At Home: Sedentary Summer

It’s summertime. Do you know where your children are?

As The Globe and Mail reports, a new report from Active Healthy Kids Canada suggests aren’t where they should be: outside, playing.

The annual Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth gives Canadian kids a ?failing grade? when it comes to physical activity and active play. According to the report, each day ?[at] lunch and after school, kids are getting only 24 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity??less than half of the minimum recommendation of 60 minutes a day.

Active play and leisure?including traditional childhood games like ?[jumping] rope, tag, hide-and-seek and Red Rover??is at an all-time low, with nearly half of Canadian children ?getting three hours or less of active play each week . . . including weekends.?

The culprit? Experts point to screen time?the report noted that ?kids in Grades 6 to 12 spend seven hours, 48 minutes each day on screens??and parental worries about safety as some factors contributing to today’s sedentary kids.

Around the World: The Edge of Space

Space: the final frontier. Cue sci-fi music: scientists now believe that we’re just a step away from reaching the edge of the great beyond.

As the Huffington Post reports, the ?Voyager 1 space probe has reached the edge of the solar system, extending its record for being the most distant man-made object in space.?

Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, have been transmitting data back to Earth since they launched in 1977, but lately Voyager 1’s data has ?[shown] a sharp increase in charged particles that originate from beyond the solar system.? The source of these particles is ?stars that have exploded elsewhere in the galaxy.?

In an official statement, NASA said it believes that this ?rapid rise? shows that ?humanity’s first emissary to interstellar space is on the edge of our solar system.? Scientists are also investigating whether the ?magnetic fields around the space craft? have shifted, another indication that the probe might have ?entered interstellar space.?

The probes? ?plutonium power sources . . . are designed to last until 2025?; after that, the probes will continue their journey through space but ?will no longer transmit data back to Earth.?