On the record

“The pain was immediate and felt like my body was on fire.”

Credit: REUTERS

Endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh (pictured) after his 19-minute swim at the North Pole, when he braved water temperatures of −1.8 °C to raise awareness of melting polar ice.

Scorecard

Low-sugar water melons

Diabetics and dieters will be pleased to learn that US geneticists have bred water melons with 50% less sugar than normal.

High-fat friends

A 30-year study monitoring some 12,000 Americans concludes that they were 57% more likely to become obese if one of their close friends became obese too, suggesting that social ties help to spread the obesity epidemic.

Zoo news

Prolific panda

Credit: CHINA DAILY/REUTERS

Huamei, a US-born giant panda now living at a reserve in Sichuan, China, has delivered her third set of twins, boosting China's captive giant-panda population by nearly 1%

Number crunch

74 watts is the power needed to display a full-screen version of the Google homepage on a conventional cathode-ray monitor.

3,000 megawatt-hours is the energy that would be saved worldwide each year if everyone switched to blackle.com, a new website that allows users to do Google-powered searches from a dark page that uses only 59 watts.

25% is the proportion of computers worldwide that still use cathode-ray monitors. This figure is declining all the time, prompting cynics to argue that 'dark searching' is merely a gimmick.

Sources: The Times, USDA, N. Engl. J. Med., blackle.com; ecoIron, Reuters