On the record
“The pain was immediate and felt like my body was on fire.”
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
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
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Sidelines. Nature 448, 396 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/448396a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/448396a