B efore you read this article, can I just check you’ve drunk enough water today? You might want to refill your bottle because, remember, if you wait until you feel thirsty, you may already be dehydrated. No one is sure where this advice came from, but it’s all over the internet. “Nowadays this is not considered sensible,” says Stuart Galloway, an associate professor in physiology, exercise and nutrition at the University of Stirling. “As humans, we have this homeostatic system, so when we need water, we feel thirsty.” Drinking when you are thirsty, he says, maintains your body’s water level within about 1-2% of its ideal state. “For most people, this is absolutely fine. Even for athletes, a loss of around 1% is considered to have negligible impact upon performance. So, although thirst may not kick in until you have lost some body water, this is not necessarily a bad thing.”
Spain's population to halve and Nigeria to be dominant global power within 80 years, report predicts
Image: Packed streets in Lagos, Nigeria, as a report suggests economies in Africa and the Arab world will start to dominate The global population is likely to shrink after the middle of this century, triggering shifts in economic power, a new report suggests. There will be around 9.7 billion people on the planet by 2064, but that number will decrease to 8.8 billion by the year 2100, according to a new report in medical journal The Lancet. The analysis says that improvements to modern contraceptive methods and the increasingly widespread education of women could be a catalyst for a decline in global fertility rates. That, according to the report, means that populations will not be sustained at current levels without a more liberal immigration approach. Populations in 23 countries, including Japan, Spain and Italy, are forecast to decline by more than half, according to the research, with another 34 countries, including China, seeing a drop of more than 25%. However, sub-S