Features

By Ghadeer Habash

Internationally Certified Career Trainer

Previously, not a lot was expected of grandparents beyond the occasional babysitting, spoiling with treats and passing on wisdom. But now, as more women join the workforce and pursue hobbies and interests outside of strictly parenting, teta and jiddo have never been more visible and indispensable to parents in Jordan.

How do parents (both mothers and fathers) succeed at working their jobs, practicing their hobbies, doing sports and staying healthy and fit while taking good care of their children?

They do so all thanks to a support system

As grandparents are living longer, healthier and more active lives, they are becoming a bigger part of the family support system. Many are part of the practical, emotional and financial support system that provides a safety net for the whole family. With more free time at their age, they are usually happy to spend it with their grandchildren so it’s a win-win situation.

Our parents (as grandparents) are our greatest blessings. We guarantee a safe and happy environment for our children when they are cared for by their grandparents. They also pass on their life experiences to their grandchildren, so kids learn a lot about history, culture, family values, food (we know teta’s food is the best!) and grandparents are delighted to share their stories with an eager audience so they, in turn, feel respected.

Thus, grandparents not only solve a major problem for their adult children or daughters and sons in-law, they can be an important part in raising well-rounded kids. Children usually enjoy everything at their grandparents’ home — they won’t want to go home easily and you can even see a bigger smile if sleeping over is an option!

When it’s not all 

smooth sailing

When you’re working hard to plan balanced meals, limit sweets and stay away from sugary drinks and then it all goes right out the window at jiddo’s house, it can be very frustrating. You know grandparents mean well so what do you do when your parenting styles don’t align?

There’s no reason to make your parents or in-laws feel like bad people who don’t care about your child’s health. Be sure they know how much you appreciate them spending time with your child and leave emotions out of it when you’re being direct with them like, “Majid had a cavity at his last dentist visit, so we’re trying to limit sweets.” But also be flexible and open to compromise. Think of going to teta and jiddo’s house as a chance to try different things that your children normally would not experience at home. Let them associate special things (heaps of attention, gifts, special foods) with their grandparents. These “extras” allowed at their grandparents’ house is the spice of life! There is no harm in breaking some rules sometimes!

Get involved

Although grandparents can be a wonderful support system, we should be mindful that they already raised kids of their own — they shouldn’t be burdened 24/7 with raising another generation. In other words, remember that you are still the parents, not them.

More should be done to support labour laws and employment options that allow for more on-site day care and flexible hours. Jordan’s Ministry of Labour announced recently measures to establish nurseries in private and public sectors.

I also advocate examining successful work models of other countries and assess whether they can be replicated in Jordan. In some countries, the start and end time of work at public and private companies and organisations are the same, including pre-schools, schools and universities, so everyone leaves and returns home at the same time! I love this idea because it helps working parents and reduces the pressure on grandparents.

Find out what more can be done and how you can help by contacting the Jordanian National Commission for Women and SADAQA (towards a friendlier work environment for women).

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

Lake Success

Gary Shteyngart 

New York: Random House, 2018

Pp. 338

With fast-paced, multilayered prose, author Gary Shteyngart takes the reader on a road trip from New York to California, from the ultra-luxury, crass materialism and white male privilege of the 1 per cent in Manhattan’s finance-capital circles, to more ethnically and class-diverse milieu in the south and southwest.

Though there are intriguing, colourful descriptions of many people and places, the real focus is on the respective self-concepts of the anti-hero, Barry, and his wife, Seema, and on the contradictory ‘post-modern’ reality of the United States today. This novel could not be timelier, as the plot stretches from the summer of 2016 into the fall, parallel to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and election victory. 

One may wonder why the book is titled “Lake Success”, for most of the story reveals the two main characters’ lives in free-fall, spiralling downward (notably parallel to Trump’s upward spiral).

When multimillionaire Barry steps on a Greyhound bus in New York, minus cellphone and credit cards, he is escaping a domestic scene he can’t handle — Seema’s scorn and his son’s severe autism. This is a man trying desperately to return to his hopeful youth by reconnecting with his college girlfriend. There are also mounting clues that he is running from the law, for his hedge fund has engaged in morally and legally reprehensible practices to stay afloat. 

Observing his behaviour with the people he meets on his trip, and the memories he recalls, one sees that Barry is obsessed with success and self-delusional enough to believe that he has been successful in his life. The bigger question of what constitutes success is an implicit theme throughout the novel. 

Barry is also obsessed with making friends and imagines chance encounters and casual conversations to be the beginnings of meaningful relationships. On the Greyhound bus, almost everyone he meets is African- or Mexican-American, and he imagines that he can mentor or “help” them, when what he really wants is a boost to his ego or, in some cases, sex. Even his sincerest efforts, such as trying to relate to his son or to resurrect his relationship with his college lover, are stymied by his failure to see that the other person perceives things differently. 

Many of his experiences should teach him that money can’t buy love or happiness, but he doesn’t seem to get it. The plot, however, shows that Barry’s delusions have a base in reality: most often, wealth does indeed protect the ultra-rich from being held accountable for their transgressions. 

Barry’s cross-county adventures give the author a chance to survey modern-day America, and it is found to be a study in contrasts. While the crassness, excessive spending and financial manipulations of the ultra-rich can only disgust, there are many examples of positive action and social solidarity among the middle- and lower classes, especially among those who identify as progressives. On the one hand, racism and sexism are the rise, let out of the closet by Trump’s campaign, but on the other hand, many communities have become more ethnically diverse and harmonious. 

Left behind in New York, Seema is hardly less dependent on wealth; she too wants a new life, yet she is more flexible than her husband and works hard to understand what it means to be a good mother to an autistic child, making her all the more unforgiving of Barry’s faults: “if only he could love his son as much as he wanted to control his own pain”, she opines. (p. 162)

For all the serious topics involved, Shteyngart tells his story with sly wit, making “Lake Success” at times hilarious. A few facts about the author’s background make the book all the more amazing. Shteyngart was born in Leningrad when there was still the Soviet Union. His family migrated to the New York when he was seven, but English was not the language of their home, making his impeccable, evocative, sometimes rollicking, prose all the more remarkable. 

Perhaps this background gives Shteyngart a special lens for observing US society and for describing it in a unique way. His descriptive powers are immense; he is able to pin down a character’s class status with a brand name, and to create nuanced characters, such as Barry, whom one alternately loves, hates and pities. The author is known for satirical writing, but this novel only partly relies on that device. While the super-rich and racists are subjected to his satirical pen, others are presented with empathy. Basic human issues, like love, loyalty, family and the challenges of having an autistic child, are addressed with great seriousness. “Lake Success” is a defining novel about the America of today, both fun and sobering to read.

Fish in the Northeast Atlantic — including cod, the prime ingredient in fish-and-chips — saw a dramatic drop of 34 per cent in the past several decades as the Earth warmed.

And it’s not only cod: many other species of fish are in hot water — literally.

Warming oceans from human-caused climate change has shrunk the populations of many fish species around the world, according to the recently released study.

Overfishing and poor fisheries management have only intensified the problem.

Some of the biggest drops were In the seas near China and Japan, where fish populations dropped by as much as 35 per cent from 1930 to 2010, the decades analysed in the study.

“We were stunned to find that fisheries around the world have already responded to ocean warming,” said study co-author Malin Pinsky, a Rutgers University ecologist. “These aren’t hypothetical changes sometime in the future.”

Globally, the drop is 4.1 per cent for many species of fish and shellfish, according to the study, which was led by Chris Free, formerly of Rutgers and now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Keeping fish stocks plentiful is vital, the study says, since Earth’s oceans have become a crucial source of food for the planet’s rapidly growing population. In fact, more than 50 million people around the world earn a living by fishing, and seafood provides about half of the protein eaten by people in developing nations, according to the study.

“We recommend that fisheries managers eliminate overfishing, rebuild fisheries and account for climate change in fisheries management decisions,” Free said.

In the study, Free and his team studied the impact of ocean warming on 124 species in 38 ecological regions around the world.

It’s not necessarily all bad news, however: while most fish populations will see a downturn as the seas warm, some, like black sea bass along the Mid-Atlantic coast, saw an increase.

However, “fish populations can only tolerate so much warming,” said study co-author Olaf Jensen, also a Rutgers scientist.

And worldwide, more fish populations dropped than rose during the period studied.

Looking ahead, “future fisheries production may be at even greater risk considering that, owing to [human-caused] climate change, the oceans are continuing to warm even faster than originally predicted,” said Australian scientist Éva Plagányi in a commentary that accompanied the study.

The humble cassette — that tiny little plastic rectangle containing the homemade mixtapes of yesteryear — is back, joining vinyl as a darling of audiophiles who miss side A and side B.

But as top musicians including Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber release their music on tape and demand continues to climb, the niche revival has faced a global shortage of music-quality magnetic tape needed for production.

Now, two facilities — one in the American Midwest and the other in western France — have stepped in to meet the need.

“It’s a good place to be — there’s plenty of business for both of us,” said Steve Stepp, who founded the National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri with his father 50 years ago.

He said that around 2000 the “imperial hegemony of the CD” cut his business, which stayed alive as a major manufacturer of books on tape that remained popular.

But despite the astronomical rise of streaming, Stepp said rock bands like Pearl Jam and The Smashing Pumpkins began seeking to manufacture anniversary tapes in the mid-2000s, launching a cassette comeback tour.

“That convinced major record labels that there was still life in the cassette as a music form,” he said. 

Several years ago National Audio bought 300,000 reels of tape from a South Korean company that gave up music-grade tape production.

As that stockpile began to shrink, his facility in November 2016 was faced with a choice: either make reels, or fold.

His business invested several million dollars buying up old equipment from defunct production facilities, and last year National Audio manufactured 18 million audio cassettes, Stepp said, selling to 3,500 record labels globally.

“I think it’s got a bright future,” Stepp told AFP of the cassette market. “It died in 2000, as far as conventional wisdom was concerned, and it has made a strong comeback since.”

“Reports of its death were greatly exaggerated.”

‘90s vibes’

Since November, Mulann — a small French company near Mont Saint Michel — has also rebooted production, the country’s first manufacturing of music-grade tape in two decades.

Already selling magnetic tape for metro tickets or military recording studios, the Mulann group acquired a plant to produce analog audio tapes under the trademark Recording The Masters.

For Jean-Luc Renou, Mulann’s CEO, there is still a place for analog sound in today’s ephemeral music world.

“Take the example of heating: you have radiators at home. It’s comfortable, it’s digital — but next to you, you can make a good fire.”

“Pleasure” is the goal, he said: “That’s the cassette or vinyl.”

The company sells tapes for 3.49 euros each, producing them by the thousands each month and exporting 95 per cent worldwide, according to commercial director Theo Gardin.

The 27-year-old admits he did not know in his youth the joys — and pains — of the Walkman personal tape player, or the delicate strip of tape that tangles up and must be rewound with, say, a pen. Or a finger.

According to Stepp, it’s precisely 20-somethings like Gardin fast-forwarding demand, as young people seek something tangible in the Internet age.

Urban Outfitters — an American clothing brand catering to hipster types that also sells electronics — on its site spells out the mixtape process.

“If you’ve never spent three to five hours sitting by the radio, waiting for that one Hanson song to come on so you could add it to your mixtape, get pumped: you can now relive that experience,” it says.

“Let those ‘90s vibes wash over you, man.”

‘A uniqueness’

Cassette tape album sales in the US grew by 23 per cent in 2018, according to tracker Nielsen Music, jumping from 178,000 copies the year prior to 219,000.

It’s nothing compared to 1994 sales of 246 million cassette albums, but significant considering the format was all but dead by the mid 2000s.

“As an old fogey I don’t want to imagine a world with no analogue,” Stepp said. “The world around is analogue; our ears are analog.”

“Digital recordings are very clean and sharp but there are no harmonics. These are digital pictures of audio recordings, if you will.”

Bobby May, a 29-year-old buyer at Burger Records in southern California, said that while “physical media in itself is a totally antiquated idea”, cassette sound has what he called a uniqueness.

“The consumer public is fickle and trends always change, but for the foreseeable future, I know tonnes of people will stay pretty crazy for records and vinyl.”

Last year vinyl saw revenues hit their highest level since 1988, totalling $419 million — an eight per cent jump from the previous year.

Though vinyl’s sound quality is unquestionably superior to cassettes, May said tapes’ low cost makes them ideal for collectors.

“I still like stuff pilin’ up around me,” May laughed, adding that he probably has 500 tapes from Burger.

In addition to the homemade and indie cassettes, he cherishes several mainstream albums as well.

“I have a prized ‘Baby One More Time’ cassette,” he said, referring to pop princess Britney Spears’ debut album. “It looks great on my shelf.”

Workouts that mix up a variety of intense exercises with brief recovery periods in between may help people lose more weight than chugging along at a steady pace on a treadmill or exercise bike, a research review suggests. 

Doctors often advise people trying to lose weight to focus on cutting calories and getting more active. But the ideal type and amount of exercise for optimal weight loss is not clear, researchers note in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. 

For the current analysis, researchers examined data from 41 smaller studies that compared weight loss results after at least four weeks of either interval training or moderate intensity continuous training programs, such as jogging, cycling or walking at a steady pace. 

Both men and women lost weight and body fat with both types of workouts, regardless of starting weight. 

However, interval training provided greater total weight loss: an average of 1.58 kilogrammes compared with 1.13 kilogrammes with continuous moderate intensity activity. 

“Losing weight is not only about how many calories you burn during exercise, but also how your body reacts during the hours and days after exercise,” said senior study author Paulo Gentil of the Federal University of Goias in Brazil. 

“We found that interval training promotes higher fat loss and sprints interval training might be particularly efficient at this,” Gentil said by e-mail. 

Interval training sessions in lasted an average of 28 minutes, compared with just 18 minutes for sprint interval sessions and 38 minutes for continuous moderate intensity workouts. 

While the exercise protocols varied, the most common high intensity interval workout alternated four minutes of all-out exercise with three minutes of recovery. 

The exercise experiments in the study included a total of 1,115 participants and lasted from four to 16 weeks. 

One limitation of the study is that the wide variety of interval training programmes tested made it hard to determine whether one particular approach might be ideal for reducing body fat or losing weight, the study authors note. 

Most exercise guidelines recommend 150 to 250 minutes a week — and up to an hour a day — of moderate intensity aerobic exercise to prevent weight gain or to achieve modest weight loss. Obese people with many more pounds to shed are advised to exercise more than an hour a day, a target few people achieve, researchers note in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. 

Exercise has many health benefits, but is not necessarily risk free, particularly for people who are older or have chronic health problems said Dr Peter Kokkinos of Georgetown University School and the Veterans Affairs Medical Centre in Washington, DC.

“Too much exercise can result in serious musculoskeletal injuries, cardiac events, including heart attacks and even death,” Kokkinos, who was not involved in the study, said by e-mail. “The risk of such injuries is extremely low with low-to moderate intensity exercises, but may increase slightly with increased exercise intensities and duration.” 

Even the higher risk of interval training can still deliver a bigger payoff, said Keith Diaz, a researcher at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York City who was not involved in the study. People who cannot manage interval training all the time may still get some benefit from doing this once a week. 

“It is suspected that interval training may lead to more weight loss because it triggers your body to burn more fat in the 24 hours after you exercise,” Diaz said by e-mail. “This is because when you exercise really intensely, your muscles use all its energy stores that come from carbohydrates.” 

But because interval training does not burn much fat during the brief bursts of exercise, other, longer workouts may achieve similar results for fat loss, Diaz added.

“Both interval training and continuous exercise generally showed similar benefits for weight loss, so whether you prefer the all-out nature of interval training or the slow and steady continuous exercise, do what you like,” Diaz advised. “Odds are you’ll keep up that habit longer if you do.”

It’s happened before and it could happen again.

Roughly 2,700 years ago, an unusually powerful solar storm swept past the Earth, scientists announced in a new study. Though it had little to no impact on people in that long ago, pre-industrial and pre-technological world, such an event today would cause widespread power outages along with potentially disastrous communication and navigation failures.

The solar storm, which was in 660BC, was about 10 times stronger than any known event in the past 70 years, study lead author Raimund Muscheler said.

A solar storm of that strength would be “a threat to modern society in terms of communication and navigation systems, space technologies and commercial aircraft operations”, the study said.

Scientists studied ancient ice in Greenland to uncover clues about previous solar storms. Looking at an ice core that dated as far back as 100,000 years, researchers found radioactive isotopes that indicated a very powerful solar storm 2,700 years ago.

“If that solar storm had occurred today, it could have had severe effects on our high-tech society,” said Muscheler, a geologist at Lund University in Sweden.

Two examples of recent severe solar storms that caused extensive power outages took place in Quebec, Canada, in 1989 and Malmö, Sweden in 2003.

Solar storms are made up of high-energy particles unleashed from the sun by explosions on the star’s surface. These types of storms are part of what’s known as space weather, when energy that blasts off from the sun interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and geomagnetic field. Separate but related space phenomena are known as geomagnetic storms.

The only visible effect down here on Earth from space weather is typically the aurora borealis, or northern lights, across Canada and the northern US.

Scientists said this is the third known discovery of a massive solar storm in historical times. This indicates that while the storms are rare, they are a naturally recurring effect of solar activity.

“That’s why we must increase society’s protection against solar storms,” Muscheler said. 

HONG KONG — Start-ups specialising in alternative protein, from eggless eggs to pea-stuffed burgers and cell-grown fish products, are piling into the Chinese territory of Hong Kong to tap the mainland’s booming multibillion dollar food market. 

At a time when traditional meat farmers have seen profits hurt by the US-China trade war and the spread of swine fever, companies such as Impossible Foods, JUST and Beyond Meat are luring affluent Asian consumers with products they say are more sustainable and environmentally friendly than conventional meat.

The global meat substitutes market was estimated at $4.6 billion last year and is predicted to reach $6.4 billion by 2023, according to research firm Markets and Markets. Asia is the fastest growing region. 

Backed by some of the world’s top billionaires including Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-shing, philanthropist Bill Gates and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, plant protein firms are expanding into China for the first time this year.

San Francisco-based JUST, valued at $1 billion and which counts venture capitalist Peter Thiel as one of its backers, is planning to launch its mung bean faux egg product in six Chinese cities starting next month.

“China is the most important market to JUST globally,” said Cyrus Pan, JUST’s China general manager. 

JUST has inked deals with Alibaba’s Tmall and JD.com to distribute its egg product starting in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Shenzhen, before expanding to other cities. 

The company says the use of mung bean as its key ingredient is important for food security and appeals to the Chinese market given its tradition as a dietary staple.

China has a history of food safety scandals from melamine-tainted eggs, smuggled frozen meat years beyond its expiry date and recycled “gutter oil” to crops tainted with heavy metals. 

Nick Cooney, managing partner of Lever VC, a US-Asian venture capital fund focused on alternative protein startups, said firms like his are eyeing joint ventures, exports and product technology licensing opportunities in China.

“Chinese consumers seem to be more open to novel foods than those in nearly any other country,” he said. 

Beyond Meat, which makes burgers and sausages from pea protein, has seen sales in Hong Kong increase 300 per cent last year, said David Yeung, Beyond Meat’s distributor in the special administrative region. 

Backed by Tyson, the world’s largest meat processor, Beyond Meat filed for an initial public offering on the Nasdaq last November and plans to start distributing in the mainland in the second half of this year. 

Rival Impossible Foods, which makes burgers out of soy, has said plant-based meat will eliminate the need for animals in the food chain and make the global food system sustainable.

The group has received around $450 million in funding since 2011 with investments from Lee Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures and Google Ventures. 

Since launching in five restaurants in Hong Kong last April, the group’s products are now in over 100 restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau. 

Impossible plans to open in mainland China within the next two years.

Asian tastes

Hong Kong-based Avant Meats, which uses cell technology to replicate fish and seafood products, is developing a cell-based fish maw prototype due for launch in the third quarter of this year, its Chief Executive Carrie Chan told Reuters. 

Fish maw, or swim bladders, are popular in Asian soups and stews and are used to add collagen to food.

Right Treat, another Hong Kong company headed by Yeung, is replicating Asia’s favourite meat — pork — using mushrooms, peas and rice for use in dumplings and meatballs. 

The company has seen its sales of its Omnipork triple since launching in Hong Kong in April 2018. It has since expanded to Singapore, Macau and Taiwan, and plans to sell in mainland China this year. 

“If we want to change the world, we must find ways to shift Asian diet and consumption, which means we must find ways to reduce Asia’s dependence on pork and other meat products,” said Yeung, who also runs Green Monday, a startup tackling global food insecurity and climate change.

Omnipork is available at more than 40 stores and will be stocked in major Hong Kong supermarket chains by the end of March, Yeung says. 

Advocates say meat substitutes are healthier and also use less water, produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions and use less land than producing the same amount of meat. 

Consumers, however, must be willing to pay a premium.

Omnipork retails for HK$43 ($5.48) for 230g versus HK$37 for the same amount of minced pork.

Impossible’s burger at HK$88 is more than double the price of a Shake Shack burger in Hong Kong.

Yet the explosion of alternative protein products across Hong Kong has given consumers such as Executive Recruiter Shazz Sabnani, greater variety.

“Before I had to rely more on vegetables and tofu-based products, whereas now I’ve introduced more of these fake meats to my diet.”

Still, not everyone is convinced about the fake meat trend.

Tseung So, a retired 70-year-old said the spaghetti bolognaise made with omnipork at Green Monday’s “Kind Kitchen” in Hong Kong, was not as tasty as real meat. 

“Why would we eat this when we can eat the same dish but with normal pork? I don’t think this will make meat eaters eat less meat but they will probably become more popular with real vegetarians.”

Healthy older adults, who have been obese for years, may be at higher risk of developing dementia than their peers who are not overweight, research from the UK suggests. 

The study team followed two groups of dementia-free adults aged 65 to 74 years for up to 15 years. One group, considered healthy, included 257,523 non-smokers who did not have cancer, heart failure or multiple chronic health problems; another group of 161,927 adults, deemed unhealthy, did smoke or have serious chronic medical issues. 

Over the first decade of the study, healthy people who were obese or overweight were less likely to develop dementia than healthy people at a normal weight, the study found. But after that, obesity was associated with a 17 per cent higher risk of dementia and being heavier no longer appeared to be protective. 

“When we looked long-term, being obese was definitely associated with increased risks of dementia,” said senior study author David Melzer of the University of Exeter in the UK. 

People with obesity often have other health problems like diabetes and high blood pressure that can independently increase the risk of dementia, previous research has found. But results regarding the connection between obesity and dementia have been mixed, with some previous studies suggesting that this excess weight might actually be protective. 

In the current study, 9,774 people in the “healthy” group were diagnosed with dementia. Slightly more than half of the dementia patients had lost at least 2.5 kilogrammes during the decade prior to their diagnosis. 

Weight loss prior to the dementia diagnosis might mask the connection between obesity and cognitive decline, Melzer said by e-mail. 

Alzheimer’s disease, the main cause of dementia, can develop slowly over up to 20 years before people get diagnosed, Melzer noted. 

“The same is true of damage to the arteries in the brain, which also contributes to dementia,” Melzer said. “This slow development of dementia makes it difficult to separate real risk factors from the effects of the disease.” 

Interestingly, obesity was associated with a lower short-term and long-term risk of dementia for the unhealthy group in the study. A total of 6,070 individuals in the unhealthy group developed dementia. 

“In general, losing weight, being more physically active, and getting blood pressures and cholesterol levels under control should make a big difference for dementia risk, plus risks of diabetes and heart disease,” Melzer said. 

The study was not designed to prove whether or how obesity might directly cause dementia in later years. Another limitation is that researchers lacked data to examine the connection between obesity and specific forms of dementia like Alzheimer’s disease, the authors note in Age and Ageing. 

In a separate study in the same journal, researchers led by Alexander Allen of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine also examined the connection between overweight and dementia, and also cast doubt on the idea that obesity is protective. 

The researchers analysed the link between excess belly fat in middle age and the risk of death from dementia over the next 40 years in about 19,000 male civil servants participating in a long-term health study. 

They found that weight loss over 30 years, starting in middle age, was associated with an increased risk of dementia in old age. Having excess fat in old age, however, was tied to a lower risk of dementia. 

While that may appear to suggest a protective effect of extra weight, in fact, the strongest connection, between weight loss over time and an eventual dementia diagnosis, points to the symptoms of developing dementia contributing to the weight loss, Allen and colleagues write. 

“These effects may reflect changes in appetite or other aspects of behaviour that result in reduced energy intake,” they note. “Thus, claims from previous studies that underweight increases the risk of dementia may be an artefact of the effects of reverse causality.” 

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Allen didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

“Regular weight checks could provide an easily measured marker for risk of frailty and subsequent detection of dementia,” Allen and colleagues write. “Whether this could allow early interventions to improve dementia outcomes could also merit further investigation.” 

SAN FRANCISCO — Google set out to disrupt the video game world on Tuesday with a Stadia platform that will let players stream blockbuster titles to any device they wish, as the online giant also unveiled a new controller and its very own studio.

The California-based technology giant said its Stadia platform will open to gamers later this year in the United States, Canada, Britain and other parts of Europe. 

For now, Google is focused on working with game makers to tailor titles for play on Stadia, saying it has already provided the technology to more than 100 game developers.

“We are on the brink of a huge revolution in gaming,” said Jade Raymond, the former Ubisoft and Electronic Arts executive tapped to head Google’s new studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment.

“We are committed to going down a bold path,” she told a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The Stadia tech platform aims to connect people for interactive play on PCs, tablets, smartphones and other devices.

Google also unveiled a new controller that can be used to play cloud-based individual or multiplayer games.

Stadia controllers mirrored those designed for Xbox or PlayStation consoles, with the addition of dedicated buttons for streaming live play via YouTube or asking Google Assistant virtual aide for help beating a daunting puzzle or challenge.

Chief executive Sundar Pichai said the initiative is “to build a game platform for everyone”.

“I think we can change the game by bringing together the entirety of the ecosystem,” Pichai told a keynote audience.

‘Netflix of gaming’

Google’s hope is that Stadia could become for games what Netflix or Spotify are to television or music, by making console-quality play widely available.

Yet, it remains unclear how much Google can grab of the nascent, but potentially massive industry.

As it produces its own games, Google will also be courting other studios to move to its cloud-based model.

Google collaborated with French video game titan Ubisoft last year in a limited public test of the technology powering Stadia, and its chief executive was in the front row at the platform’s unveiling.

A coming new version of blockbuster action game “Doom” tailored to play on Stadia was teased at the event by iD studio executive producer Marty Stratton.

“If you are going to prove to the world you can stream games from the cloud, what better game than ‘Doom’,” Stratton said.

Streaming games from the cloud brings the potential to tap into massive amounts of computing power in data centres.

For gamers, that could translate into richer game environments, more creative play options or battle royale matches involving thousands of players.

At the developers conference, Google demonstrated fast, cloud-based play on a variety of devices. But it offered no specific details on how it would monetise the new service or compensate developers.

Money-making options could include selling game subscriptions the way Netflix charges for access to streaming television.

“I think it’s a huge potential transition in the video game industry, not only for the instant access to games but for exploring different business models to games,” Jon Peddie Research analyst Ted Pollak said of Stadia.

“They say it’s the Netflix of gaming; that is actually pretty accurate.”

Ubisoft on board

Ubisoft, known for “Assassin’s Creed” and other titles, said it would be working with Google.

Its co-founder and chief Yves Guillemot predicted streaming would “give billions unprecedented opportunities to play video games in the future”. 

An “Assassin’s Creed” title franchise was used to test Google’s “Project Stream” technology for hosting the kind of quick, seamless play powered by in-home consoles as an online service.

The reliability and speed of Internet connections is seen as a challenge to cloud gaming, with action play potentially marred by streaming lags or disruptions.

Google said its investments in networks and data centres should help prevent latency in data transmissions.

In places with fast and reliable wireless, internet players will likely access games on the wide variety of devices envisioned by Google, while hard-core players in places where wireless connections aren’t up to the task could opt for consoles, according to Pollak.

“I think it is good news for everyone,” Pollak said when asked what Stadia meant to major console makers Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

The US video game industry generated a record $43.4 billion in revenue in 2018, up 18 per cent from the prior year, according to data released by the Entertainment Software Association and The NPD Group.