One Blog for the Kids!

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Too much TV puts children's hearts at risk: study

Kids, this is something that you should beware of: too much TV!
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Posted: 20 April 2011

SYDNEY: Children who spend too much time watching television increase the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes in later life, an Australian study showed on Wednesday.

In what was declared world-first research, the University of Sydney found that six- to seven-year-olds who spent the most time watching television had narrower arteries in the back of their eyes.

This increased their chances of developing heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes when they were older.

"Parents need to get their children up and moving and off the couch," said Dr Bamini Gopinath, the lead author.

The study examined 1,500 six- and seven-year-olds in 34 primary schools in Sydney.

On average, the children studied spent 1.9 hours a day watching television and 36 minutes a day in organised physical activity.

Those with the highest levels of physical activity -- just over an hour or more -- had significantly wider retinal arteries on average than those who spent less than half an hour a day being physically active.

"We found children with a high level of physical activity had a more beneficial microvascular profile compared to those with the lowest levels of physical activity," said Gopinath.

"This suggests unhealthy lifestyle factors may influence microcirculation early in life and increase the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure later in life."

Gopinath, senior research fellow at the Westmead Millennium Institute's Centre for Vision Research, added that excessive screen time leads to less physical activity, unhealthy dietary habits and weight gain.

"Replacing one hour a day of screen time with physical activity could be effective in buffering the effects of sedentary lifestyles on the retinal microvasculature in children," he said.

"Free play should be promoted and schools should have a mandatory two hours a week in physical activity for children."

The study is reported this week in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology: Journal of the American Heart Association.

-AFP/ck

Taken From ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Too much TV puts children's hearts at risk: study

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

More words, or simply, making new out of the old...?

Cover of "The Oxford English Dictionary (...

Cover via AmazonPublished: Mon 28th Feb, 2011

Scrabble addicts will now have a whole new arsenal of words to choose from after the Oxford English Dictionary has added a bunch of techie favourites.

New words added to the dictionary include: 'clickjacking', 'scareware' (fake anti-virus alert scams) and 'sexting' as well as 'feature phone' and commonly used text-speak acronym 'tbh', according to Techwatch.

Bloggable is apparently defined as "suitable or sufficiently interesting as a topic for a blog," while c'yber-bully', 'bandwidth' and 'trackpad' also get a place in the linguistic bible.

While it used to take ages to get a word into the dictionary as they caught on via word-of-mouth in playgrounds and offices alike, now social media and the internet as a whole has meant new terms spread like wildfire and become more quickly accepted.

Other non-techie terms have also made the grade such as ‘tanorexia' (being addicted to getting a tan) as well as Borat's ‘mankini'.

Going back to the more serious sentry of ‘cyber-bully,' it seems the problem of bullying online as well as the term itself has become more official, as the police will now send warning letters to the parents of children found to be bullying others on Facebook, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The letters will apparently warn the ‘cyber-bullies' they are breaking the law and could therefore be prosecuted, aiming to alert web tormentors of the seriousness of their actions and stop them becoming criminals.

A trial will reportedly begin in the Thames Valley where police will team up with teen volunteers to investigate and deal with reported of bullying on the social network.

PC Dave Thomas told the newspaper: "By alerting their parents to the problem, we are aiming to nip the problem in the bud and prevent it becoming something more serious. Social networkers, whatever their age, often don't think about what they are writing in the same way they would think about what they write in a letter or an email. If we have to investigate Facebook messages as harassment or public order offences and the young person gets charged, it could seriously affect their future."

"While we want them to realise how serious the matter is, we also want to avoid that and keep young people out of the criminal justice system if possible," he reportedly added.

If the trial goes well, the initiative could apparently be rolled out across South East England from May.

Taken from Hexus.net; source article is below:
Oxford English Dictionary embraces techie terms

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Are brains shrinking to make us smarter?

I know that in the individual level, this is true - the billions of cells and full-connection synapses are all there, and in the growing months and years, there is a necessity for much of the cells and synapses to be cut and broken: to give way to learning and strengthening the connections that retain our learning.

And it is observed in the whole human populace as well.

Read on...
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Posted: 06 February 2011

WASHINGTON: Human brains have shrunk over the past 30,000 years, puzzling scientists who argue it is not a sign we are growing dumber but that evolution is making the key motor leaner and more efficient.

The average size of modern humans -- the Homo sapiens -- has decreased about 10 percent during that period -- from 1,500 to 1,359 cubic centimetres, the size of a tennis ball.

Women's brains, which are smaller on average than those of men, have experienced an equivalent drop in size.

These measurements were taken using skulls found in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

"I'd called that a major downsizing in an evolutionary eye blink," John Hawks of the University of Michigan told Discover magazine.

But other anthropologists note that brain shrinkage is not very surprising since the stronger and larger we are, the more gray matter we need to control this larger mass.

The Neanderthal, a cousin of the modern human who disappeared about 30 millennia ago for still unknown reasons, was far more massive and had a larger brain.

The Cro-Magnons who left cave paintings of large animals in the monumental Lascaux cave over 17,000 years ago were the Homo sapiens with the biggest brain. They were also stronger than their modern descendants.

Psychology professor David Geary of the University of Missouri said these traits were necessary to survive in a hostile environment.

He has studied the evolution of skull sizes 1.9 million to 10,000 years old as our ancestors and cousins lived in an increasingly complex social environment.

Geary and his colleagues used population density as a measure of social complexity, with the hypothesis that the more humans are living closer together, the greater the exchanges between group, the division of labor and the rich and varied interactions between people.

They found that brain size decreased as population density increased.

"As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive," Geary told AFP.

But the downsizing does not mean modern humans are dumber than their ancestors -- rather, they simply developed different, more sophisticated forms of intelligence, said Brian Hare, an assistant professor of anthropology at Duke University.

He noted that the same phenomenon can be observed in domestic animals compared to their wild counterparts.

So while huskies may have smaller brains than wolves, they are smarter and more sophisticated because they can understand human communicative gestures, behaving similarly to human children.

"Even though the chimps have a larger brain (than the bonobo, the closest extant relative to humans), and even though a wolf has a much larger brain than dogs, dogs are far more sophisticated, intelligent and flexible, so intelligence is not very well linked to brain size," Hare explained.

He said humans have characteristics from both the bonobo and chimpanzee, which is more aggressive and domineering.

"The chimpanzees are violent because they want power, they try to have control and power over others while bonobos are using violence to prevent one for dominating them," Hare continued.

"Humans are both chimps and bobos in their nature and the question is how can we release more bonobo and less chimp.

"I hope bonobos win... it will be better for everyone," he added.

-AFP/ac

Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:Are brains shrinking to make us smarter?

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Dogs can smell bowel cancer

Dogs are still living up to "being man's best friend."
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Dogs aid bowel cancer fight
Posted: 01 February 2011

PARIS : Japanese researchers on Monday reported a "lab" breakthrough: a retriever which can scent bowel cancer in breath and stool samples as accurately as hi-tech diagnostic tools.

The findings support hopes for an "electronic nose" one day that can sniff a tumour at its earliest stages, they said.

Researchers led by Hideto Sonoda at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, used the specially-trained female black labrador to carry out 74 "sniff tests" over a period of several months.

Each of the tests comprised five breath or stool samples, only one of which was cancerous.

The samples came from 48 people with confirmed bowel cancer at various stages of the disease and 258 volunteers with no bowel cancer or who had had cancer in the past.

They complicated the task for the eight-year-old canine detective by adding a few challenges to the samples.

Around half of the non-cancer samples came from people with bowel polyps, which are benign but are also a possible precursor of bowel cancer.

Six per cent of the breath samples, and 10 per cent of the stool samples, came from people with other gut problems, such as inflammatory bowel disease, ulcers, diverticulitis, and appendicitis.

The retriever performed as well as a colonoscopy, a technique in which a fibre-optic tube with a camera on the end is inserted into the rectum to look for suspect areas of the intestine.

It correctly spotted which samples were cancerous and which were not in 33 out of 36 breath tests, equal to 95 per cent accuracy, and in 37 out of 38 stool tests (98 per cent accuracy).

It performed especially well among people with early stage disease, and its skills were not disrupted by samples from people with other types of gut problems.

Previous research has also found that dogs can sniff out bladder, lung, ovarian and breast cancer.

Using dogs as a screening tool is likely to be expensive.

But the success of this experiment backs hopes for developing a sensor that can detect specific compounds, in faecal material or the air, that are linked to cancer.

There is already a non-invasive method for screening for bowel cancer, which looks for telltale traces of blood in a stool sample. But it is only about 10 per cent accurate in detecting early-stage disease.

The dog used in the Japanese experiment was initially trained for water rescue in 2003 and then began training as a cancer detector in 2005.

Every time she correctly distinguished a cancer sample, she was allowed to play with a tennis ball.

- AFP/il

Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:Dogs aid bowel cancer fight

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Self-control must be learned while young

I was thinking that kids should be kids, and should be allowed they freedom while young.

I could be wrong; or that their childhood 'freedom' has a boundary after all...

Kids, take note!
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Kids who misbehave face trouble as adults, says study
Posted: 25 January 2011

WASHINGTON: Children who are over-active, cannot concentrate or act impulsively as early as age three tend to become troubled adults unless they learn self-control along the way, said a study on Monday.

An international team of researchers examined young children in New Zealand and Britain and found that the low-scorers on measures of self-control as kids faced more financial, health and substance abuse problems as they aged.

Measures of low self-control in the study of 1,000 New Zealand children included "low frustration tolerance, lacks persistence in reaching goals, difficulty sticking with a task," said the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other indicators were "over-active, acts before thinking, has difficulty waiting turn, restless, not conscientious."

The children who scored lowest on those counts faced a host of problems as adults, "things like breathing problems, gum disease, sexually transmitted disease, inflammation, overweight, and high cholesterol and blood pressure," the study said.

Researchers also saw those children emerge as adults with financial woes, such as credit card debt.

"They also were more likely to be single parents, have a criminal conviction record, and be dependent on alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and harder drugs," said the study.

"These adult outcomes were predictable across the entire spectrum of self-control scores, from low to high," said Duke University psychologist Terrie Moffitt, lead researcher on the study.

The same researchers also looked at a study of 500 pairs of fraternal twins and Britain and tracked the differences between the lower self-control twin and the higher self-control twin as they aged.

"The sibling with lower self-control scores at age five was more likely than their sibling to begin smoking, perform poorly in school and engage in antisocial behaviours at age 12," the study said.

Co-author Avshalom Caspi of Duke University said the findings suggest that an individual's ability to exert self-control has an influence of its own and is independent from the environment in which one is raised.

"This shows that self-control is important by itself, apart from all other factors that siblings share, such as their parents and home life," said Caspi.

The researchers said they found evidence that children who changed their ways and learn to exert more self-control fared better in adulthood than their counterparts, indicating that behaviour changes can show positive results.

"The good news is that self-control can change. People can change," said Alexis Piquero, a professor of criminology at Florida State University who was not a part of the study.

- AFP/de

Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:Kids who misbehave face trouble as adults, says study

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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Too much TV puts children's hearts at risk: study

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

More words, or simply, making new out of the old...?