1 May 2013

Applicants wanted for a one-way ticket to Mars

Want to go to Mars? Dutch organisation Mars One says it will open applications imminently. It would be a one-way trip, and the company hopes to build a community of settlers on the planet.

Uncharted waters, mountains or far away lands have always drawn explorers. History books show that desire for adventure, even in the face of extreme danger, did not deter the likes of Columbus or Magellan.

So it is perhaps not surprising that Mars One has already received thousands of prospective applicants. But there is no return - unlike the mission which hopes to fly to Mars and back in 2018.

A hostile planet

Scientists believe that Earth and Mars once had similar atmospheres, but they developed very differently

Mars' atmosphere is very thin, extremely cold and what water remains is frozen or hidden underground

There's evidence that Mars was once covered in oceans of water at a time when it had an abundant atmosphere

This very thin atmosphere can't stop heat from the Sun escaping into space

What makes Mars so hostile to life?

Watch how Mars and Earth ended up with such different atmospheres

Future explorers take note. Applicants must be resilient, adaptable, resourceful and must work well within a team. The whole project will be televised, from the reality TV style selection process, to landing and beyond.

On a visit to the BBC's London office, Mars One's co-founder Bas Lansdorp explains why this would be a one-way flight.

During the seven-to-eight month journey, astronauts will lose bone and muscle mass. After spending time on Mars' much weaker gravitational field, it would be almost impossible to readjust back to Earth's much stronger gravity, says Landsorp.

Successful applicants will be trained physically and psychologically. The team will use existing technology for all aspects of the project. Energy will be generated from solar panels, water will be recycled and extracted from soil and the astronauts will grow their own food - they will also have an emergency ration and regular top-ups as new explorers join every two years.

But is it realistic to believe that individuals could live and prosper on the Red Planet?

Exploring our world, and now beyond is what humans do, it's in our genome”Bas LansdorpCo-Founder, Mars One

On Earth, we are protected from the solar wind by a strong magnetic field. Without this, it would be much more difficult to survive. Although Mars once had similar protection about four billion years ago, today there is no such shield protecting it.

The Martian surface is therefore extremely hostile to life, says Dr Veronica Bray, from the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, who is sceptical about the project.

There's no liquid water, the atmospheric pressure is "practically a vacuum", radiation levels are higher and temperatures vary wildly, she says.

"Radiation exposure is a concern, especially during the trip. This can lead to increased cancer risk, a lowered immune system and possibly infertility."

The settlers will live in two units and additional domes will house food and other emergency supplies

"I have no doubt that we could physically place a human being on Mars. Whether they'd be able to survive for an extended period of time is much more doubtful," adds Dr Bray.

Ambassador for the project, Professor Gerard 't Hooft, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for theoretical physics in 1999, admits there are unknown health risks. He says the radiation is "of quite a different nature" than anything which has been tested on Earth.Technical challenge

'The single greatest achievement'

"They [the applicants] will be told that there are risks, but it will be our responsibility to keep the risks within acceptable odds."

Nasa astronaut Stan Love knows first-hand the difficulties with technology that his colleagues have experienced on the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit.

The apparatus which recycles human waste and turns "yesterday's coffee into into tomorrow's coffee needs frequent maintenance and would likely not survive years of continuous duty on Mars", he says.

Love has recently returned from Antarctica which he says is a "picnic compared to Mars".

"It's full of water, you can go outside and breathe the air. It's paradise compared to Mars and yet nobody has moved there permanently."

Although dubious about the funding, the technology and the impact of radiation, Love applauds small enterprises like Mars One.

He strongly believes private organisations will help raise awareness and hopefully discover or design some technology which will help future teams reach their goal of landing on Mars.

"We've been dreaming about this for 50 years. The Moon was just supposed to be a stepping stone to Mars. But when you study the problem, you realise it's immensely hard to do this."

Many critics have focused on funding, and whether the project would hold the public's attention for many years. It will cost an estimated £3.8bn ($6bn) to send the first group.

Dr Chris Lintott from Oxford University says that while the project is technologically plausible, he does not think they will find the funding.

"It's about having the political will and the financial muscle to make this happen. That's what nobody has been able to solve so far," he explains.

A rover will land first to scout the best area

But Lansdorp sees no issue with funding. He uses the revenue from the worldwide broadcasting rights of the Olympics as a comparison.

"This will be the biggest thing that humanity has ever done. In 15 years people will still be watching.

"Exploring our world, and now beyond is what humans do, it's in our genome. The settlers' dream of going to Mars will come true."

Whether or not the mission will achieve its goal, the publicity generated from the "big-brother" style televised application process means the world will surely be watching.

in BBC News

Atoms star in world's smallest movie from IBM

A clip from A Boy and His Atom, courtesy IBM

Researchers at IBM have created the world's smallest movie by manipulating single atoms on a copper surface.

The stop-motion animation uses a few dozen carbon atoms, moved around with the tiny tip of what is called a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM).

It would take about 1,000 of the frames of the film laid side by side to span a single human hair.

The extraordinary feat of atomic precision has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records.

It is a showpiece for IBM's efforts to design next-generation data storage solutions based on single atoms.

IBM's scientists have been behind a number of technologies that can peer into atomic and molecular systems - their recent efforts using a related machine called an atomic force microscope have yieldedpictures of single molecules and even images that detail the atomic bonds within molecules.

The new movie, titled A Boy and His Atom, instead uses the STM, an IBM invention which garnered the scientists behind it the 1986 Nobel prize in physics.

The device works by passing an electrically charged, phenomenally sharp metal needle across the surface of a sample. As the tip nears features on the surface, the charge can "jump the gap" in a quantum physics effect called tunnelling.

The 242 frames of the 90-second movie are essentially maps of this "tunnelling current" with a given arrangement of atoms. It depicts a boy playing with a "ball" made of a single atom, dancing, and jumping on a trampoline.

"The tip of the needle is both our eyes and our hands: it senses the atoms to make images of where the atoms are, and then it is moved closer to the atoms to tug them along the surface to new positions," explained Andreas Heinrich, principal investigator at IBM Research in California, US.

"The atoms hold still at their new positions because they form chemical bonds to the copper atoms in the surface underneath, and that lets us take an image of the whole arrangement of atoms in each frame of the film.

The movie studio for the world's smallest film - under high vacuum and held incredibly cold

"Between frames we carefully move around the atoms to their new positions, and take another image," he told BBC News.

The effort, detailed in a number of YouTube videos, took four scientists two weeks of 18-hour days to pull off.

It underlines the growing ability of scientists to manipulate matter on the atomic level, which IBM scientists hope to use to create future data storage solutions.

In early 2012, they demonstrated a means to store a digital "bit" - the smallest unit of information - using just 12 atoms, in contrast to the million or so atoms required by the device you are reading this on.

But A Boy and His Atom is, Dr Heinrich concedes, a bit of fun.

"This isn't really about a particular scientific breakthrough. The movie is really a conversation-starter to get kids and other people talking about - and excited about - math, science and technology."

in BBC News

18 Apr 2013

Super-powered battery breakthrough claimed by US team

The University of Illinois team says its use of 3D-electrodes allows it to build "microbatteries" that are many times smaller than commercially available options, or the same size and many times more powerful.

Researchers claim their technology could shrink the size of batteries by 10 times while offering the same power

It adds they can be recharged 1,000 times faster than competing tech.

However, safety issues still remain.

Details of the research are published in thejournal Nature Communications.

Battery breakthrough

The researchers said their innovation should help address the issue that while smartphones and other gadgets have benefited from miniaturised electronics, battery advances have failed to keep pace.

Batteries work by having two components - called electrodes - where chemical reactions occur.

In simple terms, the anode is the electrode which releases electrons as a result of a process called oxidation.

The cathode is the electrode on the other side of the battery to which the electrons want to flow and be absorbed - but a third element, the electrolyte, blocks them from travelling directly.

When the battery is plugged into a device the electrons can flow through its circuits making the journey from one electrode to the other.

Meanwhile ions - electrically charged particles involved in the anode's oxidation process - do travel through the electrolyte. When they reach the cathode they react with the electrons that travelled via the other route.

The scientists' "breakthrough" involved finding a new way to integrate the anode and cathode at the microscale.

"The battery electrodes have small intertwined fingers that reach into each other," project leader Prof William King told the BBC.

"That does a couple of things. It allows us to make the battery have a very high surface area even though the overall battery volume is extremely small.

"And it gets the two halves of the battery very close together so the ions and electrons do not have far to flow.

"Because we've reduced the flowing distance of the ions and electrons we can get the energy out much faster."

Repeatable technique

The battery cells were fabricated by adapting a process developed by another team at the university which is designed to make it faster to recharge the batteries than lithium ion (Li-on) and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) equivalents.

A cross-section of the battery reveals the 3D-design of the research project's anodes and cathodes

It involves creating a lattice made out of tiny polystyrene spheres and then filling the space in and around the structure with metal.

The spheres are then dissolved to leave a 3D-metal scaffold onto which a nickel-tin alloy is added to form the anode, and a mineral called manganese oxyhydroxide to form the cathode.

Finally the glass surface onto which the apparatus was attached was immersed into a liquid heated to 300C (572F).

"Today we're making small numbers of these things in a boutique fabrication process, but while that's reliable and we can repeat it we need to be able to make large numbers of these things over large areas," said Prof King.

"But in principle our technology is scalable all the way up to electronics and vehicles.

"You could replace your car battery with one of our batteries and it would be 10 times smaller, or 10 times more powerful. With that in mind you could jumpstart a car with the battery in your cell phone."

Safety fear

Other battery experts welcomed the team's efforts but said it could prove hard to bring the technology to market.

"The challenge is to make a microbattery array that is robust enough and that does not have a single short circuit in the whole array via a process that can be scaled up cheaply," said Prof Clare Grey from the University of Cambridge's chemistry department.

University of Oxford's Prof Peter Edwards - an expert in inorganic chemistry and energy - also expressed doubts.

"This is a very exciting development which demonstrates that high power densities are achievable by such innovations," he said.

"The challenges are: scaling this up to manufacturing levels; developing a simpler fabrication route; and addressing safety issues.

"I'd want to know if these microbatteries would be more prone to the self-combustion issues that plagued lithium-cobalt oxide batteries which we've seen become an issue of concern with Boeing's Dreamliner jets."

Prof King acknowledged that safety was an issue due to the fact the current electrolyte was a combustible liquid.

Prof William King hopes to use the microbattery to power electronic equipment before the end of the year

He said that in the test equipment only a microscopic amount of the liquid was used, making the risk of an explosion negligible - but if it were scaled up to large sizes the danger could become "significant".

However, he added that he soon planned to switch to a safer polymer-based electrolyte to address the issue.

Prof King added that he hoped to have the technology ready to be trialled as a power source for electronic equipment before the end of the year.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign team is one of several groups attempting to overhaul the way we power gadgets.

Researchers in Texas are working on a kind of battery that can be spray-painted onto any surface while engineers at the University of Bedfordshire are exploring the idea of using radio waves as an energy source.

in BBC World News

15 Apr 2013

Scientists make 'laboratory-grown' kidney

A kidney "grown" in the laboratory has been transplanted into animals where it started to produce urine, US scientists say.

Similar techniques to make simple body parts have already been used in patients, but the kidney is one of the most complicated organs made so far.

A study, in the journal Nature Medicine, showed the engineered kidneys were less effective than natural ones.

But regenerative medicine researchers said the field had huge promise.

Kidneys filter the blood to remove waste and excess water. They are also the most in-demand organ for transplant, with long waiting lists.

The researchers' vision is to take an old kidney and strip it of all its old cells to leave a honeycomb-like scaffold. The kidney would then be rebuilt with cells taken from the patient.

This would have two major advantages over current organ transplants.

The tissue would match the patient, so they would not need a lifetime of drugs to suppress the immune system to prevent rejection.

It would also vastly increase the number of organs available for transplant. Most organs which are offered are rejected, but they could be used as templates for new ones.Scaffolding

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have taken the first steps towards creating usable engineered kidneys.

They took a rat kidney and used a detergent to wash away the old cells.

The remaining web of proteins, or scaffold, looks just like a kidney, including an intricate network of blood vessels and drainage pipes.

This protein plumbing was used to pump the right cells to the right part of the kidney, where they joined with the scaffold to rebuild the organ.

It was kept in a special oven to mimic the conditions in a rat's body for the next 12 days.

When the kidneys were tested in the laboratory, urine production reached 23% of natural ones.

The team then tried transplanting an organ into a rat. Once inside the body, the kidney's effectiveness fell to 5%.

Yet the lead researcher, Dr Harald Ott, told the BBC that restoring a small fraction of normal function could be enough: "If you're on haemodialysis then kidney function of 10% to 15% would already make you independent of haemodialysis. It's not that we have to go all the way."

He said the potential was huge: "If you think about the United States alone, there's 100,000 patients currently waiting for kidney transplants and there's only around 18,000 transplants done a year.

"I think the potential clinical impact of a successful treatment would be enormous."'Really impressive'

There is a huge amount of further research that would be needed before this is even considered in people.

The technique needs to be more efficient so a greater level of kidney function is restored. Researchers also need to prove that the kidney will continue to function for a long time.

There will also be challenges with the sheer size of a human kidney. It is harder to get the cells in the right place in a larger organ.

Prof Martin Birchall, a surgeon at University College London, has been involved in windpipe transplants produced from scaffolds.

He said: "It's extremely interesting. It is really impressive.

"They've addressed some of the main technical barriers to making it possible to use regenerative medicine to address a really important medical need."

He said that being able to do this for people needing an organ transplant could revolutionise medicine: "It's almost the nirvana of regenerative medicine, certainly from a surgical point of view, that you could meet the biggest need for transplant organs in the world - the kidney."

in BBC

Nasa Ladee mission: Solving a Moon mystery

You would be forgiven for thinking that America lost interest in the Moon forty years ago, in December 1972, when Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan left the final footprint on its dusty surface. It’s certainly true that in the 1970s and 80s there was little desire to return to our grey, cratered cosmic neighbour. In fact during the 1980s no-one sent a single spacecraft, robot or orbiter. Thanks to Apollo, American scientists had an enormous pile of lunar rocks to study, Nasa’s attention had switched to the Space Shuttle and the Soviets had run out of money.

But in recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in studying the Moon in order to tackle some of the many unanswered scientific questions. In the last decade, Europe, Japan, China and India have all sent unmanned orbiters to probe the Moon’s chemical composition, gravitational field and topography. Among other things, they’ve proved the presence of water, discovered potentially useful minerals and uncovered evidence that the Moon may still be geologically active. Now, later this year, the US will be launching its fourth mission since 2009:Ladee.

Ladee (pronounced Lad-ee, rather than Lay-dee) stands for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer and is designed to build on Apollo science. Looking disconcertingly like an Apollo Command Module smothered in shiny solar panels, this robotic spacecraft will study lunar dust in the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere. “Yes the Moon has an atmosphere,” exclaims Brian Day from Nasa’s Lunar Science Institute. “People are astonished to find that out.

“We uncovered the very beginnings of our understanding of the lunar atmosphere when we visited with Apollo,” Day says, “but we haven’t really revisited the question of how much there is, what it’s made of and how it changes from month to month.”

‘Dead world’

The mission will also aim to solve another related question that’s unresolved from Apollo: a weird glow that the astronauts saw from lunar orbit. “There were these interesting ‘streamers’ that were seen out the window of the Command Module when it was round the Moon,” says Ladee project scientist Richard Elphic. “Some of the supposition is that these may be pillars of levitated dust, high into the lunar sky. But we don’t know for sure, so we’re trying to understand what role dust might play in the lunar atmosphere.”

Observations made through telescopes on Earth have already given the Ladee science team some idea of what they might find. They know, for instance, that the lunar atmosphere contains argon and helium and they were surprised to also find two metals: sodium and potassium. “Those are just the tip of the iceberg,” says Elphic, “there are probably many other species of chemicals and just as exotic.

The Moon’s thin and fragile atmosphere is technically known as a surface boundary exosphere and what makes this investigation even more interesting is that these types of atmospheres are found around bodies elsewhere in the Solar System. Mercury has one, so do larger asteroids, many of the moons of the gas giants, even the minor planets beyond Neptune. “This may be the most common type of atmosphere in our solar system and we know very little about it,” says Day. “But we happen to have one right next door – how lucky is that? We’re going to take advantage of that and go and explore it.”

in BBC

12 Apr 2013

The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Ways Your Brain Can Malfunction

There is nothing we take for granted as much as sanity. No matter what "crazy" unexpected thing might happen at the office tomorrow, you still know that you're not going to show up and find, say, your boss replaced by a talking guitar.

But as we have explored before, there are mental disorders that can mess with your perception of reality in unimaginable ways, while often leaving the rest of your mind untouched.

Disorders like ...

#6.

Fregoli Syndrome

+Share #6

Imagine you get into an argument with your asshole roommate about the unpaid rent. You need to let off some steam, so you call your girlfriend to see if she wants to go for a nice burrito somewhere, but for some reason it's your asshole roommate on the end of the line and he's calling you "honey." So you hang up and go outside, but your asshole roommate is waving at you from the neighbor's yard.

Photos.com
Apparently Mr. Moneybags has enough cash for two rents.

Furious, you go to the local bar, only to find that your asshole roommate is the one pouring the drinks. Ten minutes and two black eyes later, you find yourself getting arrested by your asshole roommate.

The Condition:

Fregoli syndrome is the delusion that some or all of the people you meet during the course of a day are actually the same person. It's named after a famous actor who was able to change costumes rapidly onstage. As you would expect, Fregoli sufferers are frequently paranoid, as they reasonably assume that some master of disguise is fucking with them. Or maybe some kind of shape-shifting wizard.

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Keep practicing, buddy. You can be James Hetfield, but you can't be all of Metallica.

The disorder comes with different degrees of severity, though. Sometimes, sufferers don't know exactly who is stalking them, but everybody looks really familiar somehow. It's like waking up to find your town populated entirely by people who went to your high school that you never spoke to much. One guy was known to just walk up to everybody and ask where they'd met before.

Fregoli syndrome also makes for an interesting insanity stew when it tag-teams with other disorders. For instance, a woman who was diagnosed with the condition also suffered from schizophrenia and something called erotomania, the belief that someone is in love with you when they aren't. She believed that actor Erik Estrada was in love with her, communicated with her telepathically and disguised himself to show up in her daily life in the form of her acquaintances and current boyfriend.

Getty
This is someone's fantasy.

It's such a sad story that we're hoping someday it will turn out she was right all along, and Mr. Estrada will be arrested.

#5.

Mirrored-Self Misidentification

+Share #5

You wake up in the middle of the night and shuffle down the hall to the bathroom. You stumble in and flick on the light, and look up at the mirror on the medicine cabinet over your sink.

A stranger is standing there. He's staring right at you, as surprised to see you as you are to see him. You scream, "Get the hell out of my bathroom, you pervert! Go look at someone else's dick!" but the man only screams your own words back at you.

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"Bring it on, buddy, I can do this all day."

The Condition:

People suffering from a disorder called mirrored-self misidentification have a breakdown with the part of their brain that understands how reflections work, so when they look at a mirror, their brain tells them they're looking at a stranger through a window. On a rational level, they understand what mirrors are and what they do, but they maintain the strong impression that their reflection is some nefarious doppelganger. It shows up mostly in Alzheimer's patients, but even then it's rare.

Scientists study the disorder by presenting subjects with a mirror, then holding up an object behind them and asking them to grab it. People without the disorder will turn around and reach for the object behind them, but someone who suffers from the condition tries to reach through the mirror, providing hours of quality entertainment for the researchers.

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"You guys are DICKS!

One patient known as TH described the man in his mirror as "a dead ringer" for himself. He would even try to talk to his reflection, though their conversations were a little one-sided. TH did not particularly dislike this person, saying he had no reason to be suspicious of him. He believed that this man lived in the apartment adjoining his own. (There was no apartment adjoining his own.)

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And they liked to look at each other while masturbating.

#4.

Visual Agnosia

+Share #4

You go to the grocery store to pick up your weekly supply of Red Bull and Febreze, but you quickly realize that something is a little off. Specifically, all of the products you pick up scream and fight back when you try to shove them into your cart. Worse, when you finally get to the register, a potted fern asks if you're paying by cash or charge.

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"Hey, asshole, my fronds are up here."

The Condition:

Visual agnosia is caused by a dysfunction in some of the brain's visual processing areas, the result of which is that you're unable to correctly identify things for what they are. And we're not talking about confusing a dog with a cat from a distance; we're talking about looking at your brother and trying to cram bread into his hair because you think he's the toaster.

If you think we made up that example to be funny, the neurologist Oliver Sacks described a patient in the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat who, at the end of an interview, grabbed his wife's head and tried to put it on his own head. According to the wife, this was the kind of bullshit she had to put up with every day.

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"Sick bastard just walked up and started dry-humpin' my head."

People suffering from visual agnosia are stuck seeing the world kind of the way a space rover on Mars does. When a person with a normally functioning brain looks at something familiar, like a rose, she sees a bunch of shapes and colors and her brain automatically tells her what that thing is. The process is so lightning fast that you aren't even aware of it.

But it is a process and it can break down. Agnosia sufferers are permanently trapped in the shapes-and-colors stage. Sacks' patient looked at a rose and described it literally as "a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment." It's kind of like being blind, except you have some jackass following you around describing things to you and making you figure out what those things are on your own. For the rest of your life.

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"Convoluted red form with a linear green attachment ... Rose McGowan?"

Mercifully, visual agnosia is just that -- a visual disorder. Sufferers retain the ability to identify things by using their other senses. Sacks' patient was able to recognize the rose when he smelled it.

Pause here and take a moment to thank your brain for all of the shit it does in the background just so you can get around every day.

"I sure hope none of those convoluted gray shapes are people!"

5 Dec 2007

Can You Afford Extreme Early Retirement?

Could retirement before you're even eligible to join AARP be the quintessential impossible dream? Not if you're consistently disciplined, focused, driven and don't give a hoot about what the Joneses think of that beat-up Chevy in the driveway, say experts.

Whether you work to live or live to work is a question increasingly answered in favor of living by couples who have opted out of the daily grind before the traditional "early" retirement age of 50-something. What's more, they're not going quietly, but instead are springing up on Web sites and in media interviews, telling their stories and encouraging others to follow suit.

Bankrate found two such couples who were eager to share their tales of extreme early retirement: Billy and Akaisha Kaderli, and Sandy Aldridge and partner Dale Lugenbehl. Though their lifestyles are vastly different, they share many traits. Several Bankrate readers also shared their early retirement experiences.

Set free to roam the world
The Kaderlis can count themselves as members of a small group of founders of the extreme early retirement trend among baby boomers. Now in their 17th year of retirement, the couple ditched their 9-to-5 jobs when they were 38 years old.

At 55, they say they would have made the same choice again, only investing sooner and with more confidence. The Kaderlis' initial $500,000 nest egg has grown steadily, partly because they hung in the stock market through the '90s boom and the historic bust that followed, and partly because they've lived on an average of just $24,000 a year. Initially, they put all their savings in a low-cost index fund.

Retiring at 38, they say, was an excellent age because they had accumulated life experiences through their careers: He was a former restaurant chef and owner, and at one time, the youngest branch manager at brokerage Dean Witter, while she continued to run the restaurant.

"We retired with youth, vigor and plenty of enthusiasm to venture out into traveling the globe. Retiring earlier, we would not have acquired enough skill or self knowledge about how we are able to interact with the world," the couple wrote from Thailand.

The Kaderlis sold their home when they retired, and remained homeless while they explored the world, spending time in the Caribbean island of Nevis, as well as in Venezuela, Mexico and Thailand. They recently purchased a small home in an Arizona retirement community, and now split their time between Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Mesa, Ariz., when not traveling to other countries.

Their Web site, www.retireearlylifestyle.com, gives them the opportunity to communicate with other early retirees, as well as educate the younger generation. Their advice to 20-somethings who want to follow the same path is simple: Save everything and stay out of debt.

Out of the mainstream
Extreme early retirement strikes a chord with people now more than in the past, says MSN personal finance columnist and author Liz Pulliam Weston. While going against the fearsome icon of the "company man" used to be part of the '60s counterculture, Weston says she's seeing a resurgence of the attitude among 20-somethings who are rejecting the consumerism that began in the 1980s. "They want more than to be chained to their desks," she says, and they have more desire to redesign their career to have more personal meaning. Sometimes that means working until 65, but shifting often to careers that suit their changing mindset.

Whether today's employees are enchanted with the idea of dropping out early or not, it's still a small group of people who can make it happen, according to Weston. "You have to be out of the mainstream to do this," she says, adding that in her experience, the successful extreme early retirees are "laser-like, and don't seem to care what people think."

Aside from an unwavering focus on their goal and an indifferent attitude toward amassing all the latest stuff, extreme early retirees can't be lumped into the same category. They run the gamut from young parents, singles and dual-income couples without children. Weston has talked to couples with as many as four children who are living in expensive areas of the country, as well as those who have no family ties and a cabin in the woods.

They share an excitement about their lives, a desire to spend time in pursuits that are meaningful to them, and often, an environmental conscience.

The simple life
All three traits apply to Aldridge and Lugenbehl, who retired more than a dozen years ago to an eight-acre parcel in Cottage Grove, Ore., with a starting nest egg of $135,000 each. They each contributed $50,000 to buy the land where they built their home, and the remainder is in CDs. They live on $400 a month, and have a health insurance policy with a deductible of $7,500.

The money has remained conservatively invested in CDs. "We like to sleep at night, so it's more important to us to know what's coming in, rather than to maximize the possible income," says Aldridge. "We've seen too many folks lose money rather than make money from their so-called investments."

Aldridge and Lugenbehl, who retired at ages 48 and 47, don't have a television and rarely eat out. Yet they don't feel like their life is lacking, says Aldridge. "We are fortunate to have found what is enough for us. I feel so totally blessed with how much we have that I can't imagine wanting more. At this point, I'd have to say it's more than enough to meet our needs and our wants."

Tips for extreme early retirement 'wannabes'
Billy and Akaisha Kaderli, the "grandparents" of the extreme early retirement movement for baby boomers, share their mantra for those seeking to follow the same path: Work hard, spend little, save a lot and spend wisely. Their additional tips include:

• Set spending and investment priorities now for the future
• Stay 100 percent out of debt, except for a mortgage
• Invest in stocks through index and mutual funds
• Use the compounding effect of time by investing early
• Seek a partner with the same financial values

Billy and Akaisha Kaderli at Kata Beach, Thailand
Aldridge acknowledges that the cost of living is lower where they are, but says they make an art form out of living well on less. They grow most of their own food, shop for clothes at yard sales, which Aldridge says is a form of entertainment for her, and find joy in small construction and gardening projects on their property.

The two cook their own meals from scratch, and volunteer to give presentations on the environmental impact of food choices, as well as what Aldridge calls "voluntary simplicity."

"Dale and I would both rather have our time," she says, "even if we end up choosing to work hard at gardening or building. At least we're the ones determining what we're going to do with our precious life energy."

Pursuing passions
Finding passion outside of a career that had become a chore is a theme among most extreme early retirees. For the Kaderlis, that meant world travel and a chance to experience diverse cultures.

"We have our youth and spirit of adventure," they wrote. "The opportunity to travel to exotic locations and meet people from foreign lands has given us a global view that no amount of money could buy."

Aldridge and Lugenbehl enjoy their day-to-day life so much that the thought of vacationing elsewhere rarely occurs to them. "We exercise faithfully three days a week, and usually take a long walk on the other four," says Aldridge. "My mother lives up here now and we take care of her. We do all the regular garden and orchard work."

The abundance of time and the freedom to choose how to spend it are the most satisfying aspects of retirement for Aldridge. "It's being able to get up each morning and decide for myself what I'm going to be doing that day. Honestly, I can't think of any downside; at least there hasn't been one for me."

Surprising reactions
Whether it's the green tinge of envy or an aversion to anyone who steps off life's predictable treadmill, extreme early retirees often face unexpected opposition from those around them.

"Back when we left our jobs, we got mostly shock," says Aldridge. "Dale's mother was a classic. She was sure we were going to go hungry and be out in the cold. That was about 13 years ago, and it's never been a problem."

"Some people have expressed envy, but we don't think we did anything they couldn't do if it really was a priority for them," she adds. "Most of our work history was part-time, and not all that highly-paid."

Aldridge says Lugenbehl's mother couldn't imagine how they would fill their time in retirement. "It was as if she thought we wouldn't be able to find things to do. My response was to ask her what she did with her time. Not another word was said because she realized that she'd never had any trouble in that regard."

The Kaderlis say that when they first retired, people treated them like they were on an extended vacation and would soon return to work. "Some thought we were committing social and financial suicide, and others projected that we were selfish or lazy since we opted out of the mandatory working world. This included family members, friends and even strangers. Our choice of early retirement was too far out of the box for them."

Think like an entrepreneur
Both the Kaderlis and Aldridge say they have always been debt free, except for the time when they had mortgages, and they avoid debt now like the plague. They also live below their means, even when their investments throw off more income.

These two actions are key to the ability to retire early, says Herb Hopwood, president of Hopwood Financial Services in Great Falls, Va. "It really comes down to the fact that you can't control what the markets are going to do, but one thing you can control is your expenses, and that's probably the biggest thing."

Hopwood likens extreme early retirement to extreme sports. "Extreme sports are risky and you must be in great physical shape. Early retirement is risky, because what you're planning is going to be for a long period of time without income...and you have to be in great financial shape."

After an initial financial plan is developed, whether informally penciled on the back of an envelope like the Kaderlis' or more formally with a financial planner, it has to be monitored and changed. Setting yourself up to receive the same income no matter how the markets perform can result in financial disaster, says Hopwood. "The objective is not to tap the principal."

Once you begin doing that, he says, it's alarming how fast principal erodes, leaving you with a smaller pot from which to draw income. A portfolio should remain fairly aggressive in equities, up to 70 percent of the total. But Hopwood cautions against a blanket approach when it comes to what's considered aggressive. "You can be aggressive in allocation, and stupid in investments." For instance, he wouldn't recommend that all the equity allocation be in biotech, or growth stocks, but in a balanced blend that will return an average of 8 percent over time.

Hopwood recommends that clients seeking a long retirement train themselves to think like entrepreneurs. The portfolio, rather than a job, is providing income, and like an entrepreneur, a retiree should be constantly watching and adjusting the rate of income.

"Too many people adjust their lifestyle to their income. That's a very dangerous thing to do."

Source:

by Judy Martel
Thursday, November 29, 2007 provided by Bankrate.com