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 …

Recently, I wrote about the Big Three Auto companies and how they need to change, and change their product lines if they wanted to stay “big”.   Since those columns there has been even more evidence that these companies are struggling to keep up with current realities.  Additional plants have closed, the production of trucks has been dramatically lowered, the projected number of vehicles to be sold this year has been lowered and now Chrysler has gotten out of the leasing business because the resale value of the big vehicles leased has plummeted.

Earlier in the year I wrote several columns about Brazil and how it will be one of the countries leading the world with economic growth, vision and innovation.  It is a country that leads the world in smart use of ethanol.  It is a country that has a sustained rate of economic growth and a country that seems to be finally realizing its potential as being the country of the future.

A good friend sent me a video about a Ford plant in Brazil that shows what the new and future auto manufacturing plants of the world can and will look like.  It is interesting that this Ford plant is in Brazil and not in the U.S.    Brazil is in the stage of becoming a new model country for manufacturing while the U.S. is stuck in institutional constructs of the last century.  The good news is that Ford has found a new way to …

It was just reported that, as expected, there are now more Internet users in China than in the U.S. As of last month there were 253 million Internet users in China as compared to 220 million in the U.S. What is striking is that in just the last year, the number of new users in China was 90 million, or a growth rate of more than 50%. That annual increase in users is more that the total number of users in most countries in the world.

There are several interesting aspects to these numbers. Of course, since China is the most populous country in the world with more than 1.3 billion people, it will ultimately have more of most any category of people, based on size alone. It is interesting that there seems to be an age divide in China. Not only are 70% of the country’s internet users under the age of 30, 90% of the new users in the last six months were high school students. This reflects the fact that the booming economy in China is led and fueled by those under the age of 40 as many of the older generations are still anchored in the past.

It is possible that, if current growth rates continue, China could have twice as many Internet users as the U.S. within two years. It is when that happens that Internet usage in China will bring about significant change. The 253 million Internet …

The tag line of this blog is “A Future Look at Today”. It is not a political blog, nor is this a political column. I have assiduously kept politics out of this space leaving partisan conversations about campaign issues to others. There is a lot of heat around partisan politics and such heat can prevent clarity. As a futurist I think about the future by looking at the trends, patterns and dynamic forces that exist or are beginning to form. Readers of this column come here to get a sense of what might happen and why. That is the purpose of this column today.

In my “2007/2008″ column published on January 1, 2008, before the Iowa caucus, my forecast for the 2008 election was:

“.. it looks to this observer that 2008 will be a Democratic landslide year on the order of 1936 and 1964. Who will be the President in 2009? The junior senator from Illinois.”

This forecast was and is based upon history, and an analysis of certain forces currently reshaping the world today. As a number of people who eagerly made bets with me in 2007 can attest, I have been saying that Barack Obama would be the next President of the United States for more than a year. The reason is that he represents, embodies and is utilizing powerful new forces that are in ascendancy today.

Disintermediation

Disintermediation has been, and will continue to be one of the most powerful forces in the …