Adam Piore's Blog

The latest excerpt from the Body Builders is out in Readers Digest. Check it out here

I recently wrote an article for Businessweek about efforts to develop a pill that would mimic the effects of exercise. Check it out here. Meanwhile, an outfit called Freethink Media did this great video piece about the book. It's worth taking a look.

I recently did a Q and A with the British website52 Insightsabout some of the ideas in my book, along with other technologies I have written about in recent months, including regenerative medicine, cancer immunology, the biology of aging and a whole host of other issues.They even took pictures of me and tried to make me look mysterious!It's a very cool site. And also has interviews with William Dafoe, Yuval Harari, Dave Eggers and many other fascinating characters.

Last weekend Fareed Zakaria named Body Builders his "book of the week" on his Sunday CNN show!"This is a mind-blowing book about the human body. Adam Piore takes us inside the technological revolution that is fixing up broken limbs and even more staggeringly enhancing the power and strength of the human body through engineering, bioengineering. He is pointing us to a future in which we will all have the ability to be Superman or Superwoman. Fascinating."

Chapter 7 in my book is all about efforts to find individuals with genetically exceptional memory. Ever wonder if you have one? Or how good it is? If you want to take the challenge, click on this link:www.extremememorychallenge.com

The Body Builders finally hits bookstores tomorrow. And it's been getting some great prepublication press. Like this story about Hugh Herr in theNew York Post story.And this review in theColumbia Alumni Magazine.The first excerpt ran on theDaily Beastabout the hunt for Viagra for the brain,

Less than a month until the publication of the Bodybuilders! I've been holding my fire on blog posts as I plan which pieces of the book to break out for stand alone stories in publications. In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple of my latest stories onthe anatomy of charisma.In my book, I wrote about some of the secrets technology is revealing about the human potential for resilience and new abilities. In these stories, I set out to learn what science and technology tell us about leaders, and people we just can't help but like. I also asked one of the researchers to analyze a sermon delivered by the most popular charismatic preacher in the world, Joel Osteen. He actually assigned a graduate student to "code" it, looking for specific charismatic leadership tactics that activate our innate tendency to identify with and trust someone.You can read thathere.Charisma has two sides. "It can be used to heat a house -- or burn it down," as one guy in the story told me. Which makes the topic especially relevant right now in the age of Trump. Charisma is, of course, relative. Many of my left-leaning, east coast pals seem immune to the Donald's charm. But ask any Trump voter if he has is it, and they'll most likely tell you he does. We should all be aware that when we fall under the spell of a charismatic -- whether its Trump, Clinton, Obama, or the guy selling used cars at the corner lot -- our brains often enter a state akin to that used by successful hypnotists to make their subjects bark like a dog. We turn off the executive control regions of the cortex. We down regulate our analytical mind. We let ourselves be flooded with positive emotions, and we prepare to follow.

Isn't that a cool picture? That's Olympic Silver Medalist Justin Gatlin (Peter Bohlersnapped the shot), the second fastest man in the world. My bookthe Body Buildersfocuses on how scientists and bioengineers are finding new ways to hack into the human body and rebuild it. But those same technologies are also helping some of us to become Bigger, Stronger, Faster and Smarter (in fact that was going to be the title of my book at one point, until Charles Duhigg beat me to it!).One of coolest stories I have written in recent months grew out the reporting for the first chapter of my book (which also features the famous rock climbing double amputee prosthetics-building geniusHugh Herr). Last spring, I flew down to Florida and spent the day hanging out with U.S. Olympic sprinter Gatlin, his coach Dennis Mitchell and a sprint biomechanics guru name Ralph Mann. They were trying to use technology to beat Usain Bolt. And it almost worked, though in the end atRioGatlin had to settle for second place.The first thing I learned is that when we run, our legs act like giant springs. We bounce like basketballs or pogo sticks. So it's not always the best idea to take long strides -- especially straight off the starting blocks. Sometimes you want to minimize air time. Notice how Justin Gatlin is almost horizontal to the ground in the pic above, like a bullet, yet his feet are just inches from the ground? Credit Ralph Mann for that. Gatlin's goal is to pound his feet into the ground as many times as possible in the beginning to gather extra bounce and power in his step. Scientists have known for decades that our ligaments are built to absorb, store and release elastic "recoil" energy when we run. In fact, about 35 percent of the power output in each stride is recycled energy. The goal off the blocks is to rev up that power as fast as possible. You can't do that if you are bursting forward, with long strides and in between them your feet are spending a lot of time in the air.Mann is himself a former Olympic medalist -- he was a hurdler. Check him out in 1972.Since retiring, he has spent years reverse engineering the biomechanics of sprint (and hurdle) speed byslowing down video of the world's fastest individuals, and precisely measuring how all the different parts of the body move in relation to one another.  From that, Mann has designed what he calls a "performance model."Speed is simple, Mann likes to say. There are primarily two components: the number of strides a runner takes each second and the length of those strides. Each comes at the expense of the other, and a coach has to decide which to emphasize. That's where Mann's performance model comes in. Its algorithms are calibrated to produce the maximally efficient ratio, based on body type and a whole host of other variables, including race length, the length of different limbs in relation to one another, and overall height and weight.If you want to know more about how it works, you can read more about it in the cover story I wrote for Popular Mechanicshere.

I met a lot of interesting people with a lot of wild ideas while I was working on my book the Body Builders (Which you can and should preorder by clickinghere).But Michael Levin's ideas were so wild, I decided to go back after I finished the book and look a little more closely.  He is the topic of my latest story forpopular science. This guy has done some crazy stuff --  he has reprogrammed the cells of frogs so that they grow six arms, induced a tadpole to grow an eye on its gut. He has even made a worm with two heads. He sent me a video that is truly spooky.Check this out:If you look closely, you will see he has turned the back tail, into a second head!Levin has done all this by manipulating the polarity across cell membranes. And he hopes someday soon to use this technique to regrow human limbs..You can clickhereto see how it might work:He and his colleague David Kaplan at Tufts have  designed a sleeve they call a biodome. More details on the link. But they soak the amputation site in a solution that effects the flow of ions across cells membrane, then protect it from infection.....and presto....The whole article ishere.

This is my first post.I'm just experimenting here. I'm hoping this will be the first of many fascinating blog posts. And that what I write here will be so compelling, that thousands will buy my bookthe Body Builders.The guy below is named Hugh Herr, and he is the first chapter of my book. I think this picture is pretty cool. Don't you?