Seniors hacking the lottery, living their best lives and inventing plant-based fuels | Full Episodes

1918 and I'm sure it was a beautiful day. Do you feel 95? How old do you feel about 52? That's not really what they have in common other than having lived a combined total of almost 400 years. It's just that decades ago they all lived in a retirement community called Leisure World, 45 miles south of Los Angeles. Hello. there and welcome to Leisure World, a new way of

living

designed for alert and active people aged 52 and over who want to make the most of life today, it is still a retirement community and they are still making the most of life, although it is not anymore.

It is no longer called Leisure World. Now it's your own city. Laguna Woods. They didn't like the word Leisure World. They are considered active. Active world. Active world. Dr. Claudia Kos spends a lot of time in Lagona Woods these days. She is a neurologist and professor at nearby UC Irvine. who discovered here the research equivalent of gold information collected from thousands of Leisure World residents back in 1981 with page after page of data about

their

diet exercise vitamins and activities 14,000 people answered this questionnaire in 1981 many of them, if they were still alive, Now they would be over 90, you saw a unique opportunity to study what worked and what didn't, so you tried to find them.

We went after the 14,000 and if they were still alive, we wanted to find where they were with $6 million in funding. from the National Institutes of Health Kos and his team set out to find out who had died when they died and convince those who were still alive and over 90 years old to sign up and you are how old now I will be 103 months old we are going to have to have a party good Jane Whistler I love a party is one of more than 1,600 men and women who found and enrolled as subjects in the study 90+ are checked from top to bottom every 6 months smile

their

facial muscles excellent reflexes balance three four five how They walk how fast they can get up and sit down fantastically and, most importantly, how their minds work.

I'm going to tell you and show you three words so you can remember brown honesty shirt brown honesty shirt perfect now please spell World they give them an hour long battery cognitive and memory tests good now spell World upside down d l ro w asks to connect letters and numbers there you have it and remember well what three words I asked you to remember before Brown shirt mhm mhm do you want a little clue yes, okay that word was honesty charity or modesty, yes, when the time comes for your exams in the studio 90 plus, Do you look forward to it or do you ever say oh, they're going to find something or I'm not going to be able to do it as well as I did?

Last time, oh yeah, I think so, but that doesn't stop me. I think it's fun. We were honestly surprised by how great many of the studio participants are in excellent 13 seconds like Lou Tado in World War II. B17 gunner who was shot down near Berlin and spent eight months as a German soldier and Sid Shiro Another World War II veteran who came to talk to us despite having suffered a stroke just weeks before that prevented him from speaking I am 92 years old and going strong Sid drives his car to his test sessions you drive a convertible you want the girls to look at you uh they call it the girl's car Sid a widower works out at the gym keeps up with the news and the ladies so you're a bachelor, yes, you date, yes, you have a rich social life, yes, it's fun, yes, a lot and I hope to last a long time, but of course not everyone is so lucky when participants like Louise Bigalow, 97, They are too fragile to come. to test the fitting rooms they come to them an orange and a banana they are the same because they are both yellow yes, Louise remembers events from a long time ago, like when her wedding veil caught fire a few minutes after this photo was taken, she went straight to the candle flames so I always had a lot of emotion all the time and that was the beginning, you will never forget it, but when it comes to recent memories and thinking skills, she struggles more and more and how she laughs and crying the same I don't know, okay, brown honesty and uh shirt, the fitting rooms go to 95 year old Ruthie's stalls, at home too, they don't go because she can't go to them, she just doesn't have time.

I'm in my car. more than I'm at home, I think because I do so many things, what do you do? I'm flying all over the place flying like walking speed three miles almost every day on Sundays, it's only 2 miles, you're on the computer okay? I am, but I'm having problems with my computer. I had a computer for 10 years and enjoyed it, but it died. Jane survived her computer to almost 100. she has lived a long time. We were all Bridge sentences. We would play Bridge and have dinner and it's so much fun some of them died they all died they all died they all oh my god I'm the only one left so what was it that brought these people to the 90's? they never had a stroke no, while their spouses, friends and colleagues were never left with almost nothing along the way what's your secret I wish I knew that jeans clearly contribute to longevity says Kos but they're not everything Jane's parents Whistler died when she was young.

Whatever her secrets are in participating in the study, we'll try to find out so you can go back and look at her medical history. Everyone in the study filled out that questionnaire in the early 1980s and compared that data to how everything is. It turns out that it has yielded a number of published findings on behaviors associated with

living

longer, so what's the verdict? No wonder smokers died earlier than non-smokers and what about exercise? People who exercised definitely lived longer than people who didn't exercise even 15 minutes. one day on average made a difference 45 was the

best

, even 3 hours didn't beat 45 minutes a day, wow that's interesting and it didn't have to be all at once, it could be for example 15 minutes of walking and then later in day gardening or something like that and it also didn't have to be very intense exercise and non-physical activities book clubs socializing with friends board games all good for every hour you spent doing activities in 19 81 you increased your longevity and the benefit of those Things We Never Leveled Up The guys we spoke to had definitely been active, but they didn't give us the impression that they had lived their

lives

worrying about their health.

I'm not a big vitamin person. Have you watched what you eat over the years? No, it's not really a dessert. I sure love dessert. I always had a glass of wine for dinner and now I still do, but I can't finish it. A clean life, eh, no, no, a clean life. You know what a clean life is. What about alcohol? you take vitamins, yes, a lot, so what vitamins helped the antioxidants? Okay, vitamin E, we're, we're sitting on the edge of our chairs, did it make any difference? Vitamin, it was my favorite, but mm, no person who took vit e did not survive. longer than people who didn't take vitamin E, they also looked at vitamin A, C, and calcium.

The short answer is that none of them made a difference. None of them made a difference in life in terms of how long they lived. What about alcohol? Oh, the alcohol did. a difference, but it may not be what you think moderate alcohol was associated with living longer than people who did not consume alcohol moderate alcohol you live longer yes, up to two drinks a day led to a reduced risk of death 10 to 15% compared to non-drinkers is not as exciting and any type of alcohol seemed to work. Many people like to say it's just red wine.

Yes, in our hands it didn't seem to matter. Martini is just as good, yes, and there is good news. For coffee drinkers, a caffeine intake equivalent to one to three cups of coffee a day was better than more or none, and if you're worried about those bulging waistlines, get this, it turns out the

best

thing you can do as you get older is at least maintain or even gain weight gain weight mhm so being a little overweight is good, being obese is never good and being overweight when you were young was not good either, but at the end of life they found that overweight people or with an average age weight survived people. who were underweight it's not good to be skinny when you're old but to live a long time even if we don't have to take care of our waistline it's not the only thing most of us care about we want to all be there to enjoy it thank you very much and it's in the areas of Alzheimer's and dementia where the 90+ study is generating some of its most provocative and surprising findings, we will tell you about that and one more thing, romance after 90, how is your sex life, you mentioned it.

When we return, we will be an aging nation. By mid-century, the number of Americans aged 90 and older is projected to quadruple, although that's good news for those of us who want to stay, and it also means more time, literally, to start losing our minds, Dementia, including the most feared form of Alzheimer's disease, is a looming threat and a primary focus of the more than 90 study participants. They are asked to donate their brains to the study after they die so that researchers can compare what they saw in life with buried secrets. In the background and the image does not always match, it brings new discoveries and new questions about what may really be causing dementia in older people and what we can do about it.

I think it was a common belief that if you reached 90 and you didn't have dementia or Alzheimer's so you weren't going to get it, unfortunately no, I really hoped to find that, but in our study that won't happen, it's not true, no or 62, It turns out that the risk of developing dementia doubles every 5 years starting at age 65 and continues to double and, given the growth in the number of older people, by mid-century we will have more people with dementia over 90 years old than the ones we currently have. ages together we're not even thinking about it we should be where do I start as charming and attractive as all the 90-plus we met one who particularly touched us was Ted Rosenbom, 96, a former American history professor who has been married for 63 years , you still look lovely to me.

I was very lucky, so now at this stage of the game, if you are running out, simply remembering our past is a source of untold joy, and the orange and the banana are the same because they are both fruits exactly Ted did well in parts of the 90+ exam, like repeating long strings of numbers backwards 6 1 8 4 3 3 4 8 1 6 but when it came time to remember the three words she had said to him just 40 seconds earlier, three words Yes, give me a clue , he missed three words, there were three words and that wasn't his only problem. What is today's date? No, there's no knows.

My worst condition is my memory when you can't remember something and what's happening inside you is terrible, frustration, terrible, you know, it's, it's, it's having an increasingly negative impact on me. Psychologically, determining what is behind your memory loss is not easy since diseases like Alzheimer's can only be definitively diagnosed in the brain after death, so it is after those over 90 die that a new beginning begins. round of research when subjects in the study donate their brains and come here to neuropathologist Dr. Ronald Kim, he showed us one of the things he always looks for for plaques. and tangles in the brain that are the telltale signs of Alzheimer's disease all these plaques form all these brown spots are plaques are plaques that's correct and in an individual like this you would expect the patient to be demented you read the newspapers every day yes , I Read them at night while Bigalow spent 5 years in the study where he died last summer and while Dr.

Kim studies his brain, the rest of the team of more than 90 people independently review years of test results and videos to assess whether he had developed dementia and whether So, although his scores were strong at first, who is our President Obama? Over the years there was a gradual but unmistakable decline. He'd pick up a newspaper he'd just finished, use the TV remote to try to make a phone call, you know? Who is the president? I want to say, okay, I can't think of that, I don't remember her age, anxious, the consensus here was probably Alzheimer's, which means a brain with plaques and tangles.

Are we ready to hear the truth? Only then will Dr. Kim open. zero pla report so no there's actually no cortical tangles anywhere quite surprising what's surprising is that they found that 40% of the time in people over 90 what doctors would think is Alzheimer's is not in attracting Balo's brain. Dr. Kim found something else, something in the more than 90-year-old study. thisfinding quite a bit of evidence of little microscopic strokes called microinfarcts, his brain was

full

of them here's a micro windar, it's the hole that's basically a small stroke, so all this tissue is missing, if you find one it suggests you should probably look for others and some patients may have hundreds or thousands of them.

These microscopic strokes are insidious because people don't even know they are having them, they can be totally silent, and slowly but surely, over time you are eliminating yourself. You're disconnecting your cortex from the rest of the brain and then you start going crazy. It may clinically look like an old summer disease. Do you know anything we can do to prevent these mini strokes? I wish I knew, but I will soon. I hope Kwa is suspicious. One thing that can cause them is low blood pressure and there is some evidence, while none of the factors in the original Leisure World study, vitamins, alcohol, caffeine, even exercise, seemed to reduce people's risk of get dementia, the 90+ study found that high blood pressure did if you have high blood pressure, it appears your risk of dementia is lower than if you don't have high blood pressure, high blood pressure, lower risk of dementia in a person of 90 years old, high blood pressure is still dangerous if you are even younger Another reason why it is so important to study older people, most of what we know, we study in much younger people and in people in their 50s, 60s or maybe 70s, and then we just assume that the same thing should happen in older people and you're saying we shouldn't, I think we shouldn't take the next contradictory finding, this time in the subjects over 90 years old who don't have dementia, we are finding that if you die without dementia in this age group, about half the time you still have plaque. and tangles in your head, no, so you can exhibit Alzheimer's and have no plaques and Tangles has the time and the other way around, both terrible, you're fine and you have plaque and Tangles, so what do you think of that?

I mean, one possibility is that Plax and Tangles have nothing to do with it, but it could be that Plax and Tangles are very, very important, but only a 90 year old who has them and didn't develop thinking problems has any way to overcome them than perhaps all the others. We would all like to know, so now they are looking at people without signs of dementia like Ruthie Stall L Tado Sid Cher and Jane Whistler to see if they have plaques and tangles but they are not affected. There is a new type of pet scan that for the first time allows us to find plates during life let me help you with that so that the 90+ studio can dedicate itself to the delicate task of putting 99y old people like Jane Whistler into the scanners Sid Shiro at 92 jumped right in Jane and Sid both have very, very, very good thinking as you saw, yes definitely and it turns out that one of her scans is positive and the other is negative, she showed them to us one by one. above the other yellow and red indicate the presence of plaque amalo this is Miss Whistler and this is Mr.

Sherro well, I'm surprised I talked to him and I'm seeing yellow and red here mhm, how impressive, hello Mr. Cher, Dr. .K was So what does that mean for Sid? The positive scan statistically means he is at higher risk of cognitive decline, but Dr. Kwa says the fact that he is doing so well despite the plaque in his brain and his stroke means he can have something protective and special. that might help the rest of us, she says they'll keep a close eye on it if it's not clear the pathology is related to what you're seeing, what does that mean in your mind?

I think we're looking for two simple and answer I think we want one thing to explain Alzheimer's see something different like what makes the skin wrinkle well. I mean, getting older makes your skin wrinkle. Being in the sun too much causes the skin to wrinkle. Not taking care of your diet and you put all that together and everyone contributes and I think the same thing could result for our thinking, especially in old age, that it is not just about Alzheimer's pathology due to plaques or not only about microinfarcts, but about the number of these blows that you receive and after a while I can't stand them all, let me hold a chair for you.

There is one last thing that we ask ourselves among the more than 90 people and that is romance. Helen Wild 92 and Henry Tornell 94, both widowers, have been dating for 3 years, so do they see each other every day? day several times every day once a day how it works having one day off a week is true tuesday tuesday is a day off is my day off Helen and Henry love being part of the 90+ study and have both signed up to donate their brains after they die, Henry just has one problem with the entire Enterprise. What the study has not asked.

I asked them: aren't they going to ask us questions about our sex life? and they said no. Okay I will. How is your sex life? Look, it's funny, you know, well, I don't know, I guess I'm not laughing, what's your sex life like? He's blushing, he's blushing, but it's that part of do you think it has anything to do with ? I would say it's a big part Helen, we're very emotional, we're very loving, but do you think sex is an important part of staying young? Yeah, okay, are we all ready? The 90+ study just received another 5-year round of NIH funding to delve into the risk factors for specific types of dementia like those microstrokes and look for genes that may be protective in their continued search for the secrets of old.

I truly believe that when we learn things from 90-year-olds, they will help 60-year-olds and 70-year-olds not only how to get to be 90, but how to do it in style and with the best possible function. Obviously you've already started telling us that we should have some wine, that we should have some coffee and Socialize, exercise and gain weight, and that's my favorite, my favorite too. We are a nation that will live longer and longer over the next 30 years. The number of Americans aged 90 and older is expected to triple, and an NIH-funded research study called 90 Plus at the University of California, Irvine is trying to learn everything it can right now from a group of men and women. who already managed to get there.

Six years ago we first reported on its first set of findings: factors associated with longer life, exercise, moderate alcohol and caffeine consumption, social engagement and our favorite, gaining a few pounds as we age, the study's focus for Over 90s is now in memory and dementia, what they have learned and what didn't appeal to us, as the over 90s did, take a quick look. when we first met them in 2014, my birthday is February 7, 198, I was born August 25, 1920 and I am 93 years old, plus June 15, 1918 and I am sure it was a beautiful day the men and women we met 6 years ago. everyone agreed to be examined by the study team of more than 90 people from top to bottom every six months a big smile their facial muscles excellent how they walk how quickly they can stand and sit fantastic and critical how they think now spell World upside down d l o w three who were an impressive and active group a B7 gunner in World War II a fellow World War II veteran who drove a convertible a 95 year old Speed ​​Walker ballroom dancers I asked them aren't you going to ask us questions about our sex life and they said no and unfortunately some who had started battling dementia what's today's date date mhm St dat what's the oldest person they've ever seen.

I have seen several 116-year-olds, neurologist Claudia Kos, the principal investigator of studies over 90 says that studying the elderly is Increasingly important Half of all children born today in the United States in Europe go to turn 103 or four years old. Half yes, half of the children born today will live between 100 and 103 or four years. You know, I don't feel a day. older than me yesterday we were invited to return six years later and found some study participants like Helen Wild, the ballroom dancer, thriving. So I like it 10 times now. 99 Helen showed us how she exercises in her chair.

Things like that. How is she doing? Jeff. good to see what's going on Lou Lou torado, WWII artilleryman turned 100 in August Lou used Zoom when he was a kid most homes didn't have a radio do you have an iPhone? I have an iPhone, yeah, you're on Facebook uh yeah, do you use Siri? Yes, I tell you every night. Wake me up tomorrow at 6:30 and she does it. Yes, who is our current president? cognitive tests by phone to subtract seven from 100 Lou and Helen Ace them and keep subtracting seven 93 86 79 their memory is better than mine, but one of our favorite 90 plus from six years ago Ruthie Stall is not so lucky back then, at 95 years old. spinning around on her lime green bug I'm flying everywhere but today at 102 years old she didn't remember that we had met and what is your name Leslie, that's a nice name, thank you Ruthie is as charming and optimistic as ever, but her memory is failing the current president or the president before him, I will choose either of the two, no, I can't, do you remember your parents?

Just move on to something else. Dr. Kos says most people, probably even most doctors, would assume that Ruthie's memory problems are due to Alzheimer's disease, but scientists are discovering more and more about the complexities of what causes Alzheimer's. dementia. You hear people say that she has Alzheimer's. He has Alzheimer's when. They should really say dementia, that's exactly it, dementia is a loss of the ability to think that affects your memory, your language, it's a syndrome, it's a syndrome, something like a headache, it's a syndrome, you can have pain headache because you have a brain tumor or you can get one because you drank too much and it's the same with dementia.

In the end we were saddened to learn that some of the 90+ participants we met in 2014 have passed away, but by donating their brains like Ted Rosenbom did, they are still a part. of the study that provides some of its most fascinating and confusing results after the death of a participant, the team of more than 90 people meets to review reams of data now, due to covid, they meet on Zoom videos of the visit 2, so tell me what you're going to do when you go home today Ted's test results showed years of memory problems like we had seen six years ago.

Give me a clue. The team of more than 90 concluded that Ted probably had Alzheimer's disease, but then awaited the results from his collaborators, a team of pathologists at Stanford University who independently examined him. They don't know anything about Ted's brain except the brain in front of them and then you get together and then we get together and it's like a reveal party, the definition of Alzheimer's disease is having the Amallo and T proteins, often called plaques. . and brain tangles, okay, the home stretch, but when the Stanford team did their report, Ted's brain didn't have them, as you can see, without even swimming the section, it's clear, it's clean, we're negative for beta love it here, it actually looks terrible. well, actually yes, you sit down and look at that, what do you include?

The only pathology we found in his head was actually tdp43. tdp43 is a great advance. It is a recently identified cause of dementia. A protein that was originally found in ALS patients and that Kos now believes explains. up to one in five cases of dementia in people over 90, can you tell if you have tdp43 while you are alive? You still can't tell if you have two other conditions that cause dementia, either small strokes called microinfarcts that damage the brain. Tissue and hippocampal sclerosis is a shrinking and scarring of a part of the brain, so it is likely that many 90-year-olds who are diagnosed with Alzheimer's in what year may actually have something else.

There are a lot of things that happen in the brain that we have no way of diagnosing during life, so we get a lot of those surprises, but we also get surprises where people have a lot of pathologies in the brain, a lot of Alzheimer's disease. , a lot of TDP disease and they still turn out to be normal. I'll hold a chair for you, that's what happened to Henry Torell, Helen Wild's ballroom dancing partner, who joked about studying sex at 90. Henry died at age 100 from cancer, mentally acute as always. We should all be so lucky, but his brain told a different story.

I don't even have to get close fl very positive, uh positive, plus the Stanford team found the highest level of plaques and tangles and tdp43 tdp43 is especially surprising, since more than one pathology usually means more severe dementia, so it was a big surprise. one of our amazing 90-year-olds who managed to have good cognition about things in his brain that should cause dementia, it used to be that when a person like Henry with thinkingOf course it had plates and the Tangles scientists assumed that dementia was just a It's a matter of time, but now they are thinking about it in a new way, that maybe certain people have protection against dementia, a phenomenon they call resilience to prove it, Although they need to follow people who are still alive they enter the convertible driving Sid Shirro from our story in 2014, let's see that Sid had a pet scan back then for the study that reveals significant amounts of amalo in his brain the question was whether dementia would be around the corner or whether Sid could somehow be resilient happy birthday to thank you Sid turned 99 this summer how old do you feel I always say 69 Sid has circulation problems that affect his breathing but he has a good memory we He told about buying his first car 80 years ago for $18 in a pool hall a '31 Chevy convertible with a rumble seat a rumble seat and I didn't know how to drive you won it in a pool hall you won it in a bed I didn't win it I bought it you bought I gave him $18 he sold a car for $18 he needed the money to shoot P, so I know he has at least two pathologies in his head.

I know he probably has high amounts of Alzheimer's and I know he has some vascular disease. We did tests on him just a couple of weeks ago and good morning, it went very well, please tell me. how much nickel is in a dollar 20 how many quarters are in $6.75 27 wow you're fast so that resilience I think is definitely resilience, it could be what resilience is all about, could it be a jean? It absolutely could be or maybe even more likely multiple genes or jeans combinations, here's my observation. Okay, six years ago you knew more than you do now.

There are so many questions whose answers we don't know. That's really a brilliant observation and explains what science is all about. Every new answer, two new questions for every new discovery, like TDP43 dementia and especially resilience, new mysteries to solve, just like its participants, the 90+ study continues to try to help the rest of us reach age 102. with Ruthie Spirit but with her memory intact. It's a shame, it's a shame because there are a lot of things I can remember and I bet you had a wonderful life, oh I do, it's still going on, thank God, you never know who will be the one to have the great idea, history has proven not. necessarily the person with the most impressive credentials a breakthrough may come from the least expected person perhaps like an 81-year-old eccentric from Massachusetts who worked in isolation and without financial support for more than a decade his approach is a challenge that has stumped scientists for many years how to transform inedible

plant

life into environmentally friendly transportation

fuels

in a clean and cost-effective way.

This unlikely inventor calls himself Messianic as in Messiah and likes to say matter-of-factly that he's saving the world and that's what you think, yes, you think I do. I guess I don't know who says things like that, Marshall Medof, he's a man on a mission who one day decided he was going to stop global warming, when I realized what was happening here I said this is an emergency. We have to find new resources, we have to find new ways to save the universe in terms of global warming, etc., etc., what was your zero science education? So, I don't have any degree in chemistry, no, of course, no, I didn't have any degree in chemistry, what's your IQ?

I have no idea, but IQ medof has been called a genius. 25 years ago he became obsessed with the environment and decided to abandon his business career and become an amateur scientist, but while engineers, geologists and ecologists with PhDs went to the laboratories at MIT and Stanford gathered, they went to one of the places most legendary in the country to reflect, this ended in Walden, which was not that far away, you mean Walden Pond, the line, yeah, okay. What I thought was the reason people were failing is that they were trying to outdo nature instead of working with it.

He knew that there is a lot of energy in

plant

life, in the form of sugar molecules that, once accessed, can be converted into fuel for transportation, the key. This sugar is said to be almost impossible to extract cheaply and cleanly, as it is locked tightly within the plant's cellulose, the main part of a plant's cell walls. What's so tantalizing is that sugar-rich cellulose is the most abundant biological material on Earth. Cellulose is everywhere. I mean there's so much cellulose in the world and nobody had managed to use it, I couldn't reach it, so that was your goal, that was my goal, so once I decided to do that I was like, wow, I can beat this! we can increase the world's resources Maybe by a third or more who knows how to figure out how to break down cellulose to get to the sugars Marshall Medof did something most of us wouldn't even dream of: he buried himself in seclusion for more than 15 years in a garage in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere I had no phone there no body can bother me and I have a bunch of papers that I had collected I started reading them the idea that this big problem could be solved without scientific experience yes, apparently I must have had a very good mother who fed me for a few more months or something because she was very sure about the fact that she would do it and I never had any doubts about your private life no, I had to give that up you gave up your private life yes of course because I didn't see no one from 9:00 in the morning until 9: at night or later alone In the garage, Medov began generating ideas and patenting so many that he needed help.

Boxes stacked to the ceiling. He surprised me how good the place looked. Craig Masterman. Marshall met Marshall for the first time 10 years ago. He graduated from MIT. chemistry, he hired me to build a laboratory, so he hired you to help him prove that what he was thinking in his head is correct. I implement things. He thinks a lot. I implement a lot of things and you will implement it at 25. Millions of bean energy What Masterman helped implement was Medoff's novel idea of ​​using these big blue machines called electron accelerators to break nature's control over valuable sugars in Internal plant life or biomass machines like these are typically used to strengthen materials such as wiring. and Cable Met Off's invention was to use the accelerator in the opposite way to separate the biomass.

Maybe you can tell us how the electron accelerator works. It's pretty simple, basically you accelerate, uh, electricity, and what happens is you accelerate down, down, where the biomass is. It is and and they attack the biomass and destroy it. It doesn't sound all that extraordinary when you hear it except that no one else had thought of it. I think the fantastic things are simple in retrospect and none of the great scientists that were working. Twenty-four hours a day to figure out how to get the sugars out, no, everyone was playing with things like sulfuric acid and steam explosion and crazy things like that, which are very expensive, all those expensive electron beams are cheap.

His inventive use of accelerators caught attention. attention from investors who saw a potential target in the technology that gave Medoff's company hundreds of millions of dollars that allowed it to expand and build this factory in Moses Lake Washington in order to turn his invention into a reality; It is planned to be

full

y operational. Here this spring agricultural waste like these ears of corn is trucked in from nearby farms, ground up by the electron accelerator, and then combined with a proprietary enzyme blend. This process was carried out. Off's remarkable invention releases plant sugars that he is now using to make products he claims will solve the problem. some of the world's most difficult problems that affect not only the environment but also our health.

One of the plant sugars is called xylos and medof says it could reduce obesity and diabetes because it is consumable and low in calories. xylos is called wood sugar and it has an unusual property that your oral bacteria can't use it, so it won't damage your teeth, sugar that doesn't damage your teeth, yes, hallelujah, you know it's a healthier sugar, don't worry. it does the same thing so you can drink all the coke you don't have to drink diet coke anymore and it would taste the same, yes of course it tastes the same. It tastes like real sugar so I tried it myself trust but check if I did I wouldn't die no you would. die, it's just sweet, I mean, it's really sweet, yeah, yeah, so it's really sweet, it's getting a little filling here.

Craig with funding from medof investors also opened a $45 million testing facility in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a long way from the garage and hired More than 70 scientists and engineers have come up with a sugar-

based

product aimed at another waterproof problem. Some call it a plague. The accumulation of plastic waste. You have said that plastic should be banned. Yes, the plastics used should be banned because all of them. What they're doing is accumulating in this enormous amount of ocean that's being stripped, but if you took a plastic bag or a plastic bottle of Diet Pepsi or whatever and threw it away, it could be there for 500 more years.

Most plastics are made from Petroleum Medof makes plastic from plants. We found your product difficult to distinguish from regular plastic, except in one key respect. Chemical engineer David Jablonsky says Zyl O's bioplastic invention can be programmed to disintegrate in specific time periods ranging from years to the same rate. At 11 weeks, you can take this and you'll see that it's very degraded and falling apart, so at 11 weeks it's already on its way to breaking down. That's right, perhaps the most important discovery of this meeting is how to extract sugars from the plant and convert them. convert them into environmentally friendly bio

fuels

, ethanol, gasoline and jet fuel, and I'm told they call this a distiller, distiller, it's actually producing alcohol right now, alcohol that you can drink or you can put in your car or you can do both. oh, there we are on the road again, so Marshall, I'm driving a huge truck, yes, on biomass fuel.

It doesn't seem any different to me than regular gasoline, no, it wouldn't be. No, methose ethanol is much better than regular corn ethanol in terms of greenhouse gas emissions 77% better according to a study that was independently reviewed yeah, it's a very Einsteinian solution uh uh you know, I really have einan I like Einstein yes, at first I was a little skeptical uh, it seems almost too good to be true. I'd never heard of it, I'm sure of that. I hadn't heard of him. Robert Armstrong, the former head of MIT's chemical engineering department, joined Zyo's board of directors after Medof told him about the electron beam accelerator, his inventive way of breaking down biomass, the electron.

Beam is really a GameChanger. I'm told it's the Holy Grail to have access to the sugars that the people at MIT are working on, the people at the National Laboratories, but no one has done it yet. Zyo has done it. Yes, he knew it. a job, of course MIT couldn't do it, you're right that it outgrew MIT and has now attracted some pretty powerful men to its board, including former Shell oil executive Sir John Jennings and three former secretaries of the cabinet, Steve Chu, Department of Energy George Soulz former Secretary of State and former Secretary of Defense William Perry well, I thought he was another Thomas Edison another Thomas Edison another Thomas Ed a very eccentric genius genius but a genius who totally came up with this idea revolutionary is definitely a character. comes from a world of characters in my scientific world but he is not a scientist uh but he has all the attributes of many successful scientists you have to believe in yourself you have to say that this is going to work if there is enough biomass to supply enough of this ethanol or gasoline in the world can make a significant dent, a possible 30% dent in the oil market, according to a Department of Energy report, but the question is, can Marshall Medoff expand its operation enough to compete with the oil industry ?

What I have in doubt is how long it will take to break into these huge industrial markets, established markets with established companies, that will be a big task, because it will not shut down oil and gas overnight, obviously, it will not shut down coal . It won't turn off nuclear power, it won't turn off all other energy sources, but it will find its place and I think it will find its place relatively quickly because of all the boxes it ticks, one of those boxes being that cyose fuels could easily be placed in fuel dispensers. existing service stations, nothing would have to be changed.

I can just put it in my car just like we did with the truck and also go straight to the pump and pick it up. exactly the same wayTransportation fuels that are clean green plastic that disintegrates sugar that doesn't rot your teeth, it's hard to believe, but it all came from the mind of the most unlikely of amateur scientists who was inspired not by any academic laboratory but by his own reflections. at Walden Pond