Microplastics contained in drinking water pose a “low” risk to human health at current levels, but more research is needed to reassure consumers, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.
Studies over the past year on plastic particles detected in tap and bottled water have sparked public concerns but the limited data appears reassuring, the UN agency said its first report on potential health risks associated with ingestion.
Microplastics enter drinking water sources mainly through run-off and wastewater effluent, the WHO said. Evidence shows that microplastics found in some bottled water seem to be at least partly due to the bottling process and/or packaging such as plastic caps, it said.
“The headline message is to reassure drinking water consumers around the world, that based on this assessment, our assessment of the risk is that it is low,” Bruce Gordon of the WHO’s department of public health, environmental and social determinants of health, told a briefing. Read Complete Article
Fitness Tracker: Humans, once in constant motion as hunters and gatherers, are moving less than ever. At first, this trend seemed like progress: Transferring our heavy and dangerous work to animals, then machines, enabled more people to live longer. As recently as the 1950s, doctors considered exercise dangerous for people over age 40; for heart disease, which was then killing a record number of Americans, they prescribed bed rest. This was partly based on their concept of what “exercise” was: Early physiologists conducted studies on their (typically young, male) graduate students or on military servicemen — and in order to become more fit than they already were, these subjects needed to work out hard. “The mantra was, you have to go to a gym, you have to do high-intensity physical activity,” says Abby C King, a professor of health research and policy and medicine at Stanford University: “this sort of ‘no pain, no gain’ phenomenon.”
That notion began to change with the 1968 publication of “Aerobics,” by Kenneth Cooper, an Air Force physician, who argued that anyone could take measures to prevent heart disease with regular “aerobic” exercise, like swimming or jogging, that increases heart rate and oxygen uptake, “improving the overall condition of the body” and thereby “building a bulwark against many forms of illness and disease.” But it was hard to tease apart whether physical activity made people healthier or whether healthier people were more likely to be active. In a landmark study published in 1989, Cooper and colleagues tried to address this problem by considering subjects’ physical fitness, a metric determined by assessing performance on a treadmill test. Theirs is believed to be the first long-term study of men and women to show that the higher a person’s fitness level, the lower their risk of mortality, especially from cardiovascular disease and cancer. But physical fitness, they noted, is not the same as physical activity, the amount of movement a person gets in the course of their daily life. The only way researchers could learn about the latter was by asking people to describe their behaviour — a much less precise method than measuring their cardiovascular capacity in a lab.
Plans are afoot to detect illegal sand-mining across the country with the help of ISRO satellites and also augment water and fodder in forest areas to prevent man-animal conflict, Union Environment and Forest Minister Prakash Javadekar said Saturday.
The government plans to use satellite image technology by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) to map every area and river to check illegal sand-mining. Javadekar said this to reporters at Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology (SACON), near here.
“With the help of ISRO technology, we will know where the sand is deposited and the government could auction it, thereby the mafia is avoided and a sustainable sand-mining will be in place,” he said in response to a question on sand-mining, which has become a major challenge. To another question on increasing man-human conflict due to encroachment of forest area, particularly elephant corridor and not abiding by HACA (Hill Area Conservation Authority) rules in Western Ghats, Javdekar said the farmers had told him that unless enough water and fodder was provided, the conflict would continue. Read Complete Article
P V Sindhu on Sunday became the first Indian to win badminton World Championships gold by beating familiar rival Nozomi Okuhara of Japan in a lop-sided final Basel on Sunday.
The Indian won 21-7 21-7 in the summit clash that lasted just 38 minutes.
Two years after being robbed off the gold by Okuhara in an epic 110-minute final at Glasgow that went down as one of the greatest battles in badminton history, Sindhu finally exorcised the ghost of that heart-wrenching loss with a completely dominating win over the same opponent.
It was Sindhu’s fifth World Championships medal — joint most for a woman singles player with former Olympics and world champion Zhang Ning of China — to go with the two successive silvers and a couple of bronze medals. Read Complete Article
Once a dominant smartphone brand, Motorola lost its market share as other Chinese brands saw a sudden surge and challenged its monopoly in the budget and midrange smartphone segment in India. But now, with back-to-back launches, the company seems to have somewhat got its mojo back. After earlier launching the photography-centric Motorola One Vision (review), Motorola, now owned by Chinese electronics major Lenovo, on August 23 launched the videography-centric Motorola One Action (Rs 13,999) in India.
The Motorola One Vision and Motorola One Action are similar in design, features and specifications, but they have different sets of optics for different audiences. As the name suggests, the Motorola One Action aims to replace your action cameras by providing a dedicated ultra-wide sensor for videography. We reviewed this phone to see if it can really replace action cameras like GoPro, and how it fares in comparison with the Motorola One Vision, especially in imaging performance:
Camera
The Motorola One Action packs a triple-camera set-up on the back, featuring a 12-megapixel primary sensor of an f/1.8 aperture with phase detection autofocus (PDAF), a 16MP ultra-wide angle sensor stacked in 90 degrees, and a 5MP depth sensor. By comparison, the Motorola One Vision has a dual-camera set-up on the back — a 48MP primary sensor of an f/1.7 aperture with PDAF and optical image stabilisation (OIS), and a 5MP depth sensor.
Speaking of the Motorola One Action’s ultra-wide angle sensor, claimed to be an action camera, its 90-degree stacking helps capture an ultra-wide field of view (FoV) in the portrait orientation. Unlike other smartphones with ultra-wide angle cameras to record videos in the landscape mode, the one in the Motorola One Action allows video recording in portrait, without the need to tilt the phone to landscape. Thought the sensor lacks OIS, it supports electronic image stabilisation (EIS), which reduces motion shakes and allowed stable video recordings — but this is at the expense of a cropped field of view.
In the action camera mode, the phone supports video recording in up to fullHD (1920 x 1080) resolution at 60 frames per second in a 16:9 aspect ratio. There is also an option to record videos in the 21:9 aspect ratio, but it is limited to 30fps only.
Leading smartphone brands such as Xiaomi, Micromax, Redmi (a sub-brand Xiaomi) and OnePlus are set to disrupt the smart television space, which has so far been dominated by electronics giants Sony, LG, Samsung and Panasonic. Internet-enabled smart TVs, which are a relatively new segment in India, are expected to see a major boost on the back of lower data tariffs, which have resulted in a massive uptick in online video consumption.
While Xiaomi is already present in this space, its sub-brand Redmi, whose smartphones are quite popular in India, is expected to launch smart TVs soon. Given the value it offers for its price point in the smartphone space, Mi TVs are also likely to be available at competitive prices.
This week, OnePlus, the maker of the hugely popular OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T handsets, too announced that it would come out with smart TVs in September. The Chinese phone-maker is expected to woo consumers with smart TVs that are as aggressively priced as its feature-rich phones. Read Complete Article
Should Aadhaar be used as KYC for social media accounts? We have recently seen a debate on this question with even the courts hearing arguments in favour and against such a move. The case began in Madras High Court and later Facebook moved the SC seeking transfer of the petition to the Apex court. The original petition was filed in July, 2018 and sought linking of Aadhaar numbers with user accounts to further traceability of messages. Before we try and answer this question, we need to first understand the differences between the different types of data on social media and messaging platforms. If a crime happens on an end to end cryptographically secure channel like WhatsApp the police may request the following from the provider to help solve the case:
1.Identity data: Phone numbers of the accused. Names and addresses of the accused.
2.Metadata: Sender, receiver(s), time, size of message, flag identifying a forwarded messages, delivery status, read status, etc.
3.Payload Data: Actual content of the text and multimedia messages. Readmore
Breaking the 10-year history of naming Android releases after desserts, Google on Thursday announced it had officially named the next version as just Android 10.
“First, we’re changing the way we name our releases. Our engineering team has always used internal code names for each version, based of tasty treats, or desserts, in alphabetical order,” said Sameer Samat, VP of Product Management, Android, in a statement. The naming tradition has become a fun part of the release each year externally too, like Android Lollipop or Marshmallows. New Android 10
“As a global operating system, it’s important that these names are clear and relatable for everyone in the world. So, this next release of Android will simply use the version number and be called Android 10,” Samat explained.
“While there were many tempting ‘Q’ desserts out there, we think that at version 10 and 2.5 billion active devices, it was time to make this change,” he added.
Maharashtra HSC result 2019: Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) has declared Maharashtra HSC result/ Maharashtra 12th Supplementary result 2019 today (August 23). A total of 128,914 students took the examination that was conducted in July. Candidates can check their marks through the website mahresult.nic.in.
Drug firm Glenmark Pharmaceuticals on Friday said its US arm has received the final approval from the US health regulator for its Fulvestrant injection used for the treatment of advanced breast cancer.
The product is a generic version of AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP’s Faslodex Injection in the same strength, the company said in a statement.
Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Inc USA has been granted final approval by the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) for Fulvestrant injection in the strength of 250 mg/5 mL (50 mg/mL), it said.
According to IQVIA sales data for the 12-month period ending June 2019, the Faslodex injection, 250 mg/5 mL (50 mg/mL) brand and and all available therapeutic equivalents achieved annual sales of approximately $549.9 million, Glenmark said.
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