One such incredible discovery was reported last week by researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego.  They reported that they had found two drugs that increased muscle endurance without exercise.  The two drugs, Alcar and GW1516 increased the endurance of ‘couch potato mice” dramatically.  Alcar increased the mice’s endurance by 44% after just four weeks of treatment.  GW1516 increased endurance by 75% but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

Across the country the sound of overweight couch potatoes clapping their remotes together was positively deafening.  On Wall Street, the price of publicly traded health club chains plummeted as sellers shorted the stocks.  Kidding on both accounts.

This discovery is analogous to eating meals without calories or smoking cigarettes without any negative health consequences. The “no pain, no gain” mantra spoken by thousands of personal trainers nation-wide might thankfully be retired.

There are some serious immediate positive possibilities for these drugs.  Health conditions such as obesity and diabetes which ...]]> The new age we are now entering, The Shift Age, will be a time of great transformation.  One of the areas that will undergo the greatest transformation is health and medicine.  It is expected that nanotechnology will bring great changes in both medical treatments and life expectancy.  The miniaturization of computer and chip technology will finally initiate the era of the bionic human to some degree.  There will breakthroughs in pharmacology and discoveries that will basically be unintended consequences of research into the treatment and cures of many diseases.

One such incredible discovery was reported last week by researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego.  They reported that they had found two drugs that increased muscle endurance without exercise.  The two drugs, Alcar and GW1516 increased the endurance of ‘couch potato mice” dramatically.  Alcar increased the mice’s endurance by 44% after just four weeks of treatment.  GW1516 increased endurance by 75% but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

Across the country the sound of overweight couch potatoes clapping their remotes together was positively deafening.  On Wall Street, the price of publicly traded health club chains plummeted as sellers shorted the stocks.  Kidding on both accounts.

This discovery is analogous to eating meals without calories or smoking cigarettes without any negative health consequences. The “no pain, no gain” mantra spoken by thousands of personal trainers nation-wide might thankfully be retired.

There are some serious immediate positive possibilities for these drugs.  Health conditions such as obesity and diabetes which are improved by exercise may soon be treated by these drugs.  Many overweight diabetics have become that way due to an aversion to rigorous exercise.  Now they might have an alternative that will at least get them in good enough shape to undertake a real exercise program..

The lead scientist on this study is Dr. Ronald Evans a scientist with the impressive credential of having won the Lasker Award, an award often won by scientists who end up winning a Nobel Prize.  He is of the foremost authorities on how hormones work in cells and a gene controlling protein called PPAR-delta.  In the past, he found that this played different roles in muscle, which exists in two forms. Type 1 muscle fibers have a lot of  mitochondria which generate energy cellular energy and are therefore resistant to fatigue.  Type 2 muscle fibers have less mitochondria and there tire more easily.  Athletes tend to have a greater amount of type 1 muscle mass while obese people have fewer type 1 and more type 2.

Dr. Evan’s research team found that both drugs remodel muscles to create more type 1 muscle mass., but that the GW1516 increases a greater amount, but only when combined with exercise.  The research team pointed out that a test has been created to test whether a competitive athlete has taken either one of these drugs, so that they cannot be used in sports where performance enhancing drugs are prohibited.

The more we learn about health, eating and exercise the more we realize that the axioms from the past are true. Exercise every day, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, be happy, know how to relax, all have been scientifically shown to increase good health and longevity.  Upon this foundation, medical science has added wonder drugs and increasingly less invasive surgical procedures and body part replacements that even 20 years ago would have been thought to be in the realm of science fiction.

We are now entering a transformative time of discoveries and breakthroughs that will provide even more amazement and give us hope, similar to this discovery of the benefits of Alcar and GW1416.  As you contemplate this, put on a good pair of shoes and go for a good walk or run.  Don’t wait for tomorrow’s discoveries; they will be here soon enough.

It is in the arena of super computers that both the outer and inner reaches of reality can be explored.  The advanced computer modeling and the running of complex scenarios and of course the ability to beat a human chess grandmaster is the realm of super computers.

The world’s fastest computer is being built and installed at the Argonne National Laboratory in the western suburbs of Chicago. IBM Corp. and the Department of Energy, which owns Argonne, have contracted for a new supercomputer that is now being installed with a peak capability of 445 teraflops, or 445 trillion calculations per second. The current record-holder is the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which has an IBM Blue Gene/L with a peak capability of about 360 teraflops.In the 60 year history of computers, there has been a constant improvement of computational speed.  Ever faster has always been one of the driving metrics of the industry.  Moore’s Law has been manifested with desktops and laptops to the point where the computers we use are as fast as we need.  The machines we use today are incredibly faster that those we used at the turn of the century.  The power of these machines however is dwarfed by the super computers now being developed.

All the issues about lack of leadership in Washington D.C. that have been addressed here on this blog aside, hearty congratulations to the U.S. Congress and to President Bush for honoring one of the greatest living human beings on the planet. This is the first time a President has ever stood with the Dalai Lama in a public ceremony. Every U.S. President over the past four decades has been bullied by China to not give any public recognition to the spiritual leader of Tibet. This week, while President Bush compromised and met the His Holiness in the private part of the White House and not the Oval Office, and did not allow pictures, he did have his picture taken with him at the ceremony at the Capitol.

I have long admired the current Dalai Lama. I have casually studied Tibetan Buddhism and find it one of the more enlightened and open of all religions. I will never forget a day, when, as a young man, I first encountered the spiritual high of Tibetan Buddhists. ...]]> Finally, the Dalai Lama was formally invited to visit a President in the White House. This week the Dalai Lama visited the White House prior to receiving the Congressional Gold Medal at the U.S Capitol. Finally, the leaders of the most powerful democracy in the world have stopped being bullied by China and have recognized one of the great spiritual leaders in the world, who is also a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

All the issues about lack of leadership in Washington D.C. that have been addressed here on this blog aside, hearty congratulations to the U.S. Congress and to President Bush for honoring one of the greatest living human beings on the planet. This is the first time a President has ever stood with the Dalai Lama in a public ceremony. Every U.S. President over the past four decades has been bullied by China to not give any public recognition to the spiritual leader of Tibet. This week, while President Bush compromised and met the His Holiness in the private part of the White House and not the Oval Office, and did not allow pictures, he did have his picture taken with him at the ceremony at the Capitol.

I have long admired the current Dalai Lama. I have casually studied Tibetan Buddhism and find it one of the more enlightened and open of all religions. I will never forget a day, when, as a young man, I first encountered the spiritual high of Tibetan Buddhists. I was in Nepal in the early 1970s and went to visit the Tibetan cultural center outside Kathmandu. I walked into a large room where some 50 Tibetans were chanting and making items for the tourist trade to support their community. Within a minute I was aware of my changed state as the high, happy vibrations in the room permeated my being. I also will never forget the one time I met the Dalai Lama at a small event. He shook and held my hand, looked into my eyes and smiled. I had a sense of peace that lasted for several days.

I have always been outraged at China for the take over and then systematic destruction of Tibet. If a country regards the Dalai Lama as a bad guy, it makes one question the moral and political character of that country. The Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. To me that says it all. I have also had a “Free Tibet” bumper sticker. So that is my disclaimer.

The Dalai Lama is the personification of peace. When the Nobel Prize committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 1989, it said, in part:

“The Dalai Lama has developed his philosophy of peace from a great reverence for all things living and upon the concept of universal responsibility embracing all mankind as well as nature. In the opinion of the Committee the Dalai Lama has come forward with constructive and forward-looking proposals for the solution of international conflicts, human rights issues, and global environmental problems.”

That is the leadership and vision the world needs right now and in the future. When asked to present his basic philosophy, the Dalai Lama once said: “ Be happy. Act with kindness and treat everyone you meet as a friend”. As humanity moves into a new age and is worried about the future, there could be few better guidelines to follow than that one.

The quest for happiness, the definition of happiness, the enjoyment of happiness, the meaning of happiness is a through line of cultures all around the world.  In just the last two years there have been several best selling books published on the subject, and a number of magazine cover articles.  Happiness as a subject is more popular than ever.  It seems pretty obvious that people want more than they have.  Type the word “happiness” into Amazon.com and the response is that there are 214,554 titles (as of today).  So people are on the hunt for happiness.

It has always struck me as odd that current cultures and governments do not focus on happiness.  If happiness is what we all ...]]> Through out the entire course of human history, there has been consistent reference to happiness.  Many philosophers have basically come to the conclusion that the fundamental goal of a human life is to be happy, to find and share happiness.  This thread exists from the earliest writing to the present day Dalai Lama.  Perhaps the most succinct advice came from the great 20th century spiritual teacher Meher Baba who said “Don’t worry, be happy!”  Of course, twenty years after Baba’s death, Bobby McFerrin recorded a wonderful song in honor of this simple reduced prescription for how to lead one’s life.