Over a specially prepared breakfast, the inventor and futurist details his plans to live for ever ... Kurzweil, who invented the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the flatbed scanner and a music synthesiser capable of reproducing the sound of a grand piano, has been thinking about artificial intelligence (AI) for 50 years. In The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), he predicted the internet’s ubiquity and the rise of mobile devices. The Singularity is Near, his 2005 bestseller, focused on AI and the future of mankind. In 2012 he joined Google as a director of engineering to develop machine intelligence. ... Kurzweil’s supporters hail him as “the ultimate thinking machine” and “the rightful heir to Thomas Edison”. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has called him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”. To his critics, he is “one of the greatest hucksters of the age”, and a “narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity”. ... His interest in health goes back to when he was 15 and his father, Fredric, had a heart attack. “He died when I was 22. He was 58.” Kurzweil realised he could inherit his father’s dispositions. In his thirties, he was diagnosed with type-two diabetes. Frustrated by conventional treatments, he “approached this as an inventor”. It has not returned. “You can overcome your genetic disposition. The common wisdom is it’s 80 per cent genes, 20 per cent lifestyle. If you’re diligent, it’s 90 per cent intervention and 10 per cent genes,” he claims.

Prosopagnosia is a condition that can make it impossible to recognize the faces of others, from friends to movie characters to parents. To varying degrees, it affects about two percent of people. ... In 2007, Glenn Alperin was flying from Atlanta to Boston. “I was reading a newspaper when this man came up to me and shook my hand. He went down the aisle shaking hands with all of the passengers,” Alperin recalls. “I waited until he was at a safe distance and turned to the man sitting next to me and asked him who that was. The guy looked at me, horrified and said, ‘That was Jimmy Carter!’” Dressed in a fishing hat and an oversized green jacket, Alperin has just finished his session at a day treatment center in Cambridge, Massachusetts He makes his way to the subway station, carefully deliberating which train to take to Brookline, where he will tutor his first student of the day. “I don’t look at people until I am spoken to,” says Alperin, who’s had prosopagnosia since infancy. He provides an interesting analogy: “Most people take a picture with their brain and store and develop the film. I take the picture, but throw the film in the trash immediately.”

Few things are more American than Coca-Cola. ... But bottled water is washing away the palate trained to drain a bubbly soda. By the end of this decade, if not sooner, sales of bottled water are expected to surpass those of carbonated soft drinks, according to Michael C. Bellas, chief executive of the Beverage Marketing Corporation. ... “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Mr. Bellas, who has watched water’s rise in the industry since the 1980s. ... Sales of water in standard lightweight plastic bottles grew at a rate of more than 20 percent every quarter from 1993 to 2005, he said. The growth has continued since, but now it has settled into percentages within the high single digits. ... If the estimated drinking of water from the household tap is included, water consumption began exceeding that of soda in the mid-2000s.

The global obesity epidemic and related nutritional issues are arguably this century’s primary social health concern. With breakthroughs in the field of medicine, huge leaps in cancer research and diseases such as smallpox and polio largely eradicated, people around the globe are, on average, living much longer and healthier than they were decades ago. The focus on well-being has shifted from disease to diet. The whole concept of healthy living is a key pillar of our Credit Suisse Mega - trends framework – themes we consider crucial in the evolution of the investment world. In this report, we specifically explore the impact of “sugar and sweeteners” on our diets. ... Although medical research is yet to prove conclusively that sugar is in fact the leading cause of obesity, diabetes type II or metabolic syndrome, we compare and contrast various studies on its metabolic effects and nutritional impact. Alongside this, we question some of the accepted wisdom as to what is perceived as “good” and “bad” when it comes to sugar consumption, namely as to whether a calorie consumed is the same regardless of where it is derived from – sugar, fats, or protein – and whether solid foods are “nutritionally different” to liquids. ... What can we expect in the future? What should investors focus on? Although a major consumer shift away from sugar and high-fructose corn syrup may be some years away, and outright taxation and regulation a delicate process, there is now a trend developing. From the expansion of “high-intensity” natural sweeteners to an increase in social responsibility mes - sages from the beverage manufacturers, we see green shoots for dietary changes and social health advancement. Ultimately, we expect consumers, doctors, manufacturers and legislators to all play a crucial role in changing the status quo for sugar.

I’ve spent much of the past year digging into the evidence. Here’s what I’ve learned. First, it’s true that the issue is complicated. But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust. ... Second, the central argument of the anti-GMO movement—that prudence and caution are reasons to avoid genetically engineered, or GE, food—is a sham. Activists who tell you to play it safe around GMOs take no such care in evaluating the alternatives. They denounce proteins in GE crops as toxic, even as they defend drugs, pesticides, and non-GMO crops that are loaded with the same proteins. They portray genetic engineering as chaotic and unpredictable, even when studies indicate that other crop improvement methods, including those favored by the same activists, are more disruptive to plant genomes. ... Third, there are valid concerns about some aspects of GE agriculture, such as herbicides, monocultures, and patents. But none of these concerns is fundamentally about genetic engineering. Genetic engineering isn’t a thing. It’s a process that can be used in different ways to create different things. To think clearly about GMOs, you have to distinguish among the applications and focus on the substance of each case. If you’re concerned about pesticides and transparency, you need to know about the toxins to which your food has been exposed. A GMO label won’t tell you that. And it can lull you into buying a non-GMO product even when the GE alternative is safer.

The Honest Company’s origins are now tech-world legend. When Alba was pregnant with her first daughter, Honor, now seven—husband and father is Cash Warren, a Yale graduate and a producer and tech investor—her friends threw a baby shower and she received a closetful of new baby clothes. When she washed her unborn baby’s onesies with a detergent her mother had recommended and broke out in hives, she was hysterical. “I was thinking, what if my baby has a reaction and I don’t know? What if her throat is closing? I had all this fear and anxiety because I was always so sick as a child.” That night she Googled every ingredient and discovered that some toxins can be labeled as “fragrance.” Her mission was clear: “I wanted safe and effective consumer products that were beautifully designed, accessibly priced, and easy to get.” Great idea, but how to implement it? ... In 2012, the company’s first year, sales reached $10 million. It launched with only 17 products, in the diapers-and-wipes category, all of which were delivered to subscribers’ homes on a monthly basis, or à la carte.

Calories consumed minus calories burned: it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain. But dieters often find that it doesn’t work. ... more than two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. For many of them, the cure is diet: one in three are attempting to lose weight in this way at any given moment. Yet there is ample evidence that diets rarely lead to sustained weight loss. These are expensive failures. This inability to curb the extraordinary prevalence of obesity costs the United States more than $147 billion in healthcare, as well as $4.3 billion in job absenteeism and yet more in lost productivity. ... part of the problem goes way beyond individual self-control. The numbers logged in Nash’s Fitbit, or printed on the food labels that Haelle reads religiously, are at best good guesses. Worse yet, as scientists are increasingly finding, some of those calorie counts are flat-out wrong – off by more than enough, for instance, to wipe out the calories Haelle burns by running an extra mile on a treadmill. A calorie isn’t just a calorie. And our mistaken faith in the power of this seemingly simple measurement may be hindering the fight against obesity.

To get to ReSTART you can either ruin your life by playing video games 20 hours a day or you can take Route 202 15 minutes south from downtown Redmond. The road runs between stands of pine trees so tall that they register as dark green canyon walls. The whole landscape, once you get clear of the strip malls and self-storage facilities, feels damp, forested, vaguely Jurassic. ... has treated something like 200 people. A typical stay lasts between 45 and 90 days, and costs $26,000 (expensive-sounding, but typical for live-in rehab of any type). Upon arrival patients must surrender all digital devices. Nearly every ReSTART patient is a male between the ages of 18 and 28. ... video games are the meth of the digitally addicted world: wildly popular and horribly destructive. It isn't that video games are so different from other online fixations, the founders of ReSTART believe, it's just that they're more extreme. The devout social-media user might worry what people think of the witty “character” he plays on Twitter; Callum cared so much about the fate of his World of Warcraft alter ego—a tall blue-haired elf he named Voga—that he adopted the schedule of a Navy SEAL.

We read almost every week of new research into the deleterious effects of sugar on our bodies. In the US, the latest edition of the government’s official dietary guidelines includes a cap on sugar consumption. In the UK, the chancellor George Osborne has announced a new tax on sugary drinks. Sugar has become dietary enemy number one. ... This represents a dramatic shift in priority. For at least the last three decades, the dietary arch-villain has been saturated fat. When Yudkin was conducting his research into the effects of sugar, in the 1960s, a new nutritional orthodoxy was in the process of asserting itself. Its central tenet was that a healthy diet is a low-fat diet. Yudkin led a diminishing band of dissenters who believed that sugar, not fat, was the more likely cause of maladies such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes. But by the time he wrote his book, the commanding heights of the field had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. Yudkin found himself fighting a rearguard action, and he was defeated. ... In 1980, after long consultation with some of America’s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors base their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US. ... We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way while everyone around him turns 180 degrees. When, in 1957, John Yudkin first floated his hypothesis that sugar was a hazard to public health, it was taken seriously, as was its proponent. By the time Yudkin retired, 14 years later, both theory and author had been marginalised and derided. Only now is Yudkin’s work being returned, posthumously, to the scientific mainstream.

Samumed is finding it easy to raise huge amounts of cash because it believes it has invented medicines that can reverse aging. Its first drugs are targeted at specific organ systems. One aims to regrow hair in bald men. The same drug may also turn gray hair back to its original color, and a cosmetic version could erase wrinkles. A second drug seeks to regenerate cartilage in arthritic knees. Additional medicines in early human studies aim to repair degenerated discs in the spine, remove scarring in the lungs and treat cancer. After that Samumed will attempt to cure a leading cause of blindness and go after Alzheimer’s. The firm’s focus, disease by disease, symptom by symptom, is to make the cells of aging people regenerate as powerfully as those of a developing fetus. ... Hood, 49, had invented a cancer drug that got his previous company, Targegen, bought by Sanofi for $635 million. He has a distinct take on drug development: He thinks everybody takes too many shortcuts and insists on doing work himself that other companies outsource, including formulating drug chemistry, testing drugs in laboratory animals and running clinical trials. ... The target Hood and Kibar went after was obvious: a gene called Wnt, which stands for “wingless integration site,” because when you knock it out in fruit flies, they never grow wings. It’s a linchpin in a group of genes that control the growth of a developing fetus–whether you’re a fly or a person. Together these genes are known as the Wnt pathway. Trigger the right ones and you might revive old flesh. Some cancers do their dirty work by hijacking Wnt, and blocking it might stop tumors.

A. gambiae has been called the world’s most dangerous animal, although strictly speaking that applies only to the female of the species, which does the bloodsucking and harms only indirectly. Its bite is a minor nuisance, unless it happens to convey the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, for which it is a primary human vector. Although a huge international effort has cut malaria mortality by about half since 2000, the World Health Organization still estimates there were more than 400,000 fatal cases in 2015, primarily in Africa. Children are particularly susceptible. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation prioritized malaria in its more than $500 million commitment to fight infectious disease in developing countries. ... Humans have been at war with members of the family Culicidae for over a century, since the pioneering epidemiologist Sir Ronald Ross proved the role of Anopheles in malaria and U.S. Army Maj. Walter Reed made a similar discovery about Aedes aegypti and yellow fever. The war has been waged with shovels and insecticides, with mosquito repellent, mosquito traps and mosquito-larvae-eating fish, with bed nets and window screens and rolled-up newspapers. But all of these approaches are self-limiting. Puddles fill up again with rain; insects evolve resistance to pesticides; predators can eat only so much. ... If Crisanti’s approach works, you could, in theory, wipe out an entire species of mosquito. You could wipe out every species of mosquito, although you’d need to do them one at a time, and there are around 3,500 of them, of which only about 100 spread human disease. You might want to stop at fewer than a dozen species in three genera—Anopheles (translation: “useless,” the malaria mosquito), Aedes (translation: “unpleasant,” the principal vector for yellow fever, dengue and Zika) and Culex (translation: “gnat,” responsible for spreading West Nile, St. Louis encephalitis and other viruses).

Of the 1,301 mosquito-borne cases recorded in the U.S., 97 percent of them are in Puerto Rico, neither a state nor a sovereign nation, but whose people are, nonetheless, U.S. citizens. As of early June, the start of Puerto Rico's long, hot and rainy summer, there are 1,259 recorded cases on the island, though some health officials believe the true number may be more than 80,000. ... unlike Ebola, which causes gruesome symptoms often followed by death, Zika is somewhat of a stealth virus. Most people infected will have no symptoms. Some may come down with conjunctivitis or break out in a skin rash, or experience muscle or joint pain or run a fever. Within a week or so, all of the symptoms, if they even emerged, are gone. In a certain number of cases, however, this may only be the beginning. ... the CDC estimates that it could cost $10 million to care for one microcephalic child. Zika, which seems to be particularly drawn to neurological tissue, may also cause swelling of the brain or spinal cord in adults, and has been linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune neurological condition that can cause severe, if usually temporary, paralysis. ... But the scariest aspect of Zika is how little scientists actually know about it. ... Zika was first discovered in 1947 in the Zika Forest of Uganda, where researchers were studying the impact of mosquito-borne viruses on rhesus monkeys. Over the next 60 years, there were only 14 documented cases of Zika in humans, mainly in Africa and parts of southern Asia. ... given the prevalence of a host of factors, ranging from effective sanitation to the ubiquity of window screens and air conditioning, this kind of outbreak anywhere in the continental U.S., and much of Europe, for that matter, is unlikely.

These are the thoughts that plague the medicated, the adults in their twenties who take prescription stimulants for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and have done so since childhood. By some accounts, the number of 26- to 34-year-olds taking ADHD medication rose roughly 84 percent between 2008 and 2012 alone. ... Prescription stimulants like Ritalin were considered a godsend when they first started being used to help hyperactive, unfocused kids succeed in school. So many children were on ADHD drugs in the ’90s that lines would form outside the school nurse’s office, where students went to take their midday doses. But almost 20 years have passed since Diller predicted that the tidal wave of prescriptions written in the ’90s would come to shape an entire generation. Now, those children are all grown up and living on their own. As adults, many find themselves unable to get off the drugs. Some fear losing their jobs, while others fear losing the only self they have come to know — a self with a prescription drug dependency that’s difficult to kick.

The problem stretches well beyond one tainted probiotic. Dietary supplements—vitamins, minerals, herbs, botanicals, and a growing list of other “natural” substances—have migrated from the vitamin aisle into the mainstream medical establishment. Hospitals are not only including supplements in their formularies (their lists of approved medication), they’re also opening their own specialty supplement shops on-site and online. Some doctors are doing the same. According to a Gallup survey of 200 physicians, 94 percent now recommend vitamins or minerals to some of their patients; 45 percent have recommended herbal supplements as well. And 7 percent are not only recommending supplements but actually selling them in their offices. ... Consumers are buying those products in droves. According to the Nutrition Business Journal, supplement sales have increased by 81 percent in the past decade. The uptick is easy to understand: Supplements are easier to get than prescription drugs, and they carry the aura of being more natural and thus safer. Their labels often promise to address health issues for which there are few easy solutions. ... It’s tough to say what portion of those products pose a risk to consumers. A 2013 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that from 2008 through 2011, the FDA received 6,307 reports of health problems from dietary supplements, including 92 deaths, hundreds of life-threatening conditions, and more than 1,000 serious injuries or illnesses. The GAO suggests that due to underreporting, the real number of incidents may be far greater.

Until very recently, aging was just a thing that happens, a decay or breakdown, chaotic and impossibly complex, that seems to accelerate only after we’ve reached the age of reproduction. ... from its birth in the early 1990s, the field of geroscience has faced significant impediments. Coming on the heels of centuries of humbug (e.g., Ponce de Leon, crushed dog testicles, Ted Williams’s frozen head), it has had to overcome a near-universal presumption of quackery. It is also an awkward match with contemporary drug research, which is organized around addressing specific maladies. Since aging is a risk factor rather than a disease — in the language of the FDA, it’s never been considered an “indication” — pharmaceutical companies are disincentivized from developing broadly aging-targeted drugs, and foundations tend to reserve their grant money for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and the like. ... For Guarente, watching the boom and bust of resveratrol was as motivating as it was unnerving. He redoubled his own efforts to be the first to bring an anti-aging pill to market, even as he and Sinclair squabbled with Kennedy and Kaeberlein in the press. At times, the interpersonal strife can seem like nothing so much as the professional equivalent of a red Maserati convertible, a time-slowing denial of the ultimate stakes that bind the men: their shared obsession with combating aging, as every one of them gets older.

The rise of immunotherapy hasn’t shifted that reality overnight, but it has sent a new jolt of energy into an age-old dream: that maybe, just maybe, medical science can turn terminal cancers into survivable conditions. ... In the past two years alone, the FDA has approved three second-generation checkpoint inhibitors, and two other arms of immunotherapy—cancer vaccines and a therapeutic approach known as adoptive T cell transfer, in which a patient’s own T cells are engineered outside the body and reinjected into the bloodstream—are showing ever-more-promising results. ... If immunotherapy leads the way to cancer cures in the coming decade, it’ll be tempting to look back on its development as inevitable, a breakthrough that was merely waiting for technology and biological research to make it possible. This would be true to some extent—scientists have hypothesized for over a century about the potential for the immune system to beat back tumors—but such a view would overlook the human choices and biases that shape the course of science. It would also overlook the power of small groups of individuals to spark major advances by bucking conventional wisdom and seeking out new frontiers. In other words, it would ignore the life of Jim Allison—a shaggy-haired, patchily bearded son of small-town South Texas whose creativity, diligence, and zest for pursuing a seemingly quixotic path far from the front lines of cancer research have added up to a revolution.

The wellness phenomenon isn’t new, and its strength has never been specificity. In 1950, J.I. Rodale, one of the earliest advocates of organic farming, launched Prevention magazine, giving readers a continuous outlet for information that was a few degrees short of science. He was sure that rimless glasses and saltwater caused cancer and that electricity kept it at bay. ... in our internet era, where presentation matters more than pedigree, we have about a million self-taught gurus who profit from preaching at events like the Longevity Now Conference that certain foods could let you live as long as you wanted ... The wellness industry has exploded into superfoods, detoxes, and celebrity healers selling magic crystals, and the press and the public have gobbled it all up ... are any wellness products worth your money, and is any of the advice being shilled by its gurus going to make you healthier? Evidence says… no. Here’s why.

Whatever their aspirations, people keep right on gorging. Americans now eat a total of 76 pounds in various sugars every year, up 8% from 1970. ... That’s the problem for Big Food: It’s built on the stuff. Some 74% of packaged foods and beverages in the U.S. contain some form of sweetener ... the final factor that is pressing heavily on packaged food companies: the ever-more-ravenous appetite for “natural,” unprocessed products. ... Think of food companies’ plight this way: The finest scientists in industry have spent decades trying to find or invent a no-calorie sweetener that tastes and feels as good as the stuff extracted from pure cane. And now, after they largely failed to master that complex, arduous task, the level of difficulty is being raised even higher: This improbable concoction cannot appear to have been engineered by scientists. ... Most people in the business believe that a “systems approach”—a blending of ingredients rather than a single molecule—is the future of the natural-sweetener industry.

“Alcosynth” probably sounds too good to be true: A synthetic form of booze with all the fun parts of alcohol but none of its downsides. A world where a night out ends without a single tearful argument, and where not one person worries about how they’re going to deal with their 8 a.m. meeting because hangovers no longer exist. It’s a utopian ideal that for many is more important — and certainly more relevant — than colonizing Mars. It would be—for the first time in the history of a species that has been consuming alcohol for 10 million years (if you include our ape ancestors)—a night of drinking with no penalty the next day. Though it sounds like a fantasy, it is the actual goal of David Nutt, a British scientist who has been touting the virtues of so-called alcosynths since 2014.

Reversing Paralysis: Scientists are making remarkable progress at using brain implants to restore the freedom of movement that spinal cord injuries take away.
Self-Driving Trucks: Tractor-trailers without a human at the wheel will soon barrel onto highways near you. What will this mean for the nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers?
Paying with Your Face: Face-detecting systems in China now authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track down criminals. Will other countries follow?
Practical Quantum Computers: Advances at Google, Intel, and several research groups indicate that computers with previously unimaginable power are finally within reach.
The 360-Degree Selfie: Inexpensive cameras that make spherical images are opening a new era in photography and changing the way people share stories.
Hot Solar Cells: By converting heat to focused beams of light, a new solar device could create cheap and continuous power.
Gene Therapy 2.0: Scientists have solved fundamental problems that were holding back cures for rare hereditary disorders. Next we’ll see if the same approach can take on cancer, heart disease, and other common illnesses.
The Cell Atlas: Biology’s next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
Botnets of Things: The relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse.
Reinforcement Learning: By experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do things that no programmer could teach them.

Smoking rates were in decline among well-educated consumers in developed economies; to make up for slipping sales, the companies were raising prices, which they could do for only so long. Meanwhile, a growing number of customers were switching to e-cigarettes in the hope of escaping their addiction or preserving their health. The devices, which use battery-powered coils to vaporize nicotine-infused solutions, had leapt on the scene seemingly out of nowhere. One of the first commercially available e-cigarettes had been created circa 2003 as a smoking cessation device by a Chinese pharmacist whose father had died of lung cancer. By 2013 the e-cigarette market had $3.7 billion in annual sales, according to Euromonitor International, and was expanding rapidly. ... Philip Morris International scrambled to fashion newfangled nicotine-delivering devices that would catch the wandering eye of the restless tobacco consumer. ... Everywhere you look in the industry, companies are pouring money into product development while borrowing liberally from the style of Silicon Valley. ... Tobacco executives often sound like media owners talking about content. That is, they’re open to delivering their drug via whatever pipe the consumer chooses—be it e-cigarettes, heat-not-burn devices, gum, lozenges, dip, or some medium that hasn’t been invented yet.

Hof claims that people can address, prevent, and treat most any malady by focusing the mind to control the metabolic processes in their cells. ... Wim Hof’s curriculum vitae includes holding his breath for six minutes, running a marathon above the Arctic circle in only shorts, and achieving a Guinness world record for the longest ice bath (nearly two hours). Hence the name. ... He describes commercial pressures on Hof as external—the man himself owns little more than a handful of t-shirts and would be fine to remain that way. ... gets to the point that the Wim Hof Method isn’t really a method in any traditional sense. Method implies a systematic study with an end goal, whereas this is more a set of principles—basic concepts and a couple techniques—to be continued throughout life. Cold exposure is supposed to help people train themselves to suppress a fight-or-flight response, and holding one’s breath teaches an ability to suppress a reflex to gasp. Through these exercises, you’re meant to gain a sense of control over the body’s autonomic processes.