Dhaka, July 20 (UNB) – The Bangladeshi Embassy in Japan organised a seminar on Bengali language and culture at Bangabandhu auditorium of the embassy in Japan on Friday.

Students of the Bangla Department under Foreign Education faculty at Tokyo University attended the seminar where Bangladeshi Ambassador to Japan Rabab Fatima spoke, said a press release on Saturday.

“It’s a matter of pride that students have been practising Bengali language and culture here in Japan,” Rabab Fatima said while speaking on the occasion.

She emphasised on working deeply with Tokyo University to enhance the study and practice of Bengali language and culture.

Students of the Bangla department also performed in a cultural event on the occasion.

The guests were served with Bangladeshi traditional food after the seminar.

Sydney, July 19 (Xinhua/UNB) -- Tooth decay and other oral diseases present a major global public health crisis with sugar as the main culprit, according to a Series on oral health published in The Lancet medical journal on Friday.

The Series brought together 13 experts from 10 different countries to explore why oral diseases have persisted globally over the last three decades, despite scientific advancements in the field.

Currently, oral diseases are among the most common in the world, affecting an estimated 3.5 billion people, yet oral health has been largely ignored by the global health community, the experts said.

Co-author, Professor Marco A Peres from Australia's Griffith university joined his colleagues in calling for radically improved global dental care, increased regulation of the sugar industry and more transparency of scientific studies which may be falling victim to conflicts of interest.

"I think that there is a global health challenge regarding oral disease," Peres told Xinhua.

"It's a big challenge and we recognize in the papers that the traditional approach to managing dental disease probably fails."

Peres and his colleagues identify three main determinants, being sugar, tobacco and alcohol, among which sugar is the single greatest contributor to deteriorating oral health worldwide.

While there have been some countries which have adopted a tax on sugar products with promising results, according to Peres in other countries such as Australia, powerful interest groups are exerting their influence to avoid the measure.

"Many public health, academic and consumer groups support a tax on sugar, but political support is limited and there is a strong lobby against the implementation of a sugar tax led by sugary drinks companies," he said.

The Series authors also suggest that oral health be less removed from general health, with dentistry rarely being thought of as a mainstream part of healthcare policy, despite its intrinsic link to health and wellbeing.

"A clear need exists for broader accessibility and integration of dental services into healthcare systems, especially primary care, and for oral health to have more prominence within universal health coverage commitments," said Dr. Jocalyn Clark, an executive editor at The Lancet.

"Everyone who cares about global health should advocate to end the neglect of oral health."

Washington, July 19 (Xinhua/UNB) -- Learning new things can make older people's brains 30 years younger in just six weeks, according to a new research from University of California Riverside (UCR).

Scientists have discovered that taking up several new tasks at the same time boosts mental power and protects people against Alzheimer's disease.

These skills range from studying new languages, using an iPad, writing music to painting.

UCR psychologist Rachel Wu says one important way of staving off cognitive decline is learning new skills as a child would.

She encouraged elder people to be a sponge, which means to seek new skills to learn, maintain motivation as fuel, rely on encouraging mentors to guide you, thrive in an environment where the bar is set high.

Building on lifelong learning research, previous studies have demonstrated the cognitive gains of older people learning new skills. But these skills were learned one at a time, or sequentially.

For Wu's studies, the researchers asked adults aged 58-86 to simultaneously take three to five classes for three months, about 15 hours per week. The course workload is similar to an undergraduate's.

After just six weeks, participants increased their cognitive abilities to levels similar to those of middle-aged adults, 30 years younger. Control group members, who did not take classes, showed no change in their performance.

"The participants in the intervention bridged a 30-year difference in cognitive abilities after just six weeks and maintained these abilities while learning multiple new skills," Wu said.

"The studies provide evidence that intense learning experiences akin to those faced by younger populations are possible in older populations, and may facilitate gains in cognitive abilities," she added.

Worldwide, around 50 million people have dementia, and Alzheimer's disease is the most common form that may contribute to 60 percent to 70 percent of the cases, according to the World Health Organization.

No treatment is currently available to cure dementia or to alter its progressive course.

Canberra, Jul 19 (AP/UNB) — A fisherman said on Wednesday he was looking for the author of a message in a bottle found off the southern Australian coast 50 years after it was written.

Paul Elliot told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that he and his son Jyah found the bottle on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia state while fishing.

Elliot said he was looking for the author Paul Gibson, who described himself in the note as a 13-year-old English boy traveling in a cruise ship along the southern Australian coast from Fremantle in the west to Melbourne in the east.

Government oceanographer David Griffin said the bottle could not have remained afloat for 50 years off the south coast because "the ocean never stays still."

Griffin suspected that the bottle had been buried on a beach for years then refloated by a storm.

"If it had been dropped in anywhere in the ocean somewhere south of Australia, then there's no way it's going to stay actually at sea moving around for more than a year or two," Griffin said.

The author gave his position as "1000 miles east of Fremantle." However it is not clear whether the author actually meant 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) out of Fremantle, which would have included a journey south along the west coast before turning east.

Hundreds of thousands of Britons migrated to Australia in the 1960s with the Australian government subsidizing their fares. Children traveled for free.

But a quarter of them returned to Britain within a few years when life in Australia fell short of their expectations.

Beijing, July 19 (Xinhua/UNB) -- Chinese scientists will begin the second-phase clinical trial of an HIV vaccine on 160 volunteers, Friday's China Daily reported.

The candidate vaccine, DNA-rTV, relies on replication of the DNA of HIV to stimulate effective immunization, according to Shao Yiming, a chief HIV researcher at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, adding that it's the first such HIV vaccine to begin a second-phase clinical trial.

This vaccine under development, which contains DNA segments from HIV instead of the full human immunodeficiency virus, will have a stronger and longer-lasting effect. It is also designed to target the HIV strains that are most common in China, Shao was cited by the newspaper as saying.

More than 130 volunteers have been recruited so far, and the initial work is underway at a hospital in Beijing and another in the city of Hangzhou, he added.

"Hopefully the second-phase trial will be completed in the latter half of 2021, and the third-phase clinical trial may start at the end of that year, which will involve thousands of volunteers in a trial to test the effectiveness of the vaccine to protect people against HIV," Shao said.