Features

Older adults who smoke are more likely to become physically frail than their counterparts who are former smokers or never used tobacco products, a recent study suggests.

Researchers studied people age 60 or older in the UK who had not yet developed so-called frailty, a term that describes a lack of robustness and physical reserves that leaves a person more vulnerable to disability when they become ill or experience an injury like a fall.

After four years of follow-up, smokers were 60 per cent more likely to become frail than participants who didn’t smoke.

“Those who quit smoking in the past did not have the same increased risk of frailty, which suggests that stopping smoking is likely to have benefits even if late in life,” said study leader Dr Gotaro Kojima of University College London.

“It could potentially decrease the risk of becoming frail,” Kojima said by e-mail.

While frailty is associated with aging, it’s not inevitable. Symptoms can include weight loss, fatigue, slow walking speed, low levels of physical activity, and reduced muscle mass. Frail elders are at higher risk for falls, fractures, hospitalisations and cognitive decline.

To see if smoking might influence the risk of frailty, researchers analysed data from a nationally representative UK survey of 2,542 older adults.

At the start of the study, 56 per cent of participants were considered “robust” because they reported no signs of frailty. The rest had one or two symptoms of frailty but not enough to be classified as frail.

Overall, 1,113 participants were former smokers and another 261 people currently smoked.

Current smokers had an increased risk of frailty even after researchers accounted for other factors that can play a role such as age, gender, alcohol use, education, income and cognitive function.

Past smokers, however, didn’t appear to have an increased risk of frailty. There also wasn’t a difference in frailty risk based on whether ex-smokers had quit at least a decade earlier or more recently, researchers report in Age and Ageing.

The picture looked different, however, when researchers examined chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a common complication of smoking that makes it difficult to breathe. COPD is linked with an increased risk of balance difficulties, muscle weakness, thinning bones, blackouts and falls.

When researchers accounted for COPD, current smoking no longer appeared to influence the risk of frailty. This suggests that smokers are more apt to become frail because of COPD rather than from smoking itself, the authors conclude.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how smoking causes frailty.

Another limitation is that researchers lacked data on how much people smoked. In addition, participants who dropped out of the study over time tended to be frailer and sicker than those who remained and were included in the final analysis.

Even so, the findings should offer smokers yet another reason to quit, said Dr Teemu Niiranen, a researcher with Boston University’s Framingham Heart Study.

“In addition to causing cancer, smoking can damage the heart, lungs, blood vessels, mouth, reproductive organs, bones, skin and eyes,” Niiranen, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by e-mail. “Dysfunction in all of these organ systems predisposes to frailty at old age.”

Quitting can’t reverse or prevent all of the health problems associated with a lifetime of smoking, noted Dr Christian Delles of the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences at the University of Glasgow in the UK. 

But the study does suggest smoking cessation may make a difference when it comes to frailty, Delles, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by e-mail. 

“[Ex-smokers’] risk of frailty was as low as that of people who had never smoked,” Delles said. “It is never too late to quit.” 

OSLO — Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun’s rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet. 

Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels. 

The United Nations says the targets are way off track and will not be met simply by reducing emissions for example from factories or cars — particularly after US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 pact.

They are pushing for other ways to keep temperatures down. 

In the countryside near Zurich, Swiss company Climeworks began to suck greenhouse gases from thin air in May with giant fans and filters in a $23 million project that it calls the world’s first “commercial carbon dioxide capture plant”.

Worldwide, “direct air capture” research by a handful of companies such as Climeworks has gained tens of millions of dollars in recent years from sources including governments, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the European Space Agency.

If buried underground, vast amounts of greenhouse gases extracted from the air would help reduce global temperatures, a radical step beyond cuts in emissions that are the main focus of the Paris Agreement.

Climeworks reckons it now costs about $600 to extract a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air and the plant’s full capacity due by the end of 2017 is only 900 tonnes a year. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of only 45 Americans. 

And Climeworks sells the gas, at a loss, to nearby greenhouses as a fertiliser to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and has a partnership with carmaker Audi, which hopes to use carbon in greener fuels.

Jan Wurzbacher, director and founder of Climeworks, says the company has planet-altering ambitions by cutting costs to about $100 a tonne and capturing one per cent of global man-made carbon emissions a year by 2025.

“Since the Paris Agreement, the business substantially changed,” he said, with a shift in investor and shareholder interest away from industrial uses of carbon to curbing climate change.

But penalties for factories, power plants and cars to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are low or non-existent. It costs 5 euros ($5.82) a tonne in the European Union.

And isolating carbon dioxide is complex because the gas makes up just 0.04 per cent of the air. Pure carbon dioxide delivered by trucks, for use in greenhouses or to make drinks fizzy, costs up to about $300 a tonne in Switzerland.

Other companies involved in direct air capture include Carbon Engineering in Canada, Global Thermostat in the United States and Skytree in the Netherlands, a spinoff of the European Space Agency originally set up to find ways to filter out carbon dioxide breathed out by astronauts in spacecrafts.

Not science fiction

The Paris Agreement seeks to limit a rise in world temperatures this century to less than 2Co, ideally 1.5oC above pre-industrial times.

But UN data show that current plans for cuts in emissions will be insufficient, especially without the United States, and that the world will have to switch to net “negative emissions” this century by extracting carbon from nature.

Riskier “geo-engineering” solutions could be a backstop, such as dimming the world’s sunshine, dumping iron into the oceans to soak up carbon, or trying to create clouds.

Among new university research, a Harvard geo-engineering project into dimming sunlight to cool the planet set up in 2016 has raised $7.5 million from private donors. It plans a first outdoor experiment in 2018 above Arizona.

“If you want to be confident to get to 1.5oC you need to have solar geo-engineering,” said David Keith, of Harvard. 

Keith’s team aims to release about 1 kilo of sun dimming material, perhaps calcium carbonate, from a high-altitude balloon above Arizona next year in a tiny experiment to see how it affects the microphysics of the stratosphere.

“I don’t think it’s science fiction ... to me it’s normal atmospheric science,” he said.

Some research has suggested that geo-engineering with sun-dimming chemicals, for instance, could affect global weather patterns and disrupt vital Monsoons. 

And many experts fear that pinning hopes on any technology to fix climate change is a distraction from cuts in emissions blamed for heating the planet.

“Relying on big future deployments of carbon removal technologies is like eating lots of dessert today, with great hopes for liposuction tomorrow,” Christopher Field, a Stanford University professor of climate change, wrote in May.

Jim Thomas of ETC Group in Canada, which opposes climate engineering, said direct air capture could create “the illusion of a fix that can be used cynically or naively to entertain policy ideas such as ‘overshoot’” of the Paris goals.

But governments face a dilemma. Average surface temperatures are already about 1oC above pre-industrial levels and hit record highs last year.

“We’re in trouble,” said Janos Pasztor, head of the new Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Project. “The question is not whether or not there will be an overshoot but by how many degrees and for how many decades.”

Faced with hard choices, many experts say that extracting carbon from the atmosphere is among the less risky options. Leaders of major economies, except Trump, said at a summit in Germany this month that the Paris accord was “irreversible”.

‘Barking mad’

Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at Oxford University, said solar geo-engineering projects seemed “barking mad”. 

By contrast, he said “carbon dioxide removal is challenging technologically, but deserves investment and trial”.

The most natural way to extract carbon from the air is to plant forests that absorb the gas as they grow, but that would divert vast tracts of land from farming. Another option is to build power plants that burn wood and bury the carbon dioxide released.

Carbon Engineering, set up in 2009 with support from Gates and Murray Edwards, chairman of oil and gas group Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has raised about $40 million and extracts about a tonne of carbon dioxide a day with turbines and filters.

“We’re mainly looking to synthesise fuels” for markets such as California with high carbon prices, said Geoffrey Holmes, business development manager at Carbon Engineering. 

But he added that “the Paris Agreement helps” with longer-term options of sucking large amounts from the air.

Among other possible geo-engineering techniques are to create clouds that reflect sunlight back into space, perhaps by using a mist of sea spray.

That might be used locally, for instance, to protect the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, said Kelly Wanser, principal director of the US-based Marine Cloud Brightening Project.

Among new ideas, Wurzbacher at Climeworks is sounding out investors on what he says is the first offer to capture and bury 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air, for $500 a tonne. 

That might appeal to a company wanting to be on forefront of a new green technology, he said, even though it makes no apparent economic sense. 

LOS ANGELES — Mark Wahlberg soared to the top of the world’s highest paid actors on an annual Forbes magazine list that highlighted a huge disparity between male and female Hollywood stars.

Wahlberg, 46, earned an estimated $68 million in 2017 thanks to his pay days for movies “Daddy’s Home 2” and “Transformers: The Last Knight”, according to the Forbes ranking released on Tuesday.

The rapper-turned-actor knocked 2016 leader Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson into second place, with estimated 2017 earnings of $65 million.

Forbes estimates earnings, before taxes and management fees, from movies, TV and commercial endorsements.

The Forbes list again highlighted Hollywood’s gender pay gap. Last week, the magazine named “La La Land” Oscar winner Emma Stone as the world’s highest paid actress with an estimated 2017 take of $26 million.

Forbes said the 10 highest-paid leading men earned a combined $488.5 million before tax in its June 2016-June 2017 scoring period, nearly three times more than the $172.5 million earned by the top 10 scoring women.

Forbes attributed the disparity to the prevalence of superhero and action blockbusters that earn big at the box office for Hollywood studios, but tend to have fewer leading roles for women.

“Pirates of the Caribbean” star Johnny Depp, who for years has been among the top five paid actors, did not make the top 20 this year, Forbes said. Depp is currently embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with his former business managers who have detailed what they describe as his lavish spending habits.

Last December, before the May 2017 release of “Pirates of the Caribbean; Dead Men Tell No Tales”, Forbes named Depp the most overpaid actor for a second straight year as films such as “Alice Through the Looking Glass” and “Mortdecai” did not fare well. 

Three of Bollywood’s biggest stars — Shah Rukh Khan ($38 million), Salman Khan ($37 million) and Akshay Kumar ($35.5 million) — took the 8th, 9th and 10th places on the Forbes list, respectively.

The fast pace of technological changes and innovation continues unabated. Minor ones aside, perhaps the most obvious, the biggest two trends are electric cars and then our increasing dependency on the digital cloud for most everything.

The first is the impressive, strong push by the industry and governments to discontinue gasoline cars and move either to hybrid or to fully electric vehicles. The second is making us not just to keep data there but also, and more importantly, to do all our computer work, transactions, purchases and business directly on the net, without installing software on our computers, except for Internet access. The combined social impacts of these two changes cannot be underestimated. Moreover, merely following is not enough, one has to make the best of it all.

Make the best of the innovations requires adaptation. So, how do you adapt?

The speed of change is nothing new. For the last 25 years or so, we have kept on saying “technological changes are taking place faster than we can adapt to them” – it’s understood. Even those working in the technology field are now finding it hard to follow. It is therefore easy to imagine how the consumer, the layman feels about it!

For a quarter of a century we have just been observing the situation and admitting how hard it was to adapt, without anyone coming up with a solution, not to the change per se of course, but to learning how to adapt quickly, smoothly.

This is a big question, and asking for a formal, structured methodology to address it is easier said than done, I admit.

Countless subjects have become crucial to living well in this modern age. Adapting to technological changes is one of them. This is one of the topics that they don’t teach you at school, for there has simply never been any curriculum set for that. Maybe academics and education authorities should start thinking about it; it is never too late.

There would be no need to establish a full college degree in what I would call “Adapting to Technological Changes”; that would be going overboard. However, setting up an elective course would do nicely. Essentially it all consists of being mentally ready to keep learning new ways, not to be “locked” in what you already know, have learned or are using at some point in time.

One should be constantly prepared to accept the fact that, for example, whatever software application you have learned and are using, you should never take it for granted or think you will be using it as it is for as long as you live, but should be willing to start all over again and again, and learn a new one several times in a lifetime, repeatedly, relentlessly.

I have spoken to computer programmers who have graduated in the 1980s. Most of them are already in their fourth or fifth programming language. College days seem so distant…

Many are the drivers who are over sixty, and who still do not make the best use of the (already old) technology built in their cars such as ABS or automatic gear shifting. How are they going to handle fully-electric cars? Swedish carmaker Volvo has just announced that starting 2019 it will completely stop building gasoline-only cars and France has serious plans to see only electric cars on its roads by 2040.

So next time you see a screen notification on your computer inviting you to upgrade Windows 10 to its new Creators version (expected before the end of this year), or if your Internet provider is after you, nagging to make you change from copper ADSL to fibre optic, just welcome the change and go for it gladly. It is easy and painless once you accept the idea that nothing stays the same for too long in the field of technology. It’s just a state of mind one has to get into.

HONG KONG — It is 2050 and the world revolves around you. From the contents of your fridge to room temperature — digital assistants ensure your home runs smoothly. Your screens know your taste and show channels you want to see as you enter the room. Your car is driverless and your favourite barman may just be an android.

Predictions for an artificial intelligence (AI)-dominated future are increasingly common, but Antoine Blondeau has experience in reading, and arguably manipulating, the runes — he helped develop technology that evolved into predictive texting and Apple’s Siri.

“In 30 years the world will be very different,” he says, adding: “Things will be designed to meet your individual needs.”

Work, as we know it, will be redundant, he says — visual and sensory advances in robotics will see smart factories make real-time decisions requiring only human oversight rather than workers, while professions such as law, journalism, accounting and retail will be streamlined with AI doing the grunt work. 

Healthcare is set for a revolution, with individuals holding the data about their health and AI able to diagnose ailments, he explains. Blondeau says: “If you have a doctor’s appointment, it will be perhaps for the comfort of talking things through with a human, or perhaps because regulation will dictate a human needs to dispense medicine. But you won’t necessarily need the doctor to tell you what’s wrong.”

The groundwork has been done: Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home are essentially digital butlers that can respond to commands as varied as ordering pizza to managing appliances, while Samsung is working on a range of “smart” fridges, capable of giving daily news briefings, ordering groceries, or messaging your family at your request.

Leading media companies are already using “AI journalists” to produce economics and sports stories from data and templates created by their human counterparts.

Blondeau’s firm Sentient Technologies has already successfully used AI traders in the financial markets. In partnership with US retailer Shoes.com, it created an interactive ‘smart shopper’, which uses an algorithm that picks up information from gauging what you like and what you do not, offering suggestions.

In healthcare, the firm worked with America’s MIT to invent an AI nurse able to assess patterns in blood pressure data from thousands of patients to correctly identify those developing sepsis 30 minutes before the outward onset of the condition more than 90 per cent of the time in trials.

“It’s a critical window that doctors say gives them the extra time to save lives,” Blondeau says, but concedes bringing such concepts to the masses is difficult.

“The challenge is to pass to market because of regulations, but also because people have an intrinsic belief you can trust a doctor, but will they trust a machine?”

For many the idea of mass AI-caused redundancy is terrifying, but Blondeau is pragmatic: humans need to rethink careers and education.

“The era where you exit the education system at 16, 21, or 24 and that is it, is broadly gone,” he explains.

“People will have to retrain and change skillsets as the technology evolves.”

Blondeau disagrees that having a world so catered to your whims and wants might lead to a myopic life, a magnified version of the current social media echo chamber, arguing it is possible to inject “serendipity” into the technology, to throw up surprises.

While computers have surpassed humans at specific tasks and games, predictions of a time when they develop artificial general intelligence enabling them to perform any intellectual task an adult can range from as early as 2030 to the end of the century.

But Blondeau, says, “Like any invention it can be used for good and bad. There will be checks along the way, we are not going to wake up one day and suddenly realise the machines are aware.”

LOS ANGELES — Without a superhero movie or new studio sequel in play, this weekend provided an opening for two smaller films to shine. But as the weekend draws to a close, one is beaming brighter than the other.

That title goes to Lionsgate’s R-rated action comedy “Hitman’s Bodyguard”, which is firing off to $21.4 million during its opening weekend at 3,377 locations. That is a solid opening, especially during a painful summer for the movie business and sleepy month of August. The final tally was fuelled by an aggressive marketing push, and a trio of stars at the centre — Samuel L. Jackson as a notorious hitman, and Salma Hayek as hit equally threatening wife, and Ryan Reynolds as a bodyguard. The film comes courtesy of director Patrick Hughes (“The Expendables 3”) and writer Tom O’Connor.

“’The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ is generating great word of mouth among moviegoers,” said Lionsgate’s distribution president David Spitz. “It has a clear runway in the weeks ahead, and we expect it to play well right into September.”

Meanwhile, “Logan Lucky” — a critical darling from Steven Soderbergh and Bleecker Street — sputtered. The heist comedy, which relied on an unconventional production and marketing strategy, made $7.6 million this weekend from 3,031 theatres. The film was partially funded through foreign pre-sales and partnering with Amazon for streaming rights. The story — penned by Rebecca Blunt, who likely does not exist — centres on a trio of siblings played by Channing Tatum, Riley Keough, and Adam Driver, who attempt to pull off a massive robbery. It’s set at the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race.

Of the two, “Logan Lucky” fared better with critics, earning a 93 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, as opposed to “Hitman’s Bodyguard”, which has a 39 per cent. But the roles are reversed when it comes to audience reception — “Hitman’s Bodyguard” has a B+ CinemaScore as opposed to “Logan Lucky’s” B.

In the end, “Logan Lucky” came in third for the weekend behind the second frame of “Annabelle: Creation”. The latest in the “Conjuring” universe from Warner Bros. made $15.5 million from 3,542 locations. And “Dunkirk” landed in fourth behind “Logan Lucky” with $6.6 million. The same studio has more cause to celebrate as “Wonder Woman” crosses $800 million worldwide.

“Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature” rounds out the top five this weekend with $5.1 million.

Outside of the wide releases, TWC continues its gradual rollout for Taylor Sheridan’s “Wind River”. This weekend it took in $3 million from 694 locations, raising its total past $4.1 million. And major acquisition at Sundance, “Patti Cake$” is struggling to find an audience with $66,000 from 14 locations.

Overall, the summer of hell continues: This season’s box office has slipped to 13.3 per cent behind last year at this point, according to data from ComScore, which also reports the 2017 box office is now pacing 5 per cent behind 2016.

A form of immunotherapy gaining ground as a way to treat childhood food allergies has shown promise in treating another rising scourge of children and young adults: Type 1 diabetes.

In a small but rigorous clinical trial, British investigators gave patients recently diagnosed with the metabolic disorder a truncated version of the chemical that gives rise to insulin.

After a quarter-century of failed efforts to treat diabetes with an immune therapy, the experimental treatment appeared to quell the immune system’s assaults on the body’s insulin-production machinery. The authors of the new study call their experimental treatment “an appealing strategy for prevention”, both in the earliest stages of Type 1 diabetes and in children who are at high genetic risk of developing the disease.

Over the trial’s 12-month duration, eight newly diagnosed diabetic subjects who got a placebo treatment required steadily increasing insulin doses to maintain glycaemic control. As their immune systems progressively destroyed the pancreatic cells that normally produce the essential hormone, their daily insulin use grew on average 50 per cent.

The 19 subjects who got the experimental immunotherapy, however, continued to produce their own insulin. Among the subjects who got the experimental immunotherapy, the need for added shots of the hormone did not escalate in the year following their diagnosis.

The different metabolic trajectories of subjects in the trial’s control group and its active arm were evident at three months — the earliest point at which a surrogate marker for insulin production was measured.

The report of the early-stage clinical trial, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, offers some preliminary reassurance that immunotherapy could be used safely in this growing population.

Researchers have been wary of pursuing the strategy in diabetes, worried that it could accelerate or strengthen the immune system’s attack on insulin-producing pancreatic cells, or cause dangerous allergic reactions. In the current study, injections of an immunotherapeutic agent caused no detectable worrisome response — not even redness or swelling at the site of injection — prompting the authors to declare its safety profile “very favourable”.

Recent years have seen progress in the bid to develop chemical mimics of allergens that train and reassure the defenders of the immune system rather than inflame and encourage them. The approach, called antigen-specific immunotherapy, has seen growing success in the treatment of allergies to common foods, such as peanuts, eggs and soy.

Similar to food allergies, Type 1 diabetes is an immune disorder — a disease in which the immune system misidentifies a harmless or even necessary agent (whether ingested peanuts or insulin-making cells in the pancreas) as a threat. The immune system’s assault not only can cause discomfort and danger in the form of itching, swelling or anaphylactic shock. In diabetes, it destroys a function that is essential to the body’s ability to extract fuel from food and to keep freely circulating blood sugar from damaging organs and blood vessels.

Just as lab-produced chemical snippets of peanuts accustom an overactive immune system to the eventual introduction of real peanuts, the researchers hoped that the chemical flag they devised would teach the immune systems of newly diagnosed diabetics to recognise insulin and call off their attack on its source.

By using just a piece of the antigen that typically causes the immune reaction, the approach of such “peptide immunotherapy” aims to inure the immune system to the object of attack while avoiding a full-on allergic response.

At Cardiff University and King’s College London, researchers led by Dr Mohammad Alhadj Ali isolated a compound called a proinsulin C19 A3 peptide. A fragment of the chemical that gives rise to insulin, the peptide (known to chemists by the catchy moniker GSLQPLALEGSLQKRGIV) is called an epitope.

Over six months, they gave 19 subjects with early diabetes injections of the epitope in one of two doses: either every two or every four weeks. The subjects’ glycemic control and insulin use were then tracked for another six months.

The subjects were mostly in their mid- to late-20s, and had all been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in the previous 100 days. The study’s recruits were all at a stage of the disorder when the pancreas’ insulin-producing cells were still at least partly intact and capable of producing the hormone in response to food intake. But the immune system’s CD4 and CD8 T-cells had begun to mount their attacks on the beta-cells of the pancreas.

Each year in the United States, some 40,000 people get a new diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, a disorder that can upend a life of carefree eating and reduce life expectancy by a decade. Like many auto-immune disorders, including celiac disease and lupus, the incidence of Type 1 diabetes appears to have risen sharply. Diagnoses of Type 1 diabetes have escalated at an annual average of 4 per cent in recent decades.

Officially opening for business in the UAE and to the public in Jordan as of earlier this year, Tesla is, however, not an uncommon sight for Jordanian motorists. Operating in a governmental fleet car capacity in Jordan and in collaboration with the Silicon Valley manufacturer, Tesla is set to become the next big thing on the local motoring landscape. 

Benefitting from a comparably favourable import duty and tax regime as electric and hybrid cars do in the Kingdom, greater brand exposure and consumer demand for electric vehicles, not to mention an admittedly small but soon to expand charging station network, the upstart American electric car maker is in relative terms, likely to prove a bigger hit in Jordan.

Dramatic and futuristic

Longest serving of a current three model line stable, the Model S first arrived in 2012, and has been expanding regularly updated in terms of power-train and technology. A large and low all-electric high performance luxury four-door, the Model S competes with an eclectic range of cars, all the way from premium saloons to luxury flagships and high-end supercar exotics in terms of outright acceleration. But with its slinky coupe-like low roofline, body-style and frameless windows, and considerable length and width, the Model S, however, closely resembles so-called ‘four-door-saloons’. 

In terms of deign aesthetic, body style and combination of sporting ability and luxurious appointment, the Model S slots in best among the Aston Martin Rapide, Audi A7, Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class and Porsche Panamera.

Lightly redesigned to feature a less conventional front design with only a small slit-style grille to both differentiate it from traditional internal combustion engine cars and further emphasise its futuristic direction, the revised Model S line-up circa 2016 also saw the introduction of the brand’s new P100D flagship variant, as recently driven on Jordanian roads.

Dramatic yet relatively understated for so extreme a car, the P100D differs little aesthetically from the rest of the swooping and stylish Model S range. Not just the most powerful Tesla yet, the Model S P100D ranks heavy hitting and astronomically expensive hypercars as among the world’s fastest accelerating road cars ever, and is arguably the world’s quickest such current regular production car.

Violent yet silent

Built as an electric car from ground up rather than adapted, the Model S features extensive use of lightweight aluminium to offset its dual electric motors’ and large battery pack’s weight, with the latter positioned across its floor to keep major weights low and concentrated within the wheelbase to enhance balance and body control through corners. Tesla’s most powerful battery pack yet at 100kwh, the P100D drives all four wheels through two electric motors with single-speed automatic gearbox. Positioned over the axles, the front motor develops an estimated 259BHP and 277lb/ft torque, and the more powerful rear motor produces 503BHP and 525lb/ft. Meanwhile a regenerative braking system harnesses kinetic energy to help charge the batteries and reduce mechanical brake wear. 

In the absence of official published combined, or total, power ratings from Tesla, the Model S P100D has been estimated to produce anywhere from between 680BHP to around 800BHP, but 762BHP seems to be the most often quoted figure. Meanwhile epic and immediate sledgehammer-like torque unofficially rated at 791lb/ft (and in excess of 900lb/ft according to one Motor Trend magazine dynometer test), slams one back into the seat and ensures beguilingly violent but silent acceleration from standstill.

Notable for the sheer surging immediacy of its torque and power output, g-force generated and seamless delivery, the P100D is officially rated as completing the 0-100km/h sprint in just 2.7-seconds. Motor Trend magazine have, however, clocked a 0-97km/h time in under 2.3-seconds, albeit from a rolling start and not absolute standstill.

Aggressive yet efficient

Aggressive, responsive and swift like scant few cars, and with no gear change interruptions, the P100D’s best performance is, however, to be had at relatively lower speed. Overtaking at what seems like warp speeds when one engages Ludicrous mode to access its full potential, the P100D is capable of an electronically limited 250km/h top speed. More than powerful enough in normal driving mode, ludicrous mode increases driveline wear and with increased power, reduces driving range.

Not just one of the world’s fastest accelerating cars, the P100D offers the longest driving range of any regular production electric car, with a combined cycle rating of 507km by the US Environmental Protection Agency (as driven with 21-inch wheels). This can be increased with slower driving and gentler inputs, or significantly reduced with more aggressive driving and higher speed.

Delivering peak performance when its battery is running relatively cool, there is a law of diminished return when one is too aggressive too often in a short space of time. However, with so much brute force available, one hardly notices a drop off, and on launch, the one feels P100D’s always active stability and traction controls scrambling to regular and harness the P100D’s prodigious output into forward motion instead of wheel-spin.

Hefty at 2250kg, the P100D’s large ventilated disc brakes are supplemented with regenerative braking to add an additional and reassuring layer of stopping force that shaves off momentum immediately on lift-off. A less aggressive regenerative brake mode, however, allows for a more fluent driving experience where one doesn’t need to keep riding the accelerator pedal as often.

Seamless delivery

Brutally quick, technologically advanced and smooth, the Models S P100D’s may not be as outright visceral in character as a light and lithe petrol-powered sports car, but in that is not what it is meant to do. Instead, it delivers is a superbly silent and effortlessly versatile driving experience that large luxury cars are meant to. 

And in comparison with most hybrid cars, its all-electric drive-line is smoother and more seamlessly fluent than the petrol-electric integration issues often associated with hybrid cars. In terms of practicality, the Model S serves well as a commuter car with its long range, low charging costs, relatively quick recharge times and availability of charging points along the Amman-Aqaba route, but cannot match the quick convenience and availability of refuelling a petrol or diesel vehicle

With a big footprint, aerodynamic form, low centre of gravity and optional adaptive air suspension it rides smooth, reassuring stability and refinement at speed. A comfortable long distance cruiser, the P100D is agile and confident through fast sweeping corners.

Turning in crisply with front wheels gripping hard and its electric-assisted steering providing quick, precise and clinical responses, the P100D’s air suspension provides taut body control. Through corners and over choppy roads, one can almost feel just how low the P100D’s centre of gravity is.

Meanwhile, its adaptive air suspension provides a mostly smooth and comfortable ride, but with a sporty set-up and low profile front 245/35R21 and 265/35R21 rear tyres, can feel on the firm side over bumps at low speed.

High tech luxury

With dual motor four-wheel-drive, and stability systems allocating power front and rear, the P100D provides good grip through corners, but given its immense and instant torque delivery, one should progressively feed power through the accelerator to not lose rear traction when powering out of corners. Effortlessly capable and precise when overtaking and poised through corners, the P100D’s low roof line, vast width and low profile tyres, however, make it tricky to maneuver in narrow and confined spaces. 

That said, its bird’s eye view camera, large reversing monitor and parking sensors with precise distance readout in centimetres, help immensely. Also useful to aid visibility is the P100D’s blind spot alert system, which is integrated with its Autopilot system, which in turn was disengaged during test drive.

Luxurious and well appointed with two-tone leather and carbon-fibre trim panels, the P100D is also highly well equipped with luxury, safety and driver-assistance features. With supportive and well-adjustable seats in front, the P100D’s various settings, information, connectivity, entertainment and other features are access through a huge, user-friendly and logical portrait-style 17-inch touchscreen.

Highly refined inside, the Model S is also a practical car with front and rear luggage room for up to 894-litres, 60:40 folding rear seats, adjustable ride height, and optional rear-facing third row child seats with five-point harnesses. Rear legroom and width are good, but for tall adults, rear headroom is less than ideal owing to the rakishly low roofline. Centre console storage is generous, but cup-holders could be better positioned, and a folding rear seat armrest would be welcome.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: Dual front & rear three phase, four pole AC electric motors

Battery: 100kwh lithium-ion

Gearbox: 1-speed automatic

Driveline: four-wheel-drive, open differentials

Axle ratio, F/R: 9.34:1/9.73:1

Power – front motor, BHP (PS) [kW]: 259 (262) [193]*

Power – rear motor, BHP (PS) [kW]: 503 (510) [375]*

Power, combined, BHP (PS) [kW]: 680-762 (690-772) [507-568]*

Torque – front motor, lb/ft (Nm): 277 [375]*

Torque – rear motor, lb/ft (Nm): 525 [712]*

Torque, combined, lb/ft (Nm): 791 (1072)*

0-97km/h: 2.5-seconds

0-100km/h: 2.7-seconds

Top speed: 250km/h

Energy consumption, city/highway: 37/32kW-hrs/160km* 

Range, at constant 105km/h, 21-inch wheels: 520km

Range, combined, EPA estimate, 21-inch wheels: 507km

Battery charging time: 6.3-9.5-hours*

Battery charging time, “supercharger”: 75-minutes*

Height: 1417-1460mm*

Width, with mirrors/mirrors folded: 2187/1964mm

Length: 4978mm

Wheelbase: 2960mm

Track, F/R: 1662/1700mm

Ground clearance: 116-160mm

Aerodynamic drag co-efficient: 0.24*

Curb weight: 2250kg*

Weight distribution, F/R; 51:49 per cent*

Headroom, F/R: 986/897mm

Legroom, F/R: 1085/897mm

Shoulder room, F/R: 1466/1397mm

Luggage volume, front and rear: 894-litres

Steering: Electric-assisted rack and pinion

Steering ratio: 14.1:1

Lock-to-lock: 2.3-turns

Suspension, F/R: Double wishbone/multilink, adaptive air dampers

Brakes, F/R: 355mm/365mm ventilated discs, regenerative braking

Tyres, F/R: 245/35R21/265/35R21

*estimates

It is not just humans who will be affected by the Great American Eclipse coming on August 21 — expect animals to act strangely too.

Anecdotal evidence and a few scientific studies suggest that as the moon moves briefly between the sun and the Earth, causing a deep twilight to fall across the land, large swaths of the animal kingdom will alter their behaviour.

Eclipse chasers say they have seen songbirds go quiet, large farm animals lie down, crickets start to chirp and chickens begin to roost.

Elise Ricard, public programmes supervisor at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, recalled the eerie silence that accompanied the start of a total eclipse early on a June morning in 2012.

“I was sitting on a beach with my back to the jungle, and if you know anything about jungles, they are not usually quiet,” she said. “But to suddenly hear all those noisy birds get quiet as the eclipse got close, that was a powerful sensory experience.”

Doug Duncan, director of the Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has had a few strange run-ins with animals over his many years of eclipse chasing.

He saw a line of lamas gather together to see a total eclipse with him and his fellow astronomers in Bolivia.

When he was viewing a different eclipse from a boat near the Galapagos Islands, he saw dozens of whales and dolphins swim to the surface of the ocean five minutes before the eclipse began. They hung out there until five minutes after the eclipse, before returning to the watery depths, he recalled.

Totality — the time when the face of the sun is fully covered by the moon — only lasts a few minutes, but scientists say it is still capable of affecting animals who use light cues to help them decide what to do and when.

“Certain stimuli can overrule normal behaviour without affecting an animal’s daily physiological rhythms,” said Joanna Chiu, who studies animal circadian clocks at the University of California, Davis. “It is not surprising that the eclipse will temporarily affect animal behaviour, but it is unlikely to affect their internal clock or their behaviour in the long run.”

University of Toledo biology professor Elliot Tramer reported that seabirds on the north coast of Venezuela were affected by a total eclipse that passed through the area in 2008.

Brown pelicans and frigatebirds that had been foraging over the water before the eclipse left the bay 13 minutes before totality and did not return until 12 minutes after the solar disk was fully revealed.

He concluded that although total solar eclipses are short, they can still interrupt normal avian daytime behaviour.

In another study published in the Journal of Fish Biology in 1998, a team of researchers found that fish also respond to changes in light during an eclipse.

After observing reef fish during a total eclipse that swept over Pinta Island in the Galapagos, the authors found that daytime fish sought shelter in the reef during totality while nocturnal fish were more likely to leave the cover of their daytime habitats.

Yet another study in Veracruz, Mexico, found that some orb-weaver spiders will start to dismantle their webs during totality, and then rebuild them when the sun’s face is revealed once again.

But there is always more to learn, so it should come as no surprise that a few experiments to document animal behaviour are in the works for the Great American Eclipse.

Jonathan Fram, an assistant professor at Oregon State University, plans to use a series of bio-acoustic sonars to see whether zooplankton in the path of totality will rise in the water column as the sun is obscured by the moon.

Across the ocean, an enormous number of animals hide in the deep, dark waters during the day, and then swim upward during the cover of night to take advantage of the food generated in the sunlit part of the ocean.

“It’s the biggest migration on the planet, and most of us don’t even know it is happening,” said Kelly Benoit-Bird, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who is not involved with Fram’s study.

Scientists have known for decades that changes in light can affect these animals’ migration patterns. For example, most of these deep-water migrants will not swim as close to the surface as usual during a full moon. Still, a total eclipse provides an ideal natural experiment that can help researchers learn how important light cues are to different critters, Benoit-Bird said.

Fram, who works on a project known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, will be able to get data from six bio-acoustic sonars off the Northwest coast — three that are directly in the path of totality and three that are not. This should allow researchers to see how much the sun has to dim to affect changes in the zooplankton’s movements.