Laser-Equipped Wheelchairs Let the Blind “See” Obstacles in Their Path | Discoblog

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The story of a PhD student weaving his way through a busy university corridor doesn’t usually make for breaking news. But then the average PhD student isn’t wheelchair-bound, visually impaired, and testing a new laser-based wheelchair navigation system. In front of a crowd of onlookers earlier this month, a student performed the first public demonstration of a wheelchair that lets blind people “see” and avoid obstacles, afterward remarking that it was just “like using a white cane” (presumably underselling the technology to blunt the jealousy blooming in the onlookers).

From the user’s perspective, the new high-tech wheelchair is quite simple: You hold a joystick in one hand to drive the motorized chair, while the other hand engages a “haptic interface” that gives tactile feedback warning you about objects in your path, be they walls, fire hydrants, or those mobile collision-makers called people.

Developed at Sweden’s Luleå University of Technology (who brought us the autonomous wheelchair), this wheelchair uses lasers that make use of the time of flight technique, wherein “a laser pulse is sent out and a portion of the pulse is reflected from any surface encountered,” and the distance ...


Snake Venom, With Ketchup-Like Viscosity, Oozes Into Prey | 80beats

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What’s the News: Most poisonous snakes don’t inject their prey with venom; instead, they bite the prey and venom insidiously trickles down a groove on their fangs into the wound. A new study in Physical Review Letters investigated the physics behind how venom travels down the grooves: It turns out that snake venom has unusual viscosity properties that keep it cohering together until it’s time to flow down the fangs and into the snake’s soon-to-be-snack—the same properties that account for how ketchup seems stuck in the bottle, then flows freely onto your fries.

How the Heck:

The researchers found that snake venom, like ketchup, is a non-Newtonian fluid, meaning that its viscosity depends on how fast it’s moving. Before the snake’s fangs make contact, the venom sticks together pretty well, rather than coming down the tooth in a constant trickle. Once the fangs sink in, however, and the venom starts dripping down the groove, it flows freely.
What starts the venom flowing, ...


The Senate Wants One Copy of Every NASA Document

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Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Letter Regarding NASA Authorization Act of 2010 Compliance

"As Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate committee charged with NASA oversight, it is our responsibility to make sure that NASA's policy direction, and the associated taxpayer investment, is proceeding in accordance with the law. Our Nation's space program is undergoing a transition that has not been seen since the end of the Apollo era, which presents many challenges and opportunities. NASA's current inaction and indecision in implementing this transition could impact our global standing and take many years and billions of dollars to repair. As a result, we are requesting bi-monthly briefings and detailed information documenting what steps NASA is taking to comply with the law. The first briefing should take place during the week of May 30, 2011."

Keith's note: Wow - what a shopping list they have prepared - its like a media FOIA request - and they want NASA to "provide the requested information and documents by June 3, 2011." I wonder if they will hold NASA in contempt of Congress if they do not get every single thing that they have asked for. Ouch. Charlie Bolden is not going to enjoy the inevitable hearing(s) that will follow.

Space Florida Call for Infrastructure Projects

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Space Florida "Call for Infrastructure Projects" - May 25 deadline

"Each year, Space Florida submits a list of project priorities to the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) for consideration in preparing a five-year work program in partnership with local Transportation Planning Organizations (TPOs). This five year Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) serves as the basis for receiving Federal and State transportation funds for aerospace-related projects."

Everest + 2

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Keith's note: Two years ago on 19 May 2009 Scott Parazynski became the first human to travel into space and stand atop the highest point on our planet. While Scott was standing in the jetstream, this is how I relayed the news via satellite phone at 4:35 am local time from a comparatively mild location at 0 degrees F at Everest Base Camp. Meanwhile, Miles O'Brien was our lifeline back to the real world and was sitting in his laundry room in New York. It does not take a lot of money to convey exploration from remote places - just determination and a compelling, personalized story to make it work. More about Scott's exploits and the after effects here.

DARPA’s 100 Year Starship Study

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DARPA Request for Information: 100 Year Starship Study

"DARPA is seeking ideas for an organization, business model and approach appropriate for a self-sustaining investment vehicle in support of the 100 Year StarshipTM Study. The 100 Year StarshipTM Study is a project seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible. The genesis of this study is to foster a rebirth of a sense of wonder among students, academia, industry, researchers and the general population to consider "why not" and to encourage them to tackle whole new classes of research and development related to all the issues surrounding long duration, long distance spaceflight. DARPA contends that the useful, unanticipated consequences of such research will have benefit to the Department of Defense and to NASA, and well as the private and commercial sector."

Keith's note: Hmmm .... DARPA has its sights set on traveling to the stars - at least as a motivational exercise - yet NASA continues to trip over itself just to get out of LEO - something it knew how to do 40 years ago (technically and politically) but has since forgotten...

Senate Hearing on Contributions of Space to National Imperatives

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Statements

Frank L. Culbertson
Christopher Chyba
Frank Slazer
Elliot Holokauahi Pulham
Sen. Rockefeller

Panelist: SpaceX Costs Offer Hope For NASA

"[Chyba] cited an analysis contained in NASA's report to Congress on the market for commercial crew and cargo services to LEO that found it would cost NASA between $1.7 billion and $4 billion to do the same job with Falcon 9 that cost SpaceX $390 million. In its analysis, which contained no cost estimates for the future cost of commercial transportation services to the ISS beyond those already under contract, NASA said it had verified the SpaceX cost figures."

Watch a Landslide Happen at 50 cm Per Hour

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From Boing Boing:

This is a photo of a landslide. But it's not a landslide that happened, it's a landslide in progress. Very, very slow progress. At Snake River Canyon, Wyoming, this flow of dirt is moving down a hillside and across a highway at a rate of 50 centimeters per hour, says Da

Has RFID Technology Become a Threat?

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With RFID technology becoming more pervasive in our everyday lives, embedded in products ranging from warehouse merchandise to passports and credit cards, the hacking of RFID chips has become a real possibility. What does security mean in an RFID system and how can it be achieved?

The preceding art

Free-Floating Planets May Be More Common Than Stars

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Astronomers, including a NASA-funded team member, have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds were probably ejected from developing planetary systems.

The discovery is based on a joint Japan-New Zealand survey that scanned the center of the Milky Way galaxy during 2006 and 2007, revealing evidence for up to 10 free-floating planets roughly the mass of Jupiter. The isolated orbs, also known as orphan planets, are difficult to spot, and had gone undetected until now. The newfound planets are located at an average approximate distance of 10,000 to 20,000 light-years from Earth.

"Although free-floating planets have been predicted, they finally have been detected, holding major implications for planetary formation and evolution models," said Mario Perez, exoplanet program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The discovery indicates there are many more free-floating Jupiter-mass planets that can't be seen. The team estimates there are about twice as many of them as stars. In addition, these worlds are thought to be at least as common as planets that orbit stars. This would add up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone.

"Our survey is like a population census," said David Bennett, a NASA and National Science Foundation-funded co-author of the study from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. "We sampled a portion of the galaxy, and based on these data, can estimate overall numbers in the galaxy."

The study, led by Takahiro Sumi from Osaka University in Japan, appears in the May 19 issue of the journal Nature.

The survey is not sensitive to planets smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, but theories suggest lower-mass planets like Earth should be ejected from their stars more often. As a result, they are thought to be more common than free-floating Jupiters.

Previous observations spotted a handful of free-floating, planet-like objects within star-forming clusters, with masses three times that of Jupiter. But scientists suspect the gaseous bodies form more like stars than planets. These small, dim orbs, called brown dwarfs, grow from collapsing balls of gas and dust, but lack the mass to ignite their nuclear fuel and shine with starlight. It is thought the smallest brown dwarfs are approximately the size of large planets.

On the other hand, it is likely that some planets are ejected from their early, turbulent solar systems, due to close gravitational encounters with other planets or stars. Without a star to circle, these planets would move through the galaxy as our sun and other stars do, in stable orbits around the galaxy's center. The discovery of 10 free-floating Jupiters supports the ejection scenario, though it's possible both mechanisms are at play.

"If free-floating planets formed like stars, then we would have expected to see only one or two of them in our survey instead of 10," Bennett said. "Our results suggest that planetary systems often become unstable, with planets being kicked out from their places of birth."

The observations cannot rule out the possibility that some of these planets may have very distant orbits around stars, but other research indicates Jupiter-mass planets in such distant orbits are rare.

The survey, the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA), is named in part after a giant wingless, extinct bird family from New Zealand called the moa. A 5.9-foot (1.8-meter) telescope at Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand is used to regularly scan the copious stars at the center of our galaxy for gravitational microlensing events. These occur when something, such as a star or planet, passes in front of another, more distant star. The passing body's gravity warps the light of the background star, causing it to magnify and brighten. Heftier passing bodies, like massive stars, will warp the light of the background star to a greater extent, resulting in brightening events that can last weeks. Small planet-size bodies will cause less of a distortion, and brighten a star for only a few days or less.

A second microlensing survey group, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), contributed to this discovery using a 4.2-foot (1.3 meter) telescope in Chile. The OGLE group also observed many of the same events, and their observations independently confirmed the analysis of the MOA group.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,Calif., manages NASA's Exoplanet Exploration program office. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/planet20110518.html

NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer Helps Confirm Nature of Dark Energy

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A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds. The survey used data from NASA's space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope on Siding Spring Mountain in Australia.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion. They contradict an alternate theory, where gravity, not dark energy, is the force pushing space apart. According to this alternate theory, with which the new survey results are not consistent, Albert Einstein's concept of gravity is wrong, and gravity becomes repulsive instead of attractive when acting at great distances.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Blake is lead author of two papers describing the results that appeared in recent issues of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed. If gravity were the culprit, then we wouldn't be seeing these constant effects of dark energy throughout time."

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

The idea of dark energy was proposed during the previous decade, based on studies of distant exploding stars called supernovae. Supernovae emit constant, measurable light, making them so-called "standard candles," which allows calculation of their distance from Earth. Observations revealed dark energy was flinging the objects out at accelerating speeds.

Dark energy is in a tug-of-war contest with gravity. In the early universe, gravity took the lead, dominating dark energy. At about 8 billion years after the Big Bang, as space expanded and matter became diluted, gravitational attractions weakened and dark energy gained the upper hand. Billions of years from now, dark energy will be even more dominant. Astronomers predict our universe will be a cosmic wasteland, with galaxies spread apart so far that any intelligent beings living inside them wouldn't be able to see other galaxies.

The new survey provides two separate methods for independently checking the supernovae results. This is the first time astronomers performed these checks across the whole cosmic timespan dominated by dark energy. The team began by assembling the largest three-dimensional map of galaxies in the distant universe, spotted by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The ultraviolet-sensing telescope has scanned about three-quarters of the sky, observing hundreds of millions of galaxies.

"The Galaxy Evolution Explorer helped identify bright, young galaxies, which are ideal for this type of study," said Christopher Martin, principal investigator for the mission at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It provided the scaffolding for this enormous 3-D map."

The astronomers acquired detailed information about the light for each galaxy using the Anglo-Australian Telescope and studied the pattern of distance between them. Sound waves from the very early universe left imprints in the patterns of galaxies, causing pairs of galaxies to be separated by approximately 500 million light-years.

This "standard ruler" was used to determine the distance from the galaxy pairs to Earth -- the closer a galaxy pair is to us, the farther apart the galaxies will appear from each other on the sky. As with the supernovae studies, this distance data were combined with information about the speeds at which the pairs are moving away from us, revealing, yet again, the fabric of space is stretching apart faster and faster.

The team also used the galaxy map to study how clusters of galaxies grow over time like cities, eventually containing many thousands of galaxies. The clusters attract new galaxies through gravity, but dark energy tugs the clusters apart. It slows down the process, allowing scientists to measure dark energy's repulsive force.

"Observations by astronomers over the last 15 years have produced one of the most startling discoveries in physical science; the expansion of the universe, triggered by the Big Bang, is speeding up," said Jon Morse, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Using entirely independent methods, data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer have helped increase our confidence in the existence of dark energy."

Caltech leads the Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission and is responsible for science operations and data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, manages the mission and built the science instrument. The mission was developed under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Researchers sponsored by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France collaborated on this mission. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/galex/galex20110519.html

Moon’s Rough ‘Wrinkles’ Reveal Clues To Its Past

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Written on the moon's weary face are the damages it has endured for the past 4-1/2 billion years. From impact craters to the dark plains of maria left behind by volcanic eruptions, the scars are all that remain to tell the tale of what happened to the moon. But they only hint at the processes that once acted—and act today—to shape the surface.

To get more insight into those processes, Meg Rosenburg and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. put together the first comprehensive set of maps revealing the slopes and roughness of the moon's surface. These maps are based on detailed data collected by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. LOLA and LRO were built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Like wrinkles on skin, the roughness of craters and other features on the moon's surface can reveal their age. "The key is to look at the roughness at both long and short scales," says Rosenburg, who is the first author on the paper describing the results, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research earlier this year.

The roughness depends on the subtle ups and downs of the landscape, a quality that the researchers get at by measuring the slope at locations all over the surface. To put together a complete picture, the researchers looked at roughness at a range of different scales—the distances between two points—from 17 meters (about 56 feet) to as much as 2.7 kilometers (about 1.6 miles).

"Old and young craters have different roughness properties—they are rougher on some scales and smoother on others," says Rosenburg. That's because the older craters have been pummeled for eons by meteorites that pit and mar the site of the original impact, changing the original shape of the crater.

"Because this softening of the terrain hasn't happened at the new impact sites, the youngest craters immediately stand out," says NASA Goddard's Gregory Neumann, a co-investigator on LOLA.

"It is remarkable that the moon exhibits a great range of topographic character: on the extremes, surfaces roughened by the accumulation of craters over billions of years can be near regions smoothed and resurfaced by more recent mare volcanism," says Oded Aharonson, Rosenburg's advisor at the California Institute of Technology.

By looking at where and how the roughness changes, the researchers can get important clues about the processes that shaped the moon. A roughness map of the material surrounding Orientale basin, for example, reveals subtle differences in the ejecta, or debris, that was thrown out when the crater was formed by a giant object slamming into the moon.

That information can be combined with a contour map that shows where the high and low points are. "By looking at both together, we can say that one part of Orientale is not just higher or lower, it's also differently rough," Rosenburg says. "That gives us some clues about the impact process that launched the ejecta and also about the surface processes that later acted to modify it."

Likewise, the smooth plains of maria, which were created by volcanic activity, have a different roughness "signature" from the moon's highlands, reflecting the vastly different origins of the two terrains. Maria is Latin for "seas," and they got that name from early astronomers who mistook them for actual seas.

Just as on the moon, the same approach can be used to study surface processes on other bodies as well, Rosenburg says. "The processes at work are different on Mars than they are on an asteroid, but they each leave a signature in the topography for us to interpret. By studying roughness at different scales, we can begin to understand how our nearest neighbors came to look the way they do."

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/moon-wrinkles.html

New Experiments Headed to Station on STS-134/ULF6

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The Space Shuttle Endeavour launched to the International Space Station on May 16, carrying with it a mix of research that will be performed on the station during and after the shuttle mission. Nearly 150 experiments are continuing aboard the station as the transition from assembly work to expanded research on the international laboratory progresses. They span the basic categories of biological and biotechnology, human research, physical and materials sciences, technology development, Earth and space science and educational activities.

Among the new experiments flying will be several experiments, flown by NASA in cooperation with the Italian Space Agency, including one that looks at how the same kind of memory shape foam used in beds on Earth might be useful as a new kind of actuator, or servomechanism that supplies and transmits a measured amount of energy for mechanisms. The U.S.-Italian experiments also will look at cellular biology, radiation, plant growth and aging; how diet may affect night vision, and how an electronic device may be able used for air quality monitoring in spacecraft.

One NASA experiment known as Biology will use, among other items, C. elegans worms that are descendants of worms that survived the STS-107 space shuttle Columbia accident. The Rapid Turn Around engineering proof-of-concept test will use the Light Microscopy Microscope to look at three-dimensional samples of live organisms, tissue samples and fluorescent beads.

A NASA educational payload will deliver several toy Lego kits that can be assembled to form satellites, space shuttles and a scale model of the space station itself to demonstrate scientific concepts, and a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency experiment called Try Zero-G that will help future astronauts show children the difference between microgravity and Earth gravity.

Research activities on the shuttle and station are integrated to maximize return during station assembly. The shuttle serves as a platform for completing short-duration research, while providing supplies and sample-return for ongoing research on station. For a full list of investigations available on this flight, see the STS-134 Press kit or visit http://www.nasa.gov.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/sts134.html

NASA Mission Will Observe Earth’s Salty Seas

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Final preparations are under way for the June 9 launch of the international Aquarius/SAC-D observatory. The mission's primary instrument, Aquarius, will study interactions between ocean circulation, the water cycle and climate by measuring ocean surface salinity.

Engineers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California are performing final tests before mating Aquarius/SAC-D to its Delta II rocket. The mission is a collaboration between NASA and Argentina's space agency, Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), with participation from Brazil, Canada, France and Italy. SAC stands for Satelite de Applicaciones Cientificas. Aquarius was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

In addition to Aquarius, the observatory carries seven other instruments that will collect environmental data for a wide range of applications, including studies of natural hazards, air quality, land processes and epidemiology.

The mission will make NASA's first space observations of the concentration of dissolved salt at the ocean surface. Aquarius' observations will reveal how salinity variations influence ocean circulation, trace the path of freshwater around our planet, and help drive Earth's climate. The ocean surface constantly exchanges water and heat with Earth's atmosphere. Approximately 80 percent of the global water cycle that moves freshwater from the ocean to the atmosphere to the land and back to the ocean happens over the ocean.

Salinity plays a key role in these exchanges. By tracking changes in ocean surface salinity, Aquarius will monitor variations in the water cycle caused by evaporation and precipitation over the ocean, river runoff, and the freezing and melting of sea ice.

Salinity also makes seawater denser, causing it to sink, where it becomes part of deep, interconnected ocean currents. This deep ocean "conveyor belt" moves water masses and heat from the tropics to the polar regions, helping to regulate Earth's climate.

"Salinity is the glue that bonds two major components of Earth's complex climate system: ocean circulation and the global water cycle," said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. "Aquarius will map global variations in salinity in unprecedented detail, leading to new discoveries that will improve our ability to predict future climate."

Aquarius will measure salinity by sensing microwave emissions from the water's surface with a radiometer instrument. These emissions can be used to indicate the saltiness of the surface water, after accounting for other environmental factors. Salinity levels in the open ocean vary by only about five parts per thousand, and small changes are important. Aquarius uses advanced technologies to detect changes in salinity as small as about two parts per 10,000, equivalent to a pinch (about one-eighth of a teaspoon) of salt in a gallon of water.

Aquarius will map the entire open ocean every seven days for at least three years from 408 miles (657 kilometers) above Earth. Its measurements will produce monthly estimates of ocean surface salinity with a spatial resolution of 93 miles (150 kilometers). The data will reveal how salinity changes over time and from one part of the ocean to another.

The Aquarius/SAC-D mission continues NASA and CONAE's 17-year partnership. NASA provided launch vehicles and operations for three SAC satellite missions and science instruments for two.

JPL will manage Aquarius through its commissioning phase and archive mission data. Goddard will manage Aquarius mission operations and process science data. NASA's Launch Services Program at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is managing the launch.

CONAE is providing the SAC-D spacecraft, an optical camera, a thermal camera in collaboration with Canada, a microwave radiometer,; sensors from various Argentine institutions and the mission operations center there. France and Italy are contributing instruments.

For more information about Aquarius/SAC-D, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/aquarius and http://www.conae.gov.ar/eng/principal.html .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/aquarius/news/aquarius20110517.html

Humanity+ @ Parsons recap: How to Live Forever review

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This past weekend at the Humanity+ @ Parsons conference in NYC I had a chance to attend the debut screening of Mark Wexler’s new documentary, How to Live Forever. The film chronicles Wexler’s struggle to come to grips with his mother’s recent death and his ensuing existential crisis. To help cope with his newfound dread, Wexler ventures down a number of paths that might help him achieve a longer life. To this end, he interviews centenarians, gerontologists, health and fitness gurus, anti-aging hucksters, and anyone else with an opinion on how to extend life spans.

Of interest to the transhumanist and radical life extension communities, Wexler talks to Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, and Tanya Jones of Alcor. But in addition to this he is lectured on hormone therapy by Suzanne Summers, takes a stab at caloric restriction, and visits with elderly Okinawans in Japan. Importantly, he explores and treats each issue with a certain seriousness—tongue just so slightly in cheek—giving each person or approach its due consideration. And by doing so, he brings the viewer into each world in an entertaining way and and then let’s them make their own minds on the efficacy of each approach.

That said, the central thrust of the documentary is rather weak; Wexler’s struggle is clearly contrived, uninteresting and underdeveloped. Thankfully it’s the characters and insights into aging that give this film its spark. Every segment, location and person that’s explored by Wexler is a little gem that offers insights into both life extension practices and novel approaches to living a healthy life. Wexler offers some wonderful food for thought by juxtaposing a caloric restriction advocate with a glutenous food critic, by visiting a nursing home in which robots are used to comfort the elderly, and by highlighting the fact that the world’s oldest woman on record smoked, drank and lived alone until her dying day.

In the end, the film offers no real solutions. Its life-affirming insights, many of which are provided by Wexler’s best friend, are pedestrian and unsatisfying. The final shot of the documentary shows Wexler sifting through his dead mother’s paintings, as if to suggest that she lives on through her work. But as Woody Allen once coyly noted, the key to achieving true immortality is by not dying in the first place.

How to Live Forever is a wonderful introduction to the sub-cultures that are a part of life extension, but it skirts past some of the deeper philosophical and ethical issues that are integral part of the larger discussion. The result is a quaint but highly enjoyable film. Those looking for something more analytical, profound or scientific, however, will need to look elsewhere.