Folic acid protects baby hearts

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Mandatory fortification of bread with folic acid would slash the risk of babies being born with a heart problem, experience from Canada shows.

Rates of severe congenital heart defects among newborns in Quebec fell significantly after the move to fortify flour and pasta began in 1998.

The British Medical Journal online study lends support to calls for introducing fortification to Europe.

But others argue against this, saying it would inevitably harm some people.

The fear is that adding folic acid to products like bread could harm some elderly people if they are deficient in other B vitamins.

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In extreme cases, this can cause irreversible damage to the nervous system.

There is also concern that it may also increase the risk of certain cancers, including bowel cancer, in some people.

In 2007 the UK's watchdog, the Food Standards Agency, agreed with expert recommendations to fortify bread or flour with folic acid.

Since then, at the request of the Chief Medical Officer, an expert working group on folate has been considering the results of recent trials looking at the effect of folic acid on the risk of some types of cancer.

The group is expected to report back to Sir Liam Donaldson this summer.

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Risk reduction

Folic acid is a synthetic form of folate, a B vitamin found in a wide variety of foods including liver and green leafy vegetables.

Pregnant women and those trying to conceive are already advised to take folic acid supplements to reduce the risk that their baby will have a "neural tube" birth defect like spina bifida.

But uptake is not ideal, particularly because some pregnancies are unplanned and can go unnoticed for some weeks.

The latest work suggests folic acid also cuts the risk of baby heart defects.

In the seven years after fortification was introduced there was a 6% drop per year in the birth prevalence of severe heart defects.

This compares with a 9% drop in neural tube defects.

Writing in the BMJ, lead author Professor Louise Pilote of McGill University in Montreal, said:

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"Given that severe congenital heart defects require complex surgical interventions in infancy and are associated with high infant mortality rates, even a small reduction in the overall risk will significantly reduce the costs associated with the medical care of these patients and the psychological burden on patients and their families."

How Susan Boyle won over the world

. Susan Boyle was just a face in the crowd.

Clips of her singing on Britain's Got Talent have notched up almost 50 million views on YouTube.

Her face appears on the front pages of papers in Britain and beyond, she has been offered a seat on Oprah's sofa and has been told she is as good as guaranteed a worldwide number one album.

The rise of the 47-year-old Scot has been a true global phenomenon.

Last Saturday, viewers saw Boyle, with double chin, unkempt hair, frumpy appearance and eccentric demeanour, step onto the talent show stage and proclaim her dream of being a professional singer.

The judges rolled their eyes and the audience pulled incredulous faces. Onlookers, on set and at home, were rubbing their hands at the prospect of another hopeless, deluded loser being crushed by a withering Simon Cowell insult.

Then she opened her mouth and sang I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables.

Her voice confounded all expectations - the judges' eyes bulged, the crowd went wild and Boyle became an instant star.

Boyle has shattered prejudices about the connection between age, appearance and talent. She has proved that you don't have to be young and glamorous to be talented, and recognised as such.

The YouTube millions have cheered on the underdog, and seen in her the possibilities for their own hopes and dreams.

Immediately after her performance, one of the judges, Amanda Holden, said they had been "very cynical", and that the performance was the "biggest wake-up call ever".

Another judge, former newspaper editor Piers Morgan, appeared with Boyle on CNN's Larry King Show.

"I'm sorry because we did not give you anything like the respect we should have done when you first came out," he told her. Referring to her appearance, he said: "We thought you were going to be a bit of a joke act, to be honest with you."

Boyle would have a best-selling album and a world tour by the end of the year, whether she wins Britain's Got Talent or not, he assured her.

And mentioning fellow judge Simon Cowell, Morgan added: "It's fair to say that his eyes have been going ker-ching ever since Susan's performance."

Blogs, newspaper columns and talk shows have been full of discussion about why Boyle has sparked such a reaction.

Swine flu could hit one in three

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A third of the world's population could be infected with swine flu, expert projections suggest.

Researchers say swine flu has "full pandemic potential", spreading readily between people and is likely to go global in the next six to nine months.

Although one in three who come in contact will likely become infected, the Imperial College London team declined to estimate the death toll.

The study based on Mexico's experience is published in the journal Science.

The number of laboratory-confirmed swine flu cases has reached 5,251 in some 30 countries around the world, with 61 having died from the disease, the World Health Organization has confirmed.

Working in collaboration with the WHO and public health agencies in Mexico, the researchers assessed the Mexico epidemic using data to the end of April and taking into account factors like international spread and viral genetic diversity.

Lead researcher Professor Neil Ferguson said it was too early to say whether the virus will cause deaths on a massive scale, or prove little more lethal than normal seasonal flu.

His "fast and dirty" analysis of Mexico's swine flu outbreak suggests that the H1N1 virus is about as dangerous as the virus behind a 1957 pandemic that killed 2 million people worldwide.

But it's not nearly as lethal as the bug that caused the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which caused an estimated 50 million deaths in 1918.

Its full impact on the UK is not likely to be known until the annual flu season in the autumn and winter, when a "really major epidemic" can be expected in the northern hemisphere, says Professor Ferguson.

Prof Ferguson, who sits on the World Health Organisation's emergency committee for the outbreak, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "This virus really does have full pandemic potential. It is likely to spread around the world in the next six to nine months and when it does so it will affect about one-third of the world's population.

"To put that into context, normal seasonal flu every year probably affects around 10% of the world's population every year, so we are heading for a flu season which is perhaps three times worse than usual - not allowing for whether this virus is more severe than normal seasonal flu viruses."

His study suggests swine flu could kill four in every 1,000 infected people.

Professor Ferguson said his findings confirmed that decisions must be taken swiftly on vaccine production.

"We really need to be prepared, particularly for the autumn. At the moment, the virus is not spreading fast in the northern hemisphere, because we are outside the normal flu season, but come the autumn it is likely to cause a really major epidemic.

"One of the key decisions which has to be made this week by the world community is how much do we switch over current vaccine production for seasonal flu to make a vaccine against this particular virus? I think those decisions need to be made quickly."

Google unveils new search tools

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Google said in its quest to create the perfect search engine, it cannot afford to rest on its laurels.

The company's comments came at an event billed as a "state of the union" on search as it unveiled new products that aim to push search in a new direction.

Google has over 63% of the US market compared to rival Yahoo with 20%.

"The race in search is far from over and innovation and continued improvement is absolutely pivotal," said Google's Marissa Mayer.

"I've said this many times but search is still in its infancy. Our engineers are worried about what is the next big thing in search and how are they going to find it," said Ms Mayer who is the vice president of search products and user experience.

She said last year Google released over 365 products and in the first quarter of this year it was 120. Ms Mayer added that this was proof that "Google gets better all the time."

Google has in the past said that despite its lead in the marketplace, users were "one click away" from switching to other alternatives.

Vanessa Fox of SearchEngineLand told the BBC that Google's ability to constantly innovate gives them a leading edge.

"Google is saying we have to provide for all searchers and do things at scale. It means they have to launch all sorts of features while some companies can concentrate on just one thing. The key thing behind why they are still ahead is because they are able to innovate at such a pace," said Ms Fox.

Hyena giggles no laughing matter

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Researchers have begun to unravel the information and social content present in the hyena's famed laugh, which they say is only used in times of conflict.

The pitch and variability of the giggles may be used to indicate age or social status, they say.

Younger hyenas tend to have high-pitched giggles, and dominant females of the strongly hierarchical clans tend to have a narrower range of sounds.

The work will be reported at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

The rich social structure of hyena clans gives rise to many vocalisations, ranging from "whoops" that travel great distances to quiet grunts among close individuals.

But it is the laugh of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) that has given them their more common moniker of "laughing hyenas".

"This is a very complex society of nocturnal animals, so acoustics is a very important communication channel for them," says Nicolas Mathevon, who led the research.

It has been hypothesised by researchers studying hyenas in the wild that the laughing is not, in fact, a sign of good humour.

Yet it remains unclear what social information the short fits of laughter - or giggles, as the researchers call them - convey.

Key coral reefs 'could disappear'

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The world's most important coral region is in danger of being wiped out by the end of this century unless fast action is taken, says a new report.

The international conservation group WWF warns that 40% of reefs in the Coral Triangle have already been lost.

The area is shared between Indonesia and five other south-east Asian nations and is thought to contain 75% of the world's coral species.

It is likened to the Amazon rainforest in terms of its biodiversity.

Temperature change

It's 2099, and across south-east Asia, a hundred million people are on the march, looking for food.

The fish they once relied on is gone. Communities are breaking down; economies destroyed.

That is what we can expect, says the new WWF report, if the world's richest coral reef is destroyed.

And that, it says, could happen this century.

It's billed as a worst-case scenario, but the report's chief author, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, says it is not as bad as the future we're currently headed towards.

"Up until now we haven't realized how quickly this system is changing," says Professtor Hoegh-Guldberg.

"In the last 40 years in the Coral Triangle, we've lost 40% of coral reefs and mangroves - and that's probably an underestimate. We've fundamentally changed the way the planet works in terms of currents and this is only with a 0.7 degree change in terms of temperature.

"What's going to happen when we exceed two or four or six?"

Climate change consequences

Avoiding a worst-case scenario would need significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and better controls on fishing and coastal areas, says the report.

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The Coral Triangle covers 1% of the earth's surface but contains a third of all the world's coral, and three-quarters of its coral reef species.

If it goes, an entire eco-system goes with it - and that, says Prof Hoegh-Gudberg, has serious consequences for its ability to tackle climate change.

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"Pollution, the inappropriate use of coastal areas, these are destroying the productivity of ocean which is plummeting right now. That is the system that traps CO2 - 40% of CO2 goes into the ocean.

"Now if we interrupt that, the problems on planet earth become even greater," says Prof Hoegh-Gudberg.

Indonesia is hosting the World Ocean Conference this week because, it says, oceans have been neglected so far in global discussions on climate change.

It wants the issue to have a bigger profile at UN climate talks later this year.

Meet the brains of the animal world

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"In the past, people thought birds were stupid," laments the aptly named scientist Christopher Bird.

But in fact, some of our feathered friends are far cleverer than we might think.

And one group in particular - the corvids - has astonished scientists with extraordinary feats of memory, an ability to employ complex social reasoning and, perhaps most strikingly, a remarkable aptitude for crafting and using tools.

Mr Bird, who is based at the department of zoology at Cambridge University, says: "I would rate corvids as being as intelligent as primates in many ways."

The corvids - a group that includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays and magpies - contain some of the most social species of birds.

And some of their intelligence is played out against the backdrop of living with others, where being intelligent enough to recognize individuals, to form alliances and foster relationships is key.

However, group living can also lead to deceptive behaviour - and western scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica ) can be the sneakiest of the bird-bunch.

Unseen Harrison lyrics displayed

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Lyrics written by former Beatle George Harrison that have never been seen before have gone on display at the British Library in London.

The untitled lyrics were written in early 1967 when Harrison was aged 23 or 24 while the Beatles had stopped touring to work in the studio.

Hunter Davies, who is researching the band's official biography, found the lyrics at the Abbey Road studio.

The hand-written lyrics were never put to music or recorded.

Jamie Andrews, head of modern literary manuscripts at the library, said: "The nation loves the Beatles so it's great to see George's lyric reunited with those of his band mates in the British Library."

Most of the British Library's Beatles collection is on loan by permission of Davies, who plans to donate it to the library after his death.