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Working up a sweat playing video games on Nintendo's interactive Wii console is no replacement for real exercise but at least it gets overweight children off the couch, according to British researchers.

The Wii allows users to thrust, wave, swing and twist its one-handed, motion-sensitive controller to direct the on-screen action and simulate real life moves such as bowling, hitting a tennis ball, or shooting a bow and arrow.

"The children were on their feet and they moved in all directions while performing basic motor control and fundamental movements skills that were not evident during seated gaming," the team wrote.

"Given the current prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity, such positive behaviors should be encouraged."

The researchers compared bowling, tennis and boxing games on the Wii to the Project Gotham Racing 3 game on Microsoft's XBOX 360 console where players simply work the controls with their fingers.

Participants, who included six boys and five girls aged 13-15, played four computer games for 15 minutes each while wearing a monitoring device to record how much energy they burned.

On the Wii, the children sweated off about 60 more calories per hour -- a far lower amount than if they had actually played the sport. The workout was also not intense enough to contribute toward the recommended amount of daily physical activity for children, the researchers said.

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"Playing new generation active computer games uses significantly more energy than playing sedentary computer games but not as much as energy as playing the sport itself," the researchers said in the journal's Christmas edition

Toddlers rescued from orphanages and placed in good foster homes score dramatically higher on IQ tests years later than children who were left behind, concludes a one-of-a-kind project in Romania that has profound implications for child welfare around the globe.

Most important, children removed from orphanages before age 2 had the biggest improvement — key new evidence of a sensitive period for brain development, according to the U.S. team that conducted the research.

"What we're really talking about is the importance of getting kids out of bad environments and put into good environments," said Dr. Charles Nelson III of Harvard Medical School, who led the study being published Friday in the journal Science.

The younger that happens, "the less likely the child is to have major problems," he added.

The research is credited with influencing child-care changes in Romania, and UNICEF has begun using the data to push numerous countries that still depend on state-run orphanages to start shifting to foster care-like systems.

"The research provides concrete scientific evidence on the long-term impacts of the deprivation of quality care for children," UNICEF child protection specialist Aaron Greenberg said. "The interesting part about this is the one-on-one caring of a young child impacts ... cognitive and intellectual development."

That orphanages are not optimal for child development comes as no surprise. Earlier studies have found that thousands of children adopted during the 1990s from squalid orphanages in Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere continued to face serious developmental problems even after moving to affluent new homes with doting parents.

But questions remain. Were those abandoned or orphaned children who spent more time in orphanages less healthy to begin with? How much damage does neglect and lack of stimulation in the early months of life do? How long does that damage last?

In the study, U.S. researchers randomly assigned 136 young children in Bucharest's six orphanages to either keep living there or live with foster parents who were specially trained and paid for by the study. Romania had no foster-care system in 2000 when the research began.

The team chose apparently healthy children. Researchers repeatedly tested brain development as those children grew, and tracked those who ultimately were adopted or reunited with family. For comparison, they also tested the cognitive ability of children who never were institutionalized.

By 4 1/2, youngsters in foster care were scoring almost 10 points higher on IQ tests than the children left in orphanages. Children who left the orphanages before 2 saw an almost 15-point increase.

Nelson compared the ages at which children were sent to foster care. For every extra month spent in the orphanage, up to almost age 3, it meant roughly a half-point lower score on those later IQ tests.

Children raised in their biological homes still fared best, with average test scores 10 points to 20 points higher than the foster-care kids.

What does that mean as these children grow up? Just this week an anxious acquaintance cornered Nelson to ask what to expect of a child who spent nine months in a Vietnamese orphanage.

"There's much more to functioning in life than your IQ," Nelson stresses.

Plus, he only now has begun testing these children again as they turn 7 and 8. They might catch up.

For now, Nelson tells adoptive parents, "The older the child is when they leave the institution, the more likely that child may have some developmental problems and the more difficult it may be to ameliorate those problems. ... The message to parents is simply to go into this with their eyes open, but not to give up."

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For the U.S. and other countries that depend on foster care instead of orphanages, the study has implications, too, because it used high-quality foster care that is not the norm in many places, Nelson noted. Studies comparing the impact of foster care of varying quality are under way.

The Romanian government requested the study and began its own foster care program shortly thereafter. Early study results are credited with influencing Romania's recent prohibition on institutionalizing children under 2 unless they are severely disabled.

Black children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods fall behind the equivalent of one year or more of schooling simply because of where they live.

Gilman was not involved with the study, which is published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A person's cognitive ability, which is mainly shaped early in life, can predict how well he or she will do later in life in terms of education, employment, whether or not they enter the criminal justice system and health.

But experts differ in whether genetics or environment are the primary shapers. And the role of the neighborhood has not been extensively studied.

For this study, sociologists at Harvard University analyzed Chicago census tract data from 1990 and 2000 and identified six neighborhood characteristics which, together, formed "concentrated disadvantage" and were linked to the cognitive abilities of children.

The six characteristics were: welfare receipt, poverty, unemployment, female-headed households, racial composition and density of children.

More than 2,000 urban Chicago children aged 6 to 12 were assessed for verbal ability and other characteristics.

The children, with their caretakers, were followed wherever they moved in the United States for seven years.

The researchers took into account the impact of moving into and out of areas of disadvantage. About 17 percent of black children not living in disadvantage moved to a disadvantaged neighborhood between 1995 and 2002, while 42 percent of black children in disadvantaged neighborhoods in 1995 moved to a non-disadvantaged neighborhood during those years.

Children who lived in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood halfway through the follow-up period were almost all black, and they fell behind their otherwise identical peers by about four points on an IQ test. This translates into about one year of schooling.

Almost one-third of black children lived at some point in "concentrated disadvantaged" neighborhoods compared to almost no white or Latino children.

The findings tilt the nature-versus-nurture debate toward the latter factor.

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"The study has implications for interventions, because they've identified the risk factors, it appears, that contribute to negative outcomes," Gilman said. "We don't have a lot of intervention research. It would seem that if you began to design intervention studies that target these specific risk factors, hopefully, you will begin to see an increase in verbal scores, particularly among African-Americans."

An animal rights group said on Thursday that some retailers were selling coats made with real animal fur that were advertised as having fake fur.

The Humane Society said in a statement that it determined the fur was real through laboratory tests and cutting open the lining of the fur trim on products it had purchased.

"This is a real problem for consumers who want to purchase animal-friendly, stylish clothes," said Kristin Leppert, director of the Humane Society's fur-free campaign.

Anne Keating, a spokeswoman for Macy's Inc, parent of the Bloomingdale's chain, said a product Bloomingdale's sells under the Aqua brand had been mislabeled on the company's Web site as having "faux fur." She said the Bloomingdale's Web site reference was being corrected to indicate that the coat contained rabbit fur.

The product "is labeled correctly in the store and always has been," Keating said.

Saks Inc spokeswoman Julia Bentley said in an e-mail that the operator of Saks Fifth Avenue stores had "previously received written confirmation" from the manufacturer that a coat it sells included fake fur. The Humane Society's statement said the coat has a rabbit fur lining.

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The Saks spokeswoman added that Saks had removed the item listing from its Web site. The manufacturer, Burberry Group plc, could not be reached for comment.