UCLA’s Dr. Stephen Coles studies the oldest people in the world. Hitting the century mark isn’t enough to pique his interest because Coles’ research focuses on supercentenarians, that is, those at least 110-year-old. Today Coles recognizes only 88 people worldwide as supercententarians, and the list is available at the Gerontology Research Group website.

Dr. Coles sat down with Reason.tv’s Ted Balaker to explain why supercententarians live so long, what eventually does them in (it’s not old age), and what could be done to help them (and the rest of us) live longer lives.

Topics include: FDA regulations, the Singularity, and immortality.

(more…)

Buried beneath the avalanche of press coverage about the lame-duck Congress, I found a story about President Obama’s mid-December meeting with twenty corporate CEOs. The purpose of this Blair House get-together was to discuss how to jump-start our still-ailing economy. Among other aims, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals to increase employment, end the recession, and double U.S. exports over the next five years.

These are lofty and laudable ambitions. But it seems that Mr. Obama’s regulatory bureaucrats haven’t gotten the memo. For example, consider the counter-productive impact of their efforts on agriculture.

As any shopper knows, food prices this past year have been rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. “Fears of a global food crisis swept the world’s commodity markets as prices for staples such as corn, rice and wheat spiraled after the U.S. government warned of ‘dramatically’ lower supplies,” the Financial Times reported in early October. “There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick later that month. “These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.”

Confronting this looming food-supply crisis is the American farmer. His productivity is such that the United States is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with $108.7 billion in farm products shipped abroad in 2010. Helping him increase the supply of agricultural products is the key to addressing both rising food prices and global shortages. His productivity is also critical to our country’s broader economic recovery.

So, you would think that the administration’s apparatchiks would be doing whatever they can to remove the regulatory impediments that farmers face. But you would be wrong. Consider several ways in which federal regulators are threatening agricultural productivity, both directly and indirectly.

(more…)

A few years ago, environmental guru, Merry Prankster, and Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand caused a minor stir with an article he wrote in the MIT publication, Technology Review.  Brand, who was an early advocate of the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, had done some re-thinking, and he concluded that environmentalist opposition to things like urbanization, population growth, biotechnology, and nuclear power generation, was wrong and needed to change.

Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he takes on these environmental shibboleths in a more concerted fashion.  On American Public Radio’s Marketplace program yesterday, host Kai Ryssdal discussed the new book with Brand.  Asked what prompted him to write the book, Brand said that,

“My fellow environmentalists have been wrong about a couple of issues and were getting in the way of important things we should be doing, both with biotechnology and with nuclear technology, and in terms of how we think about cities, and in terms of how I know we’re going to think about geoengineering–that is, direct intervention in the climate.”

 

(more…)