Very hot tea may cause throat cancer: study
By Michael Kahn
LONDON (Reuters) - Drinking hot tea may cause throat cancer, Iranian researchers said Friday, suggesting people should let steaming drinks cool before consuming them.
Previous studies have linked tobacco and alcohol with cancer of the oesophagus, and the research published in the British Medical Journal suggests that scalding beverages may also somehow pave the way for such tumors.
Drinking very hot tea at a temperature of greater than 70 degrees Celsius was associated with an eight-fold increased risk of throat cancer compared to sipping warm or lukewarm tea at less than 65 degrees, the researchers said.
Reza Malekzadeh of Tehran University of Medical Sciences and colleagues studied the tea-drinking habits of 300 people with oesophageal cancer and another 571 healthy men and women from the same area in Golestan Province in northern Iran.
That region has one of the highest rates of throat cancer in the world but smoking rates and alcohol consumption are low, the researchers said. Nearly all the volunteers drank black tea regularly, consuming on average more than a liter each day.
People who regularly drank tea less than two minutes after pouring were five times more likely to develop the cancer compared to those who waited four or more minutes, the researchers said.
British studies have reported people prefer their tea at an average temperature of 56 degrees to 60 degrees, they noted.
It is not clear how hot tea might cause cancer but one idea is that repeated thermal injury to the lining of the throat somehow initiates it, researchers said.
Cancers of the oesophagus kill more than 500,000 people worldwide each year, with the bulk of the disease occurring in discrete populations in Asia, Africa, and South America. The tumors are especially deadly, with five-year survival rates of 12 to 31 percent.
Earlier this week, U.S. and Japanese researchers reported that about a third of East Asians -- Chinese, Japanese and Koreans -- have an enzyme deficiency that puts them at higher risk of developing oesophageal cancer when they drink alcohol.
Source: Asiaone
Cristiano Ronaldo's girlfriend Gabriela Entringer confirms romance
Brazilian fitness trainer opens up about relationship
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
Cristiano Ronaldo's latest squeeze Gabriela Entringer has admitted they're seeing each other.
The Manchester United hunk hit it off with the Brazilian fitness trainer when they met at a nightclub six weeks ago.
But until now, Cris, 24, and Gabi, 28, have stay tight-lipped about the romance.
‘Everything’s happened very quickly,’ she says. ‘Cristiano won me over. I feel very passionate about him.’
But Gabriela’s mum Rosana and police officer dad Jadson are worried about the media attention she's getting.
‘Jadson has become a bundle of nerves over this,’ Rosana tells the Daily Star.
‘He thinks Gabi should stay clear of Cristiano because he’s going to turn a lot of things upside down in her life. Their relationship has been all over the Brazilian press.
‘There has even been talk that Brazil’s Playboy is ready to offer nearly £200,000 to put Gabi on their front page. Jadson would have a heart attack if that ever happened.’
Source: Zimbio.com
Happy birthday World Wide Web
GENEVA, March 13, 2009 (AFP) - The World Wide Web (WWW) on Friday marked its 20th anniversary and one of its founders admitted there are bits of the phenomenon he does not like.
The creation of the web by British computer software genius Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) paved the way for the Internet explosion which has changed our daily lives.
Berners-Lee and CERN colleagues such as Robert Cailliau, who originally set up the system to allow thousands of scientists around the world to stay in touch, took part in commemorations on Friday at the laboratory.
In March 1989, the young Berners-Lee handed his supervisor in Geneva a document entitled ?Information Management: a proposal?.
The supervisor described its as ?vague, but exciting? and later gave it the go ahead, according to CERN.
''It was really in the air, something that had to happen sooner or later,'' said former CERN systems engineer Cailliau, who teamed up with Berners-Lee.
They drew up the global hypertext 'language which is behind the ''http'' on website addresses ' and came up with the first web browser in October 1990, which looks remarkably similar to the ones used today.
''Everything that people talk about today, blogs and so on, that?s what we were doing in 1990, there?s no difference. That?s how we started,'' Cailliau told Swiss radio RSR.
The WWW technology was first made available for wider use on the Internet from 1991 after CERN was unable to ensure its development, and the organisation made a landmark decision two years later not to levy royalties.
Cailliau still marvels at developments like wikipaedia that allow knowledge to be exchanged openly around the web, but never imagined that search engines would take on the importance they have assumed today.
''A search engine is very centralised... while the web is totally decentralised, I couldn't have predicted the things that it does,'' he said.
But the commercial development of the web still irritates some of the founders.
''There are some things I don?t like at all, such as the fact that people have to live off advertising,'' said Caillau, who preferred the idea of direct 'micro payments' to information providers.
''And there?s the big problem of identity, of course, the trust between the person who is consulting and the person who provides the page, as well as the protection of children,'' he added.
Berners-Lee, now a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States and a computer science professor at Southampton University in Britain, still heads the World Wide Web Consortium that coordinates development of the web.
Lynn St. Amour, chief executive of the Internet Society, said the web is often wrongly confused with the wider Internet.
''The Internet is a vast network of networks, interconnected in many different physical ways, yet all speaking a common language,'' she explained. 'The Web is one ' albeit, the most influential and well known ' of many different applications which run over the Internet.'
''The great achievement of Tim Berners-Lee was to recognise the power and potential in the Internet,'' she added.
//ASIAONE//
