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A new study adds to evidence that laundry detergent pods are dangerous for little kids.

The pods are all-in-one packets — often brightly coloured — containing detergent that’s released in the wash, so users do not have to measure detergent in a cup. They were introduced in the US in 2012. The next year, US poison control centres received more than 17,000 calls — or about one per hour — about children who had been exposed to chemicals in laundry detergent pods, Reuters Health reported in 2014.

Now a new study, published in the journal Injury Prevention, has compared the dangers of laundry pods and standard laundry detergent and found that exposures to the pods are more likely to land a child in the hospital.

Researchers analysed data collected in the National Electronic Surveillance System from 2012 to 2014 on 26,062 non-pod related laundry detergent exposures and 9,814 pod-related exposures in children under age 18.

The most common result of the pod-related cases was poisoning, which occurred in 71 per cent of the children. The most common result of exposure to non-pod detergent was contact dermatitis, a skin disorder. 

Thirteen per cent of children in the pod-related cases needed hospitalisation, compared to 3 per cent of kids in the non-pod cases. 

Small children were at particular risk for pod-related injuries, with 94 per cent of these injuries occurring in children under six. By contrast, only 72 per cent of non-pod detergent emergency room visits were by kids under six.

The study may have underestimated the problem because it looked at emergency room visits, the authors say. “Individuals who did not require treatment, sought treatment at a different type of facility or who self-treated, are not included,” they write.

“For families with young children, this study highlights the dangers of laundry [pod] products, and really confirms advice from medical and consumer product experts who’ve been saying ‘don’t buy these’,” Dr Marcel J Casavant, the chief of Toxicology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital told Reuters Health by e-mail. 

Casavant, who’s been hired to testify in a child poisoning case, suggests that if parents buy these products, they should store them “where the child can’t see it, can’t reach it, and can’t get into it”. Parents should never give a child an opportunity to grab one of these pods.

Lead author Thomas Swain of the University of Alabama at Birmingham agrees. 

“A greater effort should be made to appropriately educate the public about the dangers of laundry detergents, specifically pods,” he told Reuters Health by e-mail. “While new regulations such as childproof containers, opaque packaging, and less appealing and colourful pods could reduce the number of pod-related emergency department visits for children, caregivers should store detergents, along with other chemicals, in a secure location where children cannot easily access them.”

Swain added, “Parents and caregivers should consider warnings from consumer safety groups; the current recommendation is pod detergent products should not be used in homes with children under six”.

Talking about the dramatically increasing number of traffic accidents in general, a friend of mine was recently saying: “Given the way some people drive it is actually a wonder there are no more accidents on the road”; which sent both of us thinking of computer failures.

The majority of private computer users complain about the lack of reliability of their desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone machines. Along the same line as my friend’s statement, I would say that “given the complexity of digital and computer-like devices today it is actually a wonder that they don’t fail more frequently”.

Perhaps drivers and IT users are equally lucky breeds, perhaps “someone” is looking after them.

If in the big business and corporate world there are armies of IT technicians to address and to take care of the daily woes of the users, the home or small enterprise user often is left helpless, with no recourse than a charitable tech-minded friend or the usual, painstaking Google search to turn to. That is if the problem itself is not an Internet disconnection, in which case a Google search is out of the question.

You have to take into consideration a large number of critical factors. These are: the variety of the devices’ hardware platforms, the different operating systems (Windows, iOs, Mac OS, Android, Linux, etc.), the old and the new versions of each, the nightmare-provoking compatibility issues between them all, and the fact that most software is less-than-perfect and often bug-laden, especially when just released. Add to that the fact that things move so fast that very few have the time or the necessary resources to get properly trained and to get to know any new product well enough, whether machine or system, and you end up with a doomsday scenario just waiting to happen.

The question is not about the probability of digital devices to fail, but more about when they will fail and how quickly, how well the failure will be addressed.

While consumers thank the heavens for protecting them and causing fewer break downs that would theoretically happen in the extremely complex IT world, they have found at the same time ways to overcome the difficulty, to be better prepared for the doomsday scenario when it happens.

It is the time-tested old recipe that consists of multiplying and diversifying devices and resources, of keeping copies of data and files. Since you cannot fully depend on one device, make sure to have many. Naturally, it comes at a cost but in most cases this additional cost will still be less than the cost you would incur by being total cut off, left helpless and losing data.

Most of us today operate at least one laptop and one powerful, smart mobile device; sometime more. When one fails the other is here to take over. With data and files saved in the cloud the still working device will do the job as well as the one that broke down. Internet connections are also diversified these days. Private users today not only have subscriptions with more than one Internet Service Provider, but they also count on pure mobile telephony networks (3G, 4G) to compensate and to cover for more traditional ADSL services whenever they let them down.

We learn to live with the risk. It could be worse.

With all the talk about the risks of “polypharmacy” — being prescribed more than five medications — it might be surprising to learn that not receiving enough of the right prescriptions can also significantly increase your risk of being hospitalised or dying. 

Yet, that is exactly what a new study from Belgium finds.

“Absence of polypharmacy is not a simple indicator of quality of care,” Dr Maarten Wauters from Ghent University told Reuters Health. “Patients with just a few medications could be at risk of missing essential and beneficial medications.” 

Wauters’ team looked for possible links between prescriptions and hospitalisations and death in their study of 503 people aged 80 years and older who were living at home. 

Unlike earlier studies that focused on polypharmacy, the researchers also studied medication underuse (not having a prescription for a medical condition) and misuse (receiving an inappropriate prescription or not using it optimally).

More than half of the study participants were taking five or more medications, but still, two-thirds were not receiving medications they should have, and 56 per cent were misusing medications. Four out of 10 patients were both underusing and misusing medications. 

“Only in 9 per cent of this population, no polypharmacy, no underuse, and no misuse was observed,” Wauters said by e-mail.

The most common health problems participants had were high blood pressure, osteoarthritis and high cholesterol. Drugs for heart problems, blood thinning and nervous system problems were the most commonly taken. 

During the 18 months covered by the study, 9 per cent of individuals died and 31 per cent had to be hospitalised. 

The risk of death increased by 39 per cent for each additional prescription an individual should have received but didn’t, and the risk of hospitalisation increased by 26 per cent for each underused prescription. 

Individuals who didn’t receive three or more medications they should have were almost three times as likely to die and twice as likely to be hospitalised as those who received all of the appropriate medications.

The most commonly underused drugs were so-called ACE inhibitors for people with heart failure, and blood thinners and statins for people with documented heart or vascular disease. These were followed by inhalers for asthma or COPD and vitamin D or calcium for people with osteoporosis.

The most commonly misused drugs were benzodiazepines, tranquilisers that should not be taken for more than four weeks. These were followed by duplicated drugs, such as two similar painkillers, two medications for blood thinning or two antidepressants from the class known as SSRIs. 

After accounting for the number of medications people were taking and underuse, misuse was not associated with the risk of dying or being hospitalised, according to the results in British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

“It has been proven that regular medication evaluations can help prescribers and their patients to keep the medication therapy optimal,” Wauters said. “Patients need to question their medications as well: ‘Is it really necessary to take these sleeping pills? Do I need something for this new disease I have? Do I have to take this pill, even if I don’t feel any changes?’” 

Wauters added that physicians and patients need to work together to find the best combination of medications to treat their unique mix of medical conditions. 

LOS ANGELES — The gravitational tug between the sun and moon is not just a dance of high and low tides: It can also trigger a special kind of earthquake on the San Andreas Fault.

This phenomenon has fascinated scientists for years. Like sea levels, the surface of the Earth also goes up and down with the tides, flexing the crust and stressing the faults inside. Further study found that during certain phases of the tidal cycle, small tremors deep underground — known as low-frequency earthquakes — were more likely to occur.

“It’s kind of crazy, right? That the moon, when it’s pulling in the same direction that the fault is slipping, causes the fault to slip more — and faster,” said Nicholas van der Elst, a US Geological Survey geophysicist and lead author of a new study on the subject published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “What it shows is that the fault is super weak — much weaker than we would expect — given that there’s 32 kilometres of rock sitting on top of it.”

Studying how these low-frequency earthquakes respond to the tides can reveal new information about the San Andreas and what it might mean for larger earthquakes, researchers say. The data offer a window into deeper parts of the fault — as much as 32km underground — that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Scientists first discovered these deeper tremors on the fault about 10 years ago, along a particularly sensitive section in Parkfield, California, where the San Andreas transitions from its northern section, where it’s gently releasing tectonic energy, to its southern portion, which is locked and capable of producing a big one.

For his most recent study, Van der Elst and his team looked at about 81,000 low-frequency earthquakes from 2008 to 2015 along the Parkfield section of the fault and compared it to the two-week tidal cycle known as the “fortnightly tide”. They found that these earthquakes were most likely to occur during the waxing period, when the tide was getting bigger the fastest.

Like ocean tides, the strongest Earth tides occur when the sun and moon are aligned, and the weakest occur when they are 90 degrees apart. The same gravitational forces stretch and compress the Earth’s crust (though the rock moves less dramatically than seawater).

Some faults are more susceptible to tidal triggering than others, such as offshore faults like the Cascadia subduction zone off the Pacific Northwest coast, scientists said. Other characteristics of the fault, such as its orientation or how close it is to the Earth’s crust, also affect the tidal response.

It’s remarkable that the San Andreas even produces small earthquakes in response to tidal forces, researchers said, given that the fault is not oriented in a way that gets the full strength of the tides.

Low-frequency earthquakes — they’re called “low-frequency” for the rumbling sound that they make, not for their rate of occurrence — tend to have magnitudes less than 1.0 and occur about 15 to 30 kilometres below ground, nearing the deepest part of the crust where it transitions to the Earth’s mantle.

The significance here is less the earthquakes themselves, and more the information they’re giving scientists about the deeper parts of the fault, said USGS seismologist David Shelly, who helped write the new study.

“They tell us that the fault continues down below where the regular or typical earthquakes stop on the San Andreas, about 10 or 12km,” Shelly said. “And they tell us a lot of things about that deep part of the fault that before, we had no idea existed at all.”

They also show that this part of the San Andreas is creeping, or slowly moving, almost all the time. These low-frequency earthquakes, with the help of tidal forces, have essentially created a natural laboratory for scientists to keep tabs on the fault’s movement.

“It’s almost like having a lot of little creep metres embedded in the fault,” Shelly said. “We can use these low-frequency earthquakes as measurements of, at least in a relative sense, how much slip is happening at each little spot on the deep part of the fault where we see these events. When we don’t see them, we don’t know what’s happening; we don’t know whether it’s slipping silently or not slipping at all.”

The information is incredibly useful, he added. Whenever the deep part of the fault slips, the stress gets transferred to the shallow part of the fault.

“So if all of a sudden, we saw that the deep part of the fault was slipping a huge amount, it might be an indication that there was an increased chance of having an earthquake come at the shallower part of the fault,” he said.

Recently I realised that I was getting a bit tired of colouring my hair the same shade of brown that I was born with. The wisps of grey that used to take a couple of months to accumulate were now appearing at faster intervals. Barely a fortnight went by after my trip to the hairdresser and it was time for me to revisit him again.

To cure this malady my hairstylist suggested I go blonde. As soon as he made this recommendation I doubled up with laughter. I thought he was joking but one look at his hurt expression convinced me that he was dead serious. People from the Indian sub continent don’t have blonde hair, I told him. It did not match our dark eyes and eyebrows. 

Even so, it was the most practical solution, he asserted. My grey tresses would merge with the golden ones and I would not need to dye my locks as often as I needed to. He got a magazine and showed me pictures of Indian and Arab actresses who had all coloured their hair ash blonde. As he was flipping the pages, I saw a man’s face with a dishevelled mop of blonde unkempt hair. It was Boris Johnson, the former Mayor of London and the current British foreign secretary who was photographed with a comical smirk, holding both his thumbs up.

I grabbed the magazine to take a closer look at the face of Brexit. Here was the man who, after campaigning for it tirelessly, supposedly spent the Saturday, after the referendum, playing cricket at the ancestral home of Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer. There was also speculation that he had not really wanted Britain to quit the EU at all, just to put up a good fight and be hailed as a gallant loser by Brexit-hungry Conservative Party members who would then vote for him in their droves when the time came to elect a new leader.

I scrutinised the visage of this controversial man who had made international headlines with his flippant remarks on world leaders from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to Vladimir Putin. I was also reminded of his most famous quote where he said, “My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.”

All this went through my head as I contemplated changing my hair colour to golden. I was going to join a tribe that not only had many dumb jokes associated with it but its most famous proponent was the blonde king, Boris Johnson himself! The lesser said about the other blondie, Donald Trump, the better. Hillary Clinton was also a blonde but as I was given to understand by another of Mr Johnson’s uncharitable observations, “She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”

Right! So I told my hairdresser that I would think about his advice. Once I got home I realised that at least three of my friends and four aunties had suddenly turned blonde. They all carried the look pretty well so maybe it was time for my makeover too. 

“Does Elvis live in Mars?” I asked my husband. 

“No dear,” he answered distractedly. 

“Can I be reincarnated as an olive?” I queried. 

“Yes dear,” he responded. 

“Should I become blonde?” I muttered. 

“No! Never! Don’t turn into Boris!” he exploded.

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — Has your child swallowed a small battery? In the future, a tiny robot made from pig gut could capture it and expel it.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are designing an ingestible robot that could be used to patch wounds, deliver medicine or dislodge a foreign object. They call their experiment an “origami robot” because the accordion-shaped gadget gets folded up and frozen into an ice capsule.

“You swallow the robot, and when it gets to your stomach the ice melts and the robot unfolds,” said Daniela Rus, a professor who directs MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “Then, we can direct it to a very precise location.”

It’s still a long way before the device can be deployed in a human or animal. In the meantime, the researchers have created an artificial stomach made of silicone to test it.

Rus said one of the robot’s most important missions could be to save the lives of children who swallow the disc-shaped button batteries that increasingly power electronic devices. If swallowed, the battery can quickly burn through the stomach lining and be fatal.

The robots could seek out and capture the battery before it causes too much damage, pushing it down through the gastrointestinal tract and out of the body.

The robot’s flexible frame is biodegradable, made of the same dried pig intestine used for sausage casing. The researchers scoured markets in Boston’s Chinatown before finding the right material to build an agile robot body that could dissolve once its mission was accomplished.

“They tried rice paper, sugar paper and hydrogel paper, all sorts of different materials,” Rus said. “We found that sausage casing has the best properties when it comes to folding and unfolding and controllability.”

Embedded in its meaty body — it wouldn’t be hard to make a kosher version, Rus said — is a neodymium magnet that looks like a tiny metal cube.

Magnetic forces control its movement. Researchers use remote-control joysticks to change the magnetic field, allowing the robot to slip and crawl through the stomach on the way to the object it is trying to retrieve or the wound where it must deliver drugs.

Would it hurt to ingest a robot? Probably not, said research team member Steven Guitron, an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering.

“I’m sure if you swallowed an ice cube accidentlly, it’s very similar,” he said.

MIT’s team has a patent pending and presented its research at a robotic conference in Sweden this spring. Rus said medical companies have expressed interest in clinical applications, which require going through the regulatory process of conducting animal and human studies.

“It’s a nifty idea,” but it could be a decade or so before hospitals could use such a device, said William Messner, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University in Massachusetts who is not involved with the project. He said it could also have promise in performing biopsies.

The US Food and Drug Administration “has to get involved with anything like this and they’re rightfully very careful about any kind of medical instrument,” Messner said. “The big problem is: What if it gets stuck? Now you’ve really got a problem.”

The multidisciplinary project fits into the growing field of soft robotics that coalesced with the 2013 founding of the peer-reviewed Soft Robotics Journal, based at Tufts. The Boston region is a hub for research into the moving machines made of flexible materials that can change shape and size, making them useful for surgery and other complex environments.

WASHINGTON — Experts say the development of self-driving cars over the coming decade depends on an unreliable assumption by many automakers: that the humans in them will be ready to step in and take control if the car’s systems fail.

Instead, experience with automation in other modes of transportation like aviation and rail suggests that the strategy will lead to more deaths like that of a Florida Tesla driver in May.

Decades of research shows that people have a difficult time keeping their minds on boring tasks like monitoring systems that rarely fail and hardly ever require them to take action. The human brain continually seeks stimulation. If the mind isn’t engaged, it will wander until it finds something more interesting to think about. The more reliable the system, the more likely it is that attention will wane.

Automakers are in the process of adding increasingly automated systems that effectively drive cars in some or most circumstances, but still require the driver as a backup in case the vehicle encounters a situation unanticipated by its engineers.

Tesla’s Autopilot, for example, can steer itself within a lane and speed up or slow down based on surrounding traffic or on the driver’s set speed. It can change lanes with a flip of its signal, automatically apply brakes, or scan for parking spaces and parallel park on command.

Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old tech company owner from Canton, Ohio, who was an enthusiastic fan of the technology, was killed when neither he nor his Tesla Model S sedan’s Autopilot braked for a truck making a left turn on a highway near Gainsville, according to federal investigators and the automaker.

Tesla warns drivers to keep their hands on the wheel even though Autopilot is driving, or the vehicle will automatically slow to a stop. A similar self-driving system Audi plans to introduce in its 2018 A7 monitors drivers’ head and eye movements, and automatically slows the car if the driver’s attention is diverted.

But Brown’s failure to brake means he either didn’t see the truck in his path or saw it too late to respond — an indication he was relying on the automation and his mind was elsewhere, said Missy Cummings, the director of the Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. The truck driver said he had heard a Harry Potter video playing in the car after the crash.

“Drivers in these quasi- and partial modes of automation are a disaster in the making,” Cummings said. “If you have to rely on the human to see something and take action in anything less than several seconds, you are going to have an accident like we saw.”

Operators — an airline pilot, a train engineer or car driver — can lose awareness of their environment when they turn control over to automation, said Rob Molloy, the National Transportation Safety Board’s chief highway crash investigator.

He pointed to the crash of Air France Flight 447 into the Atlantic Ocean while flying from Brazil to France in 2007. A malfunction in equipment used to measure air speed caused the plane’s autopilot to disconnect, catching pilots by surprise. Confused, they caused an otherwise flyable plane to stall and fall from the sky, killing 228 people.

Planes and trains have had automation “for 20, 30 years and there are still times when they’re like, ‘Wow, we didn’t expect that to happen’,” Molloy said.

Part of the problem is overconfidence in the technology causes people to think they can check out. Not long after Tesla introduced its Autopilot system, people were posting videos of car with the self-driving mode engaged cruising down tree-lined roads or even highways with no one in the driver’s seat. Brown, for example, had posted videos lauding the Autopilot system and demonstrating it in action.

“There is a tendency of people to take one ride in one of these vehicles and then conclude that because they have not crashed over the course of 10 minutes that the system must be ready,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina professor who studies the technology.

Some experts think the ability of people to monitor autonomous systems may be getting worse. With the advent of smartphones, people are accustomed to having their desire for mental stimulation satisfied immediately.

“Go into Starbucks, for example,” said Cummings. “No one can just patiently wait in line, they’re all doing something on their phones. It’s kind of pathetic.”

Some automakers may be rethinking their approach. Two years ago, General Motors announced it would start selling a Cadillac in the fall of 2016 that would almost drive itself on freeways. But last week the company confirmed that the project has been delayed for an unspecified reason.

At previous briefings, company executives said they were waiting to perfect methods of assuring that the driver pays attention to the road even when the system is on.

The system, called “Super Cruise”, will use cameras and radar to keep the car in the centre of a lane and also stay a safe distance behind cars in front of it. The system will bring the car to a complete stop without driver action if traffic halts, and it can keep the car going in stop-and-go traffic. But it’s designed for use only on limited-access divided highways.

Google, meanwhile, is aiming for a car that’s fully self-driving and may not even have a steering wheel or brake pedals.

A practical high performance brute with turbocharged 5-cylinder engine and resolute four wheel-drive roadholding, the Audi RS3 Sportback is somewhat reminiscent of the Ingolstadt manufacturer’s now iconic 1980s Quattro and 1990s RS2 models. With compact, more agile 5-door hatchback body and well over the 300BHP threshold, the RS3 is a rare beast counting only the Mercedes-Benz AMG A45 and just launched and long-awaited Ford Focus RS as competitors 

Transcending garden-variety “mega” or “hyper” hatchback and even its own mighty Volkswagen Golf R cousin, the RS3 Sportback and its practical bodied and four-wheel drive rivals are differentiated from front-drive high performance cars. A different sort of beast than track-oriented front-drivers like the Golf GTI Clubsport, Renault Megane RS, Seat Leon Cupra and Honda civic Type-R the RS3 offers all-weather ability, premium features and appointments, and more space and practicality.

Understatedly aggressive

Winner of the 2016 Middle East Car of the Year’s Best Premium Performance Hatchback award in direct competition with the AMG A45, the current RS3 was launched globally in 2015. The range-topping model in Audi’s current modular MQB (Modularer Querbaukasten, or modular transversal toolkit) platform-based A3 mid-size hatchback range, the RS3 is only the second such model, with improved performance, less weight and better weighting than its short-lived 2011-12 previous generation 335BHP predecessor.

Understated by sometimes wild performance hatchback aesthetics, the RS3 nevertheless stands out from garden-variety A3 models, including its lesser S3 performance sister model. With more muscular bumper, sharp lower lip and gill-like side intakes, its fascia features a broad tall metallic-ringed honeycomb hexagonal grille and inward tilted, moody and LED strip browed headlights. From rear it features more brightware, air diffuser, tailgate spoiler and massive dual oval tailpipes.

Elegant, cohesive and tightly penned, the RS3 features a ridged character line stretching across under a relatively level waistline, which allows for good visibility and an airy cabin ambiance. Riding on large tight gripping low profile 235/35R19 tyres, the RS3’s five-spoke alloy wheels provide easy views of its vast and highly effective 8-piston calliper 365mm disc front and 310mm rear brakes. Options include fade-free ceramic front discs and wider grippier 255/30R19 front tyres.

Ferocious five

Snarling and growling with a distinct off-beat 5-pot note, the RS3 Sportback’s 2.5-litre turbocharged 5-cylinder harks back to Audi’s most celebrated Quattro model. Mounted transversely, rather than longitudinally as traditional at Audi, the RS3 is, however, considerably more powerful and quicker than the historic Quattro. Developing 362BHP throughout 5,550-6,800rpm and brutal 343lb/ft torque peaking at 1,625-5,500rpm, the RS3 electronically governed 250km/h top speed can optionally be de-restricted to 280km/h.

Hand-built and award-winning, the RS3’s 5-cylinder is quite the gem, with intense 1.3bar boost, high 10:1 compression and direct injection, it suffers very little turbo lag, yet spins eagerly to a high rev limit. Responsive from low-end and brutally muscular in mid-range, the RS3 pulls hard throughout, underwritten by a muscular and broad torque band before seamlessly transitioning to an urgent climb to a wide and punchy peak power band.

With sticky tyres, responsive turbo boost aggressive low gearing and tenacious traction generated by its Quattro four-wheel drive, the RS3 launches ferociously off-the-line, with very little evidence of torque steer, owing to its four-wheel drive’s characteristics. Dispatching 0-100km/h in 4.3 seconds, the versatile 1,520kg RS3 also accelerates through 80-120km/h in 4.1 seconds in fourth gear. Meanwhile, the RS3’s lightened components and mass, stop-start system, relaxed tall high gears and CD0.34 aerodynamics allow for restrained 8.1l/100km combined fuel efficiency.

Fluent, agile and tenacious

Driven through a 7-speed automated dual-clutch gearbox that seamless shifts between odd and even gears, the RS3’s sophisticated four-wheel drive distributes power between front and rear axle as necessary through an electronically controlled differential. Operating with rear-bias allocating between 50-100 per cent power to the rear, the RS3 also features brake-based toque vectoring, helping to steer the car by braking the inside wheels for enhanced agility into and better traction out of corners.

Riding on MacPherson strut front and independent multi-link rear suspension along with firm damping, the RS3 maintains good contact with the ground through hard driven corners and is settled and buttoned down on vertical rebound. With its four-wheel drive differential located on the rear axle — and other components shifted rearwards for better weighting — in addition to its four-wheel drive system’s characteristics, the RS3 turns crisply and tidily into corners, well-resisting under-steer usually expected from a front-wheel drive derived platform.

A fluent handling compact high performance car able to cover ground very rapidly and confidently, the RS3 is almost as agile, poised and tidy into corners as a rear-driver. With its active power distribution, one can even nudge the RS3’s rear slightly — in less interventionist stability control modes — out to shift weight and tighten a cornering line, while more power is sent forward to pull in and out onto a straight.

Classy and uncluttered

Direct and quick, the RS3’s variable-assistance steering is precise and well-weighted, but more instinctive “feel” would not go amiss. At speed the RS3’s steering is reassuringly committed while ride stability is planted and refined. Firm but not uncomfortable, the RS3’s suspension provides and taut cornering body control and a smooth buttoned down ride. Optionally, adaptive magnetic dampers provide more comfort and control, and like engine, gearbox, steering and differential, features selectable modes.

Restrained, tasteful, classy and uncluttered yet distinctly sporty, the RS3 Sportback’s cabin features clear instrumentation — including turbo boost gauge — and controls, many of which are accessed through a pop-up infotainment screen. Uncluttered, well-built and using quality leathers and choice of materials, the RS3’s cabin features prominent metallic-ringed vents and chunky contoured sports steering wheel. Supportive comfortable and highly adjustable, the RS3 provides a commanding and alert driving position.

Well spaced and practical for its segment, the RS3 Sportback features more generous headroom than saloon derivatives of Audi’s A3 line, as well as a usefully flat 280-litre boot, which expands to 1120 litres with rear seats folded. Well-equipped with standard convenience, infotainment and safety features, the RS3 can be specified with lightweight carbon-fiber sports bucket seats with integrated side airbags, Bang and Olufsen sound system and lane-keeping driver assistance, among numerous other features.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 2.5-litre, transverse, turbocharged 5 cylinders

Bore x stroke: 82.5 x 92.8mm

Compression ratio: 10:1

Valve-train: 20-valve, DOHC, direct injection, continuously variable valve timing

Boost pressure: 1.3-bar

Gearbox: 7-speed automated dual clutch, four-wheel drive, electronic multi-plate clutch and differential lock

Ratios: 1st 3.563; 2nd 2.526; 3rd 1.679; 4th 1.022; 5th 0.788; 6th 0.761; 7th 0.635; R 2.789

Final drive, 1st, 4th, 5th, R/2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th: 4.059:1/3.45:1

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 362 (367) [270] @5550-6800rpm

Specific power: 146BHP/litre

Power-to-weight: 238BHP/tonne

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 343 (465) @1625-5500rpm

Specific torque: 187.5Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight: 306Nm/tonne

0-100km/h: 4.3 seconds

80-120km/h, 4th/5th gear: 4.1-/5.8 seconds

Top speed standard/optional: 250/280km/h (electronically governed)

Fuel consumption, urban/extra-urban/combined:

11.2/6.3/8.1 litres/100km 

CO2 emissions, combined: 189g/km

Fuel capacity: 55 litres

Length: 4,343mm

Width: 1,800mm

Height: 1,411mm

Wheelbase: 2631mm

Track, F/R: 1,559/1,514mm

Aerodynamic drag co-efficient: 0.34

Luggage volume, min/max: 280/1120 litres

Weight, unladen (kerb): 1,520kg (1,595kg)

Steering: Variable assistance rack & pinion

Turning Circle: 10.9 metres

Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts/multi-link

Brakes, F/R: Perforated, ventilated discs, 365 x 34mm/310 x22mm

Brake callipers, F/R: 8-/1-piston

Tyres: 235/35R19

DETROIT — Tesla Motors is working on modifications to its Autopilot system after it failed to stop for a tractor-trailer rig in a Florida crash that killed the driver of a Model S sedan.

CEO Elon Musk, in a Twitter post Thursday night, said Tesla is working on improvements to the radar system. Autopilot uses cameras, radar and computers to detect objects and automatically brake if a Tesla vehicle is about to hit something.

But in the May 7 crash that killed Joshua D. Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, cameras in his Tesla Model S failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky, and the car did not automatically brake, the company has said. Signals from radar sensors also did not stop the car, and Brown didn’t take control either.

Tesla wouldn’t comment Friday on Musk’s tweets or possible changes to Autopilot, which is being scrutinised by two US government agencies. Whatever changes are made have broad implications for Tesla and other automakers, who either have similar technology in place or are about ready to put it on the road as they move towards fully autonomous driving within the next decade.

Just after the crash was made public June 30, Musk gave an indication in a tweet that the radar was discounted in the Florida crash. His tweet, which since has been removed from Twitter, said that radar “tunes out” objects like an overhead road sign to avoid stopping the car for no reason. Experts say this means that the radar likely overlooked the tractor-trailer in the Florida crash.

Thursday, Musk tweeted that the company is working on changes that would “decouple” the Autopilot’s radar from its cameras and allow the radar to spot objects with fewer data points. Car sensors produce so much data that computers cannot process it all. So fewer data points are needed for self-driving systems to work.

Experts contacted by The Associated Press say it’s clear that Musk is focusing on the radar so his cars spot tractor-trailers in similar circumstances. “It kind of strikes me that they’re figuring out how to solve that problem,” said Timothy Carone, an information technology and analytics professor at the University of Notre Dame business school.

Radar can see through bright sunlight, rain, snow and other things that can block the sight of cameras, so it makes sense that Tesla would try to emphasise radar more after the Florida crash, said Raj Rajkumar, a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who leads its autonomous vehicle research.

The cars’ software would have to be updated so it considers the radar data and determines if obstacles are in the way, Rajkumar said.

Tesla has said that it constantly updates the Autopilot system as the company takes in data from cars that are on the road.

Maybe calling someone a birdbrain should not be an insult.

Newly hatched ducklings surprised scientists with the capacity to understand the concepts of “same” and “different” — an ability previously known only in more intelligent animals such as apes, crows and parrots, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

“We believe the ducklings are the first species shown to do this right after birth,” said Antone Martinho, a doctoral student at the UK’s University of Oxford Department of Zoology and the study’s lead author. “We now think that many or most bird species that imprint could probably also do it.”

Ducklings usually learn to identify and follow their mother through a process called “imprinting”, which can occur in as little as 15 minutes after hatching. Imprinting is a powerful form of learning that can allow ducklings to follow any moving object, the scientists said.

The study marked the first time an animal, including apes, learned such concepts without reinforcement, Martinho said.

“The other animals that have demonstrated this ability have all done so by being repeatedly rewarded for correct performance, while our ducklings did it spontaneously,” said Alex Kacelnik, also of the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology and a study co-author.

To conduct the experiment, the ducklings were placed in an enclosed training area where various shapes in different colours and sizes were dangled in front of them.

During the first round of training in the shapes experiment, a duckling would chase two red pyramids, Martinho said. (Chasing something, usually their mother, is a typical first act for newly hatched ducks.) In the second round, it would need to choose to follow either two red spheres or a red cone and red cylinder.

Even though neither of the shapes in the second round were the pyramids the ducklings originally viewed, they chose the two spheres because, like the two pyramids, they are two objects of the same shape.

Similarly, ducklings trained with a red cube and red rectangular prism in the first round — two differently shaped objects — preferred the cone and cylinder in the second round, because both pairs were composed of “different” shapes.

A second experiment did the same thing for colour, where every shape presented was a sphere.

“The key point of our experiment was that the pair of shapes the ducks saw and learned in the first round never appeared again,” Martinho said.

The study is important because it shows animals not normally believed to be particularly intelligent are capable of abstract thought, Ed Wasserman of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa wrote in a related article in the journal.

It also shows very young animals can display signs of abstract thinking and that those behaviours can occur without explicit rewards or punishments, he added.

“The claim that abstract relational thinking is a unique ability of human beings can no longer be supported,” Wasserman concluded.