Way up in the Great White North, beneath Canada’s Baffin Island, lies material from the very beginning of the planet.

The search for primordial stuff—rocks that have survived 4.5 billion years since the formation of the Earth without being changed by forces that shook and scrambled our planet—is one of geology’s long-running quests. In Nature this week, Matthew Jackson says he may have done it. Jackson’s team found lava rocks in Canada with a signature that matches that of the newly formed Earth, suggesting there is material below the snowy surface that has endured unchanged throughout the planet’s history.

They have the highest proportion of the isotope helium-3 relative to helium-4 of any rocks known. This suggests that the rocks came from a “primitive” region of Earth, as, unlike helium-4, helium-3 can’t be replenished and thus must have come from the original building blocks of the planet. What’s more, the ratio of two isotopes of the element neodymium match what geochemists would expect for a residue from Earth’s early ocean of molten magma [ScienceNOW].

It’s the magma pocket deep in the Earth’s interior that’s thought to be an unchanged remnant of the early, molten Earth, not the lava rocks it produced: Curiously, the surface rocks are only about 60 million years old. So if Jackson’s team is correct, this pocket of primordial mantle still fueled eruptions recently (in geologic terms). That’s a surprise:

“Even if a vestige of such material remained, it seems unlikely that it would be found in any samples from Earth’s surface or the shallow subsurface that are available to geologists,” observed David Graham of Oregon State University in Corvallis, who wrote a commentary in the same issue of Nature. “Yet that is what (this) new evidence suggests” [Discovery News].

What goes on deep down in the Earth is, as you’d imagine, difficult to prove. So after the question of whether Jackson is correct, there’s the question of how this primitive material survived and ended up where it did.

But regardless of how it happened, this ancient sample of the planet’s internal makeup will provide important information to geologists trying to piece together the early history of the Earth and its inner workings, Graham said [Los Angeles Times].

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Image: Don Francis

“Who wants to live forever?” Freddie Mercury asks on behalf of the Highlander. Michio Kaku (whom you should be reading because he’s wonderful) has started a two-part investigation over at Big Think on just that query. The cliché question comes from the basic problem of living a long time: no one wants to die, but no one wants to get old either. Pulitzer Prize-winner Jonathan Weiner’s new book Long For This World examines the science and scientists of gerontologology (aging). Stanford University professor of internal medicine Abraham Verghese reviewed Long For This World in The New York Times and was inspired by Weiner’s discussion of longevity. Verghese reflects on his own experience with terminally ill patients:

As a young physician caught up in the early years of the H.I.V. epidemic, I was struck by my patients’ will to live, even as their quality of life became miserable and when loved ones and caregivers would urge the patient to let go. I thought it remarkable that patients never asked me to help end their lives (and found it strange that Dr. Kevorkian managed to encounter so many who did). My patients were dying young and felt cheated out of their best years. They did not want immortality, just the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect. What de Grey and other immortalists seem to have lost sight of is that simply living a full life span is a laudable goal. Partial success in extending life might simply extend the years of infirmity and suffering — something that to some degree is already happening in the West.

I cannot get over the logic Verghese displays here. He notes the will of people to live in spite of suffering and lowered quality of life. The patients merely wanted “the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect.” Does he mean the life span science and civilization has already artificially extended fifty years beyond biological design? How does one differentiate between a 30-year-old who wants to be healthy enough to live to fifty and a 90-year-old who wants to be healthy enough to live to be over 100? Verghese is unable to reconcile the desire to live with a terminally low quality of life. The goal of anti-aging is not to simply increase the number of years a person spends alive; instead, the goal is to make every year, even into mid and late life, as healthy and youthful as possible.

In his post “Bullish on Longevity” Discover blogger Chris Mooney discusses a pill that would extend healthy life by about seven years. The trick is not to merely extend life, but to instead create a “compression of morbidity: The period of life beset by disease-related suffering and impairment would be compressed, and essentially come right at the end. You live long, you prosper–and then you die fairly quickly.”

Think of it this way: After taking a special test, you know you will die at the age of 77, but I offer you two options. Option one is that you live a normal life, aging naturally as your genes and lifestyle choices allow. Option two is that you take a pill that keeps you as healthy as you would be at age 30 until you were 74. You’d still mature mentally, build life experience, raise a family and expand your career. But at 70 you could be rock-climbing and getting your third PhD or running marathons and keeping pace with your grandchildren. Which option do you pick?

Aubrey de Grey, the prime subject of Weiner’s new book, focuses on making option two a reality. Contra Verghese, immortalists have their sights focused directly on allowing a full life span, instead of having the second-half hindered and hobbled by weakness, mental degeneration, and frailty. Alex Horne has a lovely article at the Guardian in which he interviews a bunch of old people who don’t seem to enjoy being old. Horne comes to the general conclusion that the death of friends, the Shakespearian loss of senses and abilities, and lack of purpose make being ancient less-than-spectacular. So the trick, as de Grey and other longevity supporters see it, is to stymie aging’s worse traits until the very last minute.

What Weiner and Verghese seem to miss is that longevity research isn’t necessarily about living forever, or even a spectacularly long time, but instead making the years one is alive less hindered by the very process of having lived so long. Make youthful health the bulk of life, not just the early peak.

Image: “Old persons home” by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu from Saatchi Gallery, London, via Wikipedia, shared through Creative Commons

Doctors recently found a surprising growth in Ron Sveden’s lung: a pea plant.

Sveden, a 75-year-old man from Massachusetts reportedly suffered from emphysema for months. He worried when he met with New York City pulmonologist Len Horovitz that he might have lung cancer. Instead, X-rays revealed a pea plant, the BBC reports, which Sveden estimates grew to around half an inch.

Dr. Horovitz says that the lung’s warmth and moisture made the perfect pea habitat and suspects a pea seed went down the wrong way. He told AOL Health:

“That can definitely happen. This did not surprise me…. You can inhale a seed of a plant or sprouting plant and it can cause bronchial obstruction. I’ve pulled food out of people’s lungs before.”

Still, given the popularity of this story, we’re guessing lung gardening is pretty rare. As Sveden says in the ABC News video above, he’s not sure how big a lung-born pea plant can grow:

“Whether this would have gone full-term and I’d be working for the Jolly Green Giant, I don’t know.”

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Between one-quarter and one-third of the food produced in the U.S. gets wasted. Why care? A new analysis by my colleagues Amanda Cuellar and Michael Webber at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at UT found that the energy embedded in wasted food accounts for at least 2 percent of our national energy budget. This week’s New Scientist features an Op-Ed I composed with Michael about wasting less to conserve more. We begin:

IT IS no secret that meeting the world’s growing energy demands will be difficult. So far, most of the focus has been on finding oil in areas that are ever more difficult to access – think BP’s Deepwater Horizon well – bringing new fossil fuels such as tar sands online and increasing energy efficiency.

Yet we have been overlooking an easier way. We could save an enormous amount of energy by tackling the huge problem of food waste. Doing so is likely to be quicker than many of the other options on the table, while also saving money and reducing emissions.

The energy footprint of food is enormous. Consider the US, where just 5 per cent of the global population consumes one-fifth of the world’s energy. Around 15 per cent of the energy used in the US is swallowed up by food production and distribution.

–

Global energy consumption is projected to increase by close to 50 per cent between 2006 and 2030. That makes reducing our dependency on fossil fuels even more challenging.

Tackling food waste should be added to the toolbox of policy options because its relative impact is on the same scale as more popular measures such as biofuel production and offshore drilling. Although we will never eliminate food waste completely, we can assuredly create the means to discard less by coming up with the right incentives for producers and consumers.

Read on at New Scientist…