It was supposed to be a celebratory year for Akafuku, a confectioner that had been selling bean-jam sweets here since 1707. On its 300th anniversary, its top-selling sweets were still indispensable gifts to bring back home or to the office after a trip to Ise Shrine here, Japan's holiest religious site.
Instead, Akafuku has become the latest Japanese food company to be exposed for lying about the contents of its products, tampering with expiration-date labels and recycling ingredients. For only the second time in its history, Akafuku, which was forced to halt production during World War II because of a sugar scarcity, has suspended operations, this time indefinitely.
Birth defects in China have increased by nearly 40 percent since 2001, according to statistics from the country's birth deformity monitoring center.
The figure was cited in a recent report by Jiang Fan, deputy head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, at a conference in Chengdu, capital city of Southwest China's Sichuan Province.
Michael Kahn
ReutersTue, 30 Oct 2007 02:26 UTC
Using ultraviolet light may one day offer a "double whammy" to kill cancer cells by better focusing antibody-based drugs and triggering the body's own defenses to eliminate tumors, researchers said on Tuesday.
In two studies with mice, a British team cloaked antibodies -- the immune system proteins that tag germs and cancer cells for elimination -- with an organic oil that blocked them from reacting until illuminated with ultraviolet light.
Will Dunham
ReutersTue, 30 Oct 2007 01:24 UTC
The AIDS virus invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic, scientists said on Monday.
Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist, said the 1969 U.S. entry date is earlier than some experts had believed.
The timeline laid out in the study led by Worobey indicates that HIV infections were occurring in the United States for roughly 12 years before AIDS was first recognized by scientists as a disease in 1981. Many people had died by that point.
Watching too much television may not only help make children fat, it may also raise their blood pressure, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They found obese children who watched four or more hours of TV a day were three times more likely to have high blood pressure than children who watched less than two hours a day.
"There is a significant association between hours of television watched and both the severity of obesity and the presence of hypertension in obese children," Dr. Jeffrey Schwimmer of the University of California, San Diego and colleagues wrote in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Samantha Cleaver
AlterNetTue, 30 Oct 2007 00:52 UTC
Green classrooms not only produce happier and better students, but they can save school districts thousands in energy costs.
Every day, 20 percent of Americans wake up, eat breakfast, and walk, bike, or drive to school. Once there, many students and teachers spend their days in classrooms with walls covered in toxic paint, breathing congested air, and squinting from inadequate lighting.
With suicide as the third leading cause of death among adolescents in the United States, a new University of Denver (DU) study reveals inhaling or "huffing" vapors of common household goods, such as glue or nail polish, are associated with increased suicidal thoughts and attempts.
Unknown
PsyBlogMon, 15 Oct 2007 16:02 UTC
A classic 1959 social psychology experiment demonstrates how and why we lie to ourselves. Understanding this experiment sheds a brilliant light on the dark world of our inner motivations.
The ground-breaking social psychological experiment of Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do. The experiment is filled with ingenious deception so the best way to understand it is to imagine you are taking part. So sit back, relax and travel back. The time is 1959 and you are an undergraduate student at Stanford University...
Children are more susceptible to avian (bird) flu than adults, a new study suggests.
Banning lead in petrol is responsible for declining crime rates in Britain, the United States and other countries, startling new research suggests.