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LONDON — Designer Tommy Hilfiger present ed his first catwalk show outside the United States on Tuesday, closing London Fashion Week with a collection taking inspiration from the British music scene.

The much-anticipated showcase of Hilfiger’s Spring/Summer 2018 collection brought a touch of sportswear chic to Fashion Week, closing the five-day event with a high-profile bang.

The 66-year-old American designer, king of a fashion empire which last year saw sales of $6.6 billion, has picked the Roundhouse as a venue, an arts space known for concerts by legendary stars like Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and David Bowie.

The choice recalls Hilfiger’s early experiences of seeking inspiration in the British capital.

“I started to come to London when I was a teen because I wanted to explore the whole lifestyle and I was obsessed with fashion. I wanted to see what was going on in London,” he told AFP at the fashion house’s London showroom.

He found flair in British bands of the period — naming the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Eric Clapton and Small Faces as influences.

“They had a sense of style that was very different to anyone else,” said Hilfiger, dressed in jeans and a gilet.

It is this “heritage of British rock” that the designer will celebrate Tuesday with a show created in collaboration with model Gigi Hadid.

“Gigi is very involved with designing the Gigi Tommy collection with us. So a lot of the ideas came from her style,” he said, describing Hadid’s taste as street, sport and fun.

The collaboration will also promote the brand’s online presence thanks to the social media profile of the model, who boasts nearly 36 million Instagram followers.

Embracing
the digital age

Tuesday marked the third time Hilfiger presents his “TOMMYNOW” concept, an on-the-road catwalk similar to a band tour. 

The idea has already proven successful on home soil, with stops in New York last year and Los Angeles in February, each bringing with it extravagance and extraordinary costs.

Hilfiger has been able to make them profitable, adopting the “see now, buy now” immediate sale approach which has emerged over the past few seasons — a trend which he is certain will not be going away. 

The designer has taken the idea even further by creating an app which enables guests to take a photo of a model and buy their outfit instantly. 

“Young people especially, they see something on the runway or they see something that looks cool, they want to wear it the next day. They don’t want to see it on the runway and wait six months to buy it,” said Hilfiger. 

The designer sees the digital age — and the social media hype that comes with it — as an irreversible trend and an opportunity to be seized. 

“I think we have to continue to move forward and we have to embrace it,” he said.

Other than Hilfiger, London Fashion Week saw another big name hit the catwalk on Sunday: Giorgio Armani.

The involvement of both designers in this year’s event has been a boost for the British fashion scene, which is well-known for bold young designers but has, apart from Burberry, often lacked major brands. 

Their presence is especially welcome in light of Brexit, which has prompted fears of a flight of talent and capital from the UK, and has exposed the country to considerable economic uncertainty.

Virtual reality games might help ease pain not just by distracting players from what ails them, but also by triggering changes in the brain, a recent research review suggests. 

Distraction may indeed play a role in pain relief, the review of six small studies suggests. But it is also possible that the technology could help produce changes in the nervous system when it’s used to help reprogram how a person responds to pain. 

“Guided imagery has long been a treatment for psychological disorders, and virtual reality is a more immersive way to provide guided imagery,” said lead study author Dr Anita Gupta of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey. 

“More research is needed to tell if virtual reality is truly effective, but having more options to treat pain is promising,” Gupta said by e-mail. 

Virtual reality technology has been around for decades, first coming to prominence when the military used it for flight simulators. The earliest hardware filled an entire room, but as the technology has become smaller and cheaper to produce, it is increasingly being used for a variety of medical purposes including wound care, physical therapy, dental pain relief and burn treatment. 

Today, mass-produced virtual reality devices may require no more than a smartphone and special headsets to operate, and a growing number of people use these gadgets to play video games and take lifelike, three-dimensional tours of places they might not be able to visit in real life. 

For the current study, researchers reviewed articles published from 2000 to 2016 that explored different ways virtual reality might augment pain relief. 

Altogether, researchers identified four small experiments that randomly assigned some patients to try virtual reality for pain relief as well as two pilot studies of the technology for this use. 

In addition to acute pain, several studies looked at chronic pain states such as headaches or fibromyalgia. These studies also combined virtual reality with other treatments such as biofeedback mechanisms and cognitive behavioural therapy. 

Taken together, the results from the small studies in the current analysis suggest that virtual reality might help with what is known as conditioning and exposure therapy, a form of behaviour therapy that involves helping patients change their response to pain when they feel it. 

More research in larger groups of patients is needed to draw firm conclusions about how well virtual reality works for pain relief, the authors caution in the journal Pain Medicine. 

But the results suggest that virtual reality treatments for chronic pain might help reduce reliance on opioid painkillers and potentially help curb misuse of these addictive medications. 

Patients need to understand that virtual reality is just a tool to design treatments, and not a treatment by itself, said Max Ortiz Catalan, a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, who was not involved in the current study. 

“You can’t prescribe virtual reality, but treatments that employ it, and the methods of such treatments are what matters,” he said by e-mail. “Two different methods can use virtual reality and one works while the other doesn’t depending on how virtual reality is used.” 

Side effects of virtual reality can include motion sickness, nausea and dizziness, Gupta said. 

Still, it’s a non-invasive approach option that is becoming more widely available and more affordable. 

“I would certainly try this as part of a traditional treatment plan with routine guidance from a board-certified pain specialist who understands the risks and benefits of all treatments involved and what works best,” Gupta said. 

Fiat-Chrysler Automotive’s (FCA) latest offering into the ever more popular and competitive compact SUV segment from its consistently popular Jeep brand, the latest generation Compass is modern, well equipped, well-packaged and efficient, and draws on the brand’s rich heritage.

Available in several petrol and diesel engines, drive-lines and versions including a capably off-road focused Trailhawk range topper for more adventurous drivers, the Limited trim version is however the most refined, and mated with entry-level 1.4-litre petrol engine and front-wheel-drive, is the urban warrior of the range.

Rugged appeal

Built on the FCA group’s “wide small architecture” with a stiff structure employing 65 per cent high strength steel construction for improving driving dynamics and comfort, and collision safety, the Jeep Compass also rides on independent front and rear suspension.

Offered with a range of colours including bright and bold hues, the Compass exudes a sense of presence, and employs a design language largely derived from its considerably larger and familiar Grand Cherokee stable mate, most evident from its upright front fascia, broad rear lights and wide and muscular stance.

With a noticeably more rugged and somewhat traditional SUV design aesthetic, the Compass strikes a more visceral chord, and features a slim and high-set interpretation of Jeep’s signature seven-slot grille, with gloss black background and honeycomb mesh inlets. Its squinting and browed headlights feature lower LED strips for moody emphasis, while lower black cladding along the bumpers flanks adds to its rugged appeal. 

Muscularly surfaced bodywork includes bulging squared-off wheelarches in traditional Jeep fashion, while a rakishly descending floating roof line with forward jutting body colour C-pillar create a sense of momentum.

Efficient and innovative

Powered by a transversely mounted turbocharged direct injection 1.4-litre four cylinder engine, the Compass features Fiat’s innovative and efficient Multiair technology with electro-hydraulic air intake control, which improves power and torque, and reduces consumption and emissions. Available in 167BHP state of tune in four wheel drive versions, the lighter 1505kg front wheel drive Compass featured, however, receives a more efficient lower output version of the same engine. 

Developing 138BHP at 5000rpm and 169lb/ft torque by just 1400rpm, it accelerates through the 0-100km/h benchmark in 9.9-seconds and onto a 192km/h top speed.

Mated to a six-speed manual gearbox in front-drive guise — rather than a nine-speed automatic available on other models — and with a stop/start system, the Compass 1.4 Multiair returns low 6.2l/100km fuel consumption and 143g/km CO2 emissions, combined. 

Relatively low-revving and refined in character, the Compass 1.4’ under square designed engine is at its best throughout a broad mid-range where maximum torque is available and power is building up, rather than below 1400rpm or at top-end beyond 5000rpm. Meanwhile, front ventilated and solid rear disc brakes are confident and reassuring.

Refined and manoeuvrable

Refined, versatile and confidently stable on highway and for an entry-level engine, one however needs to work the Compass 1.4’s gearbox more often to get the best out of it, which with quick and light shifter and light intuitive clutch pick-up, makes it more fun to drive than an auto. 

Manoeuvrable and easy to drive, the Compass offers good visibility and is easier to place in tight confines — whether in town or off-road — than its comparatively broad bonnet and width might suggest. Steering is light with a tight turning circle.

Driven through Sintra national park’s narrow and winding hill climbs in Portugal during its global launch earlier this year, the Compass proved Nimble and agile as SUVs go. Steering was quick and accurate if not especially nuanced in road feel, while independent suspension with frequency adaptive damping provided a refined, comfortable and fluent ride over imperfections and decent, if not overly firm and sporty body lean control through corners. Driven with 17-inch alloy wheels and taller sidewall 225/60R17 tyres, the Compass was also supple over lumps and bumps.

Comfort and convenience

Settled over crests and dips, the compass felt reassuring and controlled, while driving position is alert and well adjustable, with big comfortable seats and chunky multi-function steering wheel. Primarily intended for road use in front-drive guise and Limited trim, the driven compass may not have the same electronic software or 4x4 hardware as other Compass versions. 

It nonetheless offers more off-road capability than most drivers will need, including 198mm ground clearance, 406mm water fording, and 15.8° approach, 21.8° break-over and 30.8° departure angles.

User-friendly, easily accessible and accommodating for larger passengers inside, the Compass features good in-segment materials and soft textures inside, while layouts are intuitive and design pleasant. Spacious for passengers in front and rear, and with generous 438-litre minimum and 1251-litre maximum cargo capacity, the Compass is well packaged.

Standard and optional equipment levels are high and feature driver assistance and safety system including lane departure, and collision warnings, parking assistance, blindspot and rear crosspath detection and adaptive cruise control, while extensive convenience features include power tailgate and 8.4-inch Uconnect infotainment system, as tested.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 1.4-litre, transverse, turbocharged 4-cylinders

Bore x Stroke: 72 x 84mm

Compression ratio: 10:1

Valve-train: 16-valve, direct injection, variable timing

Gearbox: 6-speed manual, front-wheel-drive

Gear ratios: 1st 4.154:1; 2nd 2.118:1; 3rd 1.361:1; 4th 0.978:1; 5th 0.756:1; 6th 0.622:1

Reverse/final drive: 4:1/4.438:1

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 138 (140) [103] @5000rpm

Specific power: 100.8BHP/litre

Power-to-weight: 91.7BHP/tonne

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 169.6 (230) @1750rpm

Specific torque: 168.1Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight: 152.8Nm/tonne

0-100km/h: 9.9-seconds

Top speed: 192km/h

Fuel consumption, urban/extra-urban/combined; 7.8-/5.2-/6.2-litres/100km

CO2 emissions, combined: 143g/km

Length: 4394mm

Width: 1819mm

Height: 1624mm

Wheelbase: 2636mm

Track: 1547mm 

Ground clearance: 198mm

Approach/break-over/departure angles: 15.8°/21.8°/30.8°

Water fording: 406mm

Seating: 5

Headroom, F/R: 995/978mm

Legroom, F/R: 1046/973mm

Shoulder room, F/R: 1439/1400mm

Trunk height, length, width: 691, 605, 1069mm 

Cargo volume min/max, with tire repair kit: 438-/1251-litres

Fuel capacity: 60-liters

Unladen weight: 1505kg

Trailer towing maximum: 1000kg

Steering: Electric-assisted rack & pinion

Steering ratio: 16.5:1

Lock-to-lock: 2.68-turns

Turning circle: 11.07-metres

Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts/Chapman struts

Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs/discs

Tyres: 225/60R17

Your passcode can be hacked, but your face is yours and yours alone. That is the thinking behind Apple’s latest security measure, which is more high-tech and a bit more intimate than anything else on the market.

With Face ID, which Apple unveiled on Tuesday, owners of the company’s new top-of-the-line iPhone X will be able to unlock their phone, pay for products and use mobile apps just by glancing at their device.

“Nothing has ever been simpler, more natural and effortless,” Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said during Apple’s first product launch at its new headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. “Face ID is the future of how we unlock our smartphones and protect our sensitive information.”

Though still a novel concept for many Americans, biometric technology — which includes face, fingerprint, iris and retina recognition identification systems — has been a hotbed of research this decade. With Apple’s backing, the field just got its most high-profile boost, yet, and could soon become the industry standard, even if many consumers aren’t quite comfortable with the concept.

Technologists tout a futuristic experience that is more secure than entering a passcode. They predict the technology could one day be used to unlock cars, withdraw money from ATMs or enter connected homes.

“You can share your password. You can share your car keys. But you can’t share your biometrics,” said George Avetisov, chief executive of biometric security firm HYPR Corp.

With Touch ID, Apple’s fingerprint technology, the chance that a random person could unlock your phone with his or her fingerprint is 1 in 50,000, Apple said; with Face ID, it is one in 1 million.

Both systems store biometric data locally on the device rather than on a centralised server that could be targeted by hackers. That makes biometrics attractive from a privacy and security standpoint, Avetisov said.

Revenue for the biometrics scan software industry is projected to reach $5.5 billion this year, with estimated growth of 5.2 per cent annually for the next five years, according to a May report from IBISWorld. The market research firm noted “prolific expansion” since 2012 and named biometrics one of the nation’s five top performing niche industries.

Facial recognition technology has slowly crept into everyday life, most notably with personal photos. Upload a picture to Facebook, and the social media giant suggests friends to tag. Google and Apple can automatically identify faces in photos, making it easier for users to search their photos for a specific friend or relative.

But Face ID takes facial recognition a step further. It works by relying on an advanced suite of tech — including an infrared camera, flood illuminator, front camera, dot projector, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor — packed into the front of the new iPhone X, which starts at $999.

To set it up, hold your iPhone X in front of your face and move your head around slowly. That becomes the stored version on your phone.

To use it, glance at the front-facing camera. The dot projector beams out more than 30,000 invisible infrared dots, and the infrared camera captures an image.

Apple uses the infrared image and dot pattern and pushes them through neural networks — a kind of machine learning model — to create a mathematical model of your face and then checks that model against the stored image captured during the setup phase. Once it detects a match, the phone unlocks; Face ID will also work with Apple Pay and third-party apps.

Face ID is sophisticated enough to work in the dark, and to learn your face under different circumstances — so go ahead and wear those funky glasses or grow that hipster beard.

Schiller said Apple also worked hard to ensure the technology “can’t be easily spoofed”. Photographs will not fool it, and Apple even worked with professional mask makers and makeup artists in Hollywood to protect against attempts to beat Face ID, he said.

The tech also requires user attention — your eyes have to be open, and you cannot be looking away (meaning there is little risk of intrusion while you sleep).

Identical twins may trip up the system, but for them and anyone else averse to using their faces, the iPhone X can still be unlocked using an old-fashioned passcode.

Although Apple said Face ID will provide users with more security, the technology also raises questions about unauthorised uses, particularly by law enforcement.

Last year, federal officials dropped their legal fight against Apple after figuring out a way to unlock the iPhone used by an assailant in the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack. Apple had refused to comply with agencies’ request to engineer a way around the iPhone’s security measures, saying that doing so would set a dangerous precedent.

Ultimately, FBI technology experts were aided by an outside group, which provided a backdoor technique to extract information from the phone. That left a vexing debate over a user’s privacy versus collective security unresolved.

With Face ID set up, it is plausible that law enforcement could use a suspect’s face to unlock his or her iPhone, said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst with Forrester Research, said authorities in the US cannot compel you to provide your PIN or passcode. Faces, on the other hand, are public, so Face ID is functionally less private from a legal perspective, she said.

Apple did not respond to a call for comment on the matter; the FBI referred an inquiry to the Department of Justice, which said it did not have an immediate comment.

Many big tech companies have invested in facial technology in recent years. Facebook last year acquired FacioMetrics, which let smartphones analyse facial images in real time, and in 2015, Snapchat bought Looksery, a startup that applied filters to users’ faces.

Apple reportedly acquired two companies that were developing facial recognition technology: Israeli startup RealFace and San Diego startup Emotient, which uses artificial intelligence to read facial expressions and emotions. According to Crunchbase, RealFace was acquired this year and Emotient was bought in January 2016.

Lots of time sitting, and very little spent moving around, may contribute to loss of the ability to walk in old age, a large US study suggests. 

Researchers found that older people who watched more than five hours of TV a day and were physically active for three hours or less each week were more likely than their more active peers to have developed trouble walking at the end of a 10-year follow-up. 

Reducing sedentary time along with increasing physical activity may be necessary to maintain function in older age, the authors write in Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences. 

“If you perform low-level physical activity, like less than three hours a week, and you sit, especially sit watching television more than five hours a day, your risk of mobility loss is over three times greater than people who report high levels of physical activity and very low levels of sitting,” lead author Loretta DiPietro told Reuters Health in a phone interview. 

“Now keep in mind, when I say physical activity, that doesn’t mean going to the gym and working out necessarily. We combined all levels of light, moderate and vigorous activity. It’s the whole volume,” said DiPietro, a researcher at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health in Washington, DC. 

Walking, doing errands and moving about, housework and walking the dog all count as physical activity, she said. 

The researchers analysed data from the nationwide NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, which began in 1995, when participants were between 50 and 71 years old and filled out questionnaires about their medical histories, diet and physical activity. 

Roughly 10 years later, follow-up information was available for more than 134,000 participants who were healthy at baseline and answered another survey. 

At the end of the study period, about 30 per cent of the participants reported having some degree of mobility disability, such as having difficulty walking at a speed greater than 3.2km per hour or not being able to walk at all. 

People who were the most physically active at the beginning of the study period, defined as active more than 7 hours each week, and who sat for less than 6 hours per day, did not have any excess risk of mobility disability by the end of the study period. 

Among the most active adults, even those who sat for more than 7 hours per day also had a lower risk of mobility disability than the least-active adults who were also less sedentary. 

In all groups, as TV viewing time increased, so did the likelihood of a walking disability. People who watched five or more hours of TV per day at the start of the study period, for example, had a 65 per cent greater risk than those who watched the least TV of reporting a mobility disability by the end of the study. 

“You know, what we’ve done in our culture is replace light-intensity activities with automation,” DiPietro said. For instance, the Internet means we don’t need to go shopping anymore. “We can order from Amazon, we can order groceries, etc,” she said. “We don’t walk down the hallway anymore to talk to someone, we text them.” 

One strategy she and her colleagues propose is adding those things back. “Go down the hallway and talk. Climb up a flight of stairs to go talk to someone or to deliver something,” she said. 

“If you have to sit at a desk, every hour, you set a timer and you get up and you walk around.” DiPietro also recommends using a standing desk at work or for computer time. 

“If you’re watching TV for extended periods of time, stand up during commercials and march in place or walk around the house,” she said. 

This study adds encouraging evidence that as people spent more time being physically active, the lower the chance they experienced harmful effects from being sedentary,” said Dorothy Dunlap, a researcher at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who was not involved in the research. 

Older adults who are physically active are less likely to develop serious conditions including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, Dunlap said by e-mail. 

“People who are physically active are less likely to become depressed and are less likely to die prematurely,” she added.

Even though people are born with microbes in their mouth that they inherited from their parents, these bacteria are not associated with toothaches and cavities, a recent study suggests. 

Scientists and dentists have long understood that streptococcus bacteria in the mouth are linked to the formation of cavities. For the current study, researchers examined the so-called oral microbiome, or blend of bacteria, in the mouths of 485 pairs of twins and one set of triplets who were 5 to 11 years old. 

The researchers studied 250 identical twins and 280 fraternal twins. Overall, oral microbiomes were more similar between identical twins than between fraternal twins. This suggests that genetics play a role in the kind of bacteria in the mouth, the researchers conclude. 

“We do indeed inherit parts of our oral microbiome from our parents,” said study co-author Chris Dupont of the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California. 

Older children in the study had fewer inherited strains of bacteria and more types of bacteria that are associated with what we eat, researchers report in Cell Host and Microbe. 

“Cavities are formed when specific microbes in your mouth degrade sugar, producing acid as a byproduct, which then dissolves our teeth,” Dupont said by e-mail. “We found that the microbes you inherit are not associated with cavities.” 

Bacteria that were associated with fewer cavities were in lower abundance in twins who had a lot of added sugar in their food and drinks, the study found. 

In contrast, bacteria that are more common in children who consume a lot of sugar were associated with having more cavities. 

The study was small and did not follow people over time to see how eating habits and hygiene might influence oral bacteria into adulthood. 

While the results offer fresh evidence that genetics can shape the oral microbiome in childhood, the findings also underscore the importance of good eating habits and oral hygiene, said Dr Natalia Chalmers, director of analytics and publication at DentaQuest Institute and a researcher at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry. 

“Parents know the whole idea of nature versus nurture, and many recognise that both the genetics and the environment play a role in how our children mature,” Chalmers, who was not involved in the study, said by e-mail. 

Cavities are preventable, and the best things parents can do for kids is have them brush twice daily with fluoridated toothpaste and see a dentist twice a year, Chalmers advised. 

“The less time we allow food or drink to stay in our mouths without a water rinse or brushing, the less likely we are to develop tooth decay,” Chalmers said. 

Brushing should start as soon as that first baby tooth comes in. 

And, parents also should pay attention to what children eat, avoiding sugary foods and drinks to lower the risk of cavities. 

With extra sweets, kids not only add bad bacteria that causes cavities, they also lose the good bacteria they were born with, Dupont said. 

“Eating lots of sugar speeds up the loss of your heritable microbes,” Dupont said. “Limit sugar consumption.” 

If you thought “empty calories” were bad for you, consider this: Plastic is ending up in the bellies of fish and other marine life — and it may not be an accident. A new study finds that anchovies were actually attracted to some kinds of plastic, mistaking it for a tasty meal.

The findings, described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shed light on a worrisome reason that so much plastic could be ending up in the ocean’s delicate food web — which includes humans.

As plastic continues to accumulate in our oceans, scientists are looking at the long-term effects that the man-made material might have on the animals that eat it and on the animals that eat them. But lead author Matthew Savoca, a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Monterey, California, wondered why the animals were eating it at all.

“The aspect of the problem that was most interesting to me was, why are these animals making this mistake in the first place?” Savoca said. After all, fish and other marine life have evolved to target specific kinds of food, which should mean they would avoid plastic entirely — unless the plastic was somehow “tricking” the animals into thinking it was edible.

“What we really wanted to do was actually think about this problem from the animal’s perspective,” Savoca said.

Some observers have speculated that sea turtles end up munching on plastic bags because they look so much like jellyfish, a regular meal for leatherbacks. But marine creatures often follow their noses rather than their eyes, Savoca said — which might be a counterintuitive concept for humans, who evolved as visual hunters.

Savoca and his colleagues tested different odours on wild schools of anchovies that had been caught off the California coast. They made the smells by soaking different substances in seawater: krill (very tiny crustaceans eaten by anchovies); “biofouled” plastic coated in algae and bacteria (which happens when plastic enters the ocean); and clean plastic.

“You can sort of think of it as steeping tea, or something, and then presenting the tea to the fish,” he said.

Savoca put each flavour of sea-tea into a syringe and injected it into a container holding the swimming anchovies, watching to see how they reacted. (The scientists also used actual krill, in addition to krill-flavoured water, in their experiment.)

When the fish sensed the krill-flavoured water, they quickly bunched up to focus on the potential food source. They did not react that way to the clean plastic, but they did cluster around the biofouled plastic, covered in algae and microbes.

So plastic in the ocean could indeed be attractive to fish because of the algae that live on it. Algae give off a sulphuric smell, Savoca said, and many birds and fish have learned this odour signals a tasty meal.

“It was surprising how obvious and dramatic their responses were,” Savoca said of the experiment.

What happens to fish that eat plastic? And what happens to humans who eat those fish? The effects on marine life of eating plastic are not fully known, although researchers have noted certain changes in fish behaviour: weakened schooling and a weakened ability to evade predators. 

Today, in the world of Information Technology (IT) more particularly, the evolution and progress pattern is significantly different from what it used to be generations ago. Things evolve almost daily, in hardly perceptible steps. It is only when you look five or ten years behind you that you realise how much things have changed and that a revolution really did take place.

Apparently the days are gone when scientists used make a sudden discovery, overnight, and amaze the world with it, in some kind of a breaking news frenzy. One of the most famous examples in history is that of Sir Isaac Newton who it is said, probably anecdotally, “understood” gravity in a snap, when a ripe apple fell on him from the tree he was sitting under. That was the seventeenth century!

Even in the nineteenth century, Thomas Edison, Alexander Bell, Louis Pasteur and Guglielmo Marconi were some of the scientists who also made sensational discoveries or brought truly breaking technical and scientific innovations.

Is nowadays’ slower progress pattern a bad thing?

It is not, of course. Except for the fact that the population is used as testing ground and is made to participate in the process, by having to buy, to watch and to experiment — did I say to suffer? — through all the little steps. It is not only costly, but also exhausting.

When you keep changing frequently your smartphone or laptop computer, your usage, your financial participation, and your feedback, intentional or not, help the industry to improve the various elements of the devices: memory, processor, hard disk and so forth. Your external USB disk drive may not be much better than the one you bought last year, but certainly is a far cry from the one you got five years ago.

The same applies to software updates. The new Windows 10 Creators is clearly more powerful, safer, faster and friendlier than Windows XP, for instance. However, Microsoft made you work through Windows XP, 7, 8 and 10, over a period of about 15 years. Slowly of course, so you help but do not feel the pain. In a dream world, the company would provide with a clearly improved system every 20 or 25 years.

Earlier this week Reuters published a story titled “YuMi the robot conducts Verdi with Italian orchestra”. All that the robot did was to mimic a conductor’s gestures. The article indicates that it would have been unable to follow eventual tempo change by the orchestra. In other words it is still far, very far, from being able to replace a real conductor. And yet, every year or so you read that robots have done this or that; that soon they will be the perfect home helper for the elderly, etc.

Instead of waking up one day with the nearly-perfect robot, we are made to live all the little steps that eventually would lead to the perfect thing. In the meantime, they would like you to buy the small home robot that, supposedly, can clean up your floor. Here again, you are asked to participate in the process.

Perhaps everything that can be discovered overnight has been discovered and that technical progress, from now on, can only be achieved in little steps, with the population’s implicit participation.

Still, would not it be nice to wake up tomorrow and have a software operating system that never crashes, starts and shuts off instantly, reports errors in plain language that everyone would understand, never catches a virus and issues pre-emptive warning before the hard disk fails on you? Do not you sometimes have the feeling that the world of IT is going mad?

To quote Sir Isaac Newton: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

Adults who are inactive much of the day may be more likely to die prematurely than people who do not sit around a lot, regardless of their exercise habits, a US study suggests. 

People may also be less likely to die young if they break up sedentary time by moving around every half hour than if they remain seated for longer stretches of time without getting up, the study also suggests. 

“We think these findings suggest that it is simply not enough to be active or move at just one specific time of the day, that is, exercise,” said lead study author Keith Diaz of the Centre for Behavioural Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York. 

“We need to be mindful of moving frequently throughout the day in addition to exercising,” Diaz said by e-mail. 

While previous research has linked excessive sedentary time to an increased risk of death, many of these studies relied on people to accurately recall and report how much they moved around and might not have painted a clear picture of the relationship between mortality and inactivity. 

For the current study, researchers examined data on 7,985 adults, age 45 and older, who were asked to wear accelerometers to measure activity levels for one week. 

Overall, sedentary behaviour accounted for 77 per cent of participants’ waking hours, or about 12 hours a day, researchers report in the Annals of Internal Medicine. 

On averages, bouts of sedentary time were about 11 minutes long, and more than half of the time people spent sitting and standing happened in bouts of less than 30 minutes, the study found. 

About 14 per cent of the people in the study typically had stretches of sedentary time lasting at least 90 minutes, however. 

During the study, 340 people died after an average follow-up of four years. 

Researchers sorted participants into four groups from the least sedentary people, who spent only about 11 hours total sitting and standing in a typical day, to the most sedentary people who were inactive for more than 13 hours a day. 

They also sorted participants into four groups based on how long typical bouts of sedentary time lasted before people took movement breaks, ranging from less than 7.7 minutes to at least 12.4 minutes. 

Compared to the least sedentary people with the briefest stretches of sitting time, the most sedentary people with the longest periods of sitting down were twice as likely to die of all cause during the study period. 

One limitation of the study, however, is that the accelerometers could not distinguish between sedentary time from sitting versus inactive periods when people were standing, the authors note. 

The study also was not a controlled experiment designed to prove how or whether sedentary time directly causes premature death. 

It is possible that prolonged sedentary stretches might hasten death by causing what is known as metabolic toxicity, said Dr David Alter, head of cardiovascular and metabolic research for the University Health Network-Toronto Rehabilitation Institute in Canada. 

“The lack of activity in our muscles affects our ability to metabolise our sugars efficiently,” Alter, author of an accompanying editorial, said by e-mail. “Over time, our body accumulates excess fat, which can lead to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and death.” 

One thing that might help, however, is a stopwatch, because it could remind people to get up and move around often throughout the day and avoid long stretches of sedentary time, Alter said. 

Even though standing desks have become increasingly popular as a possible fix to the problems caused by sedentary time, it is not clear if they help people live longer. 

“Anything that will facilitate movement would be better: treadmill desks, under desk steppers or cycles, or just plain old fashioned walking breaks that can be pretty easily implemented in an office setting,” Diaz said.

There comes a time in the life of every columnist when nothing seems to go right. I am not talking about the dreaded writer’s block, which happens often enough, but worse than that is if the tools of our trade give up on us. Before the advent of e-mail and computers, whenever the typewriter ribbon ran out, there was a shortage of writing paper or the fax machines got into a freeze mode, well, our blood ran cold too. We did not have many alternatives, other than picking up the phone and dictating the piece to our editors, which was neither a suitable nor a sustainable option. 

I am well aware that all of this could have happened to me at any juncture, but surprisingly I had quite a smooth run for over two decades. Despite knowing that I cannot have a lucky streak forever, when misfortune struck, I was taken completely unawares. My laptop crashed in a remote island country that I was visiting, and with that single unexpected calamity, all links to my writing kit were broken. 

We take our gadgets for granted and I personally treat my MacBook like a moody teenager. So, if it acts in a weird manner, I just ignore it for some time and put it on a sleep mode. Most often, after a good rest, it gets rejuvenated and responds positively to my requests. I basically utilise the same technique I used while raising our child and it works wonderfully. Well, most of the time anyway. 

But, at this instance, it does not and even after two days of nonstop resting, it refuses to wake-up. My deadline is fast approaching and I am beginning to get stressed. My husband suggests I use the computer in the business centre of the hotel we are staying in. I resist the idea because who wants to be caught working in a resort that is facing the sandy white beaches of the Indian Ocean? “In all probability they do not even have a business centre,” says the voice in my head. 

On day four my laptop also does not stop snoozing. I consider writing my article on my smartphone but after squinting at it for some time I drop the idea because the screen is too small and the auto correct setting installed in it, keeps distorting my words. I am horrified when I type “things” and it becomes “thongs” and “mother” becomes “mugger”. I don’t even want to contemplate what shape my column would finally take.

Ultimately I approach the hotel staff and ask them to take me to their business centre. They look at me in complete disbelief, as if I have demanded a private jet at my disposal. One of them leads me across the breezy sun drenched lobby with views to die for, towards the interior of the building. The room is dark and neglected, with dim lighting and there is a lone computer in the corner table. It looks like nobody has ever felt the need to use the services of the place. I request for some more light which is another gargantuan task for the beleaguered hotel manager.  

“Madam, why don’t you sit on the beach?” he tries to solve my problem. 

“I have work to do, my laptop crashed,” I inform him. 

“Do you know where the switches are?” he asks me. 

“I have never come here,” I answer.

“Neither has anybody else,” he confesses under his breath.