WEIRD STUFF

Fat kids linked to chubby parents

Children are more likely to be overweight if their parents were fat. A new study has found that the risk of obesity was six times higher in middle-age people if their parents were also chubby in their 40s and 50s.

However, the danger was only three to four times higher if just a single parent was overweight.

Norwegian experts studied more than 2,000 families and looked at parents age 40 to 59 in 1994 and their children at the same age in 2015.

They used body mass index (BMI) -- which gets higher the fatter a person is -- and found for every four points on their mother's score or 3.4 on their father's, the child's BMI was 0.8 points higher.

Researcher Mari Mikkelsen, from the University of Tromso, Arctic University of Norway, said: "We found obesity can be transmitted between generations.

"Genes play an important role in our susceptibility to weight gain.

"Some studies suggest that children develop similar diet and exercise habits to their parents when they all live together. Then obesity in childhood, and especially adolescence, tends to follow them into adulthood."

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AI could be as smart as humans in 2027

Scientist Ben Goertzel, who is known as the father of artificial general intelligence (AGI), thinks it will only be three years before the "brainpower" of bots matches that of the human race.

Goertzel told a summit in Panama: "It seems quite plausible we could get to human-level AGI within, let's say, the next three to eight years. I think once an AGI can introspect its own mind, then it can do engineering and science at a human or superhuman level.

"That may lead to an increase in the exponential rate beyond even what Ray (Kurzweil, computer scientist) thought."

Tech whizzes such as Elon Musk have warned that the rapid development of AI is putting humanity at risk, and the Tesla tycoon has even suggested that he would halt the progress if he could.