Does this beach paradise hold the secret to long life?

(CNN)Jose Guevara lives with his family on a small farm. He has spent most of his life riding horses and working in the fields but today he gets around on the back of his grandson's four wheeler. He is 105 years old.

"I wake up at 6 am, then I will get some corn and go and feed the chickens or the pig," he says.

"I eat, but not as much ... generally beef, a good cut of pork, rice and beans -- four meals that we never went without in my house, thank God."

Guevara lives in the Nicoya peninsula of Costa Rica. Blessed with sandy beaches and tropical forest, it's something of a backpackers' paradise. It's also an area identified as a "Blue Zone" -- one of five hotspots around the globe where people live measurably longer lives.

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This soup could be key to living to 100

Anthony Scotto of New York restaurant Fresco by Scotto demonstrates how to make the Melis family minestrone, a Sardinian soup that might just be a key ingredient to a long life.

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Ask Ray | Immortality via the singularity

Dr. Ray Kurzweil’s current predictions include:

1. self driving cars by 2017
2. personal assistant search engines by 2019
3. switching off our fat cells by 2020
4. full immersive virtual realities by 2023
5. 100 percent energy from solar by 2033
6. by 2040-2045 we will be forever young and maybe immortal

Dr. Kurzweil now works as a Director of Engineering at Google. According to The Wall Street Journal his current project is “to bring natural language understanding to Google.”

report | Immortality via the Singularity
by Lucy

Our greatest challenge

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.” — Steve Jobs

Society faces many challenges: disease, poverty, clean water, hunger, limited resources, natural disasters, high crime rates, and the biggest of all mortality. In the world there are many diseases, some are rare, such as Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy, and some are extremely common, such as the common cold.

There have been outbreaks of many diseases throughout history and even today. The bubonic plague is an example of an outbreak that occurred in 1347. A more current disease outbreak is ebola. Poverty is another big issue all over the world.

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Making your money last if you live to 100

We are living longer but not creating financial plans to keep pace. Advisers give tips on how to make sure you don’t outlive your money.

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Google Wants You to Live 170 Years

Along the lines of self-driving cars and smart glasses, Google's newest venture promises to wow the tech scene. Only, it's not quite tech, at least in the traditional sense. The venture is called California Life Company, or Calico for short, and its goal is to extend human life by 20 to 100 years.

It sounds surreal, until consider that we already extended human life by 20 years over the past century. The average girl born today will live to be 100, a once outlying achievement.

Other research outlets have made relevant discoveries over the years, including worms that divide stem cells without aging and that resveratrol, found in red wine, seems to defend against diseases related to aging and could be manufactured as a more potent synthetic drug.

Meanwhile, companies such as Elixir Pharmaceuticals, Sirtris Pharma and Halcyon Molecular set out to extend human life, only to shut down (or be acquired, then shuttered by the buyer), many times running out of money before bringing a product to market.

Don't be quick to assume Google's involvement is strictly to benefit the common good, however. CEO Larry Page is pushing to spend on long term rather than incremental R&D. There's money to be made here. The regenerative medicine industry is valued at $1.6 billion, and anti-aging products are virtually resistant to economic cycles. Therapies available today may be expensive, untrustworthy and could produce horrific results.

But one thing is true: The quest to live just a bit longer is in demand.

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If the Body Is a Machine, Can It Be Maintained Indefinitely?

Excerpt from article

Metabolic processes drive the day-to-day business of living, but they also inevitably cause cellular damage. The body’s range of self-repair mechanisms don’t take care of everything. Eventually, a lifetime of accumulated damage causes the familiar signs of aging like “thinning skin, cloudy eyes, muscles sapped of strength, heart disease, and cognitive decline.”

De Grey is known for his research into engineered negligible senescence. Negligible senescence is a term used to describe certain animals that don’t display symptoms of aging. De Grey believes we can use biotechnology to engineer negligible senescence in humans, and he cofounded the SENS Research Foundation to lead the way.

SENS focuses on seven categories of universal damage that contribute to aging.

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Genetics Startup Wants To Prolong Life, 'Make 100 Years Old The Next 60'

J. Craig Venter, the scientist and entrepreneur involved in the first sequencing of the human genome and the first synthetic cell, today announced a typically ambitious project: tack another few decades onto everyone's lives through the largest human genome-sequencing project ever conceived. (Y'know, relatively typical.)

Venter is launching a new company, Human Longevity, through $70 million of venture funding, with the goal of sequencing 40,000 human genomes yearly. Eventually, a bank of biodata will be amassed that could provide insight into age-related illnesses--and maybe even the process of aging itself. The company wants to use new, $10-million machines to drive the cost of a sequence down to about $1,000, and everyone--healthy, sick, young, old--will have their genomes added to the bank.

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A Genetic Entrepreneur Sets His Sights on Aging and Death

J. Craig Venter is the latest wealthy entrepreneur to think he can cheat aging and death. And he hopes to do so by resorting to his first love: sequencing genomes.

On Tuesday, Dr. Venter announced that he was starting a new company, Human Longevity, which will focus on figuring out how people can live longer and healthier lives.

To do that, the company will build what Dr. Venter says will be the largest human DNA sequencing operation in the world, capable of processing 40,000 human genomes a year.

The huge amount of DNA data will be combined with huge amounts of other data on the health and body composition of the people whose DNA is sequenced, in the hope of gleaning insights into the molecular causes of aging and age-related illnesses like cancer and heart disease.

Slowing aging, if it can be done, could be a way to prevent many diseases, an alternative to treating one disease a time.

“Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it’s not a disease itself,” Dr. Venter said in an interview. Still, his company will also work on treating individual diseases of aging.

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Google’s plans to radically extend the human lifespan

Radical life extension went mainstream

Back in September, Google announced Calico, a company that will focus on health and well-being. But its ultimate purpose is to radically extend the human lifespan. As TIME put it, "That would be crazy — if it weren't Google." By launching Calico, Google CEO Larry Page hopes to tackle some of health care's most pressing problems. And by virtue of doing so, the company hopes to be a major player — if not the major player — in the burgeoning efforts to slow down, or even halt, the aging process in humans.

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Scientists discover DNA body clock

Newly discovered mechanism could help researchers understand ageing process and lead to ways of slowing it down

A US scientist has discovered an internal body clock based on DNA that measures the biological age of our tissues and organs.

The clock shows that while many healthy tissues age at the same rate as the body as a whole, some of them age much faster or slower. The age of diseased organs varied hugely, with some many tens of years "older" than healthy tissue in the same person, according to the clock.

Researchers say that unravelling the mechanisms behind the clock will help them understand the ageing process and hopefully lead to drugs and other interventions that slow it down.

Therapies that counteract natural ageing are attracting huge interest from scientists because they target the single most important risk factor for scores of incurable diseases that strike in old age.

"Ultimately, it would be very exciting to develop therapy interventions to reset the clock and hopefully keep us young," said Steve Horvath, professor of genetics and biostatistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.

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For A Longer Life, You Might Try Mowing The Lawn

We all know we're supposed to exercise daily, but precious few of us do. And it only seems to get harder with age.

There's a reason to try harder, though. Tacking more years of good health on to your life may be as simple as mowing the lawn more often and engaging in other everyday physical activities.

Researchers in Sweden measured the health of almost 4,000 60-year-olds in the late 1990s. A dozen years later, they checked back in. The people who had been active but not "exercising" at age 60 had a 27 percent lower risk of heart attack and stroke over that time, and a 30 percent lower risk of death.
Most Americans spend the majority of their waking hours sitting still in front of a computer or television.

The most active people also had trimmer waists, and better and , considered risk factors for heart disease and diabetes.

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