Word: longer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...searching through our genes for a sort of clock of clocks that tells us where we are in the sweep from the cradle to the grave and decides how fast we age. Recently he discovered a mutant fruit fly that lives more than 100 days, about one-third longer than the rest of the madding crowd in a fly bottle. What makes the difference is a single gene, which Benzer calls Methuselah...
Chances are that my generation will consume all manner of antiaging drugs and nostrums--antioxidants, growth hormone, vitamin D, garlic, red wine, melatonin, blueberries--and in the end we'll still live only a little longer than our parents. Today in Japan a clothing company is cashing in with "antistink" underwear for middle-aged men, who (according to the company) begin to emit odors. But by the time we die, or shortly thereafter, the expansion of youth and the postponement of old age may become one of the greatest enterprises of the 21st century. "I see it as inevitable," says...
...over the past century or so, most Americans have been living like kings. Thanks to increasingly high-tech farming methods, the fatty foods we crave have become plentiful and cheap in the U.S. and other developed nations. At the same time (thanks again to technology), physical exertion is no longer a part of most people's lives; most of us have to drag ourselves away from our computer or TV to burn off the excess calories. The result is inevitable. In 1950 one-quarter of Americans were classified as overweight; today half...
Meat, it seems, is not just food but reward as well. But in the coming century, that will change. Much as we have awakened to the full economic and social costs of cigarettes, we will find we can no longer subsidize or ignore the costs of mass-producing cattle, poultry, pigs, sheep and fish to feed our growing population. These costs include hugely inefficient use of freshwater and land, heavy pollution from livestock feces, rising rates of heart disease and other degenerative illnesses, and spreading destruction of the forests on which much of our planet's life depends...
...cleverly shifted from wildland hunting and gathering to systematic herding and farming, we changed the natural balances irrevocably. The shift enabled us to produce food surpluses, but the surpluses also allowed us to reproduce prodigiously. When we did, it became only a matter of time before we could no longer have the large area of wildland, per individual, that is necessary to sustain a top-predator species...