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CHICAGO — Nearly 3 out of 4 US children and young adults consume at least some caffeine, mostly from soda, tea and coffee. The rate didn't budge much over a decade, although soda use declined and energy drinks became an increasingly common source, a government analysis finds.

Although even most preschoolers consume some caffeine-containing products, their average was the amount found in half a can of soda, and overall caffeine intake declined in children up to age 11 during the decade.

The analysis is the first to examine recent national trends in caffeine intake among children and young adults and comes amid a US Food and Drug Administration investigation into the safety of caffeine-containing foods and drinks, especially for children and teens. In an online announcement about the investigation, the FDA notes that caffeine is found in a variety of foods, gum and even some jelly beans and marshmallows.

The probe is partly in response to reports about hospitalisations and even several deaths after consuming highly caffeinated drinks or energy shots. The drinks have not been proven to be a cause in those cases.

The new analysis, by researchers at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, shows that at least through 2010, energy drinks were an uncommon source of caffeine for most US youth.

The results were published online Monday in the journal Paediatrics.

The American Academy of Paediatrics recommends against caffeine consumption for children and teens because of potentially harmful effects from the mild stimulant, including increases in heart rate and blood pressure, and worsening anxiety in those with anxiety disorders.

Dr. Stephen Daniels, chairman of the academy's nutrition committee, said caffeine has no nutritional value and there's no good data on what might be a safe amount for kids.

Evidence that even very young children may regularly consume caffeine products raises concerns about possible long-term health effects, so parents should try to limit their kids' intake, said Daniels, head of paediatrics at the University of Colorado's medical school.

Soda was the most common source of caffeine throughout the study for older children and teens; for those up to age 5, it was the second most common after tea. Soda intake declined for all ages as many schools stopped selling sugary soft drinks because of obesity concerns.

NEW YORK ––Young women who smoke may have an increased risk of a common type of breast cancer, according to a new study.

Researchers found that women between 20 and 44 years old who had smoked a pack of cigarettes per day for at least 10 years were 60 per cent more likely than those who smoked less to develop so-called oestrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.

Smokers were not more likely to develop a less common form of breast cancer known as triple-negative breast cancer, which tends to be more aggressive.

“I think that there is growing evidence that breast cancer is another health hazard associated with smoking,” Dr. Christopher Li told Reuters Health.

Li is the study’s senior author from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle.

Previous research has found links between smoking and breast cancer, Li and his colleagues note in the journal Cancer. The studies looking at breast cancer among younger women have produced conflicting results, however.

They also say there are still questions about whether smoking is linked to an increased risk of some types of breast cancer but not others.

“I think there is a growing appreciation that breast cancer is not just one disease and there are many different subtypes,” Li said. “In this study, we were able to look at the different molecular subtypes and how smoking affects them.”

He and his team analysed data from young women in the Greater Seattle area who were diagnosed with breast cancer between 2004 and 2010.

Of those women, 778 were diagnosed with the more common oestrogen receptor-positive type and 182 had the less common but more aggressive triple-negative type.

The researchers also included information from 938 cancer-free women for comparison.

According to the National Cancer Institute, about one in every eight American women will eventually develop breast cancer — but the risk is lower at younger ages. Only about one in every 227 30-year-old women — or less than half a per cent of them — will develop breast cancer before the age of 40, for example.

In this study, young women who had ever smoked were about 30 per cent more likely to develop any type of breast cancer, compared to women who had never smoked.

When the researchers looked at each type of breast cancer separately, there was no link between smoking and triple-negative breast cancer.

But women who were recent or current smokers and had smoked for at least 15 years were about 50 per cent more likely to have oestrogen receptor-positive breast cancer, compared to women who had smoked for fewer years.

And those women who reported smoking at least one pack a day for 10 years were 60 per cent more likely to have that type of cancer, compared to lighter smokers.

It could be that some of the substances found in cigarettes act like estrogens, which would promote estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer, the researchers write.

“There are so many different chemicals in cigarette smoke that can have so many kinds of effects,” Li said.

Geoffrey Kabat cautioned that some of the effects found in the new study are small and not clear-cut.

HO CHI MINH CITY — Deep in the Mekong Delta, two Frenchmen have their heads buried in a sack of cacao beans. The pair — co-founders of Vietnam’s first artisan chocolate maker — resurface, murmuring appreciatively.

The sweet-toothed entrepreneurs — who quit their day jobs to set up award-winning chocolate company Marou — buy three out of four of 64-year-old farmer Vo Thanh Phuoc’s sacks of dried, fermented cacao, paying a premium on the market price for the better-than-average beans.

“When we started, the farmers thought we were crazy,” Marou’s co-founder Vincent Mourou told AFP as he nibbled on a cacao nib. Every sack of beans is individually checked as the smell, colour, texture and taste give a good indication of the chocolate to come.

“Now, they try the beans too.”

Cacao was likely first introduced in Vietnam by French colonialists in the late 19th century, but never took off as a cash crop.

As demand for high-quality chocolate rises globally — particularly in emerging markets — while supply from traditional producers like Ivory Coast falls due to ageing tree stock and other problems, the industry is eyeing communist Vietnam as a new supplier.

Cacao prices hit two-and-a-half-year highs in late January amid concerns over inventory, and some industry figures are warning of a possible deficit of one million tonnes by 2020.

The chocolate industry is “desperate to diversify” its supply of beans, which would lessen the risk of supply crunches owing to disease or political unrest, said Chris Jackson, lead economist with the World Bank in Hanoi.

Current production in the communist country is just 5,000 tonnes per year, compared to the roughly 1.4 million tons exported by Ivory Coast, according to the International Cocoa Organisation.

But this needs to grow to give the cacao industry a chance in Vietnam, said Gricha Safarian, managing director of Puratos Grand-Place, a Belgian joint venture which produces the majority of chocolate used locally in Vietnam — by hotels, bakeries and ice cream companies — and exports high-quality chocolate and cacao beans.

“Vietnam has a place to take as a medium-size producer of quality beans,” said Safarian, who has worked in Vietnam’s nascent cacao industry for two decades.

“Year by year the market is going to be more rewarding for quality beans because of this coming shortage” as demand for quality chocolate rises, especially in Asia, he said.

Vietnam’s chocolate has “a different flavour profile — the Vietnamese beans are rather different from the African bean,” which makes it stand out in the market, he said.

Chocolate crossroads

“The cacao sector in Vietnam is really at a crossroads — it could go for quality or quantity,” said Vien Kim Cuong, programme manager for Swiss NGO Helvetas, which works with cacao farmers on certification.

The country is well-known for cheap agricultural exports like coffee — it provides 50 per cent of the world’s low-end Robusta beans — and catfish so cheap it is repeatedly hit by US anti-dumping measures.

Marou and Puratos Grand-Place want the government to take a different, more upmarket route with the cacao sector — they are trying to add value locally and build a reputation for Vietnamese luxury chocolate.

“We transform an agricultural product, the cacao bean plus sugar, into a high-quality chocolate that we position as a premium product on the export market,” said Safarian — whose Made in Vietnam chocolate is found in top restaurants from Paris to Tokyo.

For Marou co-founder Samuel Maruta, setting up an artisan chocolate company in Vietnam — not known for cacao, chocolate or even high-quality export goods — was a risk.

But the pair have successfully positioned their Vietnamese single-origin chocolate as part of a growing bean-to-bar revolution, a rebellion against homogeneity in an industry dominated by major players like Kraft and Italy’s Ferrero.

Mass-produced chocolate can be “incredibly soulless”, said Maruta, a world apart from the rich, fruity, spicy notes found in a bar of the company’s 78 per cent dark chocolate.

From their Ho Chi Minh City-based factory, they’re now exporting close to two tonnes of chocolate a month, to some 15 countries.

The pair want Vietnam “to push quality cacao, so that Vietnamese cacao is known for quality and not quantity”, Maruta said.

Officials at state department VinaCacao said they aimed to increase cacao production some five-fold by 2020, but declined to provide further details.

Major buyers including industry leader MARS are eager for Vietnam to grow more higher-quality “certified” beans — MARS has pledged to use only certified beans by 2020.

“Vietnam will play a role in providing certified quality beans to MARS,” which is working locally to train farmers and research new cacao strains, MARS Vietnam cocoa development manager Dinh Hai Lam told AFP.

The only other country to go into cacao production in recent years is Indonesia, which focuses only on producing a high volume of low-end, unfermented beans.

Cacao can be a good earner for farmers — but only if they can get a premium for their beans, and the premium is based on the quality, Safarian said.

Ironically, the people who are the most difficult to convince about the quality of Vietnamese chocolate are... Vietnamese.

“The Vietnamese consumer does not trust the product of his own country yet,” Safarian said, referring to consumers’ preference for imported goods which are perceived as higher quality.

“This will change,” he said. “You cannot approach the chocolate market in Vietnam as you approach it in France or Belgium,” he said, adding that while there is not likely to be much of a market for praline, the emerging middle class is already developing a taste for chocolate.

“Being in this business for 30 years, I have still never met anyone who doesn’t like chocolate at first bite.”

LONDON — Stronger winds which have cooled the surface of the Pacific Ocean could explain what is likely to be a temporary slowdown in the pace of global warming this century, researchers said.

Last year, scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the pace of temperature rise at the Earth’s surface had slowed over the past 15 years, even though greenhouse gas emissions, widely blamed for causing climate change, have risen steadily.

Past research has linked the slowdown in the pace of warming to factors such as a build-up of sun-dimming air pollution in the atmosphere or a decline in the sun’s output. Others suggest the deep oceans may be absorbing more heat.

A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday said stronger Pacific trade winds — a pattern of easterly winds spanning the tropics — over the past two decades had made ocean circulation at the Equator speed up, moving heat deeper into the ocean and bringing cooler water to the surface.

The winds have also helped drive cooling in other ocean regions.

“We show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming,” said the study, led by scientists from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

“The net effect of these anomalous winds is a cooling in the 2012 global average surface air temperature of 0.1-0.2 degrees Celsius, which can account for much of the hiatus in surface warming since 2001.”

Cooling down

The study’s authors, including scientists from other research centres and universities in the United States, Hawaii and Australia, used weather forecasting and satellite data and climate models to make their conclusions.

“This hiatus could persist for much of the present decade if the trade winds trends continue; however, rapid warming is expected to resume once the anomalous wind trends abate,” the study said.

“If the anomalously strong trade winds begin to abate in the next few years, the model suggests the present hiatus will be short-lived, with rapid warming set to resume soon after the wind trends reverse,” it added.

Commenting on the study, Richard Allan, professor of climate science at Britain’s University of Reading, said: “These changes are temporarily masking the effects of man-made global warming.”

The fact that temperatures have risen more slowly in the past 15 years despite rising greenhouse gas emissions has emboldened sceptics who challenge the evidence for man-made climate change and question the need for urgent action.

The IPCC does not expect the hiatus to last and has said temperatures from 2016-35 were likely to be 0.3-0.7 degrees Celsius warmer than in 1986-2005.

“More than 93 per cent of the warming of the planet since 1970 is found in the ocean,” said Steve Rintoul at Australia’s CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and lead author of the chapter on oceans in the IPCC’s latest climate report.

“If we want to understand and track the evolution of climate change we need to look in the oceans. The oceans have continued to warm unabated, even during the recent ‘hiatus’ in warming of surface temperature.”

The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh
Boston/New York: Mariner Books, 2006, 329 pp

Not often does an author’s choice of setting play such an overpowering role as in Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide”.

In this novel, the unique environment of the Sundarbans shapes the plot and characters in indelible ways, and gives rise to provocative themes.

In a very visceral way, the story reveals the tension between different kinds of knowledge, different survival strategies, different approaches to nature and different concepts of progress.

The Sundarbans is an archipelago in West Bengal, southeast of Kolkata (Calcutta), with thousands of islands demarcated by rivers and streams as they head for the sea.

It is “a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable… There are no borders here to divide fresh from salt water… The tides reach as far as two hundred miles inland and every day thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater, only to reemerge hours later.” (pp. 6-7)

The peculiar eco-system enables amazing phenomenon, like a rainbow of the moon, but also poses unfathomable dangers.

Besides facing poverty and lack of state services, the people who inhabit these islands fall prey to snakes, crocodiles and tigers hiding in the dense mangrove forests, but more devastating are the relentless tides which storms periodically whip into gigantic waves sweeping away everything in their path.

There are natural wonders and adventures galore to be found here, and Ghosh describes many fascinating and suspenseful scenes, but he is most concerned with the psychological and spiritual impact of the environment on human beings.

It is its very remoteness that draws people there, and the reader enters the Sundarbans through the eyes of “outsiders” whose presence highlights chasms in Indian society — urban vs. rural, prosperous vs. poor, educated vs. illiterate, as well as the hierarchy of class and caste.

In the 1950s, as newlyweds, Nilima and Nirmal fled Kolkata to seek refuge in the area after the latter’s leftist activities got him in trouble with the authorities.

They stayed on, she heading a women’s centre and hospital for the local population, he as school headmaster, but tension persisted between her social work and his revolutionary dreams of radical change.

As the novel opens, half a century later, Kanai, their urbane nephew who runs a successful translation agency in Kolkata, has been summoned by Nilima to read the notebook Nirmal left behind when he died, which provides a story within a story, giving the novel added historical depth and background on the geology and mythology of the area. (Interestingly, the local religion and legends reflect the area’s mixed Muslim-Hindu heritage.)

On the way, Kanai encounters Piya, an American of Indian descent coming to study river dolphins. None of them will ever be the same after their time in the Sundarbans.

Piya needs Kanai as a translator, but she is more impressed by her guide, Fokir, an illiterate fisherman who knows every inch of the seemingly infinite network of rivers, including when and where the dolphins gather.

“I’ve worked with many experienced fishermen before but I’ve never met anyone with such an incredible instinct. It’s as if he can see right into the river’s heart,” she says. (p. 221)

Though they speak no common language, they work together perfectly.

In contrast, Kanai, who knows six languages, cannot navigate this strange environment. He undergoes a humbling experience when lost in the mangrove jungle, an epiphany which teaches him that words are not everything.

His journey in the wilderness mirrors that of his uncle, as recorded in his notebook, who also discovered that words were powerless to save those he loved — a group of refugees from the Bangladesh war, who were trying to establish a new community on an island designated as a wildlife reserve.

Suddenly, the government, which had been oblivious to their dispossession for a decade, was on the scene in a massive police operation to evict them.

To the refugees, it seemed “that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil”. (p. 217)

As Ghosh unmasks injustice and human frailty, as he weaves between the historical past, the mythological past and the present, the sheer beauty of his prose takes your breath away, as do the turn of events, the human emotions, dilemmas and conflicts encompassed in this novel.

WASHINGTON — The US military is spending millions to build “vanishing” technology that self-destructs on the battlefield, like the tape recorder that goes up in smoke in the “Mission: Impossible” television show.

The Pentagon’s hi-tech research arm has awarded contracts worth more than $17 million in the past two months to prevent micro-electronic sensors and other devices from falling into enemy hands.

The companies have been tasked to develop “transient” electronics that could be destroyed remotely or crumble into tiny pieces.

In the 1960s series “Mission: Impossible”, the lead spy always receives top-secret instructions on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, before being told: “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”

Now, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a 21st century version of the recorder, backing experimental projects under the Vanishing Programmable Resources Programme.

The use of small, sophisticated electronics in everything from radios to weapons has increased dramatically for American forces, but it is “nearly impossible to track and recover every device”, according to a DARPA contract document released last month.

“Electronics are often found scattered across the battlefield and might be captured by the enemy and repurposed or studied,” it said, warning America is in danger of losing its technological edge.

The new programme aims to solve the problem by creating systems “capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner”, rendering the devices useless to the enemy.

DARPA is known for its ambitious research, some of which has resulted in breakthroughs useful for both military and civilian use, including the creation of the Internet and GPS navigation system.

For its latest project, the agency is reinterpreting the idea of a “kill switch”, which dates back to the Cold War, when “permissive action link” devices were introduced to prevent a rogue nuclear launch.

Unlike ordinary off-the-shelf electronics that can last indefinitely, the agency “is looking for a way to make electronics that last precisely as long as they are needed”, said programme manager Alicia Jackson.

The device could be destroyed either by a signal sent by commanders or prompted by “possible environmental conditions” such as a certain temperature, she said.

The nascent technology is potentially revolutionary, with possible applications for medicine as well as combat, officials said.

In 2012, DARPA used similar technology to create a micro device — made of ultra-thin sheets of silicon and magnesium covered in silk — to be implanted harmlessly into the body to prevent infection from surgery.

Efforts to build degradable electronics have tended to rely on polymeric or biological materials, and that has resulted in poor electronic performance and “weak mechanical properties”, according to the agency.

The project is still a long away from being deployed in a real battle, and will require years of research by private industry.

In the latest contract for the programme, announced on January 31, DARPA provided $3.5 million to IBM for a proposal to use a radio frequency to shatter a glass coating on a silicon chip, reducing it to dust.

The Palo Alto Research Centre in California received $2.1 million to build devices with dummy circuits that would be triggered to “crumble into small, sand-like particles in a fraction of a second”.

Defence giant BAE Systems was awarded $4.5 million on January 22 and Honeywell Corporation won a $2.5 million contract on December 3 for more “vanishing” technology research.

And DARPA announced in December a $4.7 million contract for SRI International to develop “SPECTRE” batteries designed to self-destruct.

LONDON — They were a British family on a day out — almost a million years ago.

Archaeologists have announced that they have discovered human footprints in England that are between 800,000 and 1 million years old — the most ancient found outside Africa, and the earliest evidence of human life in northern Europe.

A team from the British Museum, London’s Natural History Museum and Queen Mary College at the University of London uncovered imprints from up to five individuals in ancient estuary mud at Happisburgh on the country’s eastern coast.

British Museum archaeologist Nick Ashton said the discovery — recounted in detail in the journal PLOS ONE — was “a tangible link to our earliest human relatives”.

Preserved in layers of silt and sand for hundreds of millennia before being exposed by the tide last year, the prints give a vivid glimpse of some of our most ancient ancestors.

They were left by a group, including at least two children and one adult male. They could have been be a family foraging on the banks of a river scientists think may be the ancient Thames, beside grasslands where bison, mammoth, hippos and rhinoceros roamed.

University of Southampton archaeology professor Clive Gamble, who was not involved in the project, said the discovery was “tremendously significant”.

“It’s just so tangible,” he said. “This is the closest we’ve got to seeing the people.”

“When I heard about it, it was like hearing the first line of [William Blake’s hymn] ‘Jerusalem’ — ‘And did those feet, in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green?’ Well, they walked upon its muddy estuary.”

The researchers said the humans who left the footprints may have been related to Homo antecessor, or “pioneer man”, whose fossilised remains have been found in Spain. That species died out about 800,000 years ago.

Ashton said the footprints are between 800,000 — “as a conservative estimate” — and 1 million years old, at least 100,000 years older than scientists’ earlier estimate of the first human habitation in Britain.

That is significant because 700,000 years ago, Britain had a warm, Mediterranean-style climate. The earlier period was much colder, similar to modern-day Scandinavia.

Natural History Museum archaeologist Chris Stringer said that 800,000 or 900,000 years ago Britain was “the edge of the inhabited world”.

“This makes us rethink our feelings about the capacity of these early people, that they were coping with conditions somewhat colder than the present day,” he said.

“Maybe they had cultural adaptations to the cold we hadn’t even thought were possible 900,000 years ago. Did they wear clothing? Did they make shelters, windbreaks and so on? Could they have the use of fire that far back?” he asked.

Scientists dated the footprints by studying their geological position and from nearby fossils of long-extinct animals including mammoth, ancient horse and early vole.

John McNabb, director of the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton — who was not part of the research team — said the use of several lines of evidence meant “the dating is pretty sound”.

Once uncovered, the perishable prints were recorded using sophisticated digital photography to create 3-D images in which it’s possible to discern arches of feet, and even toes.

Isabelle De Groote, a specialist in ancient human remains at Liverpool John Moores University who worked on the find, said that from the pattern of the prints, the group of early humans appeared to be “pottering around”, perhaps foraging for food.

She said it wasn’t too much of a stretch to call it a family.

“These individuals travelling together, it’s likely that they were somehow related,” she said.

Research at Happisburgh will continue, and scientists are hopeful of finding fossilised remains of the ancient humans, or evidence of their living quarters, to build up a fuller picture of their lives.

The footprint find will form part of an exhibition, “Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story”, opening at the Natural History Museum next week.

The footprints themselves, which survived for almost 1 million years, won’t be there. Two weeks after they were uncovered, North Sea tides had washed them away.