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LINQI, China — Their marriages were arranged for cash, but some of the Vietnamese women who have found unlikely Prince Charmings in remote Chinese villages say they are living happily ever after.

“Economically, life is better here in China,” said Nguyen Thi Hang, one of around two dozen women from Vietnam who have married men in Linqi.

The township is a patchwork of hamlets spaced among cornfields deep in the mountains of Henan, one of China’s poorer provinces.

It is some 1,700 kilometres away from Vietnam, but is a new market for an expanding — and sometimes abusive — marriage trade with Southeast Asia.

The business is fuelled by demand from rural Chinese men struggling to find wives in the face of their country’s huge gender imbalance, driven by its limits on family size.

Hang, 30, arrived in Linqi last November, and struggles to communicate with customers at the dusty village store where she sells noodles, cola and cigarettes.

But her basic living conditions — a tiny bedroom with bare concrete walls, and an outdoor long-drop toilet next to a cage of chickens — are an improvement on her previous home, she said.

“We lived in a bad quality brick house in Vietnam, and were farmers so had to work hard in the rice fields,” she said.

Her marriage to a local 22-year-old was arranged by her family, she said, with small ceremonies held in her hometown, and China.

“I knew they gave my family some money, but I did not dare ask my parents about that,” she said.

“My relatives told me to marry a Chinese man, they told me they care for their wives, and I wouldn’t have to work so much, just enjoy life,” she added, smiling at a group of children buying sweets.

Her construction worker husband spends most of the year away from the village and was not present when AFP visited, but her grey-haired father-in-law seemed proud of the newest addition to his family.

“Vietnamese women are just like us, they do any kind of work, and work hard,” said Liu Shuanggen. “It’s not easy to find wives in this place, women are few.”

Leftover men

It is a refrain heard across China, where decades of sex-selective abortions by families who prefer boys to girls now see 118 males born for every 100 females, according to government statistics.

The resulting gender gap has led to an explosion in “bride prices”, payments traditionally made by the groom’s relatives, hitting men in the poor countryside the hardest.

“To get married, the bride’s family will often require a car and a house, so it’s easier to get married if you have more money,” said shopkeeper Wang Yangfang, adding: “In Vietnam, they demand lower prices.”

The typical cost for a Vietnamese woman is 20,000 yuan ($3,200), Linqi residents said — less than a quarter of the local price, and such a bargain that more than 20 Vietnamese women have found homes in the area in recent years.

But the trade is also rife with abuses.

At a shelter in Vietnam, AFP this year spoke to a dozen girls who said they were tricked by relatives, friends or boyfriends and sold to Chinese men as brides.

Myanmar’s government said in a 2011 report that most trafficking from the country is “committed solely with the intention of forcing girls and women into marriages with Chinese men”.

Chinese police “rescued and repatriated” 1,281 abducted foreign women in 2012 alone, most of them from Southeast Asia, the state-run China Daily reported.

Experts say lax law enforcement in rural areas means thousands of other cases probably go undiscovered.

In Linqi, several families refused to talk about their Vietnamese members, with one woman identified as being from the country shooed indoors when reporters arrived.

A driver pointed out a tiny settlement nestled between intimidating peaks as a destination for bought women.

“When they arrive they’ll run off after a few days,” he said. “But it’s not easy to run from here, because it’s so mountainous, and the hills are full of relatives.

“If you go missing, the relatives will contact each other and bring you back.”

Runaway brides

It is impossible to say how many of the women are victims of trafficking.

“There are no precise figures,” said Zhejiang University sociology professor Feng Gang, adding: “It’s likely that the proportion of forced marriages is not large.”

Nonetheless Chinese media regularly report cases of “runaway brides” who flee shortly after their weddings.

Some will have simply changed their minds, or be scams to defraud the men of the bride price, said Feng.

Undoubtedly, some of the marriages are voluntary. The men of Linqi have travelled for work to Vietnam, where Vu Thi Hong Thuy, 21, met her husband.

“We got to know each other, fell in love and got married,” she said.

“In Vietnam... we had to work hard, but we could not earn enough. Now I think life is better as only my husband works.”

Despite currently tense relations between the communist neighbours, a host of “Vietnam dating” websites also fuels the trade, peppered with images of Vietnamese women advertised as “kind” and “obedient”.

“We charge 3,000 yuan to arrange dates in Ho Chi Minh city, and if the two decide to get married, it’s an extra 36,000 to arrange the wedding — including photographs,” said a staff member at one site, declining to be named.

Many also offer replacements if the new bride escapes.

“If the female partner divorces or runs away within the first two months, we are responsible for finding another partner,” she added.

Sportier and arguably even better looking than its convertible sister launched last year, this year’s Jaguar F-Type Coupe is a classy, quick and beguilingly beautiful two-seat sports car that consolidates the resurgent British brand’s sporting credentials.

Though smaller and more focused than the outgoing Jaguar XK, the F-Type is for all intents and purposes its effective successor as the brand’s only current two-door offering. Designed to define the brand’s sporting character by evoking past glory and showcasing new talent, the F-Type harks back to the iconic 1960s E-Type.

The F-Type’s influence and Jaguar more sporting aspirations are already permeating throughout the brand’s other offerings and the establishment of a dedicated Special Vehicles Operations, performance division.

Instant responses

Apart from the 567BHP limited edition Project 7 modified convertible variant introduced at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance motoring event last week, the F-Type R Coupe is the most powerful regular production version of Jaguar’s shapely sports car. Powered by a more powerful version of Jaguar’s charismatically muscular supercharged 5-litre direct injection V8 engine the F-Type R Coupe develops 542BHP at 6,500rpm and 502lb/ft torque at 3,500rpm, compared to its convertible F-Type V8 S sister’s 488BHP at 6,500rpm and 460lb/ft throughout 2,500-5,500rpm.

Fifteen kilogrammes lighter, the F-Type R Coupe 4.2-second 0-100km/h performance also improves upon the drophead version’s by 0.1-seconds, but without sacrificing the shared 11.1l/100km combined fuel efficiency or 259g/km CO₂ emissions ratings.

However, more important than its impressive headline performance statistics is how the F-Type R Coupe delivers them. With a Roots-type mechanically-driven supercharger ensuring the R Coupe delivers instantaneous response and boost from standstill, and continues consistently throughout its rev range, unlike the low-end lag, shorter sweet spot and lower rev limit often associated with exhaust-driven turbochargers.

Vigorously pouncing off-the-line, the R Coupe pulls hard all the way to it’s redline, with a vast and ever-muscularly generous helping of torque to underwrite its volcanic power accumulation. Viciously swift in high revs, the R Coupe benefits from effortlessly versatile mid-range delivery, including 2.4-second 80-120km/h acceleration, which in the real world ensures confidently quick and flexible in-gear overtaking manoeuvres.

Sure-footed

With active exhaust system engaged, the F-Type R Coupe’s thundering and urgent bass-rich V8 growls were amplified for a more evocatively vocal experience as it ferociously accumulated speed on the Motorland race circuit or leaped ahead of slower-moving highway traffic en route to Leida-Alguaire airport in the Spanish Catalan region.

Delivering the R Coupe’s lusty power to its driven rear wheels is an 8-speed automatic gearbox, with a conventional torque converter for seamlessly silky first and second gear shifts. Benefitting from the best that automatic and sequential gearboxes have to offer, the R Coupe’s closely-spaced 8-speed gearbox is snappily concise in the gearbox’ most focused setting and most satisfying when using the steering-mounted manual paddle-shifters.

Channelling its prodigious power through an electronic limited slip rear differential, the R Coupe reapportions power to the driven wheel best able to put down, and was especially useful during wet weather track driving, where one had to smoothly and carefully dial in power when exiting corners to not unstuck the rear tyres.

Additionally, a brake-based torque vectoring system enhances the R Coupe agility through tight and winding routes by preventing wheel-spin, while traction and stability control systems proved un-intrusive yet effective. Powerful 380mm front and 376mm rear ventilated disc brakes are hugely effective, but for track use, optional carbon ceramic 398mm front and 380mm rear brakes offer consistent fade-free performance, and reduces un-sprung weight by 21kg.

Sophisticated agility

A classy and classically-inspired front-engine rear-drive sports car, the fixed-head roof F-Type benefits from added body rigidity over its ragtop sister, which translates to enhanced ride refinement and handling precision. Stable, smooth and planted at speed, the 300km/h-capable R Coupe is a comfortable long-distance companion. Contrary to expectation, it felt more comfortable in its firmer suspension setting over choppy roads, while its comfort-oriented mode was ideal for a more relaxed pace and in city driving.

Riding on sophisticated double wishbone suspension with active dampers, the R Coupe alternatively firms up for fast cornering manoeuvres and becomes more forgiving on straight roads, while variable hydraulic steering assistance delivers more intuitive steering feel and feedback that an electric-assisted system.

With a flick of its quick and beefy steering, the R Coupe turns crisply into a corner, and well-suppressing body lean and weight transfer. Coming back on throttle by apex, the R Coupe digs its sticky 295/30R20 rear tyres into the tarmac, unleashes its vast reserves and bolts onto the straight.

Developing enormously tenacious rear grip in dry weather, the muscular R Coupe however needs to be finessed in the wet. With perfect weight distribution and big footprint, the F-Type is reassuring through fast sweepers and agile through winding switchbacks, while at-the-limit handling is predictable, controllable and progressive. Tidy, alert and stable, the sure-footed F-Type feels buttoned down through corners and on rebound from crests and dips.

Shapely and refined

With shapely aluminium body pulled tight over its stiff and lightweight bonded and riveted frame, the F-Type Coupe is the aesthetically little-altered from the stunning 2011 Jaguar C-X16 concept. Designed with a holistic fluency and three-dimensionality, the F-Type looks right from any angle.

With broad wire-mesh grille and predatory side intake gills leading to a long bonnet stretched over its front-mid engine, the F-Type Coupe’s lines trail to voluptuous Coke-bottle hips and broad shoulders. The F-Type Coupe’s roofline descends dramatically to its fastback rear hatch.

Slim rear lights accentuate its width, while side ports and quad exhausts and massive optional 20-inch alloys underline athletic posture. Additionally, a small rear spoiler rises at speed to increase aerodynamic down-force.

Elegant yet sporty, the F-Type Coupe’s cabin is luxuriously appointed and refined. Finished with red stitched quality leather upholstery, gorgeous suede roof liner and real metal and carbon fibre trim, the Coupe’s classy cabin also features chunky flat-bottom steering wheel, and driver-focused and user-friendly instrumentation.

Well-spaced and accessible, the F-Type’s seats and steering are highly adjustable, comfortable and supportive, while 407-litre boot space is generous for this segment. Adjustable headrest would be a welcome addition, while an automatic tailgate is practical, but perhaps unnecessary for a sports car.

Safety equipment and gadgets are plenty and include touchscreen unit — with access to adjustable dynamic driving modes — reversing camera, blind spot warnings and electronic brake-force distribution, among others.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 5-litre, aluminium block/head, supercharged, V8-cylinders

Bore x stroke: 92.5 x 93mm

Compression ratio: 9.5:1

Valve-train: 32-valve, DOHC, continuously variable valve timing, direct injection

Gearbox: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel-drive, electronic limited-slip differential

Ratios: 1st 4.714; 2nd 3.143; 3rd 2.106; 4th 1.667; 5th 1.285; 6th 1.0; 7th 0.839; 8th 0.667

Final drive: 2.56:1

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 542 (550) [404.5] @ 6,500rpm

Specific power: 108.4BHP/litre

Power -to-weight ratio: 328.5BHP/tonne

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 502 (680) @ 3,500rpm

Specific torque: 136Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight ratio: 412Nm/tonne

0-100 km/h: 4.2-seconds

80-120km/h: 2.4-seconds

Top speed: 300km/h (electronically governed)

Fuel economy, combined: 11.1-litres/100km

Combined CO₂ emissions: 259g/km

Fuel capacity: 72-litres

Length: 4,470mm

Width: 1,923mm

Height: 1321mm

Wheelbase: 2,622mm

Track, F/R: 1,586/1,628mm

Boot capacity: 407-litres

Kerb weight: 1,650kg

Suspension: Double wishbones, coil springs, active dampers, stabiliser bars

Steering: Variable power assistance, hydraulic rack & pinion

Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs, 380/376mm

Tyres, F/R: 255/35R20/295/30R20

By Deborah Netburn

Los Angeles Times (MCT)

What gives geckos the remarkable ability to run upside down across ceilings and stop short on smooth vertical surfaces? You could call it “the hierarchy of hairs”.

In the last 15 years, it has been determined that geckos make use of a relatively weak intermolecular force that exists between atoms known as van der Waals force.

The sole of a gecko foot is covered in tiny folds of skin. Those folds are in turn covered in tiny hairs that branch, and then branch again until the tips of the hairs, called seta, are just a few nanometers across.

The beauty of this structure is that it provides millions of tiny locations where that weak molecular force can be activated so that, amplified millions of times over, it becomes strong enough to allow a gecko to hang from a ceiling indefinitely.

All of that is amazing, but perhaps even more amazing is that despite their hyper-sticky feet, geckos move fast, running at speeds of up to 20 body lengths per second. That means the bottom of a gecko’s foot has to be able to unstick to surfaces just as efficiently as it sticks to them.

In a paper published this week in the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers at Oregon State University shed some insight on how the structure of the gecko’s foot allows it to unstick from a surface with the same ease that it sticks to it.

It turns out that the seta on gecko feet are not just plentiful and minuscule, they are also flexible, curved and come shooting out at a 60-degree angle.

The researchers found that for a gecko to stick on a ceiling or a wall, it pulls the hairs on the sole of its foot sideways just a bit, and because of the angle of the hairs (and how many of them there are), it provides enough force to support the weight of the gecko. But, when the gecko wants to move its foot, all it does is lift straight up, and it pulls away immediately with little extra energy expended.

“The angle allows it to turn the stickiness on and off,” said Alex Greaney, an assistant professor at the Oregon State University College of Engineering and the lead author of the paper, published this week.

The curviness of the seta and their flexibility help the gecko quickly change direction and catch itself. “It’s a very delicate balance between the angle and the flexibility and the curviness,” he said.

Insects and spiders have independently developed a similar system of foot stickiness, but it is unlikely that we humans will ever move with the freedom of the gecko and the fly, unfortunately.

“Geckos are the upper limit of the size of animal that can use this technology,” said Greaney. “There is a definite scaling problem.”

Greaney is interested in working on synthetic adhesives that mimic the gecko’s foot technology more accurately than in the past. He is also interested in studying more about the gecko physiology.

“The system is hierarchical — there are four legs, then toes, then flaps of skin, then hairs that branch and branch again — all this must be balanced with other stages of hierarchy and the muscular physiology of the gecko,” he said. “We want to know even more, how he does it.”

NORWICH, England — Pampering leafcutter ants with fragrant rose petals and fresh oranges may seem an unlikely way to rescue modern medicine, but scientists at a lab in eastern England think it’s well worth trying.

As the world cries out for new antibiotics, researchers at the John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich are also taking a bet on bacteria extracted from the stomachs of giant stick insects and cinnabar caterpillars with a taste for highly toxic plants.

Their work is part of a new way of thinking in the search for superbug-killing drugs — turning back to nature in the hope that places as extreme as insects’ insides, the depths of the oceans, or the driest of deserts may throw up chemical novelties and lead to new drugs.

“Natural products fell out of favour in the pharmaceutical sphere, but now is the time to look again,” says Mervyn Bibb, a professor of molecular microbiology at JIC who collaborates with many other geneticists and chemists. “We need to think ecologically, which traditionally people haven’t been doing.”

The quest is urgent. Africa provides a glimpse of what the world looks like when the drugs we rely on to fight disease and prevent infections after operations stop working.

In South Africa, patients with tuberculosis that has developed resistance to all known antibiotics are already simply sent home to die, while West Africa’s Ebola outbreak shows what can happen when there are no medicines to fight a deadly infection — in this case due to a virus rather than bacteria.

Scant financial rewards and lack of progress with conventional drug discovery have prompted many Big Pharma companies to abandon the search for new bacteria-fighting medicines. Yet for academic microbiologists these are exciting times in antibiotic research — thanks to a push into extreme environments and advances in genomics.

“It’s a good time to be researching antibiotics because there are a lot of new avenues to explore,” said Christophe Corre, a Royal Society research fellow in the department of chemistry at the University of Warwick.

Extreme locations, smart techniques

Marcel Jaspars, a professor of organic chemistry at Britain’s University of Aberdeen, is leading a dive deep into the unknown to search for bacteria that have, quite literally, never before seen the light of day.

With 9.5 million euros ($12.7 million) of European Union funding, Jaspars launched a project called PharmaSea in which he and a team of international researchers will haul samples of mud and sediment from deep sea trenches in the Pacific Ocean, the Arctic waters around Norway, and then the Antarctic.

Like the guts of stick insects or the protective coats of leafcutter ants, such hard-to-reach places house endemic populations of microbes that have developed unique ways to deal with the stresses of life, including attacks from rival bugs.

“Essentially, we’re looking for isolated populations of organisms. They will have evolved differently and therefore hopefully produce new chemistry,” Jaspars explains.

Nature has historically served humankind well when it comes to new medicines. Even Hippocrates, known as the father of Western medicine, left historical records describing the use of powder made from willow bark to help relieve pain and fever.

Those same plant extracts were later developed to make aspirin — a wonder drug that has since been found also to prevent blood clots and protect against cancer.

Pfizer’s Rapamune, used to prevent rejection in organ transplantation, came from a micro-organism isolated from soil collected in Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean, and penicillin, the first ever antibiotic, comes from a fungus.

Cubicin, an injectable antibiotic sold by US-based Cubist, was first isolated from a microbe found in soil collected on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey.

In all, more than half of all medicines used today were inspired by or derived from bacteria, animals or plants.

Yet as Jaspars says: “It’s not just about going to extreme locations, it’s now also about using smart techniques.”

Modern gene-sequencing machines mean it is now possible to read microbial DNA quickly and cheaply, opening up a new era of “genome mining”, which has reignited interest in seeking drug leads in the natural world.

It marks a significant change. In recent decades drug developers have focused on screening vast libraries of synthetic chemical compounds in the hope of finding ones capable of killing bad bugs. Such synthetic analogues are easier to make and control than chemicals from the wild, but they have yielded few effective new drugs.

The problem is they just don’t have the natural diversity of compounds that have evolved over billions of years as defence mechanisms for wild bacteria and fungi.

“We need new scaffolds, new structures and that is what natural products bring,” Corre says.

Five million trillion trillion bacteria

In the chase for new compounds generated by microbes to fight off their foes, scientists have no shortage of targets. Humans share the Earth with an awful lot of bacteria — around 5 million trillion trillion of them, according to an estimate in 1998 by scientists at the University of Georgia. That’s a 5 followed by 30 zeroes.

And as well as hunting in extreme places, there is a lot more scientists can do to explore the potential of better-known bacteria, such as species of Streptomyces found in the soil, long a rich source of antibiotics. Streptomycin, a commonly used antibiotic, was the first cure for tuberculosis and saved many lives from being lost to the lung disease until the bacteria that causes it began to develop resistance.

After publication of the first genome for a strain of Streptomyces bacteria in 2002, researchers can see that much of the antibiotic potential of this vast family of organisms remains untapped.

The DNA analysis showed that up to 30 different compounds could be extracted from just this one strain of Streptomyces — many of them ones that haven’t yet been examined for their bug-killing capacity.

Understanding the genetic coding also opens up the possibility of developing ways of turning microbial genes on or off to generate production of a specific antibiotic.

This can involve removing repressors that silence gene expression or adding activators to turn them on. Scientists are also using synthetic biology to insert genetic sequences into easily managed host cells to produce a certain compound.

The field is exploding. China’s BGI, for example, one of the world’s biggest genomics centres, is sequencing thousands of different bacteria, and similar work at other labs is adding to a mountain of data for scientists to work through.

It also provides insights into how antibiotic resistance occurs, with researchers at Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute this month reporting a new way to identify such gene changes, potentially paving the way to more targeted treatments.

These advances are tempting some large drugmakers back to the antibiotic space, with Swiss-based Roche now looking to apply its skills in genetics and diagnostics in antibacterial research.

France’s Sanofi, too, is also paying more attention by striking a deal with German research centre Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to scour the natural world for new antibiotics, while Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline says it remains committed to the field.

Yet the overall industry effort is paltry when compared with the billions of dollars spent on other disease areas, leaving scientists worried as to whether their promising ideas will find a commercial sponsor to bring them to market.

It is a commercial gap that alarms policy makers, too.

“Antimicrobial resistance is not a future threat looming on the horizon. It is here, right now, and the consequences are devastating,” Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organisation, told a ministerial conference on antibiotic resistance in June.

PUERTO PRINCESA, Philippines — A chorus of chirps filled the room as one of the Philippines’ top crocodile breeders checked on his wards in an overcrowded ‘Noah’s Ark’ for one of the world’s most endangered animals.

The chick-like cries came from metal tanks holding the baby Philippine crocodiles, artificially hatched by incubators from eggs that Glenn Rebong and his team had poached from their mothers’ nests.

“We’re producing so many but there are few opportunities to release them in the wild. So they get stuck here and you get overcrowding,” Rebong told AFP at the two-hectare Wildlife Rescue and Conservation Centre.

Crocodylus mindorensis once lived in large numbers in freshwater lakes and rivers across the Southeast Asian archipelago, and are endemic to the Philippines, but were decimated by illegal hunting for the fashion industry.

Fearful humans mistaking the timid creatures for their man-eating saltwater cousins and killing them, as well as a loss of habitat, have also contributed to their demise.

By the time the Philippine government launched its captive breeding programme in 1987, a survey found only about 250 were estimated to be in the wild.

Today there are likely fewer than that, as the areas they have been seen in recent years have got steadily smaller, according to Rebong.

The International Union of Conservation and Nature lists them as “critically endangered”, which is one step away from extinct in the wild.

The largest collection of the species now live at the centre, while two smaller private breeding operations elsewhere in the Philippines and some small sanctuaries in the wild are also key to the crocodiles’ survival.

Built with Japanese development aid, the now financially struggling centre in the southwestern city of Puerto Princesa is home to about 500 crocodiles, about half of them freshwater and the rest “salties”.

The centre augments a meagre government budget by putting some of the baby and adult crocs on display for tourists, who are warned not to stick their hands or feet into the enclosures.

The annual revenue of 12 million pesos ($274,000) from the tourists’ entrance fees is just enough to pay for the fish that the reptiles are fed, as well as to cover the salaries of 45 staff.

Selling some of the saltwater crocodiles for their leather provides another source of revenue.

However it is illegal to sell the freshwater crocodiles, because of their critically endangered status, and the centre offers sanctuary for them.

The breeding adults are kept inside grassy pens segmented by low concrete walls, where females build mounds of mud and weed for nests.

The staff periodically raids the nests to transfer the eggs to the incubators, increasing their chances of hatching and ensuring an “insurance population” of at least 100 adults is maintained, Rebong said.

Dangers in wild

The species was hunted close to extinction even though the rougher skin on its flanks is inferior to those of Crocodylus porosus, the larger saltwater crocodiles that are a mainstay of the fashion industry.

Growing to not more than three metres, the freshwater crocodiles are shy animals that eat smaller prey than their bigger cousins.

Unlike large crocodiles that defend territory, they tend to slink away from humans and Rebong said there was no record of any member of the species ever killing a person.

However few Filipinos make the distinction between the aggressive salties and the freshwater crocodiles, wanting to kill either if seen.

This has been a big factor in so few having been released into the wild, as has been their relentlessly diminishing natural habitats.

Freshwater swamps that are their favoured homes are rapidly being converted into farms, housing, or ponds for commercial fish culture.

In the nature parks where they have been released, the government has had to run education and incentive programmes to try and ensure they are not hunted down out of fear or for their lucrative skins.

“You can’t simply release them anywhere. We have to make sure they are secure in a particular area, otherwise they could end up getting killed,” Rebong said.

“People moving into a crocodile habitat kill them mostly out of fear. To them, a crocodile is a crocodile.”

In the biggest and most successful release, 50 freshwater crocodiles were let go over the past decade in the Northern Sierra Madre National Park, a sprawling 1,000-hectare spread of tropical rainforest in the north of the main island of Luzon.

Communities in the Northern Sierra Madre went along with the scheme in exchange for jobs and skills training, said park superintendent William Savella.

“They asked for incentives,” Savella told AFP, and 10 locals were eventually hired as forest rangers, helping the government protect their habitat as well as monitoring the crocodiles’ progress.

Another 25 were set free last year at a nature park on the southern island of Siargao, but Rebong said there were no plans to release more into the wild anytime soon because of the habitat restrictions.

“The ultimate measure of success is, they will breed and become a viable adult population [but] even if you breed a million here, they are still considered endangered if you cannot find any in the wild,” he said.

By Melissa Healy

Los Angeles Times (MCT)

Across the world, the excessive consumption of sodium — hiding in breads, soups and snack foods and beckoning from salt shakers everywhere — is the cause of some 1.65 million deaths by heart disease and strokes yearly, including roughly 667,000 “premature” deaths — those before the age of 70 — says a comprehensive new study.

Globally, new research concludes that one in 10 cardiovascular deaths can be attributed to excessive sodium consumption, and one in five of those among people younger than 70.

The study, conducted by an international team led by Dr Dariush Mozaffarian of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

An invited editorial touted the study as a “herculean effort” to glean the effects of excess salt consumption in a broad population. But citing the findings of two studies published alongside the global assessment, University of Alabama vascular expert Dr Suzanne Oparil declared it too early for public health officials to take up the cudgels against dietary sodium.

Daily sodium intake averaged 3.95 grammes per day across the globe, and ranged upward to 5.15 grammes, Mozaffarian’s team found. That level of consumption is well above the range that experts for the Institute of Medicine have concluded is ideal — as little as 1.5 grammes per day for those with high blood pressure (as well as diabetics, African-Americans and those 50 and older) and as much as 2.3 grammes for all others.

Diets high in sodium claimed their highest tolls in a band stretching from the countries of Georgia and the Ukraine and across Central Asia to Russia, Mongolia and China, with slightly lower death rates throughout Asia, the study found. It was lowest in Central America and the Horn of Africa.

The United States, Canada and Europe, where public health campaigns aimed at reducing sodium in foods are already under way, lay roughly at the global midpoint, with just more than 300 deaths per million attributed to high sodium intake.

The study’s seemingly dramatic findings, however, belie continuing controversy over the value of efforts to reduce sodium intake across whole populations.

Among the points of contention is whether diets high in salt cause healthy people to develop high blood pressure or merely exacerbate the condition in those who have it. In contemplating measures to reduce the sodium content in everyday foods, public health officials are also wary of causing harm to patients, including those with heart failure, diabetes or chronic kidney disease, for whom a diet very low in sodium can cause complications and lead to death.

Clinical trials have demonstrated that subjects who reduced their sodium intake lowered their blood pressure. But despite extensive research, debate and efforts at expert consensus, the value of broad sodium-reduction campaigns — as well as the targets such campaigns should aim to reach — remain controversial.

A pair of studies published alongside the global assessment underscore the suspicion that, in broad populations, the relationship between sodium intake, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and death may be quite complicated.

One study published Wednesday found a tenuous connection between sodium intake and hypertension. A second study found that over a roughly 3-year period, those ingesting between 3 and 6 grammes of sodium daily — a span that reflects the global range of sodium intake — were less likely to die or suffer a heart attack or stroke than were those who consumed diets higher or lower in sodium.

In addition, both studies suggested that for some, dietary intake of the mineral potassium may play a role in reducing excessive sodium’s ill effects.

The two studies appearing alongside the global assessment were conducted by researchers at McMaster University’s Population Health Research Institute in Ontario, Canada. Both measured, by indirect means, the sodium-intake levels of more than 100,000 people from at least 17 countries.

In the first of those studies, the link between levels of sodium intake and hypertension was most evident in older subjects, in those who had the highest sodium intake, and in subjects who had hypertension. But in people who fell outside of these groups, researchers found little discernible pattern: A diet that was moderately high in salt — just under 3 grammes a day — was not clearly linked to high blood pressure in this study. And those consuming between 3 and 5 grammes of sodium daily were only slightly more likely to have hypertension.

Those findings led Dr Oparil, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, to conclude that more study is needed before public health campaigns aimed specifically at reducing sodium intake can be safely launched.

The three articles “highlight the need to collect high-quality evidence on both the risks and the benefits of low-sodium diets,” Oparil wrote in an editorial published by NEJM Wednesday. Until clinical trials better flesh out the relationship among dietary sodium, potassium, hypertension and cardiovascular disease, she wrote, “the results argue against a reduction of dietary sodium as an isolated public health recommendation.”

That conclusion drew criticism from one public health expert who has worked with food manufacturing giants to reduce sodium content in widely-consumed processed foods.

“Given the very clear relation between sodium intake and higher blood pressure, and evidence that reducing intakes reduces risk of cardiovascular disease, I think the new findings do not change the basic conclusion that we should be moving towards lower sodium intakes,” said Dr Walter Willett of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, who was not involved in any of the newly published studies.

“The exact optimal intake is not clear. There is no question that some sodium is essential,” Willet added. As a result, he said, “while we move towards lower intakes, we should be conducting additional research to better define the optimal level.”

Have you found your perfect web browser? I haven’t so far. Chrome, Internet Explorer (IE), Safari, Firefox, Opera, I like them all, and yet…

My browser is dear to me for it is the window I have to open wide to see the web, the world, hence its importance. It cannot be overestimated. For a long time I remained faithful, exclusively, to Microsoft’s IE to do my web browsing. Being a Windows user I try, as much as possible, to use Microsoft products for maximum comfort and compatibly with the main operating system. It’s just plain common sense.

However, at one point in my living with IE a colleague convinced me to move to Chrome, the browser that Google launched in 2008. I was immediately attracted by the interface and by the speed of Chrome.

In parallel I kept on experimenting with the other browsers, namely Opera, Safari and Firefox, including the mobile versions of all existing browsers. I was driven by the need to know more and to be able to compare, so as to choose the best, and also to find my way around the browsers used by my friends and clients who work on various platforms, from Apple products to Samsung mobile devices.

To cut a long story short, for indeed a comprehensive comparison of all browsers would be a long story, it is virtually impossible today to opt for just one browser and to live perfectly happy with it. It is not only the comparison per se that is hard to do, but there’s also the fact that what may be true today may be false tomorrow, given the changes in software, the updates and the elusive aspect of Internet security.

I’ll stick to a few examples to illustrate the above and I will also keep it down to the two major browsers, Chrome and IE. It is not a coincidence that these are the two browsers I use, at least in my Windows environment.

There is no doubt that Chrome is fast, but recently it has become “randomly” incompatible with many sites, in particular those that deal with online banking. Moreover, if you are going on Microsoft sites, they would often display pop up screens telling you “This site is better viewed with IE”. You can’t blame them for that, after all IE is their baby; they have to promote it!

To make our life even more miserable, not all browsers treat plug-ins equally. Java plug-in (by Oracle) for example may prove hard to install on one browser, whereas doing it with another browser would be a breeze.

I always check my Gmail using Chrome; it’s fast and foolproof. If I want to play the nice and easy crossword puzzles I find on the site of USA Today Chrome often crashes. I still haven’t found out why. With IE, however, the site never crashes. 

On the other hand I found excellent ad blockers for Chrome; easy to install and efficient, blocking more than 90 per cent of the annoying ads. I have yet to find the same kind of plug-in for IE.

By keeping Chrome and IE and by moving from one to the other, depending on what I may be doing on the web, I got close to an ideal solution, better than just a dull modus vivendi. This being said it takes some time to find out what kind of web activity is better done with this or that browser, but this is how life with IT and the Internet is about.

Statistics about browsers usage in the world are impossible to express in simple form. This is because usage varies depending on what consumers are exactly doing through the browsers: running online applications, doing online shopping, web search, gaming, etc. For instance one given user may do his online banking with IE whereas he would switch to Chrome when it comes to searching for information. Apart from the fact that Chrome and IE certainly are the two big contenders, capturing between them some 70 per cent of the market, there are no conclusive figures.

LONDON — Taking a small daily dose of aspirin can significantly reduce the risk of developing — or dying from — bowel, stomach and oesophageal cancer, according to a large review of scientific studies.

Researchers who analysed all available evidence from studies and clinical trials assessing benefits and harm found that taking aspirin for 10 years could cut bowel cancer cases by around 35 per cent and deaths from the disease by 40 per cent.

Rates of oesophageal and stomach cancer were cut by 30 per cent and deaths from these cancers by 35 to 50 per cent.

Professor Jack Cuzick, head of the centre for cancer prevention at Queen Mary University of London, said the evidence showed that, to reap the benefits of aspirin, people need to take a daily dose of 75 to 100 milligrams for at least five years and probably up to 10 years between the ages of 50 and 65.

No benefit was seen while taking aspirin for the first three years and death rates were only reduced after five years, he and his team reported in a review in the Annals of Oncology journal.

“Our study shows that if everyone aged between 50 and 65 started taking aspirin daily for at least 10 years, there would be a 9 per cent reduction in the number of cancers, strokes and heart attacks overall in men, and around 7 per cent in women,” Cuzick said in a statement about the research.

But the researchers also warned that taking aspirin long-term increases the risk of bleeding in the stomach: among 60-year-olds who take daily aspirin for 10 years, the risk of digestive tract bleeding increases from 2.2 per cent to 3.6 per cent, and this could be life-threatening in a small proportion of people, they said.

“Whilst there are some serious side effects that can’t be ignored, taking aspirin daily looks to be the most important thing we can do to reduce cancer after stopping smoking and reducing obesity, and will probably be much easier to implement,” Cuzick said.

Aspirin, originally developed by the German drugmaker Bayer , is a cheap, over-the-counter drug generally used to combat pain or reduce fever.

The drug reduces the risk of clots forming in blood vessels and can therefore protect against heart attacks and strokes, so it is often prescribed for people who already suffer with heart disease and have already had one or several attacks.

Aspirin also increases the risk of bleeding in the stomach to around one patient in every thousand per year, a factor which has fuelled debate over whether doctors should advise patients to take it as regularly as every day.

Cuzick said the risk of bleeding “depends on a number of known factors which people need to be aware of before starting regular aspirin” and advised people to consult a doctor before embarking on daily medication.

WASHINGTON — It has long been known that the practice of mummification of the dead in ancient Egypt — fundamental to that civilization’s belief in eternal life — was old, but only now are researchers unwrapping the mystery of just how long ago it began.

Researchers on Wednesday said a form of mummification was being carried out there more than six thousand years ago, much earlier than previously thought. They said embalming substances contained in funerary textiles from the oldest-known Egyptian cemeteries showed mummy-making from as early as about 4300BC.

The embalming agents were infused into the linen used to wrap the corpse to provide an antibacterial and protective barrier. It was not as elaborate as the process used much later on the bodies of powerful pharaohs and other elites as well as many ordinary Egyptians, but came more than 1,500 years earlier than Egyptian mummification had been thought to have started.

There is evidence of mummification involving remains from around 2600BC of Queen Hetepheres, mother of Khufu, the pharaoh who commissioned the Great Pyramid at Giza outside Cairo. There also is evidence of linen that contained resin being used to wrap bodies around 2800BC.

The researchers were amazed to find that the plant, animal and mineral components used in preparing the mummies at the cemeteries in Mostagedda in central Egypt were essentially the same embalming “recipe” used thousands of years later at the pinnacle of the ancient Egyptian civilisation.

“I was surprised that the prehistoric Egyptians, who lived in a tribal society 1,000 years before the invention of writing, were already in possession of the empirical science that would later become true mummification,” said one of the researchers, Jana Jones, an Egyptologist at Macquarie University in Australia.

Biochemical analysis identified the components from funerary textiles retrieved from the cemeteries during excavations in the 1920s and 1930s and held in Britain’s Bolton Museum. The “recipe” consisted of a plant oil or animal fat base, with smaller amounts of a pine resin, an aromatic plant extract, a plant gum and petroleum.

“The ancient Egyptians believed the survival of the body after death was necessary in order to ‘live again’ in the afterlife and become immortal. Without the preserved body, this was not possible,” said Stephen Buckley, an archaeological chemist at Britain’s University of York who led the scientific research.

Jones said mummification demanded rare and costly ingredients, some from distant lands. Pine resin in the Mostagedda textiles may have come from southeastern Turkey, many hundreds of kilometres away.

The practice of mummification reached its peak during the era known as the New Kingdom, between about 1550BC and 1000BC, when powerful pharaohs reigned including Ramses II and Thutmose III, as well as the “boy king” Tutankhamen, better known as “King Tut.”

It largely stopped with Christianity’s influence around AD400. Some Christians continued it in some form until it ended completely with the arrival of Arabs spreading the new religion of Islam in AD642.

The study appears in the scientific journal Plos One.

By Karen Kaplan

Los Angeles Times (MCT)

People who jogged or ran for as little as five minutes a day reduced their risk of premature death by nearly one-third and extended their lives by about three years, according to a new study.

Researchers examined the exercise habits of more than 55,000 adults in the Dallas area who were monitored for six to 22 years. About 24 per cent of the adults described themselves as runners.

Compared to those who didn’t run, those who did were 30 per cent less likely to die of any cause during the course of the study. They were also 45 per cent less likely to die as a result of cardiovascular disease, researchers reported Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. (These figures were adjusted to take into account people’s smoking and drinking habits, how old they were when they enrolled in the study, their family’s health history and their other exercise habits.)

Put another way, non-runners were 24 per cent more likely than runners to die during the study period. In fact, the mortality risk associated with not running was greater than the mortality risk associated with being overweight or obese (16 per cent), having a family history of cardiovascular disease (20 per cent), or having high cholesterol (6 per cent).

The researchers divided up the roughly 13,000 runners into five groups based on how many minutes they ran per week. Those in the lowest group ran up to 50 minutes over a seven-day period, and those in the highest group ran for more than 175 minutes over the course of a week.

But the benefits of running were pretty much the same for all runners, according to the study.

“Running even at lower doses or slower speeds was associated with significant mortality benefits,” the researchers found.

They also measured running in other ways — by total weekly distance, frequency, speed and the “total amount of running” (which was calculated by multiplying duration and speed). In all categories, even the runners in the lowest groups were less likely to die during the study than the non-runners.

In order to reduce the risk of premature death, all it took was 30 to 59 minutes of running per week, the researchers calculated.

“This finding has clinical and public health importance,” according to the team from Iowa State University, the University of South Carolina, Louisiana State University and the University of Queensland School of Medicine.

“Because time is one of the strongest barriers to participate in physical activity, this study may motivate more people to start running and continue to run as an attainable health goal for mortality benefits,” they wrote. People who can’t devote 15 or 20 minutes to moderate physical activity each day may appreciate the efficiency of a five-minute run, they added.

If all of the non-runners had taken up running, 16 per cent of the 3,413 deaths that occurred during the study could have been averted, the researchers wrote. That would have saved 546 lives.

It’s not clear that the findings of this study would apply to the nation as a whole. Most of the adults who were tracked were college-educated, middle class or upper-middle class whites. However, the researchers noted that the “physiological characteristics” of the study participants were “similar” to those of samples that are more diverse.

In an editorial that was published alongside the study, researchers from Taiwan urged doctors to use this information to motivate their patients to exercise, even if it’s only for a few minutes a day.

“It is important to promote exercise by stressing the potential harm of inactivity,” they wrote. “Warn patients that inactivity can lead to a 25 per cent increase in heart disease and a 45 per cent increase in cardiovascular disease mortality, not to mention a 10 per cent increase in the incidence of cancer, diabetes and untold depression.”

Three of the editorial’s four authors worked on a 2011 Lancet study that found that even 15 minutes of brisk walking per day could extend a person’s life expectancy. Both that study and the new study are “good news to the sedentary.”

“Exercise is a miracle drug in many ways,” they wrote in the editorial. “The list of diseases that exercise can prevent, delay, modify progression of, or improve outcomes for is longer than we currently realise.”

The study was funded in part by Coca-Cola Co., which has emphasised the role of physical inactivity in the nation’s obesity crisis. The National Institutes of Health helped pay for the study as well.