Watching the World

Youths and Mobile Phones

“Young Britons find it impossible to organise their lives if they are deprived of their mobile telephones,” reports London’s Daily Telegraph. Researchers deprived a group of 15- to 24-year-olds of their phones for two weeks. “It was a bizarre experience,” says the report. “Young people were forced to endure a rather novel set of experiences: such as talking to their own parents, knocking on the front door of their friends’ houses and meeting their friends’ parents.” Professor Michael Hulme of Lancaster University, England, describes young users’ normal cell-phone conversations as “a way of comforting and defining themselves.” Without her phone, one teenager felt “agitated and stressed,” reports the newspaper, while another felt isolated and “had to plan in advance to meet people at exact times,” instead of “being able to talk to [his] friends whenever [he] wanted to.”

 Germans Saving Too Much Water?

Water supply and sewage collection systems in Germany are suffering because consumers are saving too much water, reports the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. In the past, higher consumption was forecast, and networks were built accordingly. At the same time, saving water has been promoted as an important contribution to safeguarding the environment and resources, and demand has decreased. The problem now is that “in many places, our drinking water is standing still in the pipes,” says Ulrich Oemichen of the German Gas and Water Boards Association. “Longer stagnation then results in pipe corrosion, and the water absorbs metals.” Also, when there is not enough water in the sewers, solid material collects and starts to rot. The only solution is to flush the freshwater- and sewage-collection systems with precious drinking water.

Cesarean Sections and Allergies

“There may be long-term risks of Caesareans we’ve not considered before,” says Sibylle Koletzko, of the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany. “I would discourage [them] for all non-medical reasons.” Researchers say that such births may be a factor in the rise in cases of asthma and allergies. A study of 865 babies who were all exclusively breast-fed for the first four months showed that those delivered by Cesarean section had more digestive problems and were more likely to develop food intolerances. According to New Scientist, “the explanation might be that babies born by Caesarean do not get a chance to swallow beneficial bacteria during birth; colonisation of the gut plays a key role in the development of the immune system.”

“The Ultimate in Home Decor”?

“Western tourists and businessmen who are illegally buying tiger skins in China are responsible for the slaughter of one of the world’s most endangered species,” says The Sunday Telegraph of London. The wild tiger population has dropped from some 100,000 a century ago to fewer than 5,000 today. Most live in India, with some in other countries of South Asia as well as the Far East. The Environmental Investigation Agency, a London charity, reports that buyers view the skins “as the ultimate in home decor, but they are pushing the tiger into extinction. . . . These animals are so critically endangered that each individual is vital to the survival of its species.” Between 1994 and 2003, there were 684 tiger skins seized, but that figure is thought to be a mere fraction of those smuggled.

Implantable Identification Chip

“The US Food and Drug Administration has approved an implantable identification microchip” as a means of accessing patients’ medical records, reports the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The manufacturers recommend that the chip, comparable in size to a grain of rice, be inserted under the patient’s skin in the triceps area. By passing a scanner over the implantation site, medical personnel can read its identification number. This is then used to access information previously stored in a database by way of a secure Internet connection. The new technology “may help improve rapid access to vital medical information for unconscious or uncommunicative patients,” says JAMA, and it “could also be used for security, financial, and personal identification applications.”

Living Together Without Marriage

“Canadians are increasingly embracing common-law unions as a precursor to marriage,” reports the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Alan Mirabelli, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family in Ottawa, says: “This generation of Canadians under 35 has experienced a level of divorce and separation among their parents like no other. So they are cautious to jump into marriage.” A national survey conducted among nearly 2,100 Canadians aged 18 to 34 found that “22 per cent . . . are cohabiting with a partner, while 27 per cent are married,” says the report. “A previous Vanier Institute study found that in 1975, 61 per cent were married, while only one per cent were living with a partner in a common-law relationship.”

A Year of Extreme Weather

“The year 2004, punctuated by four powerful hurricanes in the Caribbean and deadly typhoons lashing Asia, was the fourth-hottest on record, extending a trend since 1990 that has registered the 10 warmest years,” says an Associated Press report. Last year was also the most expensive ever when it came to weather-related damage. In the United States and the Caribbean alone, hurricanes were estimated to have caused more than $43 billion worth of damage. Storms and high temperatures in some areas coincided with exceptionally harsh winters elsewhere. Southern Argentina, as well as Chile and Peru, for example, suffered severe cold and snow in June and July. According to the report, “scientists say a sustained increase in temperature is likely to continue disrupting the global climate.”