Features

Some call it the brain, others the heart, some refer to it as the core. The fact is that a computer’s processor or CPU (Central Processing Unit) is still the essential element in any system, and by far the most important one in machines and various digital, computer-like devices of all sizes and sorts.

Several companies manufacture computer peripherals of all sorts, from hard disks to printers, scanners and monitors. Millions of people in the world write software programmes, or apps in some cases, as fashion has it now. Also, millions design and develop websites. Only a very limited number of companies can make CPUs; and all the other aspects of technology in the world would be nothing without the processor.

When it comes to making the essential chips, only a handful of companies are able to design and manufacture CPUs and have the required human, technical and financial resources to continue doing it through the years. To say that they rule the world of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is hardly an exaggeration. By extrapolating one would even say that they rule the world.

At the top reigns Intel, with an impressive 80 per cent of the world’s market share, considering all computers processors made. AMD follows with 20 per cent. These are the average figures for the last 12 months.

In the news earlier this week, and according to cnet.com, “Intel packs 8 million digital neurons onto its brain-like computer. [ ] the company takes a notable step toward a digital brain.” As impressive as this sounds, the consumer has gotten familiar, not to say blasé, with similarly sensational news about ever more powerful CPUs every couple of year or so.

The name of the game has not changed. It is all about being able to do more, to run a greater number of applications at the same time, and to do it faster than the previous season. Now Intel’s well-known range of consumer-oriented CPUs (i.e. not servers), namely the i3, i5 and i7 are in their 10th generation. Intel also shines in the domain of server computers with its Xeon CPU range that address the requirement of high-demand, data-intensive machines.

There are naturally a few other manufacturers, but they mainly target mobile devices, graphics processors (GPUs) and wireless hardware. These are ARM, Qualcomm, Huawei, Samsung and NVidia, to name only the main ones. Huawei, in particular, has excellent reputation in the field of professional wireless networking equipment, perhaps as much if not more than in the world of smartphones where the name is more often heard, thanks to the company’s aggressive advertising.

The CPU therefore is the element to start with when you are shopping for a computer, be it a desktop, a laptop or a mobile device. Getting the one that is right for you and for the applications you intend to use is critical. Of course you can then give your machine some extra boost, some vitamins, in the form of more central memory or a fast SSD disk, but they will only be, well… supplements. For the good health of your computer, the main diet, the core issue remains the CPU. Choosing the right one is like building your home on solid ground. The rest matters less.

LOS ANGELES — The divisive final season of “Game of Thrones” smashed the record for most Primetime Emmy nominations by a drama series in a single year, earning a whopping 32 nods on Tuesday.

HBO’s fantasy epic enraged fans with its bumpy conclusion but still trounced the competition to strengthen its iron grip on the small-screen equivalent of the Oscars.

“The Marvelous Mrs Maisel” — Amazon’s story of a 1950s housewife-turned-stand up comic — was a distant second with 20 nominations.

“Thrones” is the most decorated fictional show in the awards’ seven-decade history, and now has 161 nominations overall — including 47 wins. 

“For those who will be adding 2019 to their long list of nominations and or wins from other years — it never gets old!” said Television Academy chairman and CEO Frank Scherma.

The show about families vying for the Iron Throne broke a 25-year drama series nominations record held by “NYPD Blue”, which earned 27 nods in 1994.

Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington were recognised in the lead acting categories, while eight other “Thrones” cast members swept the board in the supporting and guest acting categories. The shortened eighth and last season also won a slew of technical awards.

“Thrones” capitalised on a threadbare year for drama, with several big hitters such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” missing from the main categories. The next highest-placed drama — AMC’s “Breaking Bad” prequel “Better Call Saul” — managed just eight nominations. 

HBO’s acclaimed limited series “Chernobyl” placed third overall this year with 19 nominations, ahead of perennial Emmys powerhouse “Saturday Night Live” with 18.

This year’s nominations saw HBO reclaim its title for most-nominated network from web streaming giant Netflix, which last year had ended its 17-year winning streak.

HBO claimed 137 nods to Netflix’s 117 — a record for each, meaning the pair tighten their joint stranglehold on the prestigious awards.

“Sure, things could look very different next year when HBO will be without both drama ‘Game of Thrones’... and comedy ‘Veep’”, wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg. “But for one more year, at least, HBO is tops in TV.”

Netflix’s “When They See Us”, the true story of five men wrongly accused of raping a Central Park jogger, picked up a stunning eight acting nods.

“Thank you to the real men for inviting me to tell their story... Love you, brothers”,    Tweeted series creator Ava DuVernay.

Amazon Prime also enjoyed a stellar year, more than doubling its haul to reach 47 nods, just behind NBC with 58.

As well as “Maisel”, dark British comedy “Fleabag” performed well for Amazon, with five of its actresses receiving nominations, including lead Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Waller-Bridge, who is currently rewriting the upcoming 25th James Bond film, also received a writing nomination for “Fleabag”.

But there was disappointment for the traditional big four broadcast networks — CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC — which were left “hanging on for dear life”,  said Feinberg.

In particular, the final season of CBS ratings smash “The Big Bang Theory” failed to register in any main categories.

A-listers Julia Roberts and Jim Carrey were shunned by voters, who ignored their respective performances in Amazon’s “Homecoming” and Showtime’s “Kidding”.

While Netflix/BBC thriller “Bodyguard” earned a drama series nod, its lead actor Richard Madden was a surprising omission.

The Emmys recognises shows that were on in the 12 months to May 31.

That meant several voters’ favourites were absent from main categories this year, including Hulu’s new season of “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

The 2017 drama series winner still managed to pick up 11 nominations in technical categories, for episodes submitted from the tail-end of its previous season. 

“Big Little Lies” and “Stranger Things” also just missed the cut-off this time around.

The Television Academy’s 24,000 members sifted through a record number of entries for this year’s Emmys.

The nominations were announced in a live-streamed presentation from Los Angeles hosted by “The Good Place” actress D’Arcy Carden and “The Masked Singer” panellist Ken Jeong. 

Final-round voting will now begin to pick winners who will be revealed at a glitzy Los Angeles show on September 22. 

People with high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol before age 40 are more likely to have a heart attack later in life than other adults, a new analysis suggests.

The analysis pooled data from six studies involving a total of 36,030 people. Starting when participants were 53 years old on average, researchers tracked them to see who had heart attacks, strokes, or heart failure. 

By the time half of the people had been tracked for at least 17 years, participants who had high levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol before age 40 — that is, higher than about 129 milligrammes per decilitre of blood — were 64 per cent more likely to have had events like heart attacks compared to people with low LDL levels in early adulthood. 

The upper limit of normal blood pressure is 120/80. Younger adults who had high systolic blood pressure — the “top number” — were 37 per cent more likely to develop heart failure later in life. And young adults who had elevated diastolic blood pressure — the “bottom number” — were 21 per cent more likely to develop heart failure later on. 

“Many young adults feel OK, or they’re willing to think — I’m OK now, I will make healthful choices later when I’m older,” said Dr Andrew Moran, senior author of the study and a researcher at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York City. 

“This study shows that healthy choices matter even in young adults,” Moran said by e-mail. “This means not smoking, eating a healthful diet and exercising regularly.” 

And for some high risk young adults, starting medication to manage risk factors at a younger age — something that currently isn’t done as a matter of course — may be worthwhile, Moran added. 

Very few people in the study had high blood pressure or high cholesterol during young adulthood, researchers report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 

During follow-up, 4,570 participants had events like heart attacks, 5,119 had heart failure events, and 2,862 had strokes. 

The study can’t explain whether or how high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol in early adulthood might directly cause heart attacks, strokes or heart failure later in life. 

One limitation of the analysis is that because the smaller studies used in the analysis didn’t have blood pressure and cholesterol measurements across the lifespan, in some cases researchers had to estimate how many younger adults had these risk factors based on the data they had for participants at older ages. 

“Heart failure and heart attacks are the result of years of exposure to risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol,” said Dr Samuel Gidding, coauthor of an editorial accompanying the study and medical director of the FH (Familial Hypercholesterolemia) Foundation in Pasadena, California. 

“Both cause the buildup of fat in the coronary arteries beginning in childhood; this leads to heart attack later in life,” Gidding said by e-mail. “High blood pressure puts extra strain on the heart and adapting to that stress leads to heart failure.” 

Helped by a global search through sewage, San Diego State University researchers have found that a benign gut virus appears to be older than the human race itself.

Moreover, different strains of this common virus can be traced to countries or even individual cities, said study leader Rob Edwards. Travellers rapidly pick up the local strain, providing a genetic map of their journey.

“For example, we can detect San Diego vs. New York,” Edwards said.

There are also hints that the virus might be usable to treat certain diseases related to imbalances of intestinal bacteria, he said. There’s no evidence the virus causes any human disease.

The study was published Monday in Nature Microbiology.

This virus is a bacteriophage or phage, a group of viruses that kill bacteria. Called a cross-assembly phage, or crAssphage, it infects Bacteroidetes, a genus of anerobic bacteria. The virus was first reported in 2014, by a group including Edwards.

The virus might be used to alleviate disorders such as Crohn’s disease, and possibly diabetes and obesity, he said. There are hints that imbalances in the gut bacterial population are involved in such disorders. So strains of the phage might be engineered to deliver medicines.

“Presumably, because the phage has been around so long, it’s adapted to our immune system, so it’s not going to cause a big response,” Edwards said. “This is a really exciting area of opportunity for us right now, to understand how we can shape the human microbiome with the bacteriophages that we have available to us.”

However, he said a fuller understanding of these gut microbial interactions will first be needed.

Phage therapy has been around for more than a century. In recent years, it has received more attention, as bacterial resistance to antibiotics proliferates. The University of California, San Diego has established a centre for phage therapy.

With the help of colleagues around the world, Edwards was able to get the genetic sequences of crAssphage from their locales. This greatly simplified the task.

“We put out requests by email and Twitter for scientists to get samples from their local sewage plants,” Edwards said. “It was kind of a global coming together where everybody got their own samples, sequences them and sent us the data by e-mail. So we have sequences from 67 countries.”

The virus was found to be widespread, and also related to other phages found in Old World and New World primates. This pattern suggests that crAssphage and its ancestors were present in primates before the human lineage split off, Edwards said.

Positioned between similarly sized Japanese competitors like the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla, and rugged, slightly smaller, and more affordable “world car” saloons like the Peugeot 301, Renault Logan and its own Sunny sister, the Nissan Sentra offers the best of both worlds.

Contemporary in design, yet spacious, it doesn’t sacrifice practicality at the altar of fashion, nor is it overburdened with what is unnecessary, but instead offers a “just right” package for Jordanian roads in terms of size, price, comfort, design and driving dynamic.

Styled to more cohesively fit in Nissan’s design language when first launched than smaller Sunny and Tiida sister models, and to better channel Nissan’s larger Altima and Maxima design elements, the Sentra offers similarly elegant and flowing lines.

Most similar in its fascia treatment, sporty wraparound front and rear lights, curvy front wheel-arch and subtly muscular bonnet, the Sentra’s roofline is cleverly design to flow towards its high-set boot. Nevertheless it retains a roomy, upright cabin with a generous glasshouse for visibility and an airy ambiance.

Seamless and efficient

Powered by either 1.8- and 1.6-litre naturally-aspirated four-cylinder engines regionally, and with a choice of continuously variable transmission (CVT) or a 6-speed manual gearbox driving the front wheels in the latter version, the Sentra offers progressive delivery, decent refinement and sound insulation.

Driven in 1.6 guise, it develops 113BHP at 5600rpm and 113lb/ft at around 4000rpm, and is estimated to be capable of 0-100km/h in around 11-seconds. During extensive, varied and sometimes demanding test drive conditions on Jordanian roads, it also delivered frugal real world fuel efficiency.

Responsive from idle, versatile in mid-range and confident keeping pace on highway and in town, the Sentra’s engine seems perky and willing to rev high in its own right. Ultra smooth, highly fuel efficient, and one of the better CVT systems, the Sentra’s CVT transmission inherently trades off some element of driver control in regards exact ratio changes, for efficiency, and is tuned to favour maintaining mid-range engine speeds in most situations. However, selecting “L” mode, it more readily unleashes higher revs for more power.

Unexpectedly engaging

More suitable for most drivers in Jordan for its seemingly seamless ratio changes and fuel efficiency, the Sentra’s CVT well suits what a first impression of a mild-mannered, comfortable, smooth and easy daily drive saloon. However, given more sporting handling abilities that became more apparent on narrow, snaking and textured Jordanian roads, compared to straight, smooth and wide Dubai roads where first driven in 2013, it becomes tempting to trade some CVT benefits for the manual gearbox Sentra’s greater driver involvement and performance, and lower price.

Seemingly shrinking around the driver and becoming sharper once put through its pace on narrower country lanes, the Sentra isn’t overtly sporty but soon instils confidence in its unexpected handling ability and eager in-segment clarity. Turning in tidy and crisp with little indication of under-steer, the Sentra happily tucks and weaves through switchbacks, with its good visibility, relatively narrow body making it easy to place. Predictable yet nippy and fun, it well copes with tight and fast corners, while comparatively narrow tyres help steering accuracy and feel.

Supple and spacious

Well-damped on centre for reassuring highway stability, the Sentra’s light yet tall-geared steering however becomes more delicate and communicative when loaded through corners. Refined and settled if slightly alert at speed, the Sentra is set up for supple comfort over lumps, bumps and cracks, yet doesn’t alienate the driver from road conditions and remains alert through corners and vertically settled on rebound, while cornering lean is well managed. Restrained 195/60R16 tyres meanwhile also well absorb road imperfections and durably cope with rougher patches of tarmac.

Pleasantly airy and unostentatious inside, the Sentra’s cabin features nice subtle and functionally user-friendly design elements and layouts. Materials include soft surfaces in prominent places and more discrete hard plastics. Driven in entry-level S trim with comfortable fabric upholstery and best in dark cabin colours, standard equipment includes A/C, electric windows and mirrors, CD player, remote central locking and more. Comparatively spacious in front and rear head and legroom and with generous 510-litre luggage capacity, the Sentra betters many competitors and some larger, fancier yet lower roof cars.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Engine: 1.6-litre, transverse 4-cylinders
• Bore x stroke: 78 x 83.6mm
• Compression: 9.8:1
• Valve-train: 16-valve, DOHC
• Gearbox: Continuously variable transmission (CVT) auto, front-wheel-drive
• Transmission ratios: 4.006:1-0.550:1
• Reverse/final drive: 3.771:1/3.754:1
• Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 113 (114) [84] @5,600rpm
• Specific power: 73.7BHP/litre
• Power-to-weight: 93.8BHP/tonne
• Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 113 (154) @4,000rpm
• Specific torque: 96.3Nm/litre
• Torque-to-weight: 127.8Nm/tonne
• 0-100km/h: 11-seconds (estimate)
• Fuel capacity: 52-litres
• Length: 4,615mm
• Width: 1,760mm
• Height: 1,495mm
• Wheelbase: 2,700mm
• Track, F/R: 1,545/1,540mm
• Minimum ground clearance: 165mm
• Aerodynamic drag co-efficiency: 0.29
• Head room, F/R: 1000/932mm
• Legroom, F/R: 1079/950mm
• Shoulder room, F/R: 1389/1369mm
• Hip room, F/R: 1292/1272mm
• Luggage volume: 510-litres
• Kerb weight: 1,205kg
• Steering: Electric-assisted rack & pinion
• Lock-to-lock: 3.3-turns
• Turning circle: 10.4-metres
• Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts/torsion beam
• Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs/drums
• Tyres: 195/60R16

Price, on-the-road, no insurance: JD17,600

By Tamara Jalajel
Children’s Physiotherapist 

Participation in sports helps improve not only your child’s motor skills but their overall development. Children’s social, communication and behavioural skills, and even their academic performance, are proven benefits of engaging in sports.

What sport to choose for your child?

Child’s interest

Exploring your child’s preference in physical activity is a priority. What type of activities does he or she enjoy? Does he or she like competitive games? At this stage, you can try various physical activities at home by using modified sport skills such as throwing at targets, racing, gymnastic movements and so on. 

After trying many activities, your child could choose a sport to explore further.

Sport characteristics

Each sport has its elements and skills that your child has to learn to master. For example, football involves the lower body while upper body motor coordination is necessary to play basketball and tennis. Kickboxing and jiu-jitsu involve sufficient motor coordination between the upper and lower body.

I recommend avoiding focusing on one sport and specialisation in it. By this, I mean that your child will learn the specific skills necessary for that sport only and will miss the opportunity to learn other essential skills. 

If your child wants to specialise in a sport, he or she can play two sports, such as football and boxing. Another solution to sports specialisation at a young age is to engage your child in a comprehensive exercise regimen prepared by a specialist.

Team or individual sport

Taking into consideration your child’s interest whether to play in a team setting or as an individual basis will help to narrow down options. If your child has trouble in coordinating his or her movements or has a short attention span, an individual sport like swimming is an option. Children who need motivation and encouragement tend to enjoy team sports.

Coach specialisation

Teaching children sports skills is not easy, and a coach has to know how to teach these skills gradually. 

Look for a coach with knowledge and experience to teach your child a particular sport. At team sports classes, you may also wish to ensure that the coach involves your child in the class if he or she has a short attention span or motor coordination difficulties. 

Even with its advantages on children’s overall development, sports is not always a good option to start with if your child has delays due to any specific reason. 

Forcing your child to participate in sports may lead to psychological stress. 

If you find a child rejects sports, let’s first determine the reason for withdrawal or stress. 

A children’s physiotherapist can help your child unpack and process the reasons, and then prepare your child to engage in his or her preferred sport. In the meantime, you as parents can support by playing with your children, watching sports as a family, ensuring that your child is enjoying his or her time while playing and avoiding overtraining or stressing him or her to train.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng

US: Penguin Random House, 2017

Pp. 336

Like Celeste Ng’s first novel, “Little Fires Everywhere” opens with a traumatic climax — a fire, and then pedals backwards to tell how things turned out that way. In “Everything I Never Told You” (2014), the traumatic event is the drowning of a teenage girl, but it remains unclear if it was suicide, an accident or a crime.

In “Little Fires Everywhere”, a veil of ambiguity is also thrown over the fire in the Richardson’s house, but it is more porous: Everyone assumes that Isabelle, the youngest Richardson daughter, has ignited the blaze which grew from small fires set in the middle of each family member’s bed — one of many bizarre details in the story. But this is gossip; one doesn’t know for sure if it was Isabelle, much less why she did it, until the end.

Though the plots are totally different, there are other commonalities in Ng’s two novels: Both have outsiders as major characters who have closely guarded secrets, and both focus on family relations, examining how members of the same family understand and misunderstand each other, and how they interact accordingly. In “Little Fires Everywhere”, however, the mother-child bond overshadows all other relationships. While in “Everything I Never Told You”, Ng examines how the drowned girl’s father being ethnic Chinese affected their family life, “Little Fires Everywhere” examines class differences as well. 

To illustrate this, Ng focuses not on one family or one point of ethnic difference, but rather contrasts two families of different social status and structure. Accordingly, “Little Fires Everywhere” has many more characters and a more complex plot. Just tying up the threads of the several subplots and structuring the story in retrospect is an achievement in itself.

“Little Fires Everywhere” is set in Shaker Heights, a planned suburban community in Ohio, whose residents pride themselves on living according to rational and progressive values, imagining themselves to be beyond racism and other forms of prejudice. Four mothers or would-be mothers figure prominently in the story. Mrs Richardson, mother of four, is emblematic of Shaker Heights, priding herself on always doing the right thing in an orderly way. “All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing.” (p. 161)

But the unfolding of the plot shows that “the right thing” is not always clear-cut, nor is reality fair to all. Mrs Richardson’s close friend, Mrs McCullough, for example, is suffering from being unable to have a child. 

Implicitly challenging the orderliness of these two rich women’s lives is Mia, an artist and single mother, newly arrived in Shaker Heights. Mia also lives according to her principles, but her principles are more about creativity and freedom than just following the rules. Having moved from place to place all during her daughter Pearl’s childhood, Mia promises Pearl that this time they will stay. For the first time, Pearl makes friends, and her best friends are the Richardson children. Soon many ties connect the two families, making the contrast between their lifestyles more pronounced: Mia rents a small house from the Richardsons and does Mrs Richardson’s housework, spending the rest of the time on her art projects, while Pearl excels in high school. But events conspire to make Mrs Richardson suspicious of Mia: “A sweet face. A young face, but not an innocent face. She didn’t care, Mrs. Richardson realised, what people thought of her. In a way, that made her dangerous.” (p. 138)

Things come to a head when Mrs McCullough and her husband try to adopt a female child abandoned by Bebe, a Chinese immigrant woman who was unable to provide for her at birth. But Bebe’s situation improves, and she wants to reclaim her baby. The resulting legal and moral battle cuts through family ties and friendships, as members of the two families, like the community as a whole, align either with the birth mother or the adoptive mother. 

Ng has a gift for revealing her characters’ inner thoughts and motivations, and for writing about lives lived both in affluence and stability, or off the beaten track. Under her pen, even bizarre human behaviour is rendered credible. She also poses questions that may be easy to answer in the abstract but more complicated in specific cases: Has the US reached a stage of post-racism? Is a child better off with her birth mother even if that mother is poor and marginal, or with parents who can give her a privileged life? Should a woman be deprived of her child for making one mistake? Is there always a right way and a wrong way to do things? One keeps thinking about these dilemmas and visualising the novel’s characters long after finishing the book.

“Little Fires Everywhere” is available at Books@cafe.

PARIS — Consumption of sugary drinks such as soda and fruit juice is linked to a higher risk of developing certain kinds of cancer, researchers recently reported.

The consumption of sugary drinks has exploded worldwide in recent decades and the high-calorie beverages have already been associated with a elevated risk of obesity — itself recognised as a leading cancer risk factor.

A team of researchers in France wanted to assess the associations between heightened consumption of sugar drinks and the risks of overall cancer, as well as several cancer types, including breast, prostate and bowel cancers.

They surveyed more than 100,000 adults, with an average of age of 42, 79 per cent of whom were women.

The participants, who were followed for a maximum of nine years, completed at least two 24-hour online validated dietary questionnaires, calculating their daily consumption of sugar and artificially sweetened beverages as well as 100 per cent fruit juices.

Researchers measured the daily intakes of sugary drinks against those of diet beverages and compared them with cancer cases in participants’ medical records during the follow-up period.

They found that just a 100ml increase per day of sugary drinks was associated with an 18 per cent increased risk of cancer, and with a 22 per cent increase in breast cancer.

Both sugar-sweetened drinks and fruit juices saw a similar higher risk association.

During a follow-up, researchers found 2,193 cases of cancer were diagnosed, the average age at diagnosis being 59 years.

Authors of the study, which appeared in the BMJ medical journal, stressed their work was based on observation and so could not establish the cause of cancer prognoses.

But the sample size was large and they adjusted for a number of other influential factors.

Its authors suggested that, based on their findings, taxing sugary products could have a significant impact on cancer rates.

“This large, well-designed study adds to the existing evidence that consumption of sugary drinks may be associated with increased risk of some cancers,” Graham Wheeler, senior statistician of the Cancer Research UK said of the study. 

Women who like to wake up early every day may be less likely to develop breast cancer than women who prefer to sleep in, a recent study suggests. 

While previous studies have linked inconsistent sleep schedules and getting too much rest to an increased risk of breast cancer, researchers haven’t looked as often at how much women’s wake-up time might impact this risk, researchers note in the BMJ. 

For the current analysis, researchers analysed genetic variants associated with three sleep traits: sleep duration, insomnia, and a so-called morning or evening chronotype, referring to early or late risers. They looked at data on 180,216 women in the UK Biobank study and 228,951 women in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC) study. 

In the UK Biobank study, among every 100 women who were early risers, there was one fewer case of breast cancer than among every 100 women who were late risers. But there wasn’t a clear connection between breast cancer and sleep duration or insomnia. 

In the BCAC group, women who woke up early also had a lower risk of breast cancer. In this study, sleeping more than the recommended seven to eight hours a night was associated an increased risk — 19 per cent for every extra hour. 

“The findings of a protective effect of morning preference on breast cancer risk in our study are consistent with previous research highlighting a role for night shift work in the development of breast cancer,” said Rebecca Richmond, lead study author and a researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK.

“One particular mechanism which might explain the link, known as the `light-at-night’ hypothesis, involves the suppression of melatonin levels in women exposed to artificial night at light, which in turn influences various hormonal pathways which might increase risk of breast cancer,” Richmond said by e-mail. 

But women shouldn’t rush to reset their alarm clocks to lower their breast cancer risk, Richmond said. 

“Our main findings were based on women’s reported morning or evening preference, rather than actually whether they get up earlier or later in the day,” Richmond noted. 

Another drawback is that participants were all of European ancestry, and results might differ for women from other racial and ethnic groups. 

Most women who get breast cancer develop these tumours after age 50, and they may be more prone to these tumours with a family history, certain genetic mutations, dense breast tissue, early puberty or late menopause, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. 

While women can’t control any of those risk factors, there are other risk factors related to lifestyle that can be altered, according to the CDC. These include being physically inactive, overweight, drinking alcohol, having a first pregnancy after age 30, not breastfeeding, and taking some forms of hormonal birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy for menopause symptoms. 

Sleep might also increase the risk, along with smoking, exposure to certain chemicals, and hormone changes caused by night shift work, according to the CDC. 

The current analysis wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove that specific sleep habits might directly cause breast cancer. 

It’s also not clear from the study whether women’s preferred early or late wake-up time (conformed) with their work hours, said Dr Eva Schernhammer, author of an accompanying editorial and a researcher at the Medical University of Vienna and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Being an early riser might make women’s wake up time better match a typical nine to five workday that is common for many jobs. 

 “The majority of women are neither morning or evening types, but somewhere in between on that spectrum, hence, any potential risks are likely to affect a relatively small proportion of women,” Schernhammer said by email. “However, sleep and work timing might be more important than previously thought.”

WASHINGTON — US regulators have approved a $5 billion penalty to be levied on Facebook to settle a probe into the social network’s privacy and data protection lapses, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The newspaper said the Federal Trade Commission approved the settlement in a 3-2 vote, with the two Democratic members of the consumer protection agency dissenting.

According to the report, the deal, which would be the largest penalty ever imposed by the FTC for privacy violations, still needs approval from the Justice Department before it is finalised.

Although details have not yet been released, the deal will likely include restrictions on how Facebook is able to use personal data.

Charlotte Slaiman of the consumer group Public Knowledge thinks it is unlikely the restrictions will be overly harsh.

“We don’t yet know key aspects of the settlement: whether Facebook must make any changes to its business model or practices as a result,” said Charlotte Slaiman, the group’s Competition Policy Counsel.

“By itself, this fine will not be sufficient to change Facebook’s behaviour.”

The outlook was more optimistic at the Centre for Democracy and Technology, whose president Nuala O’Connor said the fine underscored the importance of “data stewardship” in the digital age.

“The FTC has put all companies on notice that they must safeguard personal information,” O’Connor said.

Facebook did not immediately respond to an AFP query on the agreement.

Unlikely to hurt

The FTC announced last year it reopened its investigation into a 2011 privacy settlement with Facebook after revelations that personal data on tens of millions of users was hijacked by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which was working on the Donald Trump campaign in 2016.

Facebook has also faced questions about whether it improperly shared user data with business partners in violation of the earlier settlement.

The leading social network with more than two billion users worldwide has also been facing inquiries on privacy from authorities in US states and regulators around the world.

The settlement would be in line with Facebook’s estimate earlier this year when it said it expected to pay $3 billion to $5 billion for legal settlements on “user data practices”.

The fine is unlikely to hurt Facebook, which logged a profit of $2.4 billion on revenue that climbed 26 per cent to $15.1 billion in the first three months of this year.

Facebook’s stock value increased 1.8 per cent after the fine was announced, closing at nearly $205, the highest it has been all year.

Break up Facebook

Some Facebook critics have argued the company should face tougher sanctions including monitoring of its data practices, or that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg should be personally liable for penalties.

Faced with criticism, Facebook’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, called on governments to do more to regulate social networks, instead of leaving the work to companies.

“It’s not for private companies, however big or small, to come up with those rules. It is for democratic politicians in the democratic world to do so,” Clegg said in a June 24 interview with the BBC.

But there are increasing calls to dismantle the massive social network.

In May, one of Facebook’s co-founders called for the social media behemoth to be broken up, warning that Zuckerberg had become far too powerful.

“It’s time to break up Facebook,” said Chris Hughes in an editorial for The New York Times, saying it had become necessary to separate the social network from Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp services.

Zuckerberg’s “focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks”, said Hughes.