Top News Stories –
Mieko Nagaoka: 100-year-old Japanese swimmer sets 1,500m record –
A Japanese woman has become the first 100-year-old to complete a 1,500m freestyle swim in a 25m pool. Mieko Nagaoka, who only took up swimming at the age of 82, already holds the record in her age category for the same distance in a 50m pool. She completed the latest feat in just over one hour and 15 minutes, using backstroke all the way. She was the only person taking part in her age range – 100 to 104 – at the competition in Matsuyama on Saturday. Nagaoka already dominates the world record board for her age group, as awarded by the international swimming federation (Fina), holding 24 titles over both short and long distances. [BBC]
Smartphones could be charged in 60 seconds with new battery –
An iPhone 6 takes around two hours to charge but could be full of power in a minute if fitted with a new aluminium battery. Smartphones could be charged in less than one minute after scientists at Stanford University invented an aluminium battery so powerful it could revolutionise the industry. The new rechargeable battery can go from flat to full in a fraction of the time it currently takes to pull in enough electricity to fully charge a phone, laptop or tablet. While an iPhone 6 takes around two hours to fully charge its in-built battery, if it was fitted with the aluminium power source it would be completely topped up in around 60 seconds. And it will keep going for more than seven times as long as a lithium-ion battery. A traditional battery can be recharged around 1,000 times, while the new one can withstand 7,500 cycles. [Daily Telegraph]
Biggest American Indian tribe in US introduces country’s first junk food tax –
As diabetes and obesity spiral out of control on their vast reservation, Navajo Nation harks back to a healthier time and starts taxing Spam and crisps. In times gone by, Navajo Indians ate whatever mother nature was generous enough to bestow, their existence intimately and spiritually bound up with the land on which they lived. Their food would have been the envy of any modern dietitian as they foraged for pinyon nuts and wild potato, and nibbled on sumac berries, yucca fruit, prickly pears and beeweed greens. Today, life is very different in the Navajo Nation, the largest American Indian reservation in America, which covers an area of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that is the size of Scotland and has a tribal population of 300,000. The modern Navajo, who prefer to be called the Diné, are facing an intensifying health crisis fuelled by a complete transition to a diet based largely on fried potatoes, tortillas, cookies, crisps, sugary drinks and Spam. [Daily Telegraph]
[Daily Telegraph]
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