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Tesco begins plastic-free trial for selection of fruit and veg

Tesco is launching a trial to remove a selection of plastic-wrapped fruit and vegetable to cut down on packaging waste.

Britain’s biggest retailer said it would run the month-long pilot from Monday at two of its Extra stores, in Watford and Swindon, removing plastic packaging from 45 foods where loose alternatives are available. The items include apples, onions, mushrooms, peppers, bananas and avocados.

The development comes after Tesco announced last year that it would ban hard-to-recycle plastic packaging by 2019 and make all packaging fully recyclable by 2025.

Big supermarkets are responsible for producing more than 800,000 tonnes of plastic packaging waste each year, while consumers have increasingly demanded change as the environmental crisis caused by plastic grows. Plastic bag charges, introduced four years ago, have helped, although research shows that supermarkets still use billions of them each year.

Sarah Bradbury, director of quality at Tesco, said: “We hope this trial proves popular with customers. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the results, including any impact on food waste.”

The ¨Guardian 25 MArch 2019

Tesco is one of the biggest supermarkets in Britain. Wouldn't it be possible to do the same in Spain?

Inspiration session by Simon Sinek

Jesús G. has sent this interesting video. Thanks a lot for sharing.

How to spot fake news?

I think it's high time we fight against fake news, don't you think so?

Read more here: Fake News

Source: IFLA

Social media addiction should be seen as a disease, MPs say

UK report suggests sites such as Facebook and Instagram could be harming mental health

Social media addiction should be considered a disease, MPs have said, in a sign of the pressures facing technology companies and the growing concern over the impact social networks are having on users’ mental health.

The politicians called for further research on the effects of social media but said a report suggested there was good reason to believe sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – which are constantly competing for users to spend more time on their platforms – could be having a corrosive effect on children.

“It is paramount that we protect young people to ensure they are kept safe and healthy when they are online,” said the MPs, who believe the government should urgently fund long-term studies to see whether a clinical definition for social media addiction should be introduced.

The report was compiled by the all-party parliamentary group on social media and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, made up of MPs who have an interest in the topic. The report was written with the assistance of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) charity, which endorsed its findings following a series of evidence hearings.

The World Health Organization has already proposed including gaming disorder in the next revision of its International Classification of Diseases manual, categorising it as a mental illness in which increasing priority is “given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities”.

For an individual to be diagnosed as having gaming disorder the WHO suggests an individual should have shown significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, or work lives due to computer games for at least 12 months. The MPs suggest a similar definition could apply to individuals who struggle with excessive social media use, if research found this was justified.

The report also calls on the UK government to issue formal health guidance on how those aged 24 and under can avoid excessive social media use. It also backs calls for social media companies to be forced to share anonymised data with researchers to help understand the impact of their products on young people.

The group, chaired by Labour’s Chris Elmore and the Conservative William Wragg, recognised that social media had brought many benefits to society, including improved access to information on public health. However, the MPs want a 0.5% levy on social media networks’ profits to fund research, educational initiatives and establish clearer guidance for the public.

Concerns about the impact of social media on the mental health of children has increased substantially in recent years, especially after a campaign led by the parents of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017. Her father has claimed Instagram “helped kill” his daughter, prompting the social network to ban graphic self-harm images on its site.

Shirley Cramer, the chief executive of the RSPH, said: “This inquiry clearly highlights the serious and very real concerns of a variety of experts and young people. The overarching finding is the need for social media companies to have in place a duty of care to protect vulnerable users and the need for regulation which would provide much-needed health and safety protection for what is a lawless digital playground.”

She said extra research should be prioritised “to improve our understanding of the health harms, as well as benefits, from social media on our generation of digital natives, and that this research should be supported by industry itself”.

The report also acknowledges a growing awareness of the tactics employed by tech companies to encourage repeated use of their services. The MPs said the government should look at “which design aspects of social media platforms are inherently detrimental to young people’s mental health and wellbeing”.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said: “The government will soon publish a white paper which will set out the responsibilities of online platforms, how these responsibilities should be met and what would happen if they are not. An internet regulator, statutory ‘duty of care’ on platforms, and a levy on social media companies are all measures we are considering as part of our work.”

The Guardian, 18 March 2019

‘Maths anxiety’ causing fear and despair in children as young as six

Study says condition can cause physical symptoms and behaviour problems in class

Children as young as six feel fear, rage and despair as a result of “mathematics anxiety”, a condition which can cause physical symptoms and behaviour problems in class, according to a study.
Pupils in both primary and secondary school can find themselves locked in a cycle of despair, suffering from anxiety which harms their maths performance, which in turn leads to increased anxiety.
Researchers say maths anxiety should be treated as a “real concern” because of the damage it does to a child’s learning. They also point out it may be contributing to a growing maths crisis in the UK, where the level of adult numeracy is relatively low and getting worse.
According to the Nuffield Foundation report, Understanding Mathematics Anxiety, the proportion of adults with functional maths skills equivalent to a GCSE grade C has fallen from 26% in 2003 to 22% in 2011. In contrast, functional literacy skills are steadily increasing, with 57% of working-age adults gaining the equivalent level.
Researchers from the faculty of education and the centre for neuroscience in education at Cambridge University worked with 2,700 primary and secondary students in the UK and Italy – including detailed one-to-one interviews – to explore maths anxiety and its causes.
The children they interviewed provided graphic descriptions of their fears about maths. “I felt very unwell and I was really scared,” said one primary school student, describing his reaction during a lesson about equivalent fractions. “Because my table’s in the corner I kind of tried not to be in the lesson.”
The co-author Dr Ros McLellan, who led the interview research, said: “Maths anxiety is very much an emotional reaction. Younger kids won’t want to go to school when they have maths classes; they get tearful and upset.
“We had some young people saying: ‘I get so frustrated, I end up hitting the desk,’ and then they get themselves into bother. If we know what is at the bottom of the problem rather than addressing the symptoms we can address the root cause.”
Researchers found there was a general sense that maths was hard compared with other subjects, which led to a loss of confidence, yet the study points out that most children with high levels of maths anxiety are normal to high achievers in the subject.
Key triggers for anxiety included poor marks, test pressures, teasing by fellow pupils and a confusing mix of teaching methods. National Sats tests taken in the final year of primary school were a cause of anxiety for some, while the transition to secondary school was challenging for others.
The children’s emotional reactions included feelings of apprehension, tension, frustration or fear, while physical symptoms included butterflies, a racing heart or struggling to catch breath.
“The experiences of maths anxiety are multifaceted, with students expressing emotions from rage to despair,” the report says. “Students often reported overwhelming negative emotions which in some cases led them to act out in class and be removed from the classroom, or to become tearful. Others reported that they dreaded their mathematics lessons or that physical symptoms had an impact on their ability to flourish.”
It warns teachers and parents that their own anxieties about maths might have a negative influence and so urges them to tackle these first. It also urges policymakers to be conscious that emotional blocks can affect learning potential.

The Guardian, 14 March 2019

And speaking of Brexit ...

The Guardian 11 March 2019

Fake drugs kill more than 250,000 children a year, doctors warn

Doctors have called for an urgent international effort to combat a “pandemic of bad drugs” that is thought to kill hundreds of thousands of people globally every year.
A surge in counterfeit and poor quality medicines means that 250,000 children a year are thought to die after receiving shoddy or outright fake drugs intended to treat malaria and pneumonia alone, the doctors warned.
More are thought to die from poor or counterfeit vaccines and antibiotics used to treat or prevent acute infections and diseases such as hepatitis, yellow fever and meningitis.
Most of the deaths are in countries where a high demand for drugs combines with poor surveillance, quality control and regulations to make it easy for criminal gangs and cartels to infiltrate the market. Often they face only fines or minor sentences if caught.
“The penalties are a slap on the hand, but we are talking about murder by fake medicine here,” said Joel Breman, a senior scientist emeritus at the US National Institutes of Health in Maryland.
Tests on drugs in the field have identified fake and ineffective copies of a vast range of drugs including antimalarials, antibiotics and cardiovascular and cancer medicines. Many fakes originate in China and India and have been found to contain everything from printer ink and paint to arsenic. Lifestyle drugs, such as Viagra, dominate the market for counterfeit medicines.
Beyond the fakes that are made and sold by criminal gangs are poor-quality medicines that lack sufficient active ingredients to work properly, or fail to dissolve correctly when taken. Sloppy manufacturing is often to blame, but others are sold past their shelf life or have degraded in poor storage conditions.
Writing in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, doctors from the US government, universities, hospitals and the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer warn that the rise in “falsified and substandard medicines” has become a “public health emergency”. On top of the direct harm they cause, bad drugs are a major driver of antimicrobial resistance, which fuels the rise of superbugs. “This is an urgent public health issue and we need to take action,” Breman said.
Up to 10% of drugs in low and middle income countries are poor quality or outright fakes, costing local economies between $10bn and $200bn a year, the report states, and the problem is getting worse. In 2018, Pfizer identified 95 fake products in 113 countries, up from 29 fakes in 75 countries in 2008.
In a raft of recommendations, the doctors call for greater support for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) drug surveillance programme and an update to the UN’s sustainable development goals in which governments would ensure at least 90% of the medicines in their countries were of high quality. Registers of fake drugs found in the field should also be made open to the public, the doctors say.
Another recommendation is for a global treaty on drug quality that builds in the means to gather evidence on fake drug activities, and sets out extradition agreements so that suspects can face trial in countries they target. Such a treaty would encompass illegal online pharmacies, which doctors say are an increasing part of the problem.
Breman said the international community and pharmaceutical companies had to improve the security of the drug supply chain in all countries from the point of manufacture to the patient. There was an immediate need for simple and rapid tests that doctors could use to verify drug quality, he added.
“Very little has been done about this and that’s why our recommendations hit specific things that frankly have been evaded by the powers that be,” Breman said.
Last month, WHO issued a global alert about a fake cancer drug in Europe and the Americas. The counterfeit drug is packaged to look like Iclusig, an anticancer medicine used to treat adults with chronic myeloid leukaemia and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. WHO said the pill contained nothing but paracetamol.
Michael Deats, who leads the vigilance group on fake medicines at WHO in Geneva, said “the highest political will is required” to ensure that global policies on bad drugs make a difference on the ground. More than 110 countries have reported more than 2,000 cases of bad drugs overWHO’s global surveillance and monitoring system, he added, with new cases arriving every day.
Bernard Naughton, a researcher in falsified and counterfeit medicines at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, said fake medicine was a “wicked problem” that called for a combined effort from pharma companies, academia, governments, healthcare practitioners and the public.
“The UK legitimate pharmaceutical supply chain is safe but it requires constant monitoring,” he said. “Regarding online pharmacies, there is poor public understanding of how to differentiate between a legitimate online pharmacy and an illegal one. Illegal online pharmacies and the sale of medicines via social media platforms pose the greatest risk to the UK public.”

Ian Sample Science editor

The Guardian 11 March 2019

Watch & do

Watch this really interesting TED talk about happiness and write a summary of about 200 words.

Watch it without subtitles to make sure you are improving your listening skills as well.