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Fri/Sat/Sun December 8~10, 2017

IT’S a nice day, and you’d like to take a run. But your only route is along a busy road, breathing in traffi c fumes.

Or maybe your doctor has recom-mended more exercise, but you live in a city and can’t escape the air pollution.

Which is worse — not exercising, or breathing in the bad air?

Now, a British study has gone a long way towards answering that question. When middle-aged Londoners were forced to walk in either green and lovely Hyde Park, or along traffi c-clogged Oxford Street nearby, their hearts and lungs spoke the truth. Breathing in that pollution was bad.

“In all participants, irrespective of their disease status, walking in Hyde Park led to an increase in lung function,” the researchers wrote in the Lancet medical journal. And pulse wave velocity — a mea-sure of stiffened arteries — fell in every-one. The benefi ts lasted a full day.

“By contrast, these benefi cial responses were attenuated after walking on Oxford Street,” Rudy Sinharay of Imperial Col-lege, London and colleagues wrote.

It might seem obvious, but it hasn’t been clear if the drawbacks of air pollution

Pollution can counteract exercise benefitscounteract the benefi ts of exercising.

“Our fi ndings suggest that healthy people, as well as those with chronic cardiorespiratory disorders, should minimize walking on streets with high levels of pollution because this curtails or even reverses the cardio-respiratory benefi ts of exercise,” the researchers wrote.

“Instead, walking exercise should be enjoyed in urban green space areas away from high density traffi c.”

The researchers recruited 120 volunteers, 60 years and older, 80 of whom had mild heart or lung disease.

“They’re the canaries in the coal mine,” said George Thurston, an

expert on the health effects of air pollution at the New York University School of Medicine. The volunteers are a little more vulnerable to the effects of pollution than the average healthy person 20 years younger.

“Participants were randomly assigned to do a two-hour walk either along a commercial street in London (Oxford Street) or in an urban park,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the Lancet medical journal.

That was important, because other studies trying to tease out the effects of exercise, or pollution, or both, haven’t been able to show whether there is something different about people

who choose not to exercise, or those who live in polluted areas.

“This very interesting new study gets around that limitation, by get-ting the participants to do things they wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to do as part of their normal activity. That is, it’s a real experiment,” said Kevin McConway, emeritus profes-sor of applied statistics at The Open University in Britain, who was not involved in the study.

The team measured how much pollution the volunteers breathed in and measured heart and lung func-tion. Even though London is not one of the world’s most notoriously polluted cities, there is a lot of diesel pollution in downtown streets such as Oxford Street, and there is much less in nearby Hyde Park, with its trees, bushes and grassy spaces.

The researchers did measure expo-sure to pollutants. Typical pollutants that come from car and truck exhaust, including ultrafi ne particles and nitrogen dioxide, were clearly linked with reduction in lung function and less fl exible arteries, they found.

“The benefi ts of exercise disappear at highly polluted locations.”

This fi nding did not surprise Thurston, who wrote a commentary on the fi ndings in the Lancet.

“I am in Manhattan and a lot of times you see people running along very traffi cked places,” he said

“The exercise is good for you but the higher the pollution levels, the less helpful it is. The benefi ts of exercise disappear at highly polluted locations.”

Thurston said people, who worried about whether pollution is counter-acting the benefi ts of their exercise, can fi nd pollution monitors that link to smartphones. Or they can just work out away from traffi c.

(SD-Agencies)

IT is possible to have too much of a good thing — especially when it comes to children’s toys — a new study has found.

Children who have too many toys fi nd themselves easily distracted and do not enjoy quality play-time.

Researchers in Ohio, the United States, invited 36 toddlers in to play with either 16 toys or four toys.

The half that were given only four toys were found to be far more creative. They played with each toy for twice as long and were better at coming up with different variations of their games.

The study, from the University of Toledo, highlights what many parents have already been saying for years now: that it can be worth-while keeping new toys packed away in order to encourage creativity and lengthened attention span in chil-dren. “This study sought to determine if the number of toys in toddlers’ environments infl uences the quality of their play,” said lead author Carly Dauch in the journal Infant Behavior and Development.

“The higher number of incidences of play in the 16-toy condition did seem to interfere with duration and depth of play. Other toys present may have created a source of external dis-traction.

“During toddlerhood, children develop, but may not have mastered, higher-level control over attention. Their attention, and therefore, their play may be disrupted by factors in their environments that present distraction.

“The results of the present study suggest that an abundance of toys may create such a distraction.

“When provided with fewer toys in the environment, toddlers engage in longer periods of play with a single toy, allowing better focus to explore and play more creatively.”

In the 1990s, a study of a Munich nursery found similar results. Toys were removed for three months, but it only took a few weeks for the children to re-adjust and become more creative with their play-time.

(SD-Agencies)

YOU know that age-old debate about whether dogs are smarter than cats? Well, science now has a defi nitive answer. It’s dogs.

That’s the conclusion of an interna-tional team of researchers, who found that dogs possess twice the number of neurons than cats. Neurons are cells that process information. And so, the more neurons an animal has, the better its information processing capability, these scientists say.

The study was conducted by researchers from six universities in the United States, Brazil, Denmark and South Africa. It’s been accepted for publication in the journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.

The research was done in the lab of Suzana Herculano-Houzel, an associate professor of psychology and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University.

Until recently, scientists interested in comparing intelligence across spe-cies were limited to using brain size as an indicator.

“In 2005, my lab developed a very simple, fast and inexpensive method to count cells in brains and brain parts,” Herculano-Houzel said.

What the researchers did is take brain matter and essentially turn it into soup. This freed up the cell nuclei and allowed the scientists to count them directly under a microscope.

This is what they found when they looked at cats’ and dogs’ cerebral cortex, the information-processing part of the brain: A cat’s cerebral cortex has 250 million neurons. A 15-pound mixed-breed dog’s has 429 million.

When they looked at a 64-pound golden retriever, the count was even higher: 627 million neurons.

“It is fair to say, then, that dogs have about twice as many neurons as cats in their cerebral cortex,” she said. “And this implies that dogs have more cogni-tive capabilities than cats.”

And there you have it. Now, it’s just a matter of who breaks the news to Garfi eld. (SD-Agencies)

Dogs are smarter than cats

Too many toys bad for children