest materials for building future space instruments, equipment, and vehicles.

Friday , July 10, 2009

HONOLULU — 

Space pioneers envision launching high-end Hawaii tourists from the sand to the stars, taking island-hopping to new heights.

Hawaii could become the first place where travelers can use the planes for real transportation. Planners envision planes taking off in one place, traveling through space, then landing in another, going from the Big Island to Oahu. Within a decade, space travelers could island hop from Hawaii to Japan in 45 minutes.

And promoters promise a unique perspective during the flight.

“Flying down the Hawaii island chain, it’s a completely different view of the planet than you’ll see when you launch from landlocked states,” said Chuck Lauer, vice president of business development for Oklahoma City-based Rocketplane Global. “It’s the blue planet view of the world.”

Hawaii’s tourism leaders recognize the potential for attracting visitors with the promise of space travel, but it’s unclear whether Gov. Linda Lingle will release the licensing money at a time when the state is facing big budget problems and possible government employee layoffs. A new law authorizes the state to spend $500,000 to apply for a spaceport license from the federal government, which is the first step toward allowing commercial space travel from the islands.

Lingle has indicated she will either sign the legislation this month or let it become law without her signature. But she has the authority to withhold the money even after the bill becomes law.

If the plan goes forward, tourists would pay $200,000 for a weeklong package including spaceflight training, resort accommodations and short test flights to simulate weightlessness.

At the vacation’s finale, five voyagers would embark on a horizontal takeoff aboard a special rocket plane, climb to 40,000 feet before rockets fire, accelerate to 3,500 miles per hour, coast for a few minutes of weightlessness 62 miles above the Earth, flip over and then return to ground.

Jim Crisafulli, the state’s director of aerospace development, is confident many people would come to Hawaii to fly to space. “They wouldn’t bat an eye at spending that amount of money to fly to space,” he said. “It’s going to be a soul-energizing experience.”

Hawaii could become the eighth state granted a spaceport license. The process will take about three years, meaning space flights wouldn’t start earlier than 2012.

Hawaii would use existing runways on Oahu and the Big Island for its space program, which would use a rocket plane that looks like a mid-size business jet. The plane is still in the design phase, with actual construction expected to begin in a year and a half in Burns Flat, Okla.

The spaceport licensing process will involve studying the rocket plane’s potential effects on the environment, said state Tourism Liaison Marsha Wienert.

“I’m trying to stay as neutral and calm as possible on this,” she said. “As we plan for the future, I agree that we should consider all opportunities, and hopefully the environmental impact statement will show that it is an opportunity.”

Lauer said the space planes wouldn’t harm the environment because they’ll be powered by liquid oxygen and synthetic jet fuel.

Several space tourism companies, including Rocketplane, have shown interest in coming to Hawaii if they could, said John Strom, vice president of business development for Enterprise Honolulu, the Oahu economic development board. Those businesses’ studies show they can turn a tidy profit if the Hawaii market opens.

Space tourists will come away with a different understanding of how fragile the earth is, said Strom, a private pilot.

“The higher you go, the smaller it gets,” he said. “You definitely get a sense of the uniqueness of this fragile blue marble that we live on.”

(NOTE: TWITTER ENTRIES AT BOTTOM OF PAGE, UPDATED THROUGHOUT THE DAY. )

By Joseph B. White

From President Barack Obama’s first hour in office, he has been urging the American people to shape up.

“The time has come to set aside childish things,” the president said, quoting the Bible in his inaugural address. In his own words, he called for “a new era of responsibility.”

Andrew Zubko

Since then, Mr. Obama and his allies in the Democratic Congress have been working on a wide range of proposals designed to encourage citizens to change their behavior in the realms of health, finance and the environment.

Conservatives denounce the efforts as a “nanny state” that undermines personal responsibility by taking decisions out of citizens’ hands. And according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, nearly seven in 10 survey respondents said they had concerns about federal interventions into the economy.

President Obama and his circle of advisers think of it as a “nudge” state — a government that gives citizens the freedom to make choices, but arranges those choices in ways designed to leverage their lethargy for their own good, or the common good. It’s like a parent who puts a bowl of fruit within easy reach while stashing the cookies inconveniently on the pantry’s top shelf.

Mr. Obama isn’t the first president to see room for improvement in the way citizens conduct their lives. Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan told Americans to “Just Say No” to drugs. And Bill Clinton enacted a sweeping welfare overhaul that aimed, in part, to push recipients into the labor force.

But Mr. Obama’s efforts go beyond exhortations to a wide-ranging series of policies ready to warn you off bad behavior and favor good choices.

“What’s new here is the idea of ‘nudging’ and changing the choice architecture,” says Eric Patashnik, associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

Still smoking? The Food and Drug Administration will clamp down on marketing practices designed to encourage the habit — one that has had a hold on the president himself.

Mr. Obama says Americans should go for a run, or hit the gym. If that poke in the love handles from the presidential pulpit isn’t enough, members of Congress are working on proposals to levy taxes on sugary drinks and to require that restaurants put calorie information on menus.

Kenneth Baer, communications director for the Office of Management and Budget, says the administration’s goal is to help people make better informed decisions, not to mandate choices. “Steering is preferred over rowing,” he says.

The government’s track record as an agent of behavior change is mixed. Jimmy Carter’s efforts to preach the virtues of energy conservation from the Oval Office during the 1970s earned him the scorn of political rivals. Pat Caddell, a former Carter adviser, says such efforts can work — but they take time. When he was younger, littering was widespread, but the culture changed to the point that it “became socially unacceptable,” he says.

Erwin C. Hargrove, an emeritus professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, says the Obama administration appears to be trying to couch its calls for self-improvement not so much in moral terms, as President Carter did, but in terms of national self-interest — at least, for now.

“A moralist who preaches to people doesn’t get anywhere,” Mr. Hargrove says.

(Comment: Japan is forging ahead of most industrialized countries, including the U.S., in the development of robotic technologies and “humanoid” robots. The day is drawing near when such ‘droids will work in factories and homes, and even provide companionship to the elderly. Could these be the new “housepets” of the 21st century?—Michael Zey)

By YURI KAGEYAMA, AP Business Writer Yuri Kageyama, Ap Business Writer Mon Mar 16, 10:14 am ET

TSUKUBA, Japan – A new walking, talking robot from Japan has a female face that can smile and has trimmed down to 43 kilograms (95 pounds) to make a debut at a fashion show. But it still hasn’t cleared safety standards required to share the catwalk with human models.

Three Faces of Eve?

Developers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, a government-backed organization, said their “cybernetic human,” shown Monday, wasn’t ready to help with daily chores or work side by side with people — as many hope robots will be able to do in the future.

“Technologically, it hasn’t reached that level,” said Hirohisa Hirukawa, one of the robot’s developers. “Even as a fashion model, people in the industry told us she was short and had a rather ordinary figure.”

For now, the 158 centimeter (62.2 inch) tall black-haired robot code-named HRP-4C — whose predecessor had weighed 58 kilograms (128 pounds) — will mainly serve to draw and entertain crowds.

Developers said the robot may be used in amusement parks or to perform simulations of human movement, as an exercise instructor, for instance.

HRP-4C was designed to look like an average Japanese woman, although its silver-and-black body recalls a space suit. It will appear in a Tokyo fashion show — without any clothes — in a special section just for the robot next week.

The robotic framework for the HRP-4C, without the face and other coverings, will go on sale for about 20 million yen ($200,000) each, and its programming technology will be made public so other people can come up with fun moves for the robot, the scientists said.

Japan boasts one of the leading robotics industries in the world, and the government is pushing to develop the industry as a road to growth. Automaker Honda Motor Co. has developed Asimo, which can walk and talk, although it doesn’t pretend to look human.

Other robots, like the ones from Hiroshi Kobayashi at the Tokyo University of Science and Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University, have more human-like faces and have been tested as receptionists.

But demands are growing for socially useful robots, such as ones that can care for the elderly and sick, said Yoshihiro Kaga, a government official in the trade and industry ministry.

“We want this market to grow as an industry,” he said.

The robot shown Monday has 30 motors in its body that allows it to walk and move its arms as well as eight motors on its face to create expressions like anger and surprise.

In a demonstration for reporters, the robot waddled out, blinking, a bit like an animation figure come to life, and said, “Hello, everyone,” in a tiny feminine voice while its mouth moved.

The demonstration didn’t all go smoothly. The robot often looked surprised, opening its mouth and eyes in a stunned expression, when the demonstrator asked it to smile or look angry.

Its walk was also not quite ready for the Paris Collection, partly because its knees are permanently bent. It has sensors in its feet but lacks the sensitive balance of a real human.

The big challenge in creating HRP-4C was making the parts small enough so it looks female, especially its thinner legs, said Shuuji Kajita, who leads the institute’s humanoid research group.

“But this is just the first step,” he said

Capitalism Needs a Sound-Money Foundation

Let’s give the Fed some competition. Abolish legal tender laws and see whose money people trust.

By JUDY SHELTON

Let’s go back to the gold standard.

If the very idea seems at odds with what is currently happening in our country — with Congress preparing to pass a massive economic stimulus bill that will push the fiscal deficit to triple the size of last year’s record budget gap — it’s because a gold standard stands in the way of runaway government spending.

Under a gold standard, if people think the paper money printed by government is losing value, they have the right to switch to gold. Fiat money — i.e., currency with no intrinsic worth that government has decreed legal tender — loses its value when government creates more than can be absorbed by the productive real economy. Too much fiat money results in inflation — which pools in certain sectors at first, such as housing or financial assets, but ultimately raises prices in general.

Inflation is the enemy of capitalism, chiseling away at the foundation of free markets and the laws of supply and demand. It distorts price signals, making retailers look like profiteers and deceiving workers into thinking their wages have gone up. It pushes families into higher income tax brackets without increasing their real consumption opportunities.

In short, inflation undermines capitalism by destroying the rationale for dedicating a portion of today’s earnings to savings. Accumulated savings provide the capital that finances projects that generate higher future returns; it’s how an economy grows, how a society reaches higher levels of prosperity. But inflation makes suckers out of savers.

If capitalism is to be preserved, it can’t be through the con game of diluting the value of money. People see through such tactics; they recognize the signs of impending inflation. When we see Congress getting ready to pay for 40% of 2009 federal budget expenditures with money created from thin air, there’s no getting around it. Our money will lose its capacity to serve as an honest measure, a meaningful unit of account. Our paper currency cannot provide a reliable store of value.

So we must first establish a sound foundation for capitalism by permitting people to use a form of money they trust. Gold and silver have traditionally served as currencies — and for good reason. A study by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Arthur Rolnick and Warren Weber, concluded that gold and silver standards consistently outperform fiat standards. Analyzing data over many decades for a large sample of countries, they found that “every country in our sample experienced a higher rate of inflation in the period during which it was operating under a fiat standard than in the period during which it was operating under a commodity standard.”

Given that the driving force of free-market capitalism is competition, it stands to reason that the best way to improve money is through currency competition. Individuals should be able to choose whether they wish to carry out their personal economic transactions using the paper currency offered by the government, or to conduct their affairs using voluntary private contracts linked to payment in gold or silver.

Legal tender laws currently favor government-issued money, putting private contracts in gold or silver at a distinct disadvantage. Contracts denominated in Federal Reserve notes are enforced by the courts, whereas contracts denominated in gold are not. Gold purchases are subject to taxes, both sales and capital gains. And while the Constitution specifies that only commodity standards are lawful — “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts” (Art. I, Sec. 10) — it is fiat money that enjoys legal tender status and its protections.

Now is the time to challenge the exclusive monopoly of Federal Reserve notes as currency. Buyers and sellers, by mutual consent, should have access to an alternate means for settling accounts; they should be able to do business using a monetary unit of account defined in terms of gold. The existence of parallel currencies operating side-by-side on an equal legal footing would make it clear whether people had more confidence in fiat money or money redeemable in gold.

If the gold-based system is preferred, it means that people fully understand that the purpose of money is to facilitate commerce, not to camouflage fiscal mismanagement.

Private gold currencies have served as the medium of exchange throughout history — long before kings and governments took over the franchise. The initial justification for government involvement in money was to certify the weight and fineness of private gold coins. That rulers found it all too tempting to debase the money and defraud its users testifies more to the corruptive aspects of sovereign authority than to the viability of gold-based money.

Which is why government officials should not now have the last word in determining the monetary measure, especially when they have abused the privilege.

The same values that will help America regain its economic footing and get back on the path to productive growth — honesty, reliability, accountability — should be reflected in our money. Economists who promote the government-knows-best approach of Keynesian economics fail to comprehend the damaging consequences of spurring economic activity through a money illusion. Fiscal “stimulus” at the expense of monetary stability may accommodate the principles of the childless British economist who famously quipped, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” But it shortchanges future generations by saddling them with undeserved debt obligations.

There is also the argument that gold-linked money deprives the government of needed “flexibility” and could lead to falling prices. But contrary to fears of harmful deflation, the big problem is not that nominal prices might go down as production declines, but rather that dollar prices artificially pumped up by government deficit spending merely paper over the real economic situation.

When the output of goods grows faster than the stock of money, benign deflation can occur — it happened from 1880 to 1900 while the U.S. was on a gold standard. But the total price-level decline was 10% stretched over 20 years.

Meanwhile, the gross domestic product more than doubled.

At a moment when the world is questioning the virtues of democratic capitalism, our nation should provide global leadership by focusing on the need for monetary integrity. One of the most serious threats to global economic recovery — aside from inadequate savings — is protectionism. An important benefit of developing a parallel currency linked to gold is that other countries could likewise permit their own citizens to utilize it. To the extent they did so, a common currency area would be created not subject to the insidious protectionism of sliding exchange rates.

The fiasco of the G-20 meeting in Washington last November — it was supposed to usher in “the next Bretton Woods” — suggests that any move toward a new international monetary system based on gold will more likely take place through the grass-roots efforts of Americans. It may already be happening at the state level. Last month, Indiana state Sen. Greg Walker introduced a bill — “The Indiana Honest Money Act” — which would, if enacted, allow citizens the option of paying in or receiving back gold, silver or the equivalent electronic receipt as an alternative to Federal Reserve notes for all transactions conducted with the state of Indiana.

It may turn out to be a bellwether. Certainly, it’s a sign of a growing feeling in the heartland that we need to go back to sound money. We need money that works for the legitimate producers and consumers of the world — the savers and borrowers, the entrepreneurs. Not money that works for the chiselers.

Ms. Shelton, an economist, is author of “Money Meltdown: Restoring Order to the Global Currency System” (Free Press, 1994).

An SMU biologist searches to unlock the secrets to the fountain of youth

By Elaine Liner

published: February 19, 2009

In a windowless, climate-controlled chamber on the third floor of the Dedman Life Sciences building at Southern Methodist University, 15,000 fruit flies are on a diet so someday you won’t have to be.

The crumb-sized insects, weighing just one milligram each, live in slim glass and plastic tubes — 100 flies per — arranged in neat rows in ten shallow cardboard boxes stacked on shelves, one on top of the other, like little fly condominiums.

The landlord of the flies is 37-year-old scientist Johannes Bauer, Ph.D. New to the biology department at SMU, an up-and-coming center for aging research, Bauer feeds his flies every other day with a mixture of sugar and yeast as he studies the effects of calorie restriction on the flies’ health and longevity. In experiments he started at Brown University, he’s found that consuming 30 to 50 percent fewer calories daily allows the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly to live 10 to 40 percent longer than its natural life span — the equivalent in humans of living 120 years or more. Flies fed less are more alert, says Bauer. They’re more active in almost every way, except they’re not as fertile. Female flies share the tubes with males anyway because, says the scientist, “we want them to have some fun.”

Semi-starvation doesn’t sound like a party, but calorie restriction — a scientific term meaning undernutrition without malnutrition — is now being touted as the latest fountain-of-youth secret for extending the human “health span” and possibly the life span. Gerontologists, oncologists, biochemists and biologists like Bauer, engaged in calorie restriction studies on lab animals, believe they’ve found an effective way to stave off cancers, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and many other ailments. Staying hungry and living lean, say some researchers, is the only mechanism scientifically known to slow down the aging process and prevent age-related illnesses.

This comes as little surprise to children’s book author Shannon Vyff, 33, of Round Rock. For the past eight years, she has been a member of the Calorie Restriction Society, a loosely connected (mostly through Facebook) international “community” devoted to austere eating for healthy purposes.

Vyff is now one of the society’s most vocal supporters. She discovered calorie restriction after having three children in her 20s and hitting 200 pounds after the third. “I started searching online for diets and came across calorie restriction, and it made a lot of sense,” says Vyff, 5-foot-10 and now 130 pounds, up from her lowest of 117. It took her just six months on CR to lose 85 pounds. “There was an adjustment period at first. But I started to like the foods that were healthy for me. The hardest thing was cutting out some of the things that I loved eating, like pasta and breads.”

Calorie Restrictors — sometimes called CRONies, for Calorie Restriction/Optimal Nutrition — eat between 10 and 30 percent fewer calories than the typical adult, avoiding any foods high in fat, sugar or starch. Vyff now eats once a day, usually a lean chicken breast poached in water, some steamed broccoli or squash and maybe a glass of fresh orange juice. She eats red meat once every two weeks and prefers it cooked rare. Her daily calorie count hovers around 1,200 if she’s not exercising and 1,600 to 1,800 if she runs five or ten miles on the treadmill. She’s also on a local roller derby team. When she’s in training for that, she might help herself to a few extra morsels. Her favorite treat: six raw walnut halves and three Ghirardelli chocolate chips.

She credits CR with helping her pass her latest driving test without glasses for the first time. Her chronic knee pain disappeared, and her energy level zoomed, she says. Vyff’s husband, Michael Trice, 32, also follows the CR plan, with occasional lapses for desserts shared with their kids. (CR is not recommended for children or teens, even if overweight.)

And do they think living on less food will let them live to be 100 or older? “Why not? If everyone started following calorie restriction, they could extend life by decades and be healthier in the middle years.”

Adherents to calorie restriction and its cousins, raw foodism and veganism, tell similar stories about the positive effects, other than weight loss, of their eat-this/not-that regimens. They start to look younger than their years (something observed in calorie-restricted lab animals). Their chronic headaches, arthritis pain and sleep disorders go away without medication. They feel stronger, happier, more spiritually aware — as if a brain fog has lifted. Some report bursts of creative energy. Others describe a feeling of calm that envelops them after going with fewer calories for only a short time.

There is a scientific explanation for all of this. Reducing caloric intake, even by as little as 10 percent a day (skipping that extra helping of potatoes), sends the body’s cells into a low level of stress that makes them strong when high stresses occur — much the way moderate stress caused by exercise improves people’s health. “Restricting calories just a little bit puts your body in a state of stress, which makes you a little bit healthier,” says Bauer.

More than 1,000 studies dating back 70 years have shown that eating less, a lot less, retards the aging process and boosts health in a wide variety of laboratory animals: fruit flies, spiders, nematodes, mice, rats, dogs and rhesus monkeys. Calorie-restricted monkeys, for instance, look less wrinkled as they age. They have less gray hair, and look and act younger than their regular-diet counterparts. Eating less seems to make the metabolic processes in the body work more efficiently, Bauer says. The body enters an altered state that puts the brakes on aging.

In mice, flies and monkeys, that is.

“Calorie restriction works in the lower organisms, we know,” Bauer says. “But with humans it’s anybody’s guess so far.”

The best guess in the scientific community is that starting a program of calorie restriction in your thirties might add two years, says Bauer. “If you start in your forties, it’s six months. Start later than that, it’s negligible. It could be a few extra weeks.”

Yet other researchers seriously doubt the health and longevity benefits of calorie restriction for humans. They say it affects fertility and sometimes causes brittle bones. Animals put on CR early in life are smaller in adulthood. Even devoted human followers of CR complain of cold hands and sniffles that never go away.

So why all the interest in calorie restriction now? What Bauer and other researchers know for sure is that there is a genetic component to the “calorie restriction response” in lab animals, including fruit flies, that is probably similar in humans. Given less food than the body thinks it needs, there is a “switch” that goes on, says Bauer, sending a message to the body’s metabolic functions.

“If we could develop switches in the body to turn on and off the calorie restriction response, we could extend life expectancy,” Bauer says. That’s what he’s looking for in his fruit flies — the “switch” in their genetic makeup that will give the order to their bodies to be healthy and live longer, no matter how much they eat.

And if they find the switch, says Bauer, scientists want to develop a drug that will activate that genetic on-off mechanism to mimic the health effects of calorie reduction without requiring a drastic change in diet. That will be the magic pill. One that fools the human body’s metabolism and slows the aging process. One that allows people to remain disease-free without having to eat smaller meals.

And here’s the good news: Some scientists think they’ve found it.

_____________________

It’s called resveratrol. It’s a natural substance available right now for a few cents a dose in health food and vitamin stores. Sold under various retail names, it’s classified as a food supplement in the “antioxidant” category and is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

It’s been proven effective already on fat mice in a University of Pennsylvania study published in 2006 in the premier science journal Nature. Mice raised on the equivalent of a cheeseburger-and-fries diet were given resveratrol and compared to mice fattened without the supplement. The study found that the fat mice on resveratrol didn’t lose weight, but were healthier than the other mice. They also lived longer. In a French study, resveratrol-fed fat mice outran skinny ones in treadmill tests and built up healthy muscle even without exercise.

“Resveratrol could be the get-healthy drug,” SMU’s Bauer says. “It could be the miracle drug.”

And Big Pharma doesn’t even control it (yet). Medical and pharmaceutical interest in resveratrol has boomed over the past decade. Found naturally in certain vines, pine trees, red grapes, chocolate and peanuts, it is a chemical polyphenol that helps plants fight off drought, fungi, parasites and other external stressors. In the early 1990s, chemists looking to find the key to the “French paradox,” which allows the French to eat fatty food without getting heart disease, zeroed in on res­ver­atrol, part of the natural chemistry of red wine grapes and the likely reason red wine produced healthy heart effects.

Dozens of studies now have pinpointed the substance as a bonus not only to heart health but to the prevention of Alzheimer’s and diabetes, reversals of inflammatory responses to spinal cord injuries, and the prevention and treatment of stroke. Resveratrol is being tested in clinical studies as a natural supplement to chemotherapy and has shown the ability to block cancer cells before they metastasize to bone.

In the most widely publicized report on resveratrol, researchers at Harvard Medical School showed that it mimicked calorie restriction and activated the “longevity gene” in yeast, extending its life span by 70 percent. Harvard professor David Sinclair, one of the scientists on that study, is so confident about the future of resveratrol that he founded a biomedical research company, Sirtris (named for the sirtuin family of enzymes that react to calorie restriction), which focuses on discovering resveratrol-like “small molecule drugs.” Sirtris Pharmaceuticals was recently acquired by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.

Creating a synthetic resveratrol, one that can be approved by the FDA (and will be profitable for GlaxoSmithKline), will be one of the biggest medical discoveries since aspirin, Sinclair said in an interview on PBS’s NewsHour. “Let’s admit that people have claimed that they’ve had the elixir of youth probably for the last 40,000 or more years. So I don’t want to claim that we have the cure for aging, by any means, but it’s really clear that modern medicine, modern molecular biology has finally grasped a potential way to manipulate life span and have a dramatic impact on health care.”

A pill that diets for you is certainly easier than staying hungry. The question is how much resveratrol, or its derivatives, you’d have to take to get the benefits. In the concentrated version used in lab studies, each dose is about the equivalent of 14 bottles of red wine.

Paul McGlothin, 60, and wife Meredith Averill, 62, were subjects in several of the first controlled studies — at Harvard and at Washington University in St. Louis — testing resveratrol’s effects on people. “We’re probably the most tested humans in the world,” says McGlothin, CEO of an ad agency in Westchester, New York, and board chairman of the Calorie Restriction Society. After the studies, McGlothin and Averill decided to continue the calorie restriction regimen they started 15 years ago, without taking resveratrol — “though we think it’s worth consideration,” says McGlothin.

In their guidebook, The CR Way, the couple advises CRONies to eat 30 percent protein, 30 percent fat and 40 percent carbohydrates, focusing on making every bite as beneficial to the body as possible. No processed foods. Nothing fried, grilled or breaded. A day’s worth of oatmeal, blueberries, lentils, poached salmon, barley broth, steamed sweet potatoes, fresh greens and other healthy vittles might add up to between 1,100 and 1,800 calories, depending on the person’s height and weight.

By comparison, a typical adult American male under age 50 who’s not on a restricted diet and leads a fairly sedentary life eats about 2,500 calories a day without gaining weight; a typical female, about 2,000. For most Americans, too many calories come from high-fat, overprocessed food.

Rather than take resveratrol to be fat and healthy, McGlothin and Averill believe remaining underweight is the key to better health and feeling younger. McGlothin is 6 feet tall, weighs 133 pounds (down from 160 pounds 15 years ago) and has a 30-inch waist. He estimates that he consumes around 1,800 calories a day (the equivalent of one double cheeseburger, large fries and a shake). Averill dropped 20 pounds after converting to calorie restriction and now weighs 110. Both say they haven’t been sick in years.

Their eating day begins with the gradual intake of small meals, starting around 5 a.m. Their largest meal is breakfast, followed a few hours later by a lunch that might include raw or slightly steamed vegetables, beans, grains, fruit, fish and healthful fats. By 1 or 2 p.m., they’re finished eating for the day. Fasting for 12 to 15 hours between “dinner” and breakfast, they believe, allows the digestive organs to rest.

“With CR, you feel more energetic, more than you ever dreamed possible,” says McGlothin, who was featured with Averill in a recent 60 Minutes piece on CR, resveratrol and their effects on longevity. “You begin to just function better. My health was always average, not standout. But after CR, all my health ‘markers’ began to be like that of a person 15 to 20 years younger.”

McGlothin and Averill have worked closely with doctors, including Sinclair, to chart their progress as CR practitioners. “We’re proving how it works,” McGlothin says. “We’re in this to accelerate research.” And they like to boast that for many years now, they’ve been planning their 125th birthday parties.

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Back in the all-you-can-eat world, soaring obesity and inequality of health care are producing the first generation of Americans who may have a shorter life span than their parents.

After a century of increases in average life expectancy, America now ranks just above Mexico and most Eastern European nations for longevity, say statisticians at Boston College. Researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago calculate that in the first half of this century, U.S. life expectancy will level off or get shorter.

In France, Switzerland and Japan, both men and women who live to age 65 are expected to live years longer on average than Americans who reach 65. It’s estimated that 34 percent of American women currently are obese (typically, that is 20 percent over ideal weight), compared with just 4 percent in Japan. For men, it’s 28 percent and 2 percent, respectively.

With obesity come related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and cancer. By 2040, according to several studies, it’s projected that two-thirds of all American adults will be obese or overweight. Childhood obesity is already at crisis levels, with dramatic increases in type 2 diabetes among the very young. As those overweight kids transition to overweight adults, mortality levels will spike as they fall victim to early heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure and other obesity-related ailments. Meanwhile, baby boomers who’ve gained a pound or two a year in every year of middle age will be lurching heavily and unhealthily into their late sixties and seventies.

“Definitely as you age, you need fewer calories,” says Jo Ann Carson, Ph.D., who teaches clinical nutrition at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and is a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. “Your metabolism slows down, requiring fewer calories to function. But those calories should come from better-quality nutrients.”

Carson offers a simple formula for calculating how much to decrease daily food consumption to reap the health benefits. For women, subtract seven calories per day (from an average of 2,000) for every year past age 19. For men, it’s ten calories per day. Between ages 20 and 50, that’s a gradual decrease of between 210 and 300 calories (the equivalent of a couple of slices of buttered toast).

Guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2005 (the next set of guidelines will be issued next year) also advise that Americans need to eat fewer calories, fats and carbs, and should add more fruits, vegetables and whole grains to their diets. Also recommended are 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity most days of the week.

Carson points to studies that show that calorie restriction followers have healthier glucose and insulin levels as they age, less incidence of inflammatory diseases and do better on cognitive function tests.

“There’s something to this idea that getting just the right amount of calories for survival is an important way to manage health,” she says. “They find that place where they eat just enough, somewhere between 1,300 and 1,500 calories a day. The body is remarkable in how it adjusts and tries to maintain a steady state to keep you alive and functioning.”

The few calorie restriction studies using human subjects involved people voluntarily on the diet already, including one project at the Washington University School of Medicine looking at heart health among several groups, including 28 members of the Calorie Restriction Society who had been eating a CR diet for six years. The CR followers’ hearts were more elastic and able to relax better between beats compared to subjects who ate a standard Western diet and did endurance exercise training. That study concluded that leanness helped prevent disease, but only calorie reduction slowed down aging.

The most recent short-term study on CR, conducted at the University of Münster in Germany and published online in January by the National Academy of Sciences, lasted three months and determined that reducing calorie intake by 30 percent improved memory ability by 20 percent in elderly individuals (average age 60.5 years).

Evidence keeps mounting showing the many positive effects of eating less. But is a lifetime of meager meals a guarantee of long life?

The skunk at the calorie restrictors’ picnic is longevity expert Steven Austad, Ph.D., author of the book Why We Age and professor of biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He doesn’t believe that either CR or resveratrol will have as much of a “youthening” effect on humans as they do on lab animals. As he’s told several conventions of the Calorie Restriction Society in the past, what works on flies and mice fails seven out of ten times on people.

“We know that CR extends life in some animals, in some it doesn’t,” Austad says. “Some kinds of mice it works, some it doesn’t. Some fruit flies it does, some it doesn’t. People who study this tend to forget the experiments in which it didn’t work.”

Austad says he warns extreme calorie restrictors that “the jury is still out” on whether eating so little will add healthy years. “It might suppress the immune system and you could die from the next flu epidemic,” he says. Or you could end up at 80 with muscles too weak to support even a thin body. “It would be extremely interesting and exciting if reducing your food intake would extend your life. But people in the aging community tend to jump on the bandwagon and make the leap from fruit flies to humans a little too enthusiastically.”

And resveratrol? “Vastly overstated,” Austad maintains. “Resveratrol has never been shown to extend life in any mammal except one — lab mice — eating so much fat that it was like you and I ate nothing but Big Macs every day. Other studies on mice eating a normal diet, resveratrol had no impact on how long they lived. It’s an intriguing drug, but we don’t have any evidence that it really does anything.”

Nature and genetics play a much stronger role in longevity than diet, says Austad. In his research, he’s interviewed dozens of people who lived to 100 or beyond. “The ranks of 100-year-olds are not populated by marathon runners,” he says. “They didn’t exercise. Some smoked for 95 years. They’ve got a genetic quirk.”

Though he believes the first person to live to be 150 is already alive, Austad, 52, isn’t hedging his own bets on the actuarial tables. He exercises “fairly fanatically” and doesn’t smoke, but he also indulges in the occasional cocktail and he doesn’t count calories.

“Here’s an interesting thing — I’ve been to several meetings now of scientists who study calorie restriction, and I look around the room and don’t see gaunt, skinny people,” Austad says. “Some are slender, some are obese, some are muscular. If you look at those people who spend their lives [studying] CR, very few of them seem to do it themselves.”

Back in the humid fruit fly chamber at SMU, Dr. Johannes Bauer laughs when asked if he practices calorie restriction. At 5-foot-7 and 140 pounds, the German-born scientist (who looks about 19) never exercises, doesn’t take resveratrol and has never been on a diet. “Humans evolved as omnivores. They ate everything in their path,” he says.

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Ben Franklin advised in Poor Richard’s Almanac: “To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.” Franklin lived into his eighties at a time when the average life expectancy for men was around 35. If he were around today, he might also advise eating more of thy meals raw.

At a recent potluck supper of the Our Heart of Dallas Radical Health Raw/Vegan Meetup, one of ten raw food social groups in Dallas organized through Meetup.com, the dining table at host Amy Hirsch’s apartment is crowded with uncooked edibles prepared by the 25 attendees (out of 237 members total). Shiny green chard leaves are wrapped around raw bits of cauliflower on one plate, and there’s a container of pudding made from soaked hemp seeds and coconut milk. Fresh pineapple, blueberries, apples and other fruits brighten the spread. In the middle of the table sits a large bowl of something resembling wet hair. It’s hijiki, a calcium-rich brown sea vegetable the “raw foodists,” as they like to be called, eat like noodles.

Eating only uncooked, organic (as much as possible) plants and “super-foods” is the next step beyond simple calorie restriction. Pure raw foodists are vegans, eating no animal products at all, including dairy and eggs. Also no alcohol or caffeine. A raw foodist menu is made up mainly of uncooked vegetables and fruits, raw nuts and fresh juices. Vegans also restrict their daily calorie count — sometimes to half that of a non-vegan’s — because of the amount of leafy greens and other low-cal veggies they fill up on.

Miranda Martinez, a Dallas actress who also does theater production and PR, has been attending raw food get-­togethers since converting to an all-raw vegan diet in 2007. A native of Panama, Martinez, now 36, had been a yoyo dieter and admitted “bread-aholic” for much of her life. She’d tried all the major fad and commercial weight-loss plans: Atkins, The Zone, Cybergenics, Weight Watchers, low-carb, high-protein and the Master Cleanse (a liquid fast involving lemonade, cayenne pepper and maple syrup). With most, she’d lose weight and then gain it all back and more, she recalls.

In December 2007, after hitting 205 pounds, the 5-foot-2 Martinez did a 30-day Master Cleanse fast, which knocked off 21 pounds, then started eating only organic raw fruits and vegetables, totaling about 1,500 calories a day. She lost eight pounds the first week on the raw foods and also lost her craving for sweets. Within a few months, her cholesterol levels dropped into healthy numbers. She began supplementing with so-called super-foods — spirulina, bee pollen, chia seeds, nutritional yeast and nori seaweed — and signed up for Bikram yoga classes three times a week.

By July 2008, Martinez had pared off 66 pounds, going from a size 20 to a size 4. She said it wasn’t a struggle, and she is now such a believer in raw foods, she’s started working as a “coach” to help those who want to try the raw way of life. She’s also written an e-book full of tips and recipes, available on her Web site, VivaRaw.com.

“Before going raw, I felt a physical pull toward food,” Martinez says. “I wanted the bread, the chips, the desserts. I had an emotional connection to food. For me, eating raw food has meant finding freedom. As long as my food is raw, I can eat and be satisfied. Now if I get hungry, I eat another apple. It’s the best I’ve ever felt in my life. I don’t get colds anymore. My allergies went away. This is my way of life now.”

The raw foodists are energetic evangelists, touting the benefits they’ve reaped from giving up cooked and processed food. But there is no scientific basis, says UT-Southwestern nutrition expert Jo Ann Carson, for a raw food diet being healthier than one that includes cooked food, dairy and meats. “There is a science basis for calorie restriction,” Carson says. “But raw foodists are an extreme.”

Carson warns that an all-raw diet could lack adequate protein. “They’re also losing some muscle, which makes them look thin,” she says. “But when they get older, they’re not going to have the muscle strength to support themselves easily. They could be more likely to fall over, break bones and die. [Going on raw foods] might keep them from getting cancer at 50, but if they live to be 80, their musculature is not going to be as good.”

Isaac Clay, 28, is a stringbean at 6-foot-1 and 160 pounds. He met his girlfriend, Courtney Taylor, 27, at a Dallas raw foodists’ eat-and-greet last year. She started eating only raw vegan foods at age 20; he did so at 23, after a period of depression and soul-searching following the sudden death of his mother contributed to his weight topping out at 220. He credits going raw with his weight loss, his acne clearing and his chronic backaches going away. It also lifted him out of depression.

“Shock and grief derailed me,” Clay recalls. “I stuffed myself with fast food two or three times a day. I would eat fried chicken feet at a Chinese restaurant. When I first got into raw foods, it was new and huge to me. Now it’s second nature. Raw food makes the most sense.” His two favorite items: a super-food supplement made of blue-green algae and a drink powder called Chocolate Bliss that can be blended with raw fruits or vegetables as a meal replacement.

Clay estimates there are about 600 hardcore raw foodists among the various Meetup groups in the Dallas area. Almost every weekend, there’s a free buffet at somebody’s house, where people share recipes and give testimonials about which foods are “supporting” them.

Among Houston’s growing raw food community — half a dozen Meetup groups already connect 500 to 600 dedicated raw foodists around the city — Ken Browning, 44, is a heretic who still chows down on the occasional steak or Tex-Mex combo plate. The Meetup he founded last November, Your Radical Health Houston Vegan Raw Food, has 220 members meeting monthly in Magnolia, north of the city.

Browning, 6 feet 5 inches tall, got into raw foods after ballooning to 280 pounds. “I felt miserable,” he says. “I could do a diet during the day, but from 8 to midnight, I wanted Blue Bell [ice cream]. You will not lose weight until you do calorie restriction, but your life will be hell. Everything inside of you wants Cheetos.”

He waded slowly into the raw way of eating last August, starting with drinking Chocolate Bliss for breakfast and lunch, then sitting down to a “decent-sized dinner.” In three months, Browning had lost 40 pounds. “And I wasn’t hungry,” he says.

Now calling himself a “quasi-raw guy,” Browning predicts raw-veganism will become more mainstream as people look for a lifelong eating plan that is healthy, satisfying and affordable. He also sees himself staying vigorous well past middle age, something that has particular meaning: His father died of a heart attack at 55.

Michelle Steiner, 38, a 5-foot-2-inch massage therapist and full-time college student in The Woodlands, suffered for years from fibromyalgia (pain in muscles and other connective tissues) and debilitating chronic fatigue. She decided to try a vegan diet for 30 days. That was nearly four years ago. She says she felt so good after that first month — pain gone, energy up — she stayed vegan, “losing 35 pounds without even trying.”

She’s now “working toward raw,” she says. The difficulty is finding restaurants with more to eat than salads and broccoli. Instead of in-home potlucks, her Meetup group goes out to eat together to places that cater to vegans and raw food fans such as Pepper Tree Veggie Cuisine and Hometown Vegetarian Cafe.

Being part of a community of like-minded eaters is as beneficial as the food itself, says Dallas raw foodist Isaac Clay. “Getting together physically is a powerful thing. You can’t just do it through the Internet. Life is all about relationships.”

And his relationship with calorie-restricted raw foods has a higher goal: Living longer. “I just don’t plan on dying,” Clay says. “And as long as we’re nourishing our cells properly, we’re basically immortal.”

On a diet of salads and seaweed, however, it might just feel like forever.

While working on this story, writer Elaine Liner started taking resveratrol daily and eating raw foods. She has lost nine pounds.

December 08, 2008