Office workers beware: long periods of sitting at your desk may be a killer. Scientists have identified a new threat from our sedentary lifestyles that they call ‘muscular inactivity’. Sitting still for long periods of time leads to the build up of substances in the blood that are harmful to health. And exercise alone won’t shift them. Millions of people lead sedentary lives, spending their days between car, office desk and the couch in front of the TV. While the ill effects are well recognised it has conventionally been thought that they can be offset by frequent trips to the gym, swimming pool or jogging track. Now researchers say that that is not enough. In addition to regular exercise, office workers need to keep moving while they work, by making regular trips to the printer, coffee machine or to chat with colleagues. Writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Elin Ekblom-Bak and colleagues from the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm say research shows long periods sitting and lack of ‘whole body muscular movement’ are strongly associated with obesity heart disease, cancer and diabetes, and an overall higher […]
The small makeup room off the main floor of KUSI’s studios, in a suburban canyon on the north end of San Diego, has seen better days. The carpet is stained; the couch sags. John Coleman, KUSI’s weatherman, pulls off the brown sweatshirt he has been wearing over his shirt and tie all day and appraises himself in the mirror, smoothing back his white hair and opening a makeup kit. ‘I kid that I have to use a trowel, to fill the crevasses of age,’ he says, swiping powder under one eye and then the other. ‘People have tried to convince me to use more advanced makeup, but I don’t. I don’t try to fool anyone.’ Coleman is seventy-five years old, and looks it, which is refreshing in the Dorian Gray-like environs of television news. He refers to his position at KUSI, a modestly eccentric independent station in San Diego whose evening newscast usually runs fifth out of five in the local market, as his retirement job. When he steps in front of the green screen, it’s clear why he has chosen it over actual retirement; in front of the camera he moves, if not quite like a man half […]
Afghans paid $2.5bn (£1.5bn) in bribes over the past 12 months, or the equivalent of almost one quarter of legitimate GDP, a UN report suggests. Surveying 7,600 people, it found nearly 60% more concerned about corruption than insecurity or unemployment. More than half the population had to pay at least one bribe to a public official last year, the report adds. The findings contrast sharply with a recent BBC survey in which the economy appeared to top Afghan concerns. The survey commissioned by the BBC and other broadcasters in December suggested that fewer Afghans (14%) saw corruption as the biggest problem than the economy (34%) and security situation (32%). According to the UN survey, bribes averaged $160 (£98) in contrast to an average Afghan annual income of $425. Bribes were most often paid to police, judges and politicians but members of international organisations and NGOs were also seen as corrupt, the survey said. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said corruption was contributing to drug-trafficking and terrorism in Afghanistan. The UNODC said its report, Corruption in Afghanistan, was based on interviews with 7,600 people in […]
Newswise — A team of researchers including scientists from the University of Florida has shown insect colonies follow some of the same biological ‘rules’ as individuals, a finding that suggests insect societies operate like a single ‘superorganism’ in terms of their physiology and life cycle. For more than a century, biologists have marveled at the highly cooperative nature of ants, bees and other social insects that work together to determine the survival and growth of a colony. The social interactions are much like cells working together in a single body, hence the term ‘superorganism’ — an organism comprised of many organisms, according to James Gillooly, an assistant professor in the department of biology at UF’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Now, researchers from UF, the University of Oklahoma and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have taken the same mathematical models that predict lifespan, growth and reproduction in individual organisms and used them to predict these features in whole colonies. By analyzing data from 168 different social insect species including ants, termites, bees and wasps, the authors found that the lifespan, growth rates and rates of reproduction of whole colonies when considered as superorganisms were […]
Cambridge, Mass. LAST week, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, found himself in trouble for once suggesting that Barack Obama had a political edge over other African-American candidates because he was ‘light-skinned and had ‘no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one. Mr. Reid was not expressing sadness but a gleeful opportunism that Americans were still judging one another by the color of their skin, rather than – as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose legacy we commemorated on Monday, dreamed – by the content of their character. The Senate leader’s choice of words was flawed, but positing that black candidates who look ‘less black have a leg up is hardly more controversial than saying wealthy people have an advantage in elections. Dozens of research studies have shown that skin tone and other racial features play powerful roles in who gets ahead and who does not. These factors regularly determine who gets hired, who gets convicted and who gets elected. Consider: Lighter-skinned Latinos in the United States make $5,000 more on average than darker-skinned Latinos. The education test-score gap between light-skinned and dark-skinned African-Americans is nearly as large as the gap between whites and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
