Demography: How to Live Beyond 100

Your odds of living to celebrate your one-hundredth birthday are higher than ever, says University of Georgia gerontologist Leonard Poon.

Adults aged 100 or more are a fast-growing population group throughout the industrialized world, Poon notes. Most industrialized countries now average one centenarian per 10,000 residents, but the figure is moving toward one in 5,000.

“One can observe over the last century that the oldest of our population increased from a negligible number to an appreciable proportion,” Poon writes in Aging, Biotechnology, and the Future.

Poon gives the average 60-year-old a 1% chance and the average 80-year-old a 0.5% chance of becoming a centenarian.

Life-span is 30% determined by genes and 70% determined by environment, according to Poon. In 1992, he compared a group of centenarians with groups of adults in their 80s and 60s, finding a common thread of healthy living among most of the 100-or-older group: They had exercised regularly, eaten breakfast daily, consumed substantial amounts of carotenoids and Vitamin A, and refrained from smoking and abuse of alcohol.

“Human attitudes and choices may underlie the secrets of longevity,” Poon suggests.

Many centenarians, however, reach their ripe old ages despite health choices that most doctors would not like. Jeanne Calment, whose 122 years won her the Guinness Book of World Records' entry as the oldest human being, smoked until her 120th birthday.

“They are not all exemplary: Some people smoked, some drank heavily,” says L. Stephen Coles, co-founder of the Gerontology Research Group, which researches centenarian health. “There is no particular thing you could point to that you could say ‘If you do this, you will live to one hundred.’”

The deciding factor, Coles told THE FUTURIST, is genetics. He notes that many centenarians' parents lived into their 90s.

“If your parents lived long, you will probably live long,” he says.

Robert Young, claims researcher for the Gerontology Research Group, adds that being a woman also helps. In the research group's database of 4,000 “supercentenarians” — people who live more than 110 years — 90% are women.

Young attributes the gender imbalance to basic physiological differences: Women's bodies naturally last longer than men's. He says that women are statistically more likely than men to survive gunshot wounds and heart attacks, and they live with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases for far greater lengths of time.

“Women are designed for endurance, whereas men are designed for peak strength,” Young says.

However, a healthy lifestyle does help, no matter what your gender or genome might be.

“As a doctor, I cannot tell you to go smoke just because Calment did,” says Coles. “She lived in spite of her bad habits, not because of her bad habits.”

Coles encourages individuals of all ages to extend their lives as long as they can by taking good care of their health.

“They have to lead an exemplary lifestyle. It's important for people to live a long time so that they are around when aging intervention treatments become possible,” he says. — Rick Docksai

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Sources: “What Can We Learn from Centenarians?” by Leonard Poon, in Aging, Biotechnology, and the Future edited by Catherine Y. Read et al. The Johns Hopkins University Press, www.press.jhu.edu. 2008. 266 pages. $45. Order online from the Futurist Bookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.

L. Stephen Coles and Robert Young, Gerontology Research Group. Web site www.grg.org.

Predicting Supercentenarians

Gerontologist Leonard Poon surveyed 137 supercentenarians in a 2000 study and observed five predictors of living long past age 100:

1. Gender. On average, women survived 1,020 days after reaching 100 years. Men averaged only 781.
2.Family longevity. The age of death of the centenarian's fathers was positively associated with the days of survival of centenarians. No effect was found for the mother's age of death, though.
3. Income and social support. The centenarians who talked on the phone often, had a caregiver, and had someone to help on a regular basis all tended to live longer than centenarians who did not.
4.Anthropometrics. Less body fat and higher waist-to-hip ratio correlated positively with survival after 100 years.
5. Cognition. The centenarians with higher cognitive abilities tended to live the longest.

Source: Leonard Poon.

Demography

November-December 2008 Vol. 42, No. 6

How to Live Beyond 100

A very long life is one part nature and one part nurture.

Government: Civilian Peacekeepers

U.S. military officials do not hope that a new volunteer force will help them win wars. They hope it will prevent wars from starting in the first place.

The Civilian Response Corps, a body of U.S. government employees with vital professional skills, deploys to troubled parts of the world to consult local officials and help develop sagging infrastructures. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hails the new corps as a means to a more peaceful future.

“In a world as increasingly interconnected as ours, the international state system is only as strong as its weakest links,” Rice says. “We cannot afford another situation like the one that emerged in 2001 in Afghanistan.”

Corps members are now serving in Afghanistan as well as Chad, Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Sudan.

Rice argues that achieving lasting stability in zones that had experienced violence was a job that the military could not do alone; civilian experts have an important role to play.

The corps includes 250 active members who would deploy within 48 hours to the scenes of crises and 2,000 standby members who would be called up as needed. All members hold permanent jobs in other government agencies as doctors, lawyers, engineers, agronomists, police officers, public administrators, and other important roles.

Rice has consistently opposed missions in which military personnel take responsibility for peacekeeping and stabilization. During the 2000 presidential campaign, she sparked fierce denunciations in Europe when she said that then-candidate George W. Bush would remove U.S. troops from Kosovo because, as quoted by Agence France-Presse, “We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.” She added that “extended peacekeeping detracts from our readiness for global missions.”

But by 2006, chaos in post-Saddam Iraq convinced General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, that combat operations would never succeed without good peacekeeping.

“We need significantly more non-military personnel … with expertise in areas such as economic development, civil affairs, agriculture, and law,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated the call to Congress for civilian help in a November 2007 speech that expressly asked for a cadre of civilians that would help secure peace.

“We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military,” he said, adding that he was “for strengthening our capacity to use ‘soft power’ and for better integrating it with ‘hard power.’”

Congress unanimously approved the new corps and gave it a $248 million budget for the 2008 fiscal year.

Ann Vaughan of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker organization that lobbied for the new corps, sees it as a sound investment.

“This legislation is a critical first step toward changing the way the U.S. engages the world,” she says. — Rick Docksai

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WHO Global Database: Data for Saving Lives” World Health Organization. Web site (June 1, 2008).

Government

November-December 2008 Vol. 42, No. 6

Civilian Peacekeepers

A new U.S. operation hopes to stop wars before they happen.

November-December 2008 Tomorrow in Brief

Biological Brains for Robots

Robots may learn how to find their way around their environments and avoid obstacles, thanks to biological brains developed by researchers at the University of Reading in Britain. Cultured neurons are placed onto a multi-electrode array, which picks up signals generated by the cells. The signals drive the movement of the robot; as the robot approaches an object, signals stimulate the brain, and the brain’s output moves the robot, with no input from humans. The researchers hope that the work will lead not only to robots that learn, but also to improved understanding of neurological diseases and disorders of humans.

Source: University of Reading, Research Publicity, Whiteknights, P.O. Box 217, Reading RG6 6AH, United Kingdom. Web site www.rdg.ac.uk.

Alcohol Consumption Declines

Beer guzzling is on the way out in the United States. Alcohol consumption over the past 50 years has declined, particularly beer consumption, and more people say that they are nondrinkers, reports a team of researchers led by Yuqing Zhang of the Boston University School of Medicine. The researchers attribute the long-term decline to medical studies noting the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, which has been linked to improved cardiovascular health and other positive effects, as well as studies noting the ill effects of heavy consumption.

Source: “Secular Trends in Alcohol Consumption over 50 Years: The Framingham Study” by Yuqing Zhang et al., The American Journal of Medicine (August 2008), published by Elsevier, Radarweg 29, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Web site www.elsevier.com .

Ivory Poaching Imperils Elephants

The elephant death rate in Africa has reached 8% a year, a level that surpasses the 7.4% annual death rate that led to urgent measures to save the species by banning the trade of ivory. The African elephant population is now less than 470,000, down from more than 1 million when the ban was first enacted in the late 1980s, reports University of Washington biology professor Samuel Wasser. “If the trend continues, there won’t be any elephants except in fenced areas with a lot of enforcement to protect them,” he says. His research indicates that most remaining large groups of African elephants will be extinct by 2020 unless a renewed international effort is launched to halt poaching.

Source: University of Washington, Office of News and Information, Box 351207, Seattle, Washington 98195. Web site http://uwnews.org.

Compressed Air May Cut Energy Costs

The concept of storing compressed air underground for use in generating electricity may be an idea whose time has come. Sandia National Laboratories researcher Georgianne Peek believe it could offer a solution to high energy costs. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) facilities would function like batteries; air is driven into an underground geological formation during low-demand times; when it’s needed, the electricity is generated from the compressed air used in modified combustion engines. CAES storage facilities are being considered by several U.S. utilities to store the abundant wind generated in Iowa and other places.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories, News Room, P.O. Box 5800, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185-0165.

Bartering with Fuel

With runaway inflation making it nearly impossible to pay for food, rent, and other necessities with local money, Zimbabweans have turned to bartering and using innovative alternative forms of currency, such as gasoline coupons. The coupons are obtained from fuel stations in exchange for foreign currency, offering a more stable money system in a country where inflation is officially estimated at 2.2 million percent a year and more than 15 million percent according to independent economists, according to the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks. The fuel coupons and their use as a “clever type of barter trade” have become the norm in Zimbabwe, according to economic analyst John Robertson.

Source: Integrated Regional Information Networks, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Web site www.irinnews.org .

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Tomorrow in Brief

THE FUTURIST
November-December 2008 Vol. 42, No. 6

COPYRIGHT © 2008 WORLD FUTURE SOCIETY, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814. Tel. 301-656-8274. E-mail info@wfs.org. Web site http://www.wfs.org. All rights reserved.

Technology: Organic Solar Collection, The Scent of the Future

A breakthrough in concentrated photovoltaics may soon be available.
Revisiting a largely abandoned concept from three decades ago, a research team at MIT has developed a new solar concentrator that is cost-effective as well as energy-efficient. Advocated as a better way of utilizing the sun's energy output, and practically doubling the performance of existing solar panels while greatly simplifying the process, this development could make photovoltaic systems much more commercially viable in the coming years.

Most large-scale solar power operations are set up as systems of rotating mirrors that follow the path of the sun over a wide region and channel its rays into solar cells — silicon-based semiconducting devices that collect and store the energy. Cooling systems are in constant use to keep the large solar panels containing the devices from overheating. This method is less effective, more expensive, and more cumbersome than it should be, critics have long complained. The result is that energy from fossil fuels is currently still much cheaper to produce on a large scale. However, that may change soon, thanks to the MIT researchers, led by assistant professor of electrical engineering Marc Baldo.

In the MIT project, luminescent solar concentrators resembling windows absorb the sun's rays via thin films of organic color dyes that are applied in specific ratios to the surface of the glass panels. The light is then reemitted through the glass to small solar cells positioned around the edges of the panes. These solar cells take up less space, utilize less semiconducting material, and do not require extensive cooling systems or separate panels to house them. The “windows” themselves also occupy less space than the mirror system.

The glass panels can gather light while remaining stationary, they increase efficiency up to 50%, and the light can travel much farther. “We were able to substantially reduce light transport losses, resulting in a tenfold increase in the amount of power converted by the solar cells,” says team member Jon Mapel.

Ultimately, the cost-effectiveness of the new system may be its greatest advantage. After all, if ordinary pieces of glass can be converted into high-tech solar concentrators, then the technology becomes that much more accessible. Current systems could even be retrofitted with the new concentrators at very little cost. All of this will go a long way toward making the cost of solar electricity more competitive with that of the conventional grid energy.

According to the research team, if everything goes as planned, practical and affordable solar energy could be available on the market within the next three years. Three of the inventors on the team (Michael Currie, Jon Mapel, and Shalom Goffri) have just launched a start-up, Covalent Solar, with the help of several entrepreneurial grants from MIT, to commercialize the technology. For now, ensuring that it will come with at least a 20-year guarantee is the next step (the color-dye process currently remains stable for about three months). The team is already hard at work finding ways to increase the stability of these potentially revolutionary photon collectors. — Aaron M. Cohen

Sources: MIT, News Office, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. Web site.

National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22230. Web site.

The Scent of the Future

Consumers didn't need to be told that Jazz Diet Pepsi was about to hit store shelves; they could smell it. The soft-drink company had placed an ad laced with scents of black cherry and French vanilla in the October 2006 edition of People magazine.

Four months later, British travel agency Thomson Holidays sprayed its store windows with a scratch-and-sniff scent of coconut suntan lotion, in order to remind those passing by that they, via Thomson Holidays, could leave February's icy chill for beaches in sunnier climes.

Since catchy jingles and flashy graphics are ubiquitous, many companies are hoping that nice smells will prove a new way to attract c