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We?re accustomed to seeing the faces of pitiful, starving African children staring out at us from advertisements. They?re emaciated, standing on parched and cracked earth, and appealing to us for aid. Now it turns out we may be the cause of their problem.

Emissions spewed out by power stations and factories in North America and Europe may have started the severe droughts that have afflicted regions of Africa. These droughts have been among the worst the world has ever seen, and led to the famines that killed thousands in countries such as Ethiopia in the 1980s.
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Doctors now have concrete evidence that TV watching causes eating disorders in teenage girls. It?s long been suspected that skinny actresses like Ally McBeal make teenage girls feel fat, even if they?re not. Now a major study examining the impact of the introduction of television into two towns in the Pacific islands of Fiji shows that TV watching can be the cause of poor body images in girls. Dr. Anne Becker of Harvard Medical School found that eating disorders among girls on these islands have increased since they were first exposed to television. Fiji is a country where girls traditionally have round shapes and few of them used to worry about losing weight.read more

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Those of us who remember the Presidency of Richard Nixon still wonder what was on that 18 ? minute gap that got erased in one of his White House recordings. As Senator Howard Baker demanded during the investigation of the Watergate break-in, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

Thirty years later, the mystery may finally be solved. “We have decided that the time is right and appropriate to determine whether that conversation can be retrieved or recovered,” says Karl Weissenbach, a Nixon tape archivist at the National Archives. The tapes were last examined in 1974. Since then, technology used to decipher recordings has improved dramatically.
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The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization warns that lung cancer isn?t the only type of cancer caused by smoking and passive smoke inhalation. Cancers of the stomach, liver, cervix and kidney and myeloid leukemia are also linked to smoking. They found no evidence of a link between smoking and breast, endometrial or prostate cancers.

The reviewed more than 3,000 research papers on tobacco smoking and cancer, both active and passive, in order to come to this conclusion. “This is the first time a global organization is saying second-hand smoking is harmful to humans,” says Jonathan Samet of IARC. So don?t sit in too many smoky rooms and don?t listen to anyone who tells you that secondhand smoke isn?t dangerous.
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