Young people are being warned to treat the caffeine drink “with caution” after Australian research revealed it could increase risk of cardiac arrests and even death. The study found one can of sugar-free Red Bull can cause the blood to become sticky — an indicator of cardiovascular problems such as stroke. Lead researcher Scott Willoughby, from Adelaide Hospital, yesterday warned that the drink “could be deadly” for people with heart abnormalities. While the prevalence of sudden cardiac death is very low, “it could be more deadly for people who have an unknown cardiovascular abnormality”, Dr Willoughby said.
Red Bull Heart Attack Risk
Credit market turmoil has driven the U.S. into a recession and may topple some of the nation’s biggest banks, said Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “The worst is yet to come in the U.S.,” Rogoff, a Harvard University professor of economics, said in an interview in Singapore today. “The financial sector needs to shrink; I don’t think simply having a couple of medium-sized banks and a couple of small banks going under is going to do the job.” The U.S. housing slump has triggered about $500 billion in credit market losses for banks globally and led to the collapse and sale of Bear Stearns Cos., the fifth-largest U.S. securities firm. Bonds of regional banks such as National City Corp. and Keycorp are under pressure on expectations of more fallout. Rogoff, 55, said the government should nationalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s biggest mortgage-finance firms.
Large U.S. Banks May Fail Amid Recession, Rogoff
The magazine industry, already facing a decline in newsstand sales and falling ad revenue, is being besieged by a new foe: digital piracy. A fledgling website called
Mygazines.com encourages people to copy and upload popular magazines that are currently on newsstands. Visitors can read high-quality digital copies of dozens of current titles, including People, Men’s Health and The Economist, in their entirety. The site, with some 16,000 registered users as of Friday, is a “flagrant” violation of copyright laws, according to legal experts — but it is run by an offshore company of specious origin, making it difficult to shut down. “It’s pretty hard to see how it’s anything other than a straightforward set of copyright violations,” said Jeffrey Cunard, an intellectual property lawyer with Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Washington. “There are entire magazines with no commentary, no criticism — clearly not a case of classic fair use.” Magazines routinely make some or all of their articles available online for free, but they are in control of how much they release, as well as any advertising they sell.
New magazine-sharing site may violate copyrights
Brian Eno’s career has a kind of “gas and brake” quality. A performer of fine rock with Roxy Music and on solo records, he also produced maybe the biggest stadium anthems ever, namely for U2. That’s a gas. But his artier projects — from the groundbreaking ambient records like Music for Airports (1978) to his more recent digital experiments — constitute hitting the brakes in pop’s fast lane. So where’s Eno now? Still splendidly, enviably having his cake and eating it. Coming off console duties for Coldplay’s latest bazillion-seller, Eno has re-teamed with Talking Heads founder and fellow renaissance person David Byrne for the new release Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (
songs are available for free streaming at its website). Their union (Eno produced three Heads albums) yielded so much smart, danceable, and joyfully quirky music a quarter-century ago. Is it time then, perhaps, for something unhurried and reflective? Nah. It’s a gas. (via veryshortlist.com)
From
Outside.in, Radar’s powered by a brand-new Yahoo(!) platform that geo-pinpoints pro/amateur news and blog entries, then serves you aggregated updates on the local-est of minutiae: happenings within a thousand-foot radius of your crib. After entering your location, content’s filterable by topics like real estate, shopping, concerts, restos, underground bars, and even the educational system, just in case you decide to attack that pipe dream of finally learning long division. Sign up, and info’ll arrive via emails alerting you to anything from a “FroYo Faceoff” in NY’s East Village, to the joyous news that your alma mater in Mankato, MN was finally granted NCAA Div. III status…a huge boost for their athletics, given the non-existence of Div. IV. Radar’s already got the scoop on over 11,000 towns and neighborhoods, and eventually hopes to source content from major news syndicates; hopefully they’ll narrow their pinpointing even more, so you can receive alerts as scarily localized as “Uranus is sitting on your couch”. (via thrillist.com)
American consumers are showing Apple and Google love — lots of love. In the latest national economic gauge of America’s satisfaction with products and services, the two Silicon Valley companies garnered exceptionally high scores, researchers said. The American Customer Satisfaction Index, released today, gave Apple a rating of 85 out of 100, and Google garnered an 86 — both the equivalent of getting an A-plus when it comes to consumer sentiment, said Claes Fornell, a professor at the University of Michigan’s National Quality Research Center. The center publishes the index every quarter. Each quarterly index spotlights different industry sectors. Overall consumer satisfaction remained anemic, indicating consumer spending will remain weak with growth of no more than 2.3 percent in the third quarter, Fornell said. “Satisfaction leads to consumer spending, and consumer spending is about two-thirds of the economy,” he said. “If you have unhappy customers in the aggregate, they are going to be less likely to want to repeat the experience of buying. In the situation we are in today, you want to encourage spending.”
Apple and Google score high on customer satisfaction
Women are waiting longer to have children, and more women than ever are choosing not to have children at all, according to a new Census Bureau report. Twenty percent of women ages 40 to 44 have no children, double the level of 30 years ago, the report said; and women in that age bracket who do have children have fewer than ever — an average of 1.9 children, compared with the median of 3.1 children in 1976. “A lot of women are not having any children,” said Jane Lawler Dye, a Census Bureau researcher who did the report, which looked at women of childbearing age in 2006. “It used to be sort of expected that there was a phase of life where you had children, and a lot of women aren’t doing that now,” Ms. Dye said. Women with advanced degrees are more likely to be childless, the study found. Of women 40 to 44 with graduate or professional degrees, 27 percent are childless, compared with 18 percent of women who did not continue their education beyond high school, the data show.
More Women Than Ever Are Childless, Census Finds
And innovation on the internet happens at a rapid pace. Ten years ago, Google was simply an idea being explored by two graduates in California. The years to come will offer more that is new and exciting. It’s easy to forget, sitting in the UK or the US, just how far the internet still has to go. Today, there are only about 1.4 billion users, representing a bit more than one-fifth of the world’s population, and a substantial amount of the content on the web is still written in English. But the internet is becoming more global. Asia has more than 500 million users and Europe nearly 400 million and internet-enabled mobile phones will help extend the net to Africa, Latin America and the Indian subcontinent. We’re about to see further waves of innovation.
If you thought the internet was cool, wait until it goes space age
