this is cool

Ray Kurzweil hasn't given much thought to his epitaph or spent an afternoon shopping for a burial plot. It's not that the idea of death hasn't occurred to him; he's 56, his father died of a heart attack at 58, and heart disease claimed his paternal grandfather. Kurzweil just doesn't plan on dying. Ever. "I think death is a tragedy," he says. "We've rationalized that it's a good thing, because we've had no alternative."

inventors, expects that rapidly accelerating progress in the fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and medical devices will eradicate the scourge that is human expiration sometime within the next 50 years. His latest book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, coauthored with Dr. Terry Grossman and published this month, is almost certainly the first diet book that promises not just to help readers drop excess pounds but to render them immortal.