A Secret to Long Life: UFOs?

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Ralph Gardner – … I met Alexander Imich at a party where he was the oldest person in the room. That may not sound like a big deal—more and more frequently these days I attend events where I am the oldest person. But the party where I met Dr. Imich was for people over the age of 100, and there were a couple dozen of them.

Dr. Imich, a chemist born in 1903, and I had a brief conversation at the Queens event. I vowed to see him again, and not because he was ancient, or at least not just because he was ancient. My grandmother lived to almost 105, but she was just a shadow of herself after 100. Dr. Imich, on the other hand, remains a dynamo. But it was his interests that most intrigued me. At the party, he regaled me with tales of paranormal events he claimed he’d witnessed—at his West End Avenue apartment, no less.

I don’t believe in parapsychology or UFOs, another of the centenarian’s interests, but I was impressed with his passion on the subject and his claim to have published dozens of scholarly papers in several languages. So I asked Arthur Solomon, the gentleman who had invited me to the party back in October, whether he could reconnect me with Dr. Imich (the honorific from a Ph.D. he earned in zoology in 1929).

Mr. Solomon checked and reported that unfortunately Dr. Imich had entered the hospital with some unspecified ailment. A couple of months later, Mr. Solomon contacted me. “I bet you never expected to hear from me again,” his email began. “But here I am with news about Dr. Imich. I was told he is feeling better and would like to do the interview.”

So on Monday afternoon I visited him at his apartment at the Esplanade, a senior-citizens residence on West End Avenue. He has lived there 50 years, actually since before it became a senior residence and was a hotel, according to Robin Kaufman, his social worker.

If there were any doubts about Dr. Imich’s mental acuity, he dispelled them within seconds of our arrival at his cluttered one-bedroom apartment with excellent views of the Hudson River. He complimented Natalie Keyssar, our photographer (“You’re beautiful,” he said); commented that he wasn’t aware that The Wall Street Journal ran photographs; and then patiently spelled out the name of the Polish city where he was born, Czestochowa, launching into its history. …

Occasionally Dr. Imich would lapse into silence—only for a few seconds—and I’d wonder whether it was a sign of senility, or at least flagging stamina. But that wasn’t it, because his next recollection, or retrieval of a name or date from the distant past, was just as confident, his voice just as robust, as anything that he’d said previously  ….

But on to the paranormal, though Dr. Imich doesn’t claim to possess such powers himself. He produced bottles filled with objects such as bottle caps and plastic utensils that couldn’t have fit through their holes. He also told the story of the time he heard an explosion in his apartment and discovered a visitor, whose arrival he’d been awaiting at his front door, seated on the floor behind him. He also believes in UFOs and has a photograph on his desk of friends he says were abducted by aliens. Finally, he believes that humans can survive largely without food, and attributes his longevity, at least in part, to how little he eats.

Whether he’s right about any or all these things scarcely matters. “I’ve never seen Alex tired,” said Ms. Kaufman, who works for Selfhelp, a support organization for Holocaust survivors. “All that stuff he was talking about keeps him going.”

via A Secret to Long Life: UFOs – WSJ.com.

Awesome. But it would be nice to hear what Dr. Imich actually said about UFOs.  I don’t understand how someone can get to the point where he is writing for the WSJ, and yet is able to get away with saying he does not believe that some flying objects are unidentified.

“I don’t believe in parapsychology or UFOs”.

Why, then, write an article titled “A Secret to Long Life: UFOs”?

Saying you “don’t believe in UFOs” is a bone headed statement.  So, do you believe in … “objects”? Do you believe some objects fly, float, reflect, or otherwise appear to be in the sky? Okay, last question: Do you believe some objects that appear to be in the sky are unidentified?  If you answered YES to all three, then you DO believe in UFOs, so stop lying. If you do not believe some flying objects are unidentified, then kindly explain exactly what was picked up by forward looking infrared radar by the Mexican military, for starters.

And, Ralph, parapsychology is a field of study. It really exists! Do you understand what I’m saying? The field of study, parapsychology, exists. I think you intended to say that you believe people are mistaken who believe in ghosts, life after death, telekinesis, telepathy, regression memories, out of body experiences, and anything else parapsychologists research.  I guess your way of saying it is shorter.

>Development in fog harvesting process may make water available to the world’s poor

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In the arid Namib Desert on the west coast of Africa, one type of beetle has found a distinctive way of surviving. When the morning fog rolls in, the Stenocara gracilipes species, also known as the Namib Beetle, collects water droplets on its bumpy back, then lets the moisture roll down into its mouth, allowing it to drink in an area devoid of flowing water.

What nature has developed, Shreerang Chhatre wants to refine, to help the world’s poor. Chhatre is an engineer and aspiring entrepreneur at MIT who works on fog harvesting, the deployment of devices that, like the beetle, attract water droplets and corral the runoff. This way, poor villagers could collect clean water near their homes, instead of spending hours carrying water from distant wells or streams. In pursuing the technical and financial sides of his project, Chhatre is simultaneously a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering at MIT; an MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management; and a fellow at MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship.

Access to water is a pressing global issue: the World Health Organization and UNICEF estimate that nearly 900 million people worldwide live without safe drinking water. The burden of finding and transporting that water falls heavily on women and children. “As a middle-class person, I think it’s terrible that the poor have to spend hours a day walking just to obtain a basic necessity,” Chhatre says.

A fog-harvesting device consists of a fence-like mesh panel, which attracts droplets, connected to receptacles into which water drips. Chhatre has co-authored published papers on the materials used in these devices, and believes he has improved their efficacy. “The technical component of my research is done,” Chhatre says. He is pursuing his work at MIT Sloan and the Legatum Center in order to develop a workable business plan for implementing fog-harvesting devices.

Interest in fog harvesting dates to the 1990s, and increased when new research on Stenocara gracilipes made a splash in 2001. A few technologists saw potential in the concept for people. One Canadian charitable organization, FogQuest, has tested projects in Chile and Guatemala.

Chhatre’s training as a chemical engineer has focused on the wettability of materials, their tendency to either absorb or repel liquids (think of a duck’s feathers, which repel water). …

One basic principle of a good fog-harvesting device is that it must have a combination of surfaces that attract and repel water. For instance, the shell of Stenocara gracilipes has bumps that attract water and troughs that repel it; this way, drops collects on the bumps, then run off through the troughs without being absorbed, so that the water reaches the beetle’s mouth.

To build fog-harvesting devices that work on a human scale, Chhatre says, “The idea is to use the design principles we developed and extend them to this problem.”

To build larger fog harvesters, researchers generally use mesh, rather than a solid surface like a beetle’s shell, because a completely impermeable object creates wind currents that will drag water droplets away from it. In this sense, the beetle’s physiology is an inspiration for human fog harvesting, not a template. “We tried to replicate what the beetle has, but found this kind of open permeable surface is better,” Chhatre says. “The beetle only needs to drink a few micro-liters of water. We want to capture as large a quantity as possible.” …

via Development in fog harvesting process may make water available to the world’s poor.

>How meditation might ward off the effects of ageing

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… Visitors here to the Shambhala Mountain Centre meditate in silence for up to 10 hours every day, emulating the lifestyle that monks have chosen for centuries in mountain refuges from India to Japan. But is it doing them any good? For two three-month retreats held in 2007, this haven for the eastern spiritual tradition opened its doors to western science. As attendees pondered the “four immeasurables” of love, compassion, joy and equanimity, a laboratory squeezed into the basement bristled with scientific equipment from brain and heart monitors to video cameras and centrifuges. The aim: to find out exactly what happens to people who meditate.

After several years of number-crunching, data from the so-called Shamatha project is finally starting to be published. So far the research has shown some not hugely surprising psychological and cognitive changes – improvements in perception and wellbeing, for example. But one result in particular has potentially stunning implications: that by protecting caps called telomeres on the ends of our chromosomes, meditation might help to delay the process of ageing. …

Scientists from a range of fields are starting to compile evidence that rather than simply being a transient mental or spiritual experience, meditation may have long-term implications for physical health.

There are many kinds of meditation, including transcendental meditation, in which you focus on a repetitive mantra, and compassion meditation, which involves extending feelings of love and kindness to fellow living beings. One of the most studied practices is based on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, or being aware of your own thoughts and surroundings. Buddhists believe it alleviates suffering by making you less caught up in everyday stresses – helping you to appreciate the present instead of continually worrying about the past or planning for the future.

“You pay attention to your own breath,” explains Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist who studies the effects of meditation at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston. “If your mind wanders, you don’t get discouraged, you notice the thought and think, ‘OK’.”

Small trials have suggested that such meditation creates more than spiritual calm. Reported physical effects include lowering blood pressure, helping psoriasis to heal, and boosting the immune response in vaccine recipients and cancer patients. In a pilot study in 2008, Willem Kuyken, head of the Mood Disorders Centre at Exeter University, showed that mindfulness meditation was more effective than drug treatment in preventing relapse in patients with recurrent depression. And in 2009, David Creswell of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh found that it slowed disease progression in patients with HIV.

Most of these trials have involved short courses of meditation aimed at treating specific conditions. The Shamatha project, by contrast, is an attempt to see what a longer, more intensive course of meditation might do for healthy people. The project was co-ordinated by neuroscientist Clifford Saron of the Centre for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. His team advertised in Buddhist publications for people willing to spend three months in an intensive meditation retreat, and chose 60 participants. Half of them attended in the spring of 2007, while the other half acted as a control group before heading off for their own retreat in the autumn. …

They found that at the end of the retreat, meditators had significantly higher telomerase activity than the control group, suggesting that their telomeres were better protected.  The researchers are cautious, but say that in theory this might slow or even reverse cellular ageing. “If the increase in telomerase is sustained long enough,” says Epel, “it’s logical to infer that this group would develop more stable and possibly longer telomeres over time.” …

via How meditation might ward off the effects of ageing | Life and style | The Observer.

>’Immortal’ Animals Reveal Anti-Aging Secrets

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… The animals that can possibly achieve immortality under ideal conditions, such as sea squirts, certain corals, Hydra, and Turritopsis nutricula (the immortal jellyfish), often activate telomerase. Helen Nilsson Sköld of the Department of Marine Ecology, University of Gothenburg, and colleague Matthias Obst are studying sea squirts and starfish to learn more about how these marine creatures seem to ward off aging.

Out of the animal immortality A-list, sea squirts and starfish have genes that most closely resemble those of humans.

“Animals that clone themselves, in which part of an individual’s body is passed on to the next generations, have particularly interesting conditions related to remaining in good health to persist,” Sköld was quoted as saying in the press release. “This makes it useful to study these animals in order to understand mechanisms of aging in humans.”

“My research has shown that sea squirts rejuvenate themselves by activating the enzyme telomerase, and in this way extending their chromosomes and protecting their DNA,” she added. “They also have a special ability to discard ‘junk’ from their cells. Older parts of the animal are quite simply broken down, and are then partially recycled when new and healthy parts grow out from the adult bodies.”

Starfish are also amazingly immune to problems that affect

the rest of us. If they lose a body part, for example, many species can simply grow another one. Reproduction involves tearing apart their bodies, somewhat akin to growing a new plant from a broken off piece of a “mother plant.”

Eternal life, from an evolutionary standpoint, however, has a big drawback. Due to asexual reproduction, the species as a whole retains very low genetic variation. This means they could be particularly vulnerable to climate change and not enjoy immortality after all.

Scientists are therefore rushing to study such species, which may hold the secrets of increasing our own longevity. …

via ‘Immortal’ Animals Reveal Anti-Aging Secrets : Discovery News.

>Tornado closes Lambert-St Louis airport

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The US airport of Lambert-St Louis has been closed indefinitely after a tornado ripped through its main terminal.

The storm tore off a large section of the terminal’s roof, shattering windows and sending debris flying.

Several people were being treated for minor injuries.

The storm, one of a series to pass through central and eastern Missouri, also flattened homes in the area, felled trees and tore down power lines.

Lambert-St Louis airport said all flights were cancelled pending full safety assessments, and a clean-up was under way.

“We have all hands on deck here,” said Mayor Francis Slay, speaking at the airport.

‘Grown men crying’

St Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch, who was at the airport as the storm approached, said people watching the tornado suddenly had to scramble for safety.

“About the time we came into the building, the doors blew off,” he said.

“Literally 10 seconds later, it was over. It’s amazing to me more people weren’t hurt.”

Dianna Merrill, who was waiting for a flight to New York, said she had been looking out of the window hoping her delayed flight would arrive.

“Glass was blowing everywhere. The ceiling was falling… the wind was blowing debris all over the place,” she said.

“It was like being in a horror movie. Grown men were crying. It was horrible.”

via BBC News – Tornado closes Lambert-St Louis airport.

>Happiest places have highest suicide rates

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Countries and U.S. states that rank near the top in happiness also rank near the top in suicides rates, U.S. and British researchers suggest.

Professor Andrew Oswald if the University of Warwick England, Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in New York, and Mary C. Daly and Daniel Wilson, both from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, say they used U.S. and international data that included comparisons of a random sample of 1.3 million U.S. adults and another on suicide decisions among about 1 million Americans.

Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland each indicate relatively high levels of happiness levels, but also high suicide rates. Nevertheless, the researchers note that because of variation in cultures and suicide-reporting conventions, the findings are only suggestive.

Comparing happiness and suicide rates across U.S. states presents an advantage because cultural background, national institutions, language and religion are relatively constant nationwide.

States with people who report they are generally more satisfied with their lives tend to have higher suicide rates. For example, Utah is ranked first in life-satisfaction but has the ninth-highest suicide rate, while New York is ranked 45th in life satisfaction but has the lowest suicide rate in the country. …

via Happiest places have highest suicide rates – UPI.com.

>Bullet lodged in man’s brain for 23 years

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Doctors have finally discovered why Wang Tianqing has been suffering from epilepsy for more than two decades.

A two-centimetre rusted bullet, embedded in the head of a farmer for 23 years, has been removed at a local hospital.

In 1988 Wang Tianqing, who lives in Zhangjiakouin city in northern China’s Hebei province, was knocked unconscious on his way home by a blow to the head.

“I thought I’d been hit by a slingshot,” said Wang. “I saw a man standing on a hill and thought he’d hit me.”

He woke up in a hospital bed, was given anti-inflammatory drugs by the doctors and sent home.

Shortly afterwards he started having epileptic seizures which grew progressively worse over the next two decades.

On a return trip to the hospital for treatment for his convulsions, the bullet was spotted on his CAT scan.

Wang Zhiming, an attending surgeon from Neurosurgical Oncology department, said that the survival rate for being shot in the head would usually be one out of several thousand, but the bullet missed his brain’s main veins and not injured his brainstem.

via Video: Bullet lodged in man’s brain for 23 years – Telegraph.

>Nationwide study finds US meat and poultry is widely contaminated

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Steve Yozwiak – Drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria linked to a wide range of human diseases, are present in meat and poultry from U.S. grocery stores at unexpectedly high rates, according to a nationwide study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen).

Nearly half of the meat and poultry samples — 47 percent — were contaminated with S. aureus, and more than half of those bacteria — 52 percent — were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics, according to the study published today in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

This is the first national assessment of antibiotic resistant S. aureus in the U.S. food supply. And, DNA testing suggests that the food animals themselves were the major source of contamination.

Although Staph should be killed with proper cooking, it may still pose a risk to consumers through improper food handling and cross-contamination in the kitchen.

Researchers collected and analyzed 136 samples — covering 80 brands — of beef, chicken, pork and turkey from 26 retail grocery stores in five U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Flagstaff and Washington, D.C.

“For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial,” said Lance B. Price, Ph.D., senior author of the study and Director of TGen’s Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health.

“The fact that drug-resistant S. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from the food animals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food-animal production today,” Dr. Price said.

Densely-stocked industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics, are ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria that move from animals to humans, the report says.

“Antibiotics are the most important drugs that we have to treat Staph infections; but when Staph are resistant to three, four, five or even nine different antibiotics — like we saw in this study — that leaves physicians few options,” Dr. Price said.

“The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — including Staph — remains a major challenge in clinical medicine,” said Paul S. Keim, Ph.D., Director of TGen’s Pathogen Genomics Division and Director of the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at Northern Arizona University (NAU).

“This study shows that much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with multidrug-resistant Staph. Now we need to determine what this means in terms of risk to the consumer,” said Dr. Keim, a co-author of the paper.

The U.S. government routinely surveys retail meat and poultry for four types of drug-resistant bacteria, but S. aureus is not among them. The paper suggests that a more comprehensive inspection program is needed.

S. aureus can cause a range of illnesses from minor skin infections to life-threatening diseases, such as pneumonia, endocarditis and sepsis.

via Nationwide study finds US meat and poultry is widely contaminated.

There are good reasons some things are not even tested for. Out of sight, out of court.

>Royal Wedding ‘to serve as rehearsal for Queen’s funeral’

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The Royal Wedding marks the beginning of a new generation of British royals, but sources are reporting the occasion will also serve as a rehearsal for a more sombre task: Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.

Senior palace officials will take full advantage of the presence of dignitaries and Commonwealth leaders to go through rehearsals necessary for the monarch’s funeral, the Sunday Express reports.

The 29 April wedding procession will use the same route as the sovereign’s cortege, when a gun carriage will escort her coffin from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall.

According to the Express, the operation has discreetly been codenamed London Bridge.

“Obviously we all hope such a sad event will be a long way off – HM may be 84 but she’s in very good health – yet we need to rehearse the logistics and timings for what will be a huge ceremony,” The newspaper quoted a royal aide as saying.

“It may seem odd to think about his grandmother’s demise at the same time as William’s wedding but having all these diplomats and VIPs in London on 29 April makes it sensible to run through the procedures and things like seating plans.

“The Queen, who is very pragmatic about this sort of thing, knows about the dry run. The arrangements are reviewed annually and any significant changes have to be approved by her. There’s no sentimentality involved on her part; she actually takes rather a keen interest in the details.”

via Royal Wedding ‘to serve as rehearsal for Queen’s funeral’.

>World’s oldest man Walter Breuning dies in US aged 114

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The world’s certified oldest man, whose advice to others included the observation “you’re born to die”, has passed away aged 114 in the US.

Walter Breuning was old enough to remember his grandfather recounting his part in the slaughter of the American Civil War, during the 1860s.

In his final years in Montana, he was passionate about ending two modern wars, those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His long good health he put down to a strict regime of two meals a day.

“How many people in this country say that they can’t take the weight off?” he asked in an interview with the Associated Press news agency in October.

“I tell these people, I says get on a diet and stay on it. You’ll find that you’re in much better shape, feel good.”

The former railway clerk died of natural causes in hospital in Great Falls.

He had been living in the same retirement home since 1980.

His wife of 35 years, Agnes Twokey, died in 1957.

“We got along very good,” Breuning said. “She wouldn’t like to spend money, I’ll tell you that.”

Of his grandfather, he remembered hearing, at the age of three, his recollections of killing Southerners during the Civil War.

“I thought that was a hell of a thing to say,” he said.

Reflecting on mortality, he told the Associated Press: “We’re going to die. Some people are scared of dying. Never be afraid to die. Because you’re born to die.” …

via BBC News – World’s oldest man Walter Breuning dies in US aged 114.

Congratulations on the long life and rest in peace, Walter B. Two meals a day, eh? Might be something to that.

Avoid the Major Causes of Death
A person born in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century could expect to live to an age of 49 years. At the end of the 20th century, life expectancy had increased to 77 years. This increase of 57 percent was the result of improvements in public health, medicine, and nutrition. Similar improvements have been achieved throughout the world by the eradication and control of infectious diseases and advances in agriculture. However, the maximum life span of humans has not changed substantially. Only 1 in 10,000 people in developed countries can expect to live to 100 years of age.

The first step in living to a ripe old age is to avoid the major causes of death by understanding their origin. The Center for Disease Control listed the following number of casualties from the top ten leading causes of death for the U.S. in 2005:

• Heart Disease: 652,091
• Cancer: 559,312
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 143,579
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 130,933
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 117,809
• Diabetes: 75,119
• Alzheimer’s disease: 71,599
• Influenza/Pneumonia: 63,001
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 43,901
• Septicemia: 34,136

The risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes can be reduced substantially by eating nutritious natural foods, maintaining a normal weight, exercising regularly, and not smoking. The chance of death can also be decreased by avoiding drugs, alcohol abuse, pollution, violence, and wars. At the same time, it is important to practice good hygiene, get competent medical care, get protective vaccinations, and avoid risky behavior that can result in accidents or infection with the viruses that cause AIDS or hepatitis.

Survival of Mice on Various Degrees of Calorie Restriction (Walford)

Calorie Restriction Extends Life
The life-extending effect of reduced calorie diets was reported in 1935 along with the observation that CR stunted body size.[1]  Since then, CR has been proven to extend the average and maximum life span for many species including yeasts, worms, mice, rats, etc. Animal experiments on calorie restriction after maturity indicate that adult-onset CR also increases longevity. …

How to start calorie restriction.

Read Dr. Roy Walford’s book Beyond the 120 Year Diet: How to Double Your Vital Years. This book describes the science which we hope will help us live longer, although this has not been conclusively proved for humans.

Download CRON-o-Meter (http://spaz.ca/cronometer/). This is a free nutrition-tracking program that will help you to analyze your food so that you can learn to optimize what you eat. You don’t have to start a diet, but you have to start measuring and weighing what you eat. In this way, you will learn how many calories you are now consuming on a daily basis, and you will also get a summary of your macronutrient ratios. The program will also point out any nutritional deficiencies.

Get some lab tests to establish a medical baseline including lipid panel, CBC, blood pressure, bone density, etc.

Join the Calorie Restriction Society. This will give you access to support from many members who can answer your specific questions.

Concentrate on Optimum Nutrition. …

Exercise 30 minutes per day with emphasis on strength-building exercises, but don’t overdo it to avoid getting injured.

Use the Calorie Restriction Calculator to determine the number of calories required to achieve 5% Calorie Restriction. Start with a 5% CR diet, but make sure that you still achieve Optimum Nutrition on the lower calorie diet.

Once you are familiar with measuring your food and optimum nutrition, you can gradually reduce your calories. …