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Virtual worlds for children and teenagers websites like Neopets, Club Penguin and Habbo are a big business. On these sites, children create an avatar and, with it, explore an imaginary universe. They can play games, chat and decorate virtual rooms or other spaces.

By the end of this year, there will be 70 million unique accounts - twice as many as last year - in virtual worlds aimed at children under 16.

As the number of these virtual world’s grows, so, too, does the demand for sophisticated monitoring software and people, called moderators, who can act as virtual playground monitors. Tamara Littlleton, chief executive of eModeration, a company based in London that provides moderation services, says the most common dangers that children and teenagers face online are bullying and young people’s own efforts to share personal information that could enable strangers to contact them in the real world.

The software is integrated into a virtual world’s site. If the technology uncovers slang or other patterns matching signs of bullying or sexual predation, it sends an alert to a moderator, who can then go through the entire conversation, as well as at every posting from either participant.

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A 10-week study has thrown up evidence that consumption of fructose-sweetened, not glucose-seeetened beverages, can adversely affect both sensitivity to insulin and how the body handles fats, creating conditions that invite heart attacks and strokes. In the study, conducted by Peter Havel and colleagues at the University of California-Davis, overweight individuals consumed glucose or fructose sweetened beverages that provided 25 percent of their energy requirements for 10 weeks, said a UCD release. During this period, individuals in both groups put on about the same amount of weight, but only those who consumed fructose-sweetened beverages exhibited an increase in intra-abdominal fat.

Further, only these individuals became less sensitive to the harmoneinsulin( which controls glucose levels in the blood) and showed signs of dyslipidemia( increased levels of fat-soluble molecules known as lipids in the blood). It is not known whether these effects would persist over the long term or whether they would occur in normal-weight folks. The fructose-glucose debate has been percolating for a while.

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The Fortune 500 may be dominated by male CEOs, but Ms Indra Nooyi, the Indian American CEO of Pepsico is listed fourth among “15 women show what it takes to lead” some of America’s biggest companies.

The Fortune 500 Women CEOs listing of the US business magazine notes that since becoming CEO in 2006, Ms Nooyi, 53, has grown the company’s top line-revenue from 10 per cent in 2008 to $43.3 billion - and raised its profile in some goodwill engendering arenas. Ms Nooyi, who gets $13.4 million in compensation, has pushed PepsiCo to target health-conscious and female consumers, resulting in such new products as Smartfood’s low-fat popcorn clusters, low-calorie Trop 50 and Starbucks Frappuccino Lite.

“While Pepsi was forced to cut 3,500 jobs and close six plants last year, Ms nooyi had announced big expansions abroad: $500 million in India, $1 billion in China and $3 million in Mexico,” Fortune said. The list of woman leaders of firms from sectors such as health care, food, retail and technology, is topped by Ms Patricia Woertz, 56, chairman, president and CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, who spent three decades working in the oil industry before joining ADM. She gets a compensation of $17.5 million.

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Britain’s annual retail price inflation rate fell 0.4 per cent in March, turning negative for the first time in nearly 50 years due to falling home loan payments, official data showed on Tuesday. The Retail Prices Index( RPI ) inflation rate, which includes the cost of home loans, sank last month after a flat reading in February, the Office for National Statistics revealed in a statement. ‘For the first time since March 1960, annual inflation measured by the RPI, which includes housing costs such as mortgageinterest payments and council tax, fell below zero,” the ONS said.

The Bank Of England has slashed interset rates six times since October, to the current record-low of 0.5 per cent, as it seeks to lift the country out of recession. “The most eye-catching data saw headline retail prices fall 0.4 per cent year-on-year in March, thereby moving into negative territory for the firt time in 49 years as it was dragged down by sharply reduced mortgage interest rates,” IHS Global Insight economist, Mr Howard Archer noted. Meanwhile, the 12-month consumer price inflation slowed to 2.9 per cent in March owing to sliding domestic gas, housing and transport costs.

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Most consumers do not want to get a PC  by purchasing microprocessors, hard drives and operating systemm software from different suppliers and assemblin them all into a working computer. They prefer to buy a complete, customised machine from one supplier. Corporate customers increasingly want the same thing: a one stop shop for hardware, software and services. And the largest technology companies are deploying their huge cash hoards to make acquisitions to bolster their ability to be that single provider.

That trend drove Oracle, a leader in business software, to announce Monday that it was spending $7.4 billion to buy an ailing Sun Microsystems and get into the computer hardware business. Oracle beat our rival I.B.M. which considered buying Sun to enhance its own software offerings but ended serious acquisition talks about two weeks ago. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves,” Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison, said on Monday.

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Although Indian IT could now take a year more to touch export revenues of $60 billion - the industry anticipated it could by 2010 - the long term scenario remains promising, trade body Nasscom reassures. If the Indian IT industry can capitalise on emerging opportunities, it can possibly block export revenues of $175 billion by 2020 from under $50 billion currently. Domestic revenues could bulge four times to $50 billion from just $12 billion in 2008. The numbers would inch up the industry’s contribution to annual GDP to 6 per cent from the current 5.5 per cent and its share of annual exports to 28 per cent by 2020 from about 19 per cent now.

In this process, the industry would also create 30 million direct and indirect urban employment. At the moment, the IT sector directly employs a little more than 2 million. However, here’s the caveat. India is likely to lose 10 per cent of its market share to other locations by 2020 if issues such as talent shortage and poor infrastructure are not addressed, Nasscom on Tuesday pointed out, basing its assumptions on a research conducted by McKinsey and Company.

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Acne is perhaps the most common chronic skin disease. It is an inflammatory condition of the sebaceous glands and hair follicles usually found on the face, the neck, chest and shoulders. Nearly eight out of ten young people between the ages of 12 and 24 suffer from some degree of acne. It is closely related to the disturbance in the harmones experienced at puberty.

The majority of patients recover between the ages 20 and 30 years. But, it is still common in men over 30 years. In women, it rarely lasts beyond the early thirties and is normally worse before each menustral period. The disease cauises a great deal of embarrassment at an age when people tend to be sensitive about personal appearance.

The skin, covering the entire body, is a marvellous and intricate mechanism. It serves three main purposes; namely protection of the inner organism, regulation of body temperature and elimination of cell waste and systemic refuse. The skin is directly connected with and intimately bound up with the working of the whole system. All skin diseases, including acne, are the outcome of malfunctioning of the body as a whole.

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The formation of stones in the kidneys or urinary tract is a fairly common disorder. The stones are formed from the chemicals usually found in the urine such as uric acid, phosphorous, calcium and oxalic acid. They may vary in consistency from grit, sand and gravel-like obstructions to the size of bird’s eggs.

Stones may form and grow because the concentration of a particular substance in the urine exceeds its solubility. This disorder occurs more frequently in middle age, with men being affected more often than women.

The kidneys are two bean-shaped organs, lying below the waist on either side of the spinal coloumn on the back wall of the abdomen. They are soft and reddish brown in colour. They are the filtering plant for purifying the blood, removing water and salts from it which are passed into the bladder as urine.

The formation of stones in the kidneys is the result of defects in the general metabolism. They usually occur when the urine becomes highly concentrated due to heavy perspiration or insufficient intake of fluids.

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