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Clampdown on marketing to British children through TV advertising is not enough to protect them, says WHO report

Food companies are accused on Tuesday by the World Health Organisation, the public health arm of the UN, of finding ways to bypass the rules on advertising unhealthy products to children and fuelling the obesity epidemic.

Attempts by the authorities in Britain to clamp down on marketing to children through television advertising are not enough to protect them, a major report by the WHO says. There are tough rules on advertising during children’s TV programmes but not on shows such as ITV1′s Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor, which research shows are widely watched by younger viewers.

Increasingly, food companies are also targeting children through computer games, mobile phones and social networks such as Facebook.

The WHO report calls for tighter regulation across the whole of Europe of the marketing to children of foods high in fat, salt and sugar.

“Millions of children across the region are being subjected to unacceptable marketing practices,” said Zsuzsanna Jakab, regional director of WHO Europe. “Policy simply must catch up and address the reality of an obese childhood in the 21st century.

“Children are surrounded by adverts urging them to consume high fat, high sugar, high salt foods, even when they are in places where they should be protected, such as schools and sports facilities.”

Britain has done more than some other European countries to guard children against advertising for unhealthy food, snacks and sweets, says the report, but it is not one of the five countries – Denmark, France, Norway, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden – that have fully implemented the EU code on restricting marketing to children. There are, says the report, gaps and weaknesses in the UK regulations.

There are strict rules to prevent foods with high salt, fat and sugar content being advertised on TV during children’s programmes, and the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, said this reduced children’s exposure to advertising for crisps, sugary drinks, fried chicken nuggets and the like by 37% between 2005 and 2009. But, says the report, there has been an overall increase in advertising for junk foods at other times of the day “and children continued to be exposed to HFSS (high fat, salt and sugar foods) advertising, especially during TV programmes between 6pm and 10.30pm”.

This is what is called family viewing rather than children’s TV.

According to the Children’s Food Campaign, the TV programme most watched by four- to 15-year-olds is Britain’s Got Talent, which airs from 8pm to 9pm, with more than 1 million child viewers. Next most watched by children are The X Factor and I’m a Celebrity. Commercials running during Britain’s Got Talent typically include ones for fizzy drinks and chocolate.

The report says: “Overall these data suggest that despite full implementation of the regulation, children in the UK appear to be exposed to just as much food advertising as before full regulation.”

Food companies are increasingly using the internet and mobile phones to interact with children. Online advertising overtook TV advertising in

Source: Sarah

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Twenty infrasound monitoring stations around the world registered the explosion, scientists report in a paper accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters (abstract here). A meteor explosion on 8 October 2009 over Indonesia had been recorded by 17 stations.

Some 460 kilotonnes of TNT equivalent — almost 10 times the energy of the 2009 Indonesia event – were released when the 9,000-tonnes object exploded over the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, injuring more than 1,000 people. It was the most energetic confirmed airburst since the explosion in 1908 of the Tunguska meteor over Siberia, which is estimated to have packed between 3 and 5 megatonnes of TNT equivalent. Fireball events in the order of 500 kilotonnes of explosive energy occur, on average, every 75 years.

The team reports that infrasound signals of the Chelyabinsk explosion circled twice around the entire globe and were recorded until almost 3 days after the event. The data on infrasound propagation can be used for calibrating the performance of the international monitoring network designed to detect violations of the nuclear test-ban-treaty that came into force last year.

Watch Crosstalks on Is physics changing our understanding of the world? and What is the future of man in the universe?

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How we look today:

How we might look in 20 000 years:

How we might look in 60 000 years:

How we might look in 100 000 years:

Source, Forbes

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The mushroom clouds produced by more than 500 nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War may have had a silver lining, after all. More than 50 years later, scientists have found a way to use radioactive carbon isotopes released into the atmosphere by nuclear testing to settle a long-standing debate in neuroscience: Does the adult human brain produce new neurons? After working to hone their technique for more than a decade, the researchers report that a small region of the human brain involved in memory makes new neurons throughout our lives—a continuous process of self-renewal that may aid learning.

For a long time, scientific dogma held that our brains did not produce new neurons during adulthood, says Pasko Rakic, a neuroscientist at Yale University who was not involved in the study. In 1998, however, a group of Swedish researchers reported the first evidence that neurons are continually born throughout the human lifespan. The researchers injected a compound normally used to label tumor cell division into patients who had agreed to have their brains examined after death. When the scientists examined the postmortem brain tissue, they found that new neurons had indeed sprung forth during adulthood. The cells were located in a part of the hippocampus—a pair of seahorse-shaped structures located deep within the brain and involved in memory and learning. The compound was later found to be toxic, however, and the experiment was never repeated.

Since 1998, a number of studies have demonstrated that new neurons are generated in the same small region of the hippocampus in mice and appear to play an important role in memory and learning, says Kirsty Spalding, a molecular biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the new study. Because the 1998 work was never confirmed by independent research, however, scientists have fiercely argued over whether the neuron birth seen in mice also occurs in people.

More than 10 years ago, Spalding’s adviser, Jonas Frisén, a stem cell researcher at the Karolinska Institute and study co-author, urged her to take on a project aimed at settling this debate by using an unconventional approach. The method, which has taken Spalding more than a decade to develop, hinges on a massive pulse of radioactive carbon-14 isotopes released by nuclear explosions in the 1950s and ’60s, which doubled the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. This pulse stopped with the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned aboveground tests of nuclear weapons, and the unstable carbon-14 isotopes have steadily decayed. Because cells incorporate carbon from the atmosphere into their DNA as they divide, the proportion of carbon-14 to the more stable carbon isotope carbon-12 acts as a time stamp for when a cell was born.

Spalding has been using this ratio to determine the age of teeth in forensic investigations and theturnover rate of fat cells. But she had to improve the sensitivity of the technique so that it could detect the isotopic ratio in DNA from the roughly 6-gram sliver of neural tissue in the hippocampus thought to produce new neurons, the dentate gyrus. At best, the isotope is present in only one out of every 15 neurons, she says, making it difficult to detect in small amounts of tissue.

For the first 5 years, Spalding worked on finding an effective way of separating the roughly 20 million neurons in the dentate gyrus from other types of hippocampal cells and then extracting their DNA. Discovering that she could use a fluorescence-activated cell sorting machine to distinguish non-neuronal cells from neurons by making them glow in different colors was “a high point,” she says. The next 5 years were largely spent on finding ways to purify the DNA samples and extract and analyze the carbon atoms using high-powered particle accelerators. “We had many years without any results,” Frisén says. “It was fun, but frustrating.”

After finally getting the technique down pat, Spalding decided that it was time to try it on some real human brain tissue. She and her colleagues extracted hippocampi from 55 deceased people who had given informed consent to have their brains studied. They then ground up the tissue samples, sorted the cells, and extracted the DNA. Next, she sent the purified genetic material to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where it was reduced to pure carbon pellets and split into different carbon isotopes by weight in a particle accelerator, allowing the researchers to calculate the ratio between carbon-12 and carbon-14.

Spalding, Frisén, and colleagues then created a mathematical model estimating, based on those ratios, the rate of cellular turnover within the hippocampal neurons. More than a third of hippocampal neurons were regularly replaced, with roughly 1400 new neurons added each day during adulthood, they report online today in Cell. “Some cells are dying, some are being replaced,” Spaulding says. “There is a constant flux of life and death.”

“This is a spectacular independent confirmation” of the 1998 study suggesting that new neurons are born during adulthood in the dentate gyrus, writes Gerd Kempermann, a neuroscientist at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Dresden, in an e-mail. “It will likely settle the case.”

Kempermann says that his own and other’s studies in mice indicate that fresh adult neurons have a specific function in the hippocampus—for example, in helping the brain distinguish between things that belong to the same category, or comparing new information to what it has already learned from experience. The ability to distinguish between the Beatles and Rolling Stones, yet still identify both as “rock bands,” is one example of this type of task in humans, Frisén says.

There is another possibility, however: Our ability to replace hippocampal neurons could be an evolutionary vestige that is not all that important today, Rakic says. He argues that human survival may have depended not so much on our ability to produce new neurons, but on our ability to keep old ones in order to accumulate memories over the entire lifespan. Compared with fishes, frogs, reptiles, and birds, some of which can regrow entire brain structures, he says, “it is interesting that neuronal turnover in humans is limited to a single population of neurons in only one relatively small structure, and it is worthwhile to examine why it persists.”

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

Source: Wired Science

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This is what starvation looks like

Our planet is in the throes of a mass extinction. That extinction is not, however, limited to wild animals and plants. It will also affect many of our food crops. The two major trends in global agricultural are on a collision course for disaster. The result will mean fewer food crops for humans and animals. Our children won’t have the rich range of agricultural food options we currently enjoy, just as our generation has lost the wild foods our grandparents could hunt and forage.

The first trend is standardization and limitation in crop and seed types. Fewer types of crops are being grown, and fewer varieties of the same crop. Industrial farming focuses on a limited number of commercial crops. That is easiest to standardize for purchase of inputs and crop sales. Agricultural corporations have no particular incentive to preserve seed stock. They’re just in the growing business.

For example, genetically, about 20,000 wheat varieties exist. Of those, a few hundred are commercially grown. What happened to the rest of the types of wheat? Some are grown by hobbyists and subsistence farmers. Many disappear, decreasing the available genetic diversity. Or consider buckwheat. Hardier than wheat and native to a different set of locations, it could be a reliable food crop. Instead, it’s a niche crop.

As we choose to grow this narrower range of crops, climate change is propelling a host of new crop diseases, ranging from viruses to fungi and bacterial diseases. Florida, for example, is facing an unprecedented outbreak of citrus greening a bacterial disease that kills citrus trees. The disease arrived in Florida eight years ago, probably as a result of globalization. Growers are attempting to battle it with intense use of pesticides, but the state has lost 30% of its citrus production since the infection began and the bacteria continue to spread. Asian soybean rust is a fungus that causes crop failures around the world; spreading to the US as a result of the bad 2004 hurricane season. Recent reports from Louisiana indicate that 2013 is the worst year on record for the fungus, probably because of the mild 2012-2013 winter. The old threat of wheat rust, another fungus, continues to devastate African agriculture and is now found from Australia to Arkansas as well.

Fungi like warm, humid weather and a short winter. Bacteria take advantage of severe weather events to spread. Climate change means all of those things. Crop disease is going to get worse, not better.

What does this mean for our children’s food? Time will tell. The impact could be almost invisible. If we lose entire wheat varieties to fungus, we may be able to seamlessly switch over to others. Most people don’t really notice what kind of wheat goes into their bread or pasta beyond noting white or whole wheat.  The USSR didn’t engage in the kind of crop breeding that the US and Europe did; as a result, farmers in the former USSR are still growing many kinds of old

Source: Global

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Eric Anderson, working at Space Adventures, are confident that the first hotel in space will be ready within ten years. He also think that people will live in space eventually. Millions of people want to go to space and the technology is almost there to meet the demand. Market studies has been made, and the result shows that 40 percent of the general public want to visit space in their lifetime.

“It just has to reach a point where they can afford it and it is safe enough for them to feel that they are not risking their lives excessively do it”, says Eric Anderson. “But I do think the tourism market is a catalyst. It is not by any stretch the only reason we would go to space. We will go to space for resources: we will mine the asteroids, will get precious metals like platinum-group metals from asteroids. People will live in space, will do pharmaceutical research, will develop new drugs. Space will become part of our economic sphere of influence, but tourism is a fantastic catalyst for that.”

On the other hand, Stephen Hawking is confident that the humankind won’t survive for another 1,000 years on our fragile planet. What do we need to know about space before we build a community out there? The economic crisis has made it impossible for space science to continue in the same pace as before and NASA’s science budget was slashed by $300 million this year.

Will space science depend on financial gain, and if so, when will it be economic viable to start businesses that provide homes in space? And what will happen to them who can’t afford to move? Will space only be an option for the super-rich in the future?

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Source – Techcrunch

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Source – The Guardian

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