says Aubrey de Grey, a leading gerontologist at Cambridge University."The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today ... whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries"
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
said Woody Allen, expressing an ageless desire in mankind. This desire to live forever is a recurring theme reflecting the human mind, whether it be for a physical fountain of youth, for re-birth in a future incarnation or an eternity in a here-after, in the latter case rejecting the planet and future generations entirely.the words of Aubrey de Grey, a leading gerontologist at Cambridge University. The research is coming on leaps and bounds. A couple of years ago it was thought to be further away from being realised than it is now."The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today ... whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries"
Accidents can still happen. Back in the early years of the third millennium an American biologist, Professor Steven Austad, studied death rates among 11-year-olds, the age at which disease is the least likely killer. On the basis of these figures, which included death by accidents of varying degrees of improbability, Austad calculated an “immortal” human was likely to live an average of 1,200 years.
And so, in 3194, blooming, youthful, beautiful, 1,200-year-old Sally is strolling along Esher High Street. A piano falls from a sixth-floor window and kills her. Sad, but never mind, she had a good innings.
All of this — well, not the piano — is exactly what Aubrey de Grey and an increasing number of scientists around the world expect to happen.
Henry Ward Beecher"Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life."
""How can it enter into the thoughts of man, that the soul, which is capable of such immense perfections, and of receiving new improvements to all eternity, shall fall away into nothing almost as soon as it is created?
Nanoparticles that are one milliard of a metre in size are widely used, for example, in cosmetics and food packaging materials. There are also significant amounts of nanoparticles in exhaust emissions. However, very little is yet known of their health effects, because only a very small portion of research into nanoparticles is focused on their health and safety risks.
Nanoparticles have even been dubbed the asbestos of the 2000s bys some researchers, and therefore a considerable threat to people's health. While the use of nanoparticles in consumer products increases, their follow-up procedures and legislation are lagging behind. The European Union chemicals directive REACH does not even touch upon nanomaterials.
President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s state of the nation address went on for 85 minutes and contained more than 8,000 words, but the section that prompted the most chatter on Thursday was a single sentence, the one that proposed lengthening the Russian president’s term to six years from four.
The proposal in the televised speech on Wednesday sounded odd, coming from a man just six months into his first term, and he offered little insight into his motive. It has led to rumors that Mr. Medvedev was laying the groundwork for his mentor, Vladimir V. Putin, the former two-term president who is now prime minister, to return as president, perhaps as early as next year.
What was, however, more significant in Medvedev's presentation was the outspokenness with which he condemned the Russian state apparatus's interference in elections, mass media, civil society and the economy - all of which gives, in Medvedev's opinion, birth to corruption in the bureaucracy.
Under president Vladimir Putin, the various official and unofficial alterations of Russia's political system amounted to a centralization and insulation of power in the Kremlin, which by 2007 had led to the restoration of authoritarianism and a de facto one-party system.
In contrast, Medvedev made it clear that he wants to return power to the people and to see politics becoming more pluralistic. Thus, Medvedev proposed that smaller parties should have a voice in the political process, suggesting that those parties falling below a 7% threshold in parliamentary elections yet reaching more than 5% should in the future be represented with at least one or two deputies in the Duma. (One suspects that this peculiar modification of the electoral system is a result of a somewhat awkward compromise between Medvedev, who apparently wants to make the composition of the legislature more diverse, and conservative forces in the government who seek to preserve the high 7% threshold. The latter was introduced only recently to secure the nearly total control of the lawmaking process by Putin’s United Russia Party.)
Still, in formulating its policies towards Moscow, the West should take due notice that the formally most powerful politician in Russia can be counted on as a firm supporter of democratic values.
Of course, the West was still careful about directly supporting independence movements inside the Soviet Union. When the Lithuanian authorities approached the American embassy in Moscow to ask whether the United States would lend support to the independence of Lithuania, the immediate response was negative. When the Soviet Union tried to use force to reestablish control in Baltic states in January 1991, however, the reaction from the West--including from the United States--was fairly straightforward: "Do as you wish, this is your country. You can choose any solution, but please forget about the $100 billion credit."
What were Gorbachev's options at the time? He could not easily dissolve the Soviet empire; the conservative elements inside the Soviet leadership were strongly against this notion. Yet he could not prevent the dissolution of the empire without a massive use of force. But if force was employed, the Soviet state would not get the necessary funds from the West, without which Gorbachev had no chance of staying in power.
On August 22, 1991, the story of the Soviet Union came to an end. A state that does not control its borders or military forces and has no revenue simply cannot exist. The document which effectively concluded the history of the Soviet Union was a letter from the Vneshekonombank in November 1991 to the Soviet leadership, informing them that the Soviet state had not a cent in its coffers.
Russia will be attending the G20 summit next week, but they want a reduced role for the IMF while the west wants it strengthened.
Dvorkovich said any country willing to participate in global financial management should be allowed to play a role in new institutions, in contrast with the IMF, which Russia views as dominated by the U.S. and other G7 nations.
Russia's other proposals for G20 summit include more powers for global financial institutions, new global risk management system, more advanced information disclosure, harmonisation of accounting rules and capitalisation of financial institutions.
Russia bears a longstanding grudge against the IMF, which provided advice for many ill-fated market reforms in the 1990s and decided against bailing Russia out in the wake of the 1998 financial meltdown.
The organisation, which comprises Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is widely seen as a counter-weight to NATO's influence in Eurasia. It is primarily concerned with security issues. This time, however, the sides are discussing how to develop social and economic cooperation.
At the beginning of his speech at the SCO Council of Prime Ministers, Vladimir Putin stressed the role the SCO countries should play in the changing world political and economic landscape.
“We now clearly see the defectiveness of the monopoly in world finance and the policy of economic selfishness. To solve the current problem Russia will to take part in changing the global financial structure so that it will be able to guarantee stability and prosperity in the world and to ensure progress,” he said.
What began with the explosion of the housing bubble has unfolded into a far-reaching global financial crisis affecting everything from banks to retail sales to the auto industry. Consumer confidence is hovering at record lows and consumer spending has declined for the first time in 17 years as Americans prepare to ride out what economists think could be the most severe recession in decades.
The first order of business for the new president will be to stabilize the economic crisis.
As the U.S. presidential candidates sprint toward the finish line, the Bush administration is also sprinting to enact environmental policy changes before leaving power.
Whether it's getting wolves off the Endangered Species List, allowing power plants to operate near national parks, loosening regulations for factory farm waste or making it easier for mountaintop coal-mining operations, these proposed changes have found little favor with environmental groups.
Senator Obama has been a big supporter of corn subsidies for American farmers to produce the plant-fuel ethanol.
But a new report from his own green adviser warns of the many problems associated with the biofuel.
Daniel Kammen's paper says that a car will emit more greenhouse gases driving on corn ethanol processed with coal than it will using normal petrol.
America remains the greatest single power in the world, yet the rise of China, the new belligerence of Russia and the wealth of the Gulf set this election in a very different context to its predecessors.
In this election America was not looking simply for a candidate able to command its forces as it enjoyed undisputed hegemony. It was more anxious than that. It was looking for a leader, like Mr Obama, who could command and might deserve the respect of the world.
The crisis in the financial markets only added to that feeling. For the first time in a generation the free market ideal and its advocates were on the back foot.
At a meeting on Monday in Marseille, the European Union's collected foreign ministers put finishing touches on a six-page memorandum that will guide their dealings with the next American administration. It is the first time that the EU has drawn up a road-map for relations with the US.
To Asian ears, Obama's calls for tougher labor and environmental rules and steps to reduce the U.S. trade deficit sound like thinly veiled protectionism, just as a global financial crisis makes exports more crucial than ever.
``The immediate concern with Obama will be economic relations,'' said Wu Xinbo, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. ``The U.S. will be less forthcoming in pursuing economic liberalization in the Asia region'' because of concerns about jobs lost to trade.
Obama's goal of corralling developing economies into binding pollution-reduction commitments and his pledges to insert labor and environmental standards in trade agreements may spark unified opposition in an Asia that has more tools than ever to resist Western pressure.
It is unlikely that Putin, now Russia’s prime minister but still the country’s most powerful man, will be kept waiting when his aides call America to arrange a meeting with the new president.
Nor will Putin be as ingratiating and eager to please. Then he was the president of a broken, penurious country trying to find its place in a world utterly dominated by the United States. Today he steers a country eager to reassert itself and ready to challenge America at a time when US influence seems to many in Moscow to be on the wane.
No longer the supplicant, Russia is likely to try to test the new administration, probing its weaknesses in an attempt to humiliate its old Cold War foe.
"Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America ... Watch. We're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."
But it’s also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it’s important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some.
In parts of the US supplies are so vulnerable that last autumn the Red Cross delivered water parcels to the town of Orme in Tennessee. 'I thought, "That can't be the Red Cross. We're Americans!"' resident Susan Anderson told a reporter. In California, some farmers abandoned their crops this year as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared the first state-wide drought for 17 years. Meanwhile Barcelona was so desperate that it began importing tankers of water from cities along the coast. Even in the notoriously wet UK, water has become such a problem in the crowded southeast that one company plans to build a desalination plant, the sort of desperate measure associated with oil-rich desert states.
The Stockholm International Water Institute talks about 'an acute and devastating humanitarian crisis'; the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, warns of a 'perfect storm'; Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary General, has raised the spectre of 'water wars'. And, as the population keeps growing and getting richer, and global warming changes the climate, experts are warning that unless something is done, billions more will suffer lack of water - precipitating hunger, disease, migration and ultimately conflict.
Each Briton uses about 150 litres of tap water a day, but if you include the amount of water embedded within products our water consumption is around 3400 litres every day!
If present levels of consumption continue, two-thirds of the global population will live in areas of water stress by 2025. Increasing human demand for water coupled with the effects of climate change mean that the future of our water supply is not secure.
About 70 per cent of the water consumed by people in the UK, for example, comes from overseas, according to Waterwise, a UK government-funded body that aims to reduce water usage by businesses. It is imported in the form of food, clothing, computers and cars. These imports give people in developed countries a far higher “water footprint” than people in poor countries.
.In the world today, over a billion people lack safe drinking water. As tension mounts between states competing for diminished supplies of “blue gold,” the global water industry is expected to become a trillion-dollar-a-year operation within a decade.
Up until now, no single publication has given shape and meaning to statistics about water use, re-use, and control. With a range of maps of startling clarity and richness of detail, The Water Atlas brings together the latest findings to show water distribution worldwide, the real cost of use in water-rich countries, and the dangers of a future where privatization and profit dictate availability. The atlas covers a wide range of topics, from consumption and scarcity to areas of political tension and looming catastrophes. Including detailed profiles of vulnerable regions—such as California, the Middle East, and India—as well as bold summaries of the global picture, The Water Atlas will be a unique resource for general readers as well as health professionals, advocates, and students
Carbon pollution levels are rising so fast that the world has no realistic chance of hitting ambitious climate targets set by Britain and the G8, an influential report to the Australian government has warned.
The Garnaut report says developed nations including Britain, the United States and Australia would have to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 5% each year over the next decade to hit the 450ppm target. Britain's climate change bill, the most ambitious of its kind in the world, calls for reductions of about 3% each year to 2050.
Friends of the Earth said: "A target of 550ppm of carbon dioxide is a recipe for disaster and even the lower target of 450ppm will mean we will face runaway climate change. The Arctic sea ice and Himalaya glaciers are already disappearing and the permafrost bomb is looming. We need much deeper cuts. Professor Garnaut has described strong targets as delusional, but he continues to feed a delusional policy debate that recognises the problem but doesn't want to implement the solution."
As I report on climate change, I come across a lot of scary facts, like the possibility that thawing permafrost in Siberia could release gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or the risk that Greenland could pass a tipping point and begin to melt rapidly. But one of the most frightening studies I've read recently had nothing to do with icebergs or megadroughts. In a paper that came out Oct. 23 in Science, John Sterman — a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Sloan School of Management — wrote about asking 212 MIT grad students to give a rough idea how much governments need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to eventually stop the increase in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. These students had training in science, technology, mathematics and economics at one of the best schools in the world — they are probably a lot smarter than you or me. Yet 84% of Sterman's subjects got his problem wrong, greatly underestimating the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions need to fall. When the MIT kids can't figure out climate change, what are the odds that the broader public will?
No corner of the Earth is immune from the effects of global warming, according to a new study that confirms manmade temperature rises in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Temperature records over the last century show that warming in the planet's coldest and most remote wildernesses is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study, published today in Nature Geoscience, is the first to find the fingerprints of manmade global warming on the Antarctic, where a shortage of data makes it hard to be sure. Last year's report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said human influence could be detected on every continent, except Antarctica. Climate sceptics have exploited this omission to question the science of global warming.
Consumerism is the biggest obstacle to sustainability and the pressure to consume is stoked by greater inequality. Inequality amplifies social status differences and adds to status insecurity and competition. People in more unequal societies struggle to keep up: they work longer hours, borrow more and save less.
Fairness is also key to policies to reduce global warming. Allowing rich nations or individuals to produce 10 times the carbon emissions of the poor is not a basis for agreement and effective enforcement.
Seven Puget Sound killer whales are missing and feared dead in what could be the biggest decline among the sound's orcas in nearly a decade, say scientists who carefully track the endangered animals.
"This is a disaster," Ken Balcomb, a senior scientist at the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island, said Friday. "The population drop is worse than the stock market."
While the official census won't be completed until December, the number of live "southern resident" orcas now stands at 83.
New research by the Wildlife Conservation Society and Save the Elephants has found that African Elephants are quickly becoming trapped by new road construction cutting through their forest habitats.
The study, which appeared in today’s issue of Public Library of Science, says the elephants have adopted a “siege mentality” and literally cannot bring themselves to cross roadways, even in search of food.
“Forest elephants are basically living in fear of their lives in prisons created by roads. They are roaming around the woods like frightened mice rather than tranquil formidable giants of their forest realm,” said Dr. Stephen Blake, the study’s lead author.