SHORT CUTS

Reuters

IX X

XI XII I

How sugar industry

shifted blame to fat
Getty Images

Funded Study To Play

Down Risk To Heart
Anahad OConnor

CLIFF DANCING: A dance group performs

on the cliffs in Zhangjiajie, China, on Tuesday

Aug and July are hottest

months on record: Nasa

t just keeps getting hotter. August has

tied July for the distinction of being the
hottest month since record-keeping
began in 1880, Nasa said in a news release on Monday. And theres a good
chance 2016 will become the third year in
a row of record heat. An increase in
greenhouse gas emissions and El Nio, a
weather pattern that warms parts of the
Pacific Ocean, has contributed to temperature increases in 2016, scientists said
earlier this year. But weve had El Nios
before, they havent given us the recordwarm temperatures like this, said Gavin
Schmidt, the director for Nasas Goddard
Institute for Space Studies. The records
being set continue to stack up.
 August and July are now the hottest
months on record
 Every month since October 2015 has set
a new monthly high-temperature record
 The first six months of this year beat
2015 for the hottest half-year ever recorded.

Now, a fitness app for dogs:

Scientists in Australia claim to have developed the worlds first fitness app for dogs
that can track canines activities, healthrelated issues or behaviours that may be
problematic. Doglogbook app will give
smartphone users to log the activities of
their pet in a usual day like eating,
walking, playing and rate the enjoyment it
gets from each activity.

he sugar industry paid scientists

in the 1960s to play down the link
between sugar and heart disease
and promote saturated fat as the culprit
instead, newly released historical documents show. The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a
researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and published on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart
disease, including many of todays dietary recommendations, may have been
largely shaped by the sugar industry.
They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades, said Stanton Glantz of UCSF. The documents
show that a trade group called Sugar Research Foundation, known today as Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of $49,000 in todays dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease.
The studies used in the review were
handpicked by the group, and the article,
published in the prestigious New England
Journal of Medicine, minimised the link
between sugar and heart health and cast
aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
Even though the influence-peddling
revealed in the documents dates back
nearly 50 years, more recent reports
show that the food industry has continued to influence nutrition science.
Last year, an NYT article revealed
that Coca-Cola had provided millions of
dollars in funding to researchers who sought to play down the link between sugary drinks and obesity. In June, AP reported that candy makers were funding studies that claimed children who eat candy

SUGAR-COATED TRUTH

tend to weigh less than those who do not.

The Harvard scientists and the sugar
executives with whom they collaborated
are no longer alive. One of the scientists
was D Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at US department of agriculture. Another was Dr
Fredrick J Stare, the chairman of Harvards nutrition department.
In response to the JAMA report, Sugar
Association said the 1967 review was published at a time when medical journals did
not typically require researchers to disclose funding sources. The industry should have exercised greater transparency
in its research activities, the association
said. Even so, it defended industry-funded
research as important. It said decades of
research had concluded that sugar does
not have a unique role in heart disease.
The revelations are important because the debate about the relative
harms of sugar and saturated fat continues today, Glantz said. For many decades, health officials encouraged Americans to reduce their fat intake, which led
many people to consume low-fat, highsugar foods that some experts now blame for fueling the obesity crisis.
Hegsted used his research to influence the US governments dietary recommendations, which emphasised saturated fat as a driver of heart disease while
largely characterising sugar as empty calories linked to tooth decay. The fat warnings remain a cornerstone of dietary
guidelines in the US. NYT NEWS SERVICE

A t-shirt to convert body heat into electricity

Washington: Scientists have
developed a new light-weight,
conductive material which
can convert body heat into
electricity, and lead to t-shirts
or arm bands that generate power for wearable electronics.
The prototypes, developed
by researchers at North Carolina (NC) State University in
the US, are lightweight, conform to the shape of the body,
and can generate far more
electricity than previous lightweight heat harvesting tech-

Getty Images

GREEN FABRIC

nologies. The researchers also

identified the optimal site on
the body for heat harvesting.
Wearable thermoelectric
generators (TEGs) generate
electricity by making use of
the temperature differential
between your body and the ambient air, said Daryoosh Vashaee, associate professor at NC
State. Previous approaches
either made use of heat sinks which are heavy, stiff and bulky or were able to generate
only one microwatt or less of

power per square centimetre,

Vashaee said. Our technology generates up to 20 microwatt per square centimetre
and doesnt use a heat sink,
making it lighter and much
more comfortable, he said.
The new design begins
with a layer of thermally conductive material that rests on
the skin and spreads out the
heat. The material is topped
with a polymer layer that prevents the heat from dissipating
through to the outside air. PTI

II III

TIMES

THE TIMES OF INDIA, NEW DELHI

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

21

TRENDS
You can post
longer tweets
from Sept 19
New York: Twitter is making good on its promise to
give users more room in tweets. The micro-blogging website will stop counting media
attachments, including images, GIFs, videos, polls, and
usernames, against the 140character limit starting September 19, allowing users to
compose longer tweets, a media report said.
The new change will not
completely remove the 140character limit. What it really changes is how Twitter
counts the character limit.
Twitter first announced plans to stop counting
extras like photos, videos,
and user polls toward the limit back in May, but gave no
firm date on when the shift
would occur, TheVerge reported on Tuesday.
It is still unclear as to
whether all of these changes will occur simultaneously or in stages.
The extra room for text
will give users more flexibility in composing their messages, the report added. IANS

Insta allows
users to filter
abusive words
San Francisco: Instagram
on Monday began letting
users tackle online abuse
by creating lists of words
that would have comments
hidden from sight at the popular photo and video-sharing service. This feature
lets you list words you consider offensive or inappropriate, Instagram co-founder and chief executive Kevin Systrom said in a blog
post. Comments with these words will be hidden
from your posts.
People can tap on gear
icons in their profiles to
find a freshly added Comments tool where they can
made lists of words they
consider inappropriate.
A default list of words is
provided as an option.
The move comes amid
growing concerns about
abusive or insulting online
comments at media and social networking sites. AFP

Dolphins language resembles

human communication
Getty Images

Will Worley

olphins are capable of

highly developed spoken language which
resembles human communication, scientists have suggested. While it has long been
acknowledged dolphins are of
high intelligence and can
communicate within a larger
pack, their ability to converse
with each other individually
has been less understood.
But researchers at the Karadag Nature Reserve, Feodosia, Crimea believe the pulses,
clicks and whistles of up to
five words made by dolphins are listened to fully by
another before a response is
made. Essentially, this exchange resembles a conversation between two people,
wrote lead researcher Vyacheslav Ryabov in the study
published in Mathematics
and Physics. Ryabov said
each pulse produced by a dolphin is different from another in its time span and the
frequencies it emits. In this
regard, we can assume that

Dolphins listen to what the other is saying before responding

each pulse represents a phoneme or a word of the dolphins spoken language, he

wrote. However: The dolphins speech unfortunately lies beyond the time and frequency characteristics of the
human hearing, and is thus
unavailable to humans.
The study was conducted
on two adult bottlenose captive dolphins, a male named
Yasha and a female called Yana. The pair have lived for 20
years in a swimming pool.
Without food rewards, a special audio system recorded the

exchanges between the dolphins. The noises emitted were

of a different pattern than those produced in a pod. Ryabov
said: The analysis of numerous pulses registered in our
experiments showed that the
dolphins took turns in producing pulse packs and did not
interrupt each other, which gives reason to believe that each
of the dolphins listened to the
others pulses before producing its own. This language
exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language. THE INDEPENDENT

WHY LITHIUM-ION
CELLS HEAT UP
Samsung has recalled 2.5 million
Galaxy Note 7 smartphones after
nding a aw in the battery that resulted in
res. It is the latest problem for the
lithium-ion battery, the power source at the
heart of most modern devices

High storage but prone to overheating

These batteries can store a large amount of energy in a small
space, but the problem of overheating has been seen before
The Layers
of a lithium-ion
battery
Anode
(Graphite)

Battery in use

Charging

OVERHEATING

Lithium ions
migrate to the
cathode

Electricity drives
ions back to
anode

Can be caused if there is

a fault or damage to

the thin separator uid

between the anode and
the cathode

Separated by
conducting
uid

The separation uid can

be very thin in compact

Cathode +
(Typically
includes cobalt,
manganese,
nickel and
oxygen)

If the cathode and anode

touch there can be a
short-circuit, leading
to overheating, and a

batteries that maximise

the active material

thermal runway