Questões de Vestibular

The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates has said that the international community's efforts to fight hunger and poverty are inefficient and outdated. He said advances made by the digital revolution needed to be harnessed to help the world's poorest farmers more effectively.

Mr Gates said more needs to be done to support poor farmers in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. He said there was a lack of coordination between governments, aid donors and the UN's agencies, like the World Food Programme. Mr Gates called for the setting up of what he called a “public score card” system.

This would make it easier to tell how well, or how badly, different countries and agencies were performing in the fight to reduce poverty.

He said the effort to help small farmers also needs to harness the power of advances made in digital technology. In an age when satellites can tell instantly exactly how much wheat is in a field, he said, it was a shame that people were still being sent out with pen, paper and tape measures to try to do the same job.

Mr Gates said that the stakes couldn't be higher for the families of poor farmers. If they don't benefit from the fruits of the digital revolution they will fall far behind. But Mr Gates believes that if they can be connected to some of the latest breakthroughs in science they will have a chance to leapfrog foward.

Sure, soda can rot your teeth and make you fat, but that’s not all. Sugary drinks may increase your risk of heart disease, especially if you’re a heavy guy, say scientists from the University of California at Davis. In the study, overweight people who drank a fructose-sweetened beverage with a meal saw their triglyceride levels spike three times as high over 24 hours than people who drank a glucose-sweetened beverage. Triglycerides are fats in your blood, and high levels are thought to boost heart-disease risk. Your liver converts fructose to triglycerides, causing the spike, says study author Karen Teff, Ph.D. Most fruit juices also contains fructose, so dilute apple juice with equal parts water.