Influencers overtaking journalists as news source: report

PARIS — TikTok influencers and celebrities are increasingly taking over from journalists as the main source of news for young people, according to a report published Wednesday by the Britain-based Reuters Institute.

The report found that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users and 52 percent of Instagram users get their news from "personalities" -- compared to 33 to 42 percent who get it from mainstream media and journalists on those platforms, which are most popular among the young.

The figures were based on interviews with some 94,000 people across 46 countries, conducted for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of Britain's University of Oxford.

"While mainstream journalists often lead conversations around news in Twitter and Facebook, they struggle to get attention in newer networks like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok," the report said.

Lead author Nic Newman highlighted people like Britain's Matt Welland, who discusses current affairs and daily life on TikTok for his 2.8 million subscribers.

"Or it could be a celebrity like a footballer talking about a topical news event," he told AFP, such as footballer Marcus Rashford's 2020 campaign to get free school meals for children from poor families.

For young people, "news" is not just the traditional focus on politics and international relations, but "anything new that is happening in any walk of life: sports, entertainment, celebrity gossip, current affairs, culture, arts, technology..." he added.

'FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE'

Facebook remains the leading source of news among social networks worldwide, but its influence is dropping, with 28 percent saying they use it to get news, compared with 42 percent in 2016.

This likely reflects Facebook's shift away from news-sharing towards a focus on friends and family, as well as young people's preference for more video-based apps like TikTok and YouTube.

TikTok now reaches 44 percent of 18-24-year-olds, and 20 percent get their news from the app, up five percent on last year.

The biggest challenge for traditional news outlets is the falling number who go direct to their websites -- just 22 percent, down 10 points since 2018 -- rather than relying on social media links.

In his foreword, Reuters Institute director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said this shift presented "a much more fundamental change" for the news industry than even the shift from paper to digital a generation ago.

"Legacy media... now face a continual transformation of digital as generations come of age who eschew direct discovery for all but the most appealing brands, (and) have little interest in many conventional news offers oriented towards older generations' habits, interests, and values," he said.

These new audiences are aware of the risks of relying on algorithms, with only 30 percent thinking this is a good way to get a balanced diet of news -- but that is still considered better than relying on journalists, who scored just 27 percent.

None of this is good news for media firms reliant on subscribers and ad revenue.

The report found that 39 percent of subscribers had canceled or renegotiated subscriptions, though the overall share of people paying for news across 20 countries surveyed remained stable compared with last year at 17 percent.

Agence France-Presse

US pharma firm says COVID-19 vaccine produces antibodies in mice, guinea pigs

US immunotherapy company Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc on Wednesday said its experimental vaccine to prevent coronavirus infection was shown to produce protective antibodies and immune system responses in mice and guinea pigs.

"We saw antibody responses that do many of the things we would want to see in an eventual vaccine," said Dr. David Weiner, director of the vaccine and immunotherapy center at the Wistar Institute, which has collaborated with Inovio. 

"We are able to target things that would prevent the virus from having a safe harbor in the body."

Inovio, which began human testing of its vaccine in April, said preliminary results from that trial are expected in June. 

The 40 healthy participants in the Phase 1 trial are given 2 shots, 4 weeks apart, of the vaccine, called INO-4800, and then followed for 2 weeks.

"We are already seeing safety data and it has been benign," Dr. Katherine Broderick, head of research and development at Inovio, told Reuters. "Some people have slight redness of the arm."

Once the preliminary data are in, she said Inovio expects to approach the US Food and Drug Administration for authorization to move into a Phase 2/3 trial, which could happen in July or August.

Inovio said the latest animal study results, published in the journal Nature Communications, validate its DNA medicines platform and build on previous positive clinical trial data for its experimental vaccine against a different, but related, coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

That vaccine and INO-4800 are made using newer technology that focuses on specific genes on the outer "spike" portion of the virus.

Inovio said the newly published data demonstrate virus neutralizing activity using 3 separate testing procedures. Study authors also said they detected the antibodies in the lungs of the vaccinated animals.

Inovio next plans to test the vaccine in larger animals including rabbits and monkeys, and to undertake "challenge" studies in mice, ferrets and monkeys, Broderick said. 

Challenge studies involve intentionally giving the virus to an animal and then seeing if the vaccine prevents infection.

There are currently no approved treatments or vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Experts predict a safe and effective vaccine could take 12 to 18 months to develop.

-reuters-

Amazon fires drive spike in child breathing problems in Brazil - study

BRAZIL—The surge in fires in Brazil's Amazon rainforest this year fueled a spike in young children being treated for breathing problems as smoke clouded the air throughout the region, according to a study released on Wednesday.

Roughly 5,000 children aged 9 or younger were treated each month in May and June in 36 areas within Brazil's so-called "arc of deforestation," the area partially encircling the Amazon where destruction of the forest is the highest, according to a study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a public health research institute.

That is double the monthly average for the past 10 years, with the study linking the rise to the forest fires.

The study only examined cases for May and June, the latest data available, when the number of fires were slightly higher than the previous year. But that period is well before the surge in August when fires in the Amazon nearly tripled compared to the same period a year ago.

The number of forest fires in the Amazon for the year had surged to their highest point since 2010 by August, drawing global outcry that Brazil was not doing enough to protect the world's largest tropical rainforest.

Environmentalists and researchers say that farmers and others destroying the forest were purposefully setting the fires. Brazil's government sent in the military to fight the fires and launched an investigation into the causes.

Cristovao Barcelos, one of the researchers who wrote the study, said it stands to reason that with the increase of fires starting from July that the number of cases could also show an increase.

"There's a sequence that starts with deforestation, then comes fires and breathing problems," Barcelos said.

In areas recording more fires than usual, a child is 36 percent more likely to develop respiratory problems, the study said. Barcelos added that 2 percent of the children who sought treatment later died.

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Childhood smoking exposure tied to irregular heartbeat in adulthood

Children who grow up breathing their parents’ secondhand smoke are more likely to develop a heart rhythm disorder known as atrial fibrillation than the kids of nonsmokers, a recent study suggests.

Based on families in the decades-long Framingham study, researchers found that half of the children of smokers included in the analysis were exposed to at least a half pack, or 10 cigarettes, a day - and for every pack-a-day increase in smoke exposure, kids’ risk of developing atrial fibrillation in adulthood climbed by 18 percent.

A small part of the risk for adult atrial fibrillation was associated with the tendency of smokers’ children to become smokers themselves as adults, the study team notes in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Smoking may have unintended and unanticipated downstream harms that have not previously been considered as part of the actual total negative consequences of smoking,” said Dr. Gregory Marcus, senior author of the study and an atrial fibrillation researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

“These findings demonstrate how parental behaviors and exposures can meaningfully influence their children in ways that may not become apparent until late in adulthood,” Marcus said by email.

For the study, researchers examined data on 2,816 children and at least one of their parents. Overall, 82 percent of the kids were exposed to secondhand smoke by a parent at some point during childhood.

A total of 404 kids or 14.3 percent developed atrial fibrillation after researchers followed half of the children for at least 4 decades.

Exposure to secondhand smoke from parents was also associated with a 34 percent higher risk that children would become smokers, researchers report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

And, becoming a smoker explained about 17 percent of the increased atrial fibrillation risk tied to parental smoking.

In atrial fibrillation, electrical impulses in the upper chambers of the heart are chaotic, causing that part of the heart muscle to quiver rather than contracting normally. 

As a result, blood doesn’t move as well to the heart’s lower chambers. This can lead to the formation of clots that can travel through the arteries to the brain and cause a stroke.

The study wasn’t designed to prove whether or how secondhand smoke exposure during childhood might cause atrial fibrillation.

“Early exposure to tobacco smoke may result in damage to the pulmonary veins, the heart, or the interface between the two, which may increase the propensity to atrial fibrillation,” Marcus said.

One limitation of the study is that researchers lacked smoking data for a large proportion of parents, which may have resulted from limited awareness of the health risks of smoking when some of the families started being followed in the 1950s, researchers note. It’s also unclear how much exposure to smoke kids had in the womb, which might also impact atrial fibrillation risk.

Even so, the results should offer parents who smoke yet another reason to quit, Marcus said.

“Smoking unfortunately remains common, especially among young individuals of child-bearing age,” Marcus added. “Complete smoking avoidance or cessation is the most healthy strategy for parents that want their kids to experience long-term health.”

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Many sexually active Pinoys don't use condoms, survey says

MANILA—Most sexually active Filipinos don't always use condoms, a survey this year has found, which puts them at risk of sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy.

A study by PhilCare, a leading health maintenance organization (HMO), showed that only 1 out of 10 Filipinos always use protection.

Of the 820 sexually active Filipinos polled nationwide, at least 30 percent said they used condoms very frequently to prevent pregnancy and at least 40 percent to avoid sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Condom use for the prevention of STDs was also higher among women with 48 percent than men with 36 percent. 

Some 36 percent of women and some 30 percent of men reported using condoms for pregnancy prevention.

The study also found out that Mindanaoans used protection more compared to the national average. 

Some 26 percent of respondents from Mindanao used condoms against unplanned pregnancy, more than twice the national average of 12 percent.

Meanwhile, at least 18 percent of respondents from Mindanao used condoms against STDs, way higher than the national average of 13 percent.

The survey also revealed that only 2 out of 10 young adults, aged 18 to 30, always used protection.

Over half of young adults used protection very frequently against STDs while almost 40 percent did to avoid pregnancy.

Meanwhile, only 12 percent of men and women between 31 to 40 used condoms against STDs while 14 percent said they did to prevent pregnancy.

Older respondents in between 40 to 50 reported lower condom use. Only 10 percent used protection against STDs while only 7 percent as contraception.

"It’s important that we gather relevant information to find solutions to this problem afflicting a growing number of Filipinos,” said lead researcher Fernando Paragas of the University of the Philippines.

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Who's a Good Boy? Wolves, not dogs, apparently

WASHINGTON, United States - If you're looking for a word to describe your adorable pet pup, "selfish" might not top the list.

But a new study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE suggests Fido's reputation for being caring is all a ruse -- at least if you're a fellow dog.

A series of touchscreen experiments carried out by the Wolf Science Center in Vienna, Austria found that wolves make for more selfless pack mates than dogs who were also raised in groups.

The study's authors say the findings suggest domestic dogs inherited their cooperative tendencies from their fierce wolf ancestors, rather than through their contact with human beings, a competing hypothesis.

Researchers trained the animals to use their snouts to press a "giving" symbol on a screen that delivered food to an adjacent enclosure, where a fellow animal may or may not be present.

Over multiple trials, wolves opted to deliver food to members of their own pack, knowing they would not get anything in return -- but lost interest if they were shown an unfamiliar wolf.

Dogs, on the other hand, showed no particular inclination to feed other dogs when no personal payoff was involved, regardless of whether they knew them or not.

"This study shows that domestication did not necessarily make dogs more prosocial," said lead author Rachel Dale.

"Rather, it seems that tolerance and generosity towards group members help to produce high levels of cooperation, as seen in wolves."

But don't write off your pooch just yet. The authors cautioned against applying the results of an experiment carried out on pack dogs to pet dogs, who have been found to have prosocial tendencies in past studies. 

The researchers believe those behaviors could be the result of training or encouragement, and say more research is needed to determine what accounts for the differences.

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Some 4.5 pct of US adults identify as LGBT - study

An estimated 4.5 percent of US adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and they tend to be younger and poorer than the population at large, according to an analysis of polling data released on Tuesday.

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined previously released results from the Gallup Daily Tracking survey and went deeper into the data, enabling a more detailed demographic picture of the adult US LGBT population of roughly 11.3 million people.

The institute found Washington, D.C., had the highest percentage of LGBT people at 9.8 percent and North Dakota had the lowest at 2.7 percent.

The self-identifying LGBT population also skews younger. Only 23 percent are age 50 or older, compared with 47 percent of non-LGBT adults, and 56 percent of LGBT adults are under age 35 compared with 28 percent for the non-LGBT population.

"Younger people are more likely to actually live as LGBT and to identify that way because they are growing up in a time when it's more acceptable to acknowledge those feelings and to act on them," said Kerith Conron, research director at the Williams Institute.

The LGBT population is also economically disadvantaged: more likely to lack access to a sufficient nutrition or to have household incomes below $24,000, the analysis found.

Although LGBT people come from all ethnic groups, people of color represent a slightly higher percentage than they do in the general population for reasons that require more research, Conron said.

The Williams Institute, which specializes in LGBT research for law and public policy, also confirmed its previous estimate of the transgender population at 0.6 percent, or roughly 1.4 million US adults.

Conron said an apparent one-percentage-point increase in the LGBT population from 2011 was likely the result of more people feeling comfortable responding to questions about their sexual orientation.

In 2011, the Williams Institute estimated the US LGBT population at 3.5 percent based on other survey data.

Modern polls and surveys estimate the LGBT population well below a common but unattributed figure of 10 percent that sexologists link to an oversimplification of Alfred Kinsey's work some 70 years ago.

However, in surveys that are more anonymous and private, closer to 10 percent of respondents say they have some level of same-sex attraction even if they stop short of identifying themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, Conron said.

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Online daters aim 'out of their league,' study says

Most people who use online dating websites seek partners who are out of their league, said a study Wednesday based on heterosexuals in four big U.S. cities.

"Both men and women pursued partners about 25 percent more 'desirable' than themselves," said the report in the journal Science Advances.

Hardly anyone reached out to people who ranked significantly lower than themselves.

People's desirability was determined using a ranking algorithm based on how many messages they received from other popular users on a dating site in New York, Seattle, Boston and Chicago.

"If you are contacted by people who are themselves desirable, then you are presumably more desirable yourself," said the study.

Using this PageRank algorithm, which is employed by web search engines, researchers could establish a person's "league," which they scientifically coined "hierarchies of desirability."

For some at the pinnacle of the dating game, the flurry of messages from would-be suitors was dizzying.

"The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1,504 messages during the period of observation, equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month," said the study.

While researchers did not reveal the end to this lady's love story, they did find that the majority of daters on the site tended to reach out to people who were ranked higher than themselves.

They also tended to send lengthier messages to people deemed higher on the desirability ladder.

In most cases, these long-shots fell short.

When there is a big gap in desirability between online daters, "there is a pronounced drop in the probability of reply," said the report.

And only in Seattle were there signs that long letters were more successful than short messages at getting a potential mate to respond.

People have probably been pining for unattainable love interests since the dawn of time.

But taking a scientific look at the phenomenon gives cause for hope, according to lead author Elizabeth Bruch, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

"I think a common complaint when people use online dating websites is they feel like they never get any replies," she said.

"This can be dispiriting. But even though the response rate is low, our analysis shows that 21 percent of people who engage in this aspirational behavior do get replies from a mate who is out of their league, so perseverance pays off."

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World's rich grow richer as bull markets roar on - study

ZURICH - The pool of money held by the world's wealthiest people grew by 12 percent last year to nearly $202 trillion as bull markets and the dollar's weakening against most major currencies boosted global fortunes, an international advisory firm's study released on Thursday said.

Adjusted for exchange rate swings, wealth rose 7 percent, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) survey found.

While residents of North America held the greatest share of personal wealth at almost 43 percent, the fastest growth came in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Most super-rich individuals lived in the United States, China and Japan.

The business of providing advice to those super-rich is still strong in North America.

However, legacy retail brokerages such as Morgan Stanley , Bank of America Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, UBS AG Group's Wealth Management in the Americas and Wells Fargo Advisors lost market share as less wealthy clients went elsewhere.

Legacy brokerages' market share fell to 37 percent in 2016 from 41 percent in 2012, while the portion held by direct channel firms such as Charles Schwab and Fidelity grew modestly to 21 percent from 20 percent.

More than 35 million Americans now have between $250,000 and $1 million, a wealth bracket the industry calls mass affluent. BCG senior partner Brent Beardsley said that many mass affluent savers hold a lot of their money in a retirement account, like a 401(k), which oftentimes are managed by a company like Schwab or Fidelity.

"(They have) a natural structural advantage" over legacy brokerages, Beardsley said.

BCG's annual study also showed Switzerland remained the world's biggest centre for managing offshore wealth with $2.3 trillion, followed by Hong Kong with $1.1 trillion and Singapore with $0.9 trillion.

The two Asian centers have grown at yearly rates of 11 and 10 percent respectively over the past five years, more than three times the 3 percent rate Switzerland has posted.

It is in the fast-growing markets that large wealth managers including Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse are casting wider nets.

The Swiss banking secrecy from which they long profited has been weakened, meaning rich people from around the world can no longer easily use the Alpine Republic to stash wealth away from tax authorities at home.

The changes have put Switzerland in fierce competition with faster-growing centres like Hong Kong and Singapore. 

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Americans waste 150,000 tons of food per day: study

TAMPA, United States - Americans waste nearly 150,000 tons of food per day, amounting to about one pound (422 grams) per person, and fruits and vegetables are mostly what gets tossed, said a study Wednesday.

The amount of land used annually to grow food that ends up in the garbage in the United States is 30 million acres, or seven percent of total US cropland. Some 4.2 trillion gallons of irrigation water gets wasted, too, said the report in the journal PLOS ONE.

Fruits and vegetables made up 39 percent of total food waste, followed by dairy (17 percent), meat (14 percent) and grains (12 percent).

Items least likely to be thrown out included salty snacks, table oils, egg dishes, candy and soft drinks.

"Higher quality diets have greater amounts of fruits and vegetables, which are being wasted in greater quantities than other food," said co-author Meredith Niles, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont. 

"Eating healthy is important, and brings many benefits, but as we pursue these diets, we must think much more consciously about food waste."

The report, based on government data and surveys about food waste from 2007 to 2014, found that the amount of wasted food equals about 30 percent of the average daily calories consumed for every American.

The costs to the environment and to farmers are "significant," it said.

"Food waste corresponded to harvests produced with the use of 780 million pounds of pesticide and 1.8 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer, annually."

Solutions may include teaching consumers how to better prepare and store fresh fruits and vegetables, revising "sell-by" dates, encouraging people to buy imperfect produce, and incorporating efforts to prevent food waste into government sustainability programs.

"Food waste is an issue that plays out at many different levels," said lead author Zach Conrad at the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in North Dakota. 

"Looking at them holistically will become increasingly important to finding sustainable ways of meeting the needs of a growing world population."

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Financial infidelity: One in five Americans hides bank account

One in five Americans has hidden at least one bank account or credit card from their spouse or partner, a survey has found.

Younger people tended to be more likely to keep an account from a partner, with almost a third of millennials (people aged 18-37) admitting to having done so, according to the study by YouGov Plc, an internet-based market research and data analytics firm.

Twenty-four percent of Gen Xers (aged 38 to 53) had hidden assets, and 17 percent of baby boomers (54 to 72) admitted to having hidden an account, it added.

Just eight percent of people 73 or older had hidden a card or account, it said.

The study also found that almost a third (31 percent) of Americans said that keeping a card or account secret was worse than cheating romantically.

Meanwhile, 11 percent of all couples say they never discuss their combined finances.

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ADHD a 'brain disorder', not just bad behaviour: study

People with ADHD have slightly smaller brains than those without the condition, according to a study released Thursday which insisted it is a physical disorder and not just bad behavior.

The largest analysis to date of the brains of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder found "structural differences" and evidence of delayed development compared with non-sufferers, researchers reported.

"The results from our study confirm that people with ADHD have differences in their brain structure and therefore suggest that ADHD is a disorder of the brain," said the study's lead author, Martine Hoogman of Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands.

"We hope that this will help to reduce stigma that ADHD is 'just a label' for difficult children or caused by poor parenting," she said in a statement.

The results of the study, which involved 1,713 people with ADHD and 1,529 people without the condition, were published in The Lancet Psychiatry.

Most often diagnosed in children, ADHD is blamed for severe and repeated bouts of inattention, hyperactivity or impulsiveness that can cause problems at school or home.

The symptoms can persist into adulthood.

The causes remain in dispute, and some specialists say ADHD is nothing but an excuse for using drugs to subdue children with difficult personalities or bad parents.

Drugs for treating ADHD, such as Ritalin, have been blamed for side effects including weight loss or gain, liver damage and suicidal thoughts.

For the latest study, Hoogman and a team analysed the MRI scans of people aged four to 63, suffering from ADHD or not.

- Emotional control -

They measured overall brain volume as well as the size of seven regions thought to be linked to the disorder.

The volume overall was smaller in people diagnosed with ADHD, as were five of the brain regions, the team said.

"These differences are very small -- in the range of a few percent -- so the unprecedented size of our study was crucial to help identify these," Hoogman said.

"Similar differences in brain volume are also seen in other psychiatric disorders, especially major depressive disorder."

The regions affected included the amygdala, which is involved in the regulation of emotion.

Previous studies which associated changes in brain volume with ADHD had been too small to be conclusive, the team said.

The differences observed in their study were most prominent in children, but also present in adults with the condition.

The findings suggest that delays in the development of several brain regions were characteristic of ADHD, the researchers said.

They found no difference between people who were taking or had taken ADHD drugs, and those who had never taken such medications -- suggesting that the brain changes were not caused by psychostimulants.

In a comment on the study, Jonathan Posner of Columbia University said it was an "important contribution" to the field of ADHD science.

He said further research was needed to determine the effects of medication on the brains of people with ADHD, and how they develop as people get older.

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Study of cancer-causing toxins finds e-cigarettes much safer than smoking

Consuming e-cigarettes is far safer and less toxic than smoking conventional tobacco cigarettes, according to the findings of a study analyzing levels of dangerous and cancer-causing substances in the body.

Researchers found that people who switched from smoking regular cigarettes to e-cigarettes or nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) such as gum or patches for at least six months had much lower levels of toxins in their saliva and urine than those who continued to smoke.

"Our study adds to existing evidence showing that e-cigarettes and NRT are far safer than smoking, and suggests that there is a very low risk associated with their long-term use," said Lion Shahab, a specialist in epidemiology and public health at University College London who led the work.

E-cigarettes, which heat nicotine-laced liquid into vapor, have grown into an $8 billion-a-year market, according to Euromonitor International - more than three times that of NRT products. They are, however, still dwarfed by a tobacco market estimated by Euromonitor to be worth around $700 billion.

Many health experts think e-cigarettes, or vapes, which do not contain tobacco, are a lower-risk alternative to smoking and potentially a major public health tool.

But some question their long-term safety and worry that they may act as a "gateway" to taking up conventional cigarettes. The U.S. surgeon general in December urged lawmakers to impose price and tax policies that would discourage their use.

Monday's study, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed saliva and urine samples from long-term e-cigarette and NRT users as well as smokers, and compared levels of key chemicals found in their bodies.

It found that smokers who switched completely to e-cigarettes or NRT had significantly lower levels of toxic chemicals and carcinogens compared to people who continued to smoke tobacco cigarettes.

Those who used e-cigarettes or NRT but did not completely quit smoking did not show the same drop in toxin levels. This underlined that a complete switch was needed to get the long-term health benefits of quitting tobacco, the researchers said.

The World Health Organization says tobacco is the world's biggest preventable killer, with a predicted cumulative death toll of a billion by the end of this century if current trends continue. Tobacco smoking currently kills around 6 million people a year.

Kevin Fenton, national director of health and well-being at the government authority Public Health England, said the findings held a clear message for tobacco smokers.

"Switching to e-cigarettes can significantly reduce harm to smokers, with greatly reduced exposure to carcinogens and toxins," he said in a statement. "The findings also make clear that the benefit is only realized if people stop smoking completely and make a total switch.

"The best thing a smoker can do, for themselves and those around them, is to quit now, completely and forever."

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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