Running on a regular basis can slow the effects of ageing, a study by US researchers shows.

Elderly joggers were half as likely to die prematurely from conditions like cancer than non-runners.

They also enjoyed a healthier life with fewer disabilities, the Stanford University Medical Center team found.

Experts said the findings in Archives of Internal Medicine reinforced the importance that older people exercise regularly.

Survival of the fittest

The work tracked 500 older runners for more than 20 years, comparing them to a similar group of non-runners. All were in their 50s at the start of the study.

IT'S not just the sphere of culture that has an east-west divide. The Earth's inner core of solid iron also behaves differently in each hemisphere, transmitting seismic waves faster in the eastern side than in the west.

The phenomenon has baffled scientists, but now numerical simulations developed by Julien Aubert of the French national research centre's Institute of Geophysics in Paris and his team suggest that the anomaly may be due to subterranean "cyclones" found in parts of the liquid iron outer core.

These swirling cyclones drag cooler material from the top of the outer core right down to the bottom, where iron is gradually crystallising onto the solid inner core. This cooling causes crystals to form more quickly and with random alignments. That makes the material stronger, which in turn means it is able to carry seismic waves more quickly.

Aubert's work indicates that for the past 300 million years most of these iron cyclones will have been found below Asia, so most of the cooling effect will have been in the eastern hemisphere. Over that time, the inner core has grown by about 100 kilometres, and on the eastern side of the core that layer should have formed from the fast-transmission crystals.

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Monday, August 11, 2008
By Emmanuel Angleys, AFP

QUILLABAMBA, Peru -- Once bleak and lifeless places degraded by years of high-impact farming, Peruvian coffee farms are being transformed by a growing trend for certification schemes offering ethical and environmental guarantees to western consumers. 

As we get ready for the Olympics starting in Beijing, the games pose us a bit of a problem. A global event like this should be a gift to a news channel with an audience around the world. All those countries participating, all that action to report on. The trouble is, we can only show tiny snapshots of that action. 

The broadcasting rights are tightly restricted by the IOC, who've sold the rights to individual broadcasters in dozens of countries. Channels like BBC World News, beamed across the world, are therefore confined to showing a total of just one minute's worth of pictures within our bulletins - and even then not until after midnight of the day that the events took place.

Our answer is My Games - a live interactive TV and online show hosted by Adnan Nawaz from Beijing that taps into the views and passions of fans from all over the world, and cunningly avoids the need to show any official Olympics pictures.

As we get ready for the Olympics starting in Beijing, the games pose us a bit of a problem. A global event like this should be a gift to a news channel with an audience around the world. All those countries participating, all that action to report on. The trouble is, we can only show tiny snapshots of that action. 

The broadcasting rights are tightly restricted by the IOC, who've sold the rights to individual broadcasters in dozens of countries. Channels like BBC World News, beamed across the world, are therefore confined to showing a total of just one minute's worth of pictures within our bulletins - and even then not until after midnight of the day that the events took place.

Our answer is My Games - a live interactive TV and online show hosted by Adnan Nawaz from Beijing that taps into the views and passions of fans from all over the world, and cunningly avoids the need to show any official Olympics pictures.

To cover or not to cover

• Rome Hartman
• 5 Aug 08, 10:25 AM

The programme that I produce - World News America - has as its primary mission to bring smart and sophisticated BBC coverage of international issues and events to an American audience.

But we also aspire to offer distinctive coverage of stories inside America, and in the ten months since we launched the program, that has mainly meant covering Presidential politics.

Of course there's no shortage of political reporting in the US at the moment; frankly, it's more like a glut. So our effort, as I've said before, is to focus on the quality of our coverage rather than the quantity.

Last week provides an interesting example. We made a deliberate decision to steer clear of the whole flap over the McCain campaign ad comparing Obama to Britney and Paris, and the subsequent back-and-forth about whether Obama had or had not "played the race card."

It all struck me as much ado about nothing...campaigns and candidates cynically trying to throw each other off-stride, nothing at all to do with the really important problems facing the country; precisely the kind of stuff that has made so many Americans so fed up with our current politics.