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PARIS — Weight-loss guidelines have long counselled dieters that kilos shed too quickly are likelier to creep back than those lost at a slower pace.

But an Australian study, published on Wednesday, says this is wrong.

Over the long term, fast-track and slow-track dieters are equally likely to regain most of the weight they lost, according to a paper published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.

Research led by Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne divided 204 obese men and women into two groups.

One group entered a weight-loss programme of 12 weeks, the other a more gradual 36 weeks.

The 12-week group were restricted to a diet of 450-800 calories per day, while the other group had their energy intake reduced by about 500 calories per day.

Those who lost 12.5 per cent or more of their bodyweight from both groups were then placed on a three-year maintenance diet.

By the end of the trial, individuals in both groups had regained some 71 per cent on average of the kilos they had shed.

“By contrast with the widely held belief that weight lost rapidly is more quickly regained, our findings show that regain is similar after gradual or rapid weight loss,” the team said.

“Our data should guide committees that develop clinical guidelines for the management of obesity to change their advice,” they added.

Dieters are generally told that a weight loss tempo of no more than 500 grammes per week is best.

The researchers noted some interesting short-term differences in how the two groups responded.

Among the fast-dieting group, more achieved their weight loss target — 81 per cent compared to half of the other group — and fewer left the programme.

These initial successes may be partly explained by a process called ketosis which kicks in with low-calorie intake — the body burns fat to produce breakdown products called ketones, which are known to suppress hunger.

“Losing weight quickly may also motivate participants to persist with their diet and achieve better results,” said the authors.

But this made no difference in the longer term, with the weight piling up again over time.

“For weight loss, a slow and steady approach does not win the race,” Corby Martin and Kishore Gadde of the US-based Pennington Biomedical Research Centre said in a comment.

“The myth that rapid weight loss is associated with rapid weight regain is no more true than one of Aesop’s fables.”

In comments distributed by the London-based Science Media Centre, nutritionists said the study reiterated that sustained weight loss remained a challenge, however it is achieved.

“While weight loss is hard, weight loss maintenance is even harder,” said Nick Finer, an endocrinologist from University College London Hospitals.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is coming out with bigger, more expensive versions of its Nexus phone and tablet to attract more of the affluent consumers who faithfully buy each new generation of Apple’s iPhone and iPad. It’s also releasing a new streaming video and music device, Nexus Player, to compete with Apple TV and Roku, among others.

The new line-up announced Wednesday is Google’s latest volley in its duel with Apple in the increasingly important mobile device market. Google’s Android software and Apple’s iOS software power most of the world’s smartphones and tablets.

The Nexus products, which will hit store shelves in November, also will compete against a variety of other phones and tablets that run on the free Android software, including popular devices made by Samsung Electronics.

Both of the Nexus devices will run on a new version of Google’s Android operating system. The latest software is called “Lollipop” in keeping with Google’s tradition of naming its Android upgrades after treats.

Google’s product unveiling came on the eve of a Thursday event where Apple Inc. is widely expected to update the trend-setting iPad that has defined the tablet market since its 2010 release.

The latest Nexus 9 tablet, made by HTC, features a nearly nine-inch (22.9cm) screen — two inches (5.1cm) larger than the previous version. The device also will cost considerably more, with prices for the Nexus 9 starting at $399 — 74 per cent more than its predecessor. That’s still $100 less than the starting price for the current iPad Air, which has a nearly 10-inch (25.4cm) screen.

The new smartphone, called the Nexus 6, boasts a nearly six-inch (15.2cm) screen, eclipsing the 5.5-inch (14cm) display on the iPhone 6 Plus that Apple began selling last month.

Google is charging a comparable price for the Nexus 6, with prices beginning at $649 for a phone without a wireless contract commitment. That’s $300 more than the previous generation, a Nexus 5 with a roughly five-inch (12.7cm) screen.

The dramatic price increases on the Nexus devices represents a strategic shift for Google. The Mountain View, California, company traditionally has hailed the Nexus line as state-of-the-art products available at more affordable prices than Apple’s devices.

Because Google gives away its Android software, other devices running on the software typically sell for less than the iPhone and iPad. That has enabled more people around the world to buy smartphones and tablets.

But makers of mobile apps have poured more resources into tailoring their products for the iPhone and iPad because the owners of those devices typically have more disposable income to spend.

Google is now aiming for more of Apple’s affluent market with the Nexus line while trying to ensure people with lower incomes can still buy smartphones through a recently launched programme called Android. One. The first Android One phones went on sale in India last month for roughly $100.

Getting more people online benefits Google because the company has built a lucrative digital ad network though its dominant search engine and other services, including e-mail, maps and YouTube video clips.

CUPERTINO, California — Apple Inc introduced a faster, slimmer iPad Air 2 on Thursday, tacking on modest improvements such as a fingerprint sensor to its mainstay tablet in time for what is expected to be a hotly contested holiday season for mobile devices.

Marketing chief Phil Schiller, calling the tablet the world's slimmest, described several new features such as an anti-reflective screen and confirmed the inclusion of the "Touch ID" sensor, already available on the latest iPhones.

Apple may struggle, however, to arouse the same passion for tablets as in past years, among consumers faced with an abundance of hand-held, touch-screen devices.

Tablet sales are set to rise only 11 per cent this year, according to tech research firm Gartner, compared to 55 per cent last year, even as smartphone sales continue to soar and personal computer sales are waning.

Tablet sales for Apple, which defined the category with the iPad just four years ago, have fallen for two straight quarters. Investors remain focused on the iPhone, Apple's main revenue generator, but a prolonged downturn in iPad sales would threaten about 15 per cent of the company's revenue.

The new iPads will go up against recently introduced tablets from Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc in coming months.

Apple also said it will launch its new electronic payments service on Monday, after the iPhone maker signed up another 500 banks to support a feature that competes with eBay Inc's PayPal and other online systems.

Chief Executive Tim Cook said developers were beginning to design apps for its upcoming Watch.

Apple last month introduced the Watch, its first new device since the iPad in 2010. The company's entry into the rapidly expanding wearable computing arena will be available only from 2015, but Cook said software development kits for the device will be available from November.

One must admit that gifts come in very good packaging these days, with glossy shiny paper, which is sometimes transparent, and the bows tied in satiny ribbons that trail in all direction. It can be quite intimidating too and at times it is better to view the present from a safe distance, than actually unwrap it. Why spoil the artistically packaged creation, says the voice in the head. 

I come from a country of recyclers. Much before it became a global phenomenon, with enthusiastic people campaigning for its awareness, Indians were recycling everything. Large tomato sauce bottles, when emptied, were washed and put out in the sun to dry. They were then used for storing drinking water. In the town where I spent my childhood, there was hardly any household that did not have these bottles in their refrigerator. In fact some of them still carried a sticker of the squash or lemonade that it originally contained. People would try scrubbing it off with an iron scrubber but give up midway, if the glue was strong. 

Old sarees were converted into curtains or tablecloths and older sarees were used as a stuffing while making quilts. Newspapers lined not only the kitchen and bathroom shelves but were also reused for wrapping gifts. It made for quite a sober sight and no child was overtly excited with a toy packed inside a cover that announced robberies, murders or election results under its headlines. 

The gifts themselves were boringly practical. I mean why would a five-year-old boy be happy with a one-metre shirt length piece of cloth as a birthday present? Or even a token 21 bucks, hastily put inside an envelope? There would always be that additional one coin for extra goodwill. So the denominations ranged between a very tightfisted 11, gifted by miserly relatives, to an extremely generous 101, presented by extravagant friends. It did not make the children happy, because they hardly had any use for money. But it put a smile on the faces of their parents, for sure. 

What made us happy were the gift boxes, literally too. For instance, if there were a watch or a pen set that was presented, we kids would pounce on the empty containers. The unusual shapes of the cartons would fire our imagination. We created games around these make-believe tankers or tunnels and it kept us busy for hours on end. We used them to keep our glass marbles, especially if the cardboard case was elongated. 

Foreign products were not easily available those days and an empty coke can occupied a pride of place in my study table. It doubled up as a stationery holder with thin pencils popping out of it. The joy was in collecting these rare bits and pieces and reusing them.

But the youngsters today are completely immune to these self-innovation techniques. Recently we received a massive gift of flowers. I immediately started to rearrange the bouquet. 

“She will put the bigger flowers in big vases,” my spouse announced. 

“And dry the smaller ones for potpourri,” our daughter added. 

“Paint the flowerpot too,” my husband predicted. 

“In black and gold maybe,” guessed the little one. 

“You forgot the satin ribbon and the cellophane paper,” I reminded.

“Iron the first and fold the second,” they instructed. 

“And this sponge?” I held up the water soaked square. 

“Will hit one of our heads if we don’t shut up,” they chorused.

NEW YORK — Mark Skwarek is surrounded by infiltrating militants in New York’s Central Park. He shoots one, then hearing a noise from behind, spins to take down another. All of a sudden, everything flashes red. He realises he’s been hit. The words “Game Over” appear before his eyes.

Skwarek is indeed in Central Park. But he’s wearing a new set of Epson Moverio B200 glasses that allow an entire world of virtual characters, objects and structures to overlay and interact with his real environment through so-called “augmented reality”. Skwarek has raised over $30,000 on the group fund-raising site Kickstarter to launch Semblance Augmented Reality (AR). His company aims to liberate video games from the TV and turn them into physical experiences. He’s poised to release Semblance AR’s first app for iOS and Android phones.

Augmented reality isn’t new. But it’s hitting the mainstream thanks to the rising popularity of wearable technology like fitness trackers, smart watches and glasses. GPS tracking, sensors and camera technology on mobile devices are finally strong enough and widely available. Video gamers are an obvious target group for use, but businesses too are finding that combining wearables with augmented reality could solve practical problems. 

For example, crews needing to repair a complex mud pump on an oil rig could simply activate step-by-step visual instructions right in front of their eyes, hands-free, and in real time.

Wearables will empower the deskless worker the same way computers and mobile devices have done for the office worker, says Brian Ballard, CEO and founder of augmented-reality software company APX Labs in Herndon, Virginia. Wearables like smart glasses can make employees a kind of “instant expert” by giving them access to information wherever they are in real time and save time and money that is usually spent on separate training.

“You’re giving an entire new class of workforce — that could be 5 or 10 times of [the number of people] you have people sitting at a desk — access to information,” says Ballard, who previously worked on augmented-reality product development for the military. “That’s fundamentally revolutionary.”

“The technology is here right now. It’s just implementing them in a product, showing consumers that it has a value and can do things better than they were doing before,” says consumer tech analyst Benjamin Arnold at the NPD Group. “That’s where I see the tipping point coming.”

Samsung plans to sell a $200 Gear VR headset as an attachable companion to its upcoming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone. The headset, which can give people an immersive experience with concerts, aerial footage and games, has sensors to gauge the head’s position and to tell the phone which part of a 360-degree image to display. The VR was developed with Oculus, which Facebook Inc. bought for $2 billion this year. Gamers have been using motion detection systems such as Microsoft’s Kinect for the Xbox. And Apple Watch is coming out early next year, introducing even more consumers to wearables.

Battery life and Internet connectivity will need to be continually improved to make business use most efficient. But it won’t be long before augmented reality becomes fully integrated into our lives and blurs the line between what’s real and digital, says Ballard.

SAN FRANCISCO — With the global tablet computer market showing signs of cooling, Apple’s expected unveiling of its new iPads Thursday looks to shore up its position at the high end.

The iPad event in a small auditorium on Apple’s campus in the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino comes with Google reportedly set to introduce a new Nexus tablet powered by Android software and manufactured by Taiwan’s HTC.

Google-backed Android software has the biggest share of the global tablet market due to the ubiquity of low-priced devices they power, according to Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa.

Apple tablets driven by the company’s iOS software have the second largest market share, with a small portion going to devices running on Microsoft’s mobile Windows operating system.

“Apple has a limited addressable market, because Apple products, in general, are not for everybody,” Kitagawa said of the company sticking with its formula of premium products at top-end prices.

“I think Apple is going to keep on with the premium segment; I don’t believe they are going to have a cheap iPad.”

The overall tablet market is moving toward low-cost devices, meaning that hardware makers unwilling to let go of premium pricing will tend to lose share, according to International Data Corporation (IDC) analyst Jitesh Ubrani.

Apple’s current line of iPads starts at around $400 for the “mini” tablet and $500 for the larger iPad Air in the US market, nearly twice the cost of many Android devices.

Analysts predicted the Apple event on Thursday to be low-key, showcasing iPads enhanced with features such as fingerprint reading and the Apple Pay mobile wallet which are also built into top-of-the-line iPhones.

Freshening the iPad line is not expected to dramatically boost sales in a tablet market that has been cooling.

“A substantial redesign of the iPad is required to help give much needed momentum to iPad sales and the tablet market as a whole,” Ubrani said.

Many tablet makers mistakenly assumed that people would replace the devices as often as they bought new smartphones, according to Gartner analyst Van Baker.

It turns out people are holding onto tablets much longer, because they typically supplement other screens and telecom companies don’t subsidise prices the way they do with smartphones.

“As long as my iPad 3 does what I want it to do, there is little incentive to get a new one,” said Baker.

While the tablet boom appears to have quieted in developed economies where there is more cash to spend on premium products, opportunity is seen in the business world where the devices can make some jobs more efficient.

“One way for Apple to secure their market is by getting more business users,” Kitagawa said.

“It is not the most productive device for many types of work, but some jobs that involve moving around are perfect like healthcare or sales or insurance inspectors.”

In contrast, jobs that require sitting in an office tending to data, documents or spread sheets are better suited for now to computers with keyboards, large monitors, and mouse controllers.

System administrators at major businesses long reliant on Microsoft software understandably lean toward Windows tablets, but are often pressured to accommodate personal mobile devices such as iPads that workers want to use on the job.

Microsoft Surface tablets have been geared for business needs and aimed squarely at workplaces.

Tablets won’t eclipse personal computers as fast as previously thought, according to market watchers.

“The tablet market is going through a bit of a lag as buyers figure out what it is good for; what they want, and how much they want to spend,” said Forrester analyst Frank Gillett.

“Some people figure they can’t replace a laptop with a tablet, so are essentially deciding whether to commit to a third gadget in their lives.”

IDC earlier this year cut its forecast for shipments of tablets and “two-in-one” devices combining tablet and laptop features to 233.1 million, saying growth would be about half of what was originally predicted.

While shipments in mature markets such as North America and Western Europe were forecast to remain flat, those in emerging regions were expected to climb overall by 12 per cent.

GENEVA — Dressed in an immaculate white lab coat, Sandra Mottaz stares intently through a stereo microscope at a bold-coloured painting purportedly by French master Fernand Leger, searching for signs of forgery.

“Here, we can make out vertical lines in what could be a grid,” Mottaz says, looking up from the shiny white instrument providing a three-dimensional view of the painting.

That could signal the painting is a fake, but artists themselves also use the technique to copy their own work onto different formats, so more tests are needed, she says.

Mottaz and her colleagues at the Fine Arts Expert Institute (FAEI) use cutting-edge scientific methods like radiocarbon dating and infrared reflectography to determine the authenticity of artworks, and sometimes to uncover unknown masterpieces.

“When you buy an apartment, you always get an appraisal first. But in the art world, until recently, you could buy works for 10 million euros without sufficient documentation,” says FAEI chief Yann Walther.

But that is changing amid soaring prices in an art market where works worth an estimated $60 billion change hands each year.

The ballooning amounts up for grabs have also hiked the incentive for art forgers, and scientists like Walther and Mottaz are increasingly being called upon to supplement efforts by traditional art experts and conservationists to authenticate works.

The art world has in recent years been rocked by forgery scandals, revealing fake works attributed to a long line of masters, including Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock and Leger.

Experts estimate a full half of all artworks in circulation today are fake — a number that is difficult to verify but that Walther says is, if anything, an underestimate.

Between 70 and 90 per cent of works that pass through FAEI turn out to be fake, he says.

His institute sits inside the Geneva Freeports, a heavily guarded toll- and customs-free zone where collectors from around the world store more than a million artworks, including Picassos, Van Goghs, Monets and apparently a Leonardo da Vinci.

It can be tricky spotting fakes with the naked eye, but top-notch lab equipment helps.

Mottaz carefully carries the Leger to another room where her colleague Valeria Ciocan uses infrared reflectography to confirm the grid underneath the working man’s face, supposedly painted in 1954.

Lab chief Kilian Anheuser then moves the piece to the nearby x-ray room, where he determines that the pigments used are different from the ones Leger usually turned to in the 1950s.

This is still not hard proof of a forgery, says Anheuser, who wants to go on to radiocarbon date the paper, allowing him to determine if it is from trees felled before or after nuclear tests carried out in the 1950s.

If the paper can be dated to after 1955, when Leger died, the answer will be obvious, he says, adding though that he needs the go-ahead from the owner before moving forward with pricier tests.

Depending on what tests they run, scientific labs can charge clients up to 15,000 euros ($19,000) per painting, which might sound steep until you consider the value of many of the paintings they study.

Another piece provides a starker example of what can be found lurking under the surface of paintings that look fine at first glance.

A reclining nude attributed to French artist Albert Marquet and dated 1912 looks authentic until Ciocan uses reflectography to expose a tractor painted in great detail underneath.

The tractor’s tyres, revealingly, are of a make that did not hit the market until the 1930s.

The research sometimes also reveals that a work is of greater value than first thought.

Walther recalls one of the first pieces to pass through the lab: a painting titled “Winter Scene” by 17th century Dutch great Adam Van Breen.

The piece, owned by a Geneva collector, was believed to be a copy the artist or his atelier had made of what was thought to be the original, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris.

But the scientists found sketching underneath indicating the artist’s own research, hinting that the Geneva collector’s piece was in fact the original.

Even without such startling findings, “scientific analysis adds value to artworks,” Walther says, pointing out that his institute’s research helps “tell a story”, revealing the artist’s creative process and the techniques used.

Art historian and restorer Andrea Hoffmann of Atelier Arte in Geneva agrees that scientific methods can be useful in some cases.

But these methods are no substitute for traditional experts like herself, who draw on familiarity with an artist’s style and historical context to spot problems.

“Ninety per cent of what can be seen in a painting can be seen with your eyes,” she says, stressing: “That is where experience comes in.”

WASHINGTON — Federal health officials have approved a daily pill that can cure the most common form of hepatitis C without the gruelling pill-and-injection cocktail long used to treat the virus.

But the drug’s $1,125-per-pill price is sure to increase criticism of drugmaker Gilead Sciences, whose pricing strategy for an older hepatitis drug has already drawn scorn from patient groups, insurers and politicians worldwide.

The Food and Drug Administration said Friday it cleared Gilead’s Harvoni combination pill for patients with genotype 1 of hepatitis C, a form of the liver-destroying virus that accounts for 70 per cent of the estimated 3.2 million cases in the US For the first time ever, these patients will not have to take a decades-old combination of antiviral pills and shots that causes flu-like side effects.

The new pill combines Gilead’s blockbuster Sovaldi, approved last December, with a new antiviral drug called ledipasvir, which attacks the virus using a different mechanism. The dual-acting approach mimics drug combinations Gilead has long used to treat HIV.

It’s another breakthrough for Foster City, California-based Gilead, which analysts expect to bring in billions of dollars in new sales. The company says the new drug will cost $94,500 for a 12-week supply. About 40 per cent of patients may be able to take the drug for eight weeks, reducing the price to about $63,000.

But patient advocates on Friday renewed their criticism of Gilead and the pharmaceutical industry trend toward sky-high drug pricing.

“When history is written, this is going to be the breaking point where drug prices went completely out of control and nobody did anything about it,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “Never before has a drug been priced at this level for such a large population.” About 25 per cent of people with HIV infection are also infected with hepatitis C.

But other groups noted that the eight-week regimen could make the medicine more palatable to insurers, improving access.

“With the eight-week course the price actually offers relief to 40 per cent of the population who will be taking this drug — that’s significant,” said Ryan Clary, executive director of the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, a coalition group which accepts funding from drugmakers, including Gilead.

The shorter treatment option is recommended for patients who have not been treated for the disease before and don’t have advanced liver damage.

Gilead executives say Harvoni’s price is actually slightly lower than the current standard treatment: Sovaldi plus a cocktail of two other drugs, which the company estimates comes to $95,000 for 12 weeks, on average. Despite such explanations, the new drug’s approval is sure to renew scrutiny of prices for life-saving drugs.

Members of the Senate have already asked Gilead to hand over documents detailing its decision to price Sovaldi at $84,000 for one 12-week regimen.

The health insurance industry has been blasting Gilead for months over Sovaldi’s price, and most insurers require prior authorisation before they will pay for it. Three state Medicaid programs refuse to pay for the drug.

Gilead executives say their drugs are cost effective, despite their large upfront cost, because they cure more patients in less time than older drugs, and prevent the catastrophic problems for patients like liver failure.

“Insurers must be willing to invest in the long-term health outcomes of their patients. They can’t just look at it as an immediate cost,” said Gilead Vice President Gregg Alton in an interview with the Associated Press.

Sovaldi will continue to be used by patients with three other genotypes of the virus, who account for about 20 to 25 per cent of US cases. Those patients were already able to take Sovaldi without the cocktail of ribavirin pills and interferon injections, a combination that can cause nausea, fatigue, rash and other symptoms.

Company studies submitted to the FDA showed that Harvoni cured between 94 and 99 per cent of patients across three trials of 1,500 patients with various stages of the disease.

Hepatitis C causes at least 15,000 US deaths per year, according to government figures. Prior to Sovaldi, the standard treatments involved a one-year regimen of multiple pills and injections that cured only 65 to 75 per cent of patients. Many patients failed to complete the process due to debilitating side effects.

Hepatitis C grows slowly over decades and many people don’t realise they are infected until liver damage has already occurred. People born between 1945 and 1965 are five times more likely to have the virus than people of other age groups, and federal health authorities are urging all baby boomers to get tested.

Sovaldi racked up about $5.8 billion in sales in the first half of 2014, making it one of the most profitable drug launches of all time. Gilead expects to treat 150,000 patients this year and another 200,000 in 2015.

AbbVie, Merck & Co. Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb and other drugmakers are each racing to complete their own pill-only hepatitis therapies.

Pharmaceutical consulting firm Decision Resources estimates that the global market for hepatitis C drugs will grow to more than $30 billion by 2016.

WASHINGTON — People are changing Earth so much, warming and polluting it, that many scientists are turning to a new way to describe the time we live in. They’re calling it the Anthropocene — the age of humans.

Though most non-experts don’t realise it, science calls the past 12,000 years the Holocene, Greek for “entirely recent”. But the way humans and their industries are altering the planet, especially its climate, has caused an increasing number of scientists to use the word “Anthropocene” to better describe when and where we are.

“We’re changing the Earth. There is no question about that, I’ve seen it from space,” said eight-time spacewalking astronaut John Grunsfeld, now associate administrator for science at NASA. He said looking down from orbit, there was no place he could see on the planet that didn’t have the mark of man. So he uses the term Anthropocene, he said, “because we’re intelligent enough to recognise it”.

Grunsfeld was in the audience of a “Living in the Anthropocene” symposium put on last week by the Smithsonian. At the same time, the American Association for the Advancement of Science is displaying an art exhibit, “Fossils of the Anthropocene”. More than 500 scientific studies have been published this year referring to the current time period as the Anthropocene.

And on Friday the Anthropocene Working Group ramps up its efforts to change the era’s name with a meeting at a Berlin museum. The movement was jump started and the name coined by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2000, according to Australian National University scientist Will Steffen.

Geologists often mark new scientific time periods with what they call a golden spike — really more of a bronze disk in the rock layer somewhere that physically points out where one scientific time period ends and another begins, said Harvard University’s Andrew Knoll, who supports the idea because “humans have become a geologic force on the planet. The age we are living now in is really distinct”.

But instead of a golden spike in rock, “it’s going to be a layer of plastic that covers the planet, if not a layer of [heat-trapping] carbon”, said W. John Kress, acting undersecretary of science for the Smithsonian. Kress said the Smithsonian is embracing the term because “for us it kind of combines the scientific and the cultural in one word”.

It’s an ugly word, one that many people don’t understand, and it’s even hard to pronounce, Kress admitted. That’s why when he opened the Smithsonian’s symposium, he said, “we are living in the Anthropocene”, then quickly added: “the age of humans.”

“Never in its 4.6-billion-year old history has the Earth been so affected by one species as it is being affected now by humans,” Kress said.

Steffen, one of the main leaders of the Anthropocene movement, said in an e-mail that the age of humans is more than just climate change. It includes ozone loss, disruption of nitrogen and phosphorous cycles that are causing dead zones, changes in water, acidification of the ocean, endocrine disruptors and deforestation.

Steffen said there’s no scientific consensus for the term Anthropocene yet, but he sees support growing. To become official it has to be approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences’ Commission on Stratigraphy.

That process is detailed and slow, said Harvard’s Kroll, who spearheaded the last successful effort to add a new time period, the little known Ediacaran period, about 600 million years ago. It took him 15 years.

The head of that deciding committee, Stan Finney at California State University at Long Beach, said in an interview that he is often called “the biggest critic” of the Anthropocene term. He said while there’s no doubt humans are dramatically changing the planet, creating a new geologic time period requires detailed scientific records, mostly based on what is in rocks.

Supporters also don’t agree on when the Anthropocene starts. Suggestions include the start of farming, industrialisation and the use of the atomic bomb.

The Geological Society of America hasn’t taken up the term yet, but may soon start paying attention to the concept, said society president Hap McSween of the University of Tennessee.

“I actually think it’s a great idea,” McSween said. “Humans are profoundly affecting the environment, probably as much as natural events have in the past. And when effects become profound enough, we draw a new boundary and make it a period. ... It’s a good way to point out the environmental havoc that humans are causing.”

LONDON — Businesses and governments around the world are increasingly turning to voice biometrics, which sometimes are described as voiceprints, to replace passwords and fight fraud. A look at this fast-growing technology:

Talk your way past security

Canada’s TD Bank Group, the National Australia Bank Ltd. and the Bank of New Zealand are among the businesses allowing customers to sign into their accounts or skip call centre security questions by supplying a voiceprint.

“There’s no need for a call centre agent to know your name, your mother’s maiden name, your inside leg measurement or whatever,” said Clive Summerfield, whose Sydney-based Auraya Systems is supplying the technology to the Bank of New Zealand. “The machine can verify that this voice belongs to this account and that’s all you need to know.”

Sign contracts with your voice

California-based VoiceVault gives consumers and businesses the option of attaching “vocal signatures” to documents by speaking into the receiver following a telephone prompt. Nik Stanbridge, who spoke to The Associated Press this year when he was still with VoiceVault, said the technology helped cut down on paperwork and increased closure rates for health insurance contracts. Executives can use the technology to close big deals, too.

“The countersigning can be done by somebody on a golf course,” Stanbridge said.

Turn your speech into a spare key

FST Biometrics is using voice biometrics to secure everything from apartment complexes to airports. Voice recognition in conjunction with other biometric techniques now screens those who show up at the door of New York City’s Knickerbocker Village. 

 “The voice biometric replaces what we used to use for a PIN code or a RFID [swipe] card,” FST Biometrics executive Shahar Belkin said. “We found it to be much more user-friendly and at the same time much more secure.”

Help authority keep an ear on you

Georgia-based AnyTrax uses the technology to monitor low-risk offenders on parole. The company’s Louie Hunter said the automated calls to an offender’s home landline telephone prompts the person being monitored to repeat a random set of numbers into the phone.

It can spare people convicted of petty crimes from routine visits to their parole officers.

“It’s better than missing work, explaining to your boss why you have to take half a day, get money for a bus or get a friend to take you,” Hunter said. With voice authentication, “they can step out at a break or lunch and make a phone call and get right on back to their life”.

Quietly being harvested

Over the telephone, in jail and online, a new digital bounty is being harvested: the human voice.

Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords.

“We sometimes call it the invisible biometric,” said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field.

Those companies have helped enter more than 65 million voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to the Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

“There’s a misconception that the technology we have today is only in the domain of the intelligence services, or the domain of ‘Star Trek’,” said Paul Burmester, of London-based ValidSoft, a voice biometric vendor. “The technology is here today, well-proven and commonly available.”

And in high demand.

Dan Miller, an analyst with Opus Research in San Francisco, estimates that the industry’s revenue will roughly double from just under $400 million last year to between $730 million and $900 million next year.

Barclays Plc. recently experimented with voiceprinting as an identification for its wealthiest clients. It was so successful that Barclays is rolling it out to the rest of its 12 million retail banking customers.

“The general feeling is that voice biometrics will be the de facto standard in the next two or three years,” said Iain Hanlon, a Barclays executive.

Vendors say the timbre of a person’s voice is unique in a way similar to the loops and whorls at the tips of someone’s fingers.

Their technology measures the characteristics of a person’s speech as air is expelled from the lungs, across the vocal folds of the larynx, up the pharynx, over the tongue, and out through the lips, nose, and teeth. Typical speaker recognition software compares those characteristics with data held on a server. If two voiceprints are similar enough, the system declares them a match.

The Vanguard Group Inc., a Pennsylvania-based mutual fund manager, is among the technology’s many financial users. Tens of thousands of customers log in to their accounts by speaking the phrase: “At Vanguard, my voice is my password” into the phone.

“We’ve done a lot of testing, and looked at siblings, even twins,” said executive John Buhl, whose voice was a bit hoarse during a telephone interview. “Even people with colds, like I have today, we looked at that.”

The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up.

In the US, law enforcement officials use the technology to monitor inmates and track offenders who have been paroled.

In New Zealand, the Internal Revenue Department celebrated its 1 millionth voiceprint, leading the revenue minister to boast that his country had “the highest level of voice biometric enrolments per capita in the world”.

In South Africa, roughly 7 million voiceprints have been collected by the country’s Social Security Agency, in part to verify that those claiming pensions are still alive.

Activists worry that the popularity of voiceprinting has a downside.

“It’s more mass surveillance,” said Sadhbh McCarthy, an Irish privacy researcher. “The next thing you know, that will be given to border guards, and you’ll need to speak into a microphone when you get back from vacation.”