A new study performed by Australian researchers has finished with some shocking results, concluding that, even with exercise, extended TV watching leads to a higher risk of death.
The researchers tracked 8800 people for six years, and found that those who watched TV for over 4 hours per day had a 46 percent better chance of dying of any cause, and an extremely high 80 percent more likely chance of dying of cardiovascular disease, over those that spent less than two hours a day.
“It’s not the sweaty type of exercise we’re losing,” says David Dunstan, a researcher at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, Melbourne. “It’s the incidental moving around, walking around, standing up and utilizing muscles that [doesn't happen] when we’re plunked on a couch in front of a television.” On average, most of the participants had about 30 minutes of exercise per day.
The results seem to follow the latest trend of studies which has shown that periods of inactivity can lead to slower processing of fats and other chemicals in the body.
The American Heart Association journal says Americans average 5 hours of TV a day.
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ICANN, the private body in charge of overseeing the foundations of the Internet has voted in favor of allowing characters other than the Roman alphabet for websites, including traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew among 16 alphabets.
For the time being however, the changes will only be limited to domains run by national governments such as .us or .uk.
ICANN’s vote came after six years of discussions into the matter. The group says that about 40 percent of all websites are controlled by national governments with the other 60 percent being “top level” domains such as .net, .com and .org.
“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN.
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Iowa senator Tom Harkin recently became chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, following the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. On Monday, Harkin vowed to look into the possibilities of cancer risks from mobile phone use. He said he was concerned that nobody was able to definitively prove that mobile phones could not cause cancer.
“I’m reminded of this nation’s experience with cigarettes. Decades passed between the first warnings about smoking tobacco and the final definitive conclusion that cigarettes cause lung cancer,” Harkin said. It is estimated that 4 billion people worldwide use mobile phones regularly.
Harkin called a hearing of the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, to examine the issue on Monday. “I will pursue this beyond this panel, with the National Institutes of Health,” he said afterward.
However, Harkin should be aware that an enormous amount of research has been conducted already on this issue, and no link has ever been found to prove that mobile phones do cause cancer. Simply saying that nobody has been able to disprove it does not make it more plausible, and it is slightly concerning at least that an elected Senator would pursue something on the grounds that nobody could disprove its existence - but it isn’t surprising.
Of course, there are reports occasionally that do show that there “might” be links in cases, and just recently the Environmental Working Group showed that radio wave emissions vary from one mobile phone brand to the next. Even with this taken into account however, all the research has shown that mobile phones do not emit waves capable of damaging DNA in cells in a human body.
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