We all know that exercise is good for us, but often struggle to do the 150 minutes of moderate level activity a week that's recommended. So what's the alternative, asks Michael Mosley. A few years ago, while making a Horizon documentary called The Truth about Exercise I was introduced to something which changed my life - HIIT or High Intensity Interval Training . Typically you do a few very short bursts of intense cycling on an exercise bike, with brief recovery periods. The promise of HIIT is that you will get maximum benefit in minimum time - and that is certainly what I have found. But how well does it compare to other forms of exercise? With the help of researchers from Nottingham University we decided to find out. We started by recruiting a group of 24 volunteers, aged between 40 and 60, who all have jobs and lifestyles that are best described as "pretty sedentary". We then divided them into four groups.
Traditional banking in Africa has failed - 80% of the continent's 1.2 billion people do not have a bank account or access to formal financial services. So mobiles and web-based services are stepping in to fill the gap. But there is much more to Africa's financial services story than M-Pesa, the wildly successful mobile banking platform launched in Kenya and Tanzania in 2007. For example, Nigeria's Social Lender looks at borrowers' social media profiles to assess their creditworthiness. One of the issues lenders face is that it is near impossible to obtain adequate data about people, particularly in rural areas. So mobile and web are proving useful ways of gathering it. Social Lender uses its own algorithm to assign a "social reputation score" to each user, with "social guarantors" acting like referees validating their trustworthiness. As the youth-orientated website strapline has it: "Get rep, get cash, stay fly". "T