Features

NEW YORK — The fair-skinned man with the hoodie and dark ski cap sits on a bench outside McNally Jackson Books in downtown Manhattan, where neither patrons nor employees seem aware that he’s the author of a work so in demand at the store that it’s often out of stock.

Known to his growing fan base as “Anonymous”, he has given us one of the more unusual self-published successes: “Diary of an Oxygen Thief”, a 147-page fictionalised memoir, or autobiographical novel, depending on how much of this story of a recovering alcoholic and the damage he has inflicted and absorbed you care to believe.

“It has an unusual negative space,” says the author, who on e-mail uses the names Tom Wilkinson and Stanley Easyday and prefers to be identified as O2Thief. “It couldn’t be more naked, but at the same time... ‘Who the hell is it?’ I think it’s a very powerful place to write.”

Some books catch on immediately, others take their time, but “Oxygen Thief” has really followed the scenic route. First published by the author in 2006, the book has slipped on and off the charts ever since, apparently dependent on the occasional tweet or other online comment. “Oxygen Thief” has been such a homegrown operation that the author not only served as his own editor and cover designer, but has also sold the book in the streets and would personally ship it to retailers, sometimes taking on orders for thousands of copies.

His workload is about to lighten. This year, “Oxygen Thief” cracked the top 20 on both Amazon.com and iTunes, enough to interest literary agent Byrd Leavell and eventually a publisher, Gallery Books, a pop culture imprint of Simon & Schuster that plans to release an e-edition this week and a paper version in mid-June. (Film rights have been acquired by Gotham Group.)

“I monitor the Amazon top 100 regularly, and while many self-published titles make a brief appearance there, a persistent best-seller commands special attention,” said Gallery Executive Editor Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, whose authors have included Tucker Max, Ace Frehley and Grace Jones.

Douglas Singleton, a buyer and manager at McNally Jackson, said the store has sold more than 200 copies of “Oxygen Thief,” the in-house record for a “consignment order.” Asked if he has met the author, Singleton said he wasn’t sure. He thinks the man who delivers copies of “Oxygen Thief” is the book’s writer, but it’s been a couple of years since he’s seen him.

“We’ve often talked about the mysterious nature of the person who drops off the book,” Singleton said. “I have an e-mail address for him and sometimes I’ll contact him and say we’re sold out and we need another 20 copies. And I get no answer back. Then I’ll be walking behind the register one day and there’ll be 20 copies. And one of my co-workers will say, ‘Someone dropped off a bag and said it was for you’.”

Mainstream recognition does not mean you will learn more about him, beyond what he includes in the book. Anonymous authors, even ones who meet with reporters, don’t do book tours. Ruby-Strauss is counting on social media (the author himself has a website, http://www.02thief.com , and Twitter feed, @02thief) and expects that he will give telephone interviews.

“The book has such an underground feel to it, a nontraditional promotional campaign focusing on these elements makes perfect sense,” the editor said.

As his readers would assume and his accent suggests, the author says he is a native of Ireland, who has lived everywhere from London to Minneapolis, but has spent the past decade in New York. Like the narrator of his book, he has spent much of his professional life in advertising. He declines to give his exact age, but says — plausibly — that he’s at least 40.

The author had never attempted a book before “Oxygen Thief”, but wanted to give it a try, unsure if or why anyone would care about a man who begins his tale by confiding, “I liked hurting girls”. The first half reads like a variation of J.P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man”, the comic saga of a ne’er-do-well and the affairs ruined by his own design. The gods strike back in the second half as the O2Thief falls for a photographer identified as Aisling and eventually learns — or thinks he learns — she is using him for a book about relationships.

“We can’t be sure this really happened,” the author explained. “It’s like a Hitchcockian story — his view of the world.”

“When I started the book, I understood immediately why it had captured the spirit of the times,” Ruby-Strauss said. “I continued reading, and I discovered it was not the book I thought it was; then I finished reading, only to find my latter revelation was also incorrect. I felt unsettled about the whole thing for several days, which struck me as very promising.”

Self-published best-sellers often debate whether to sign on with a traditional publisher, whether the loss of independence is compensated by the security and resources that enable them to focus solely on writing. The O2Thief is happy to try it both ways. He will continue to be his own boss for his next two volumes: “Chameleon on a Kaleidoscope,” released in 2012 and yet to attain the popularity of “Oxygen Thief”, and the upcoming “Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs”, inspired by what he calls “an inherent incompatibility between the sexes”.

He’ll consider deals for those books only if “the demand for them also becomes insatiable”.

A more sportingly flavoured and more powerful version of British ultra-luxury carmaker Bentley’s flagship Mulsanne model, the Speed was introduced in 2014. Derives its name from the high-speed straight at the Le Mans endurance race, the Mulsanne Speed epitomises Bentley’s impeccably established luxury credentials and early motor sport heritage, including five Le Mans victories during 1924-30.

A modern post-Rolls Royce, modern Volkswagen group-era car the Mulsanne Speed, however, best reflects the brand’s historic and engineering continuity. Not unpleasantly disconcerting in how a car so large, heavy, comfortable and luxurious could be so fluent, manageable and effortlessly swift, the Mulsanne Speed captures the brand’s “gentleman racer” image and brings to mind the “silent sports car” adage of the Bentley’s early 1930s Rolls Royce era.

Grand impression

Luxuriously proportioned with indulgently long tall bonnet and distance between wheels and A-pillar, upright wire mesh grille, short front overhang, flowingly curved hips and tapered boot, the Mulsanne’s design pays homage to past designs. Its defined bonnet and grille edges and big central headlight and lower smaller outward lights are particularly reminiscent of the 1955-65 Continental saloons, while its rear quarter design evolves from the previous generation Arnage.

The direct successor to the Arnage, the Mulsanne is based on a similar rear-drive platform, rather than other modern Bentleys’ Volkswagen-Audi derived platform and four-wheel drive. Hand built at the brand’s historic factory in Crewe, UK, the Mulsanne is also uniquely powered by an updated version of the same large displacement L-Series V8 engine as its predecessors, the rights to which Volkswagen owns since 1998.

A grand car in the full sense of the word, the Mulsanne nonetheless enjoys a subtle sense of dynamic tension, with its more sporting Speed variant distinguished from the regular Mulsanne by its darker tinted metallic brightware and grille, stainless steel tailpipes and side fender badges. Just larger, the Speed’s huge 21-inch alloys and 265/40R21 tyres are well proportioned to the Mulsanne’s 5575mm length, 1926mm width and high waistline. 

Tsunami of torque

Part and parcel of Volkswagen’s wholesale acquisition of Rolls Royce and Bentley in 1998 and retained after the Rolls Royce brand name moved to BMW in 2003, the Bentley Mulsanne is powered by the long-serving traditional L-Series V8 engine. First introduced in 1959 and in continual development since, the latest version deployed in the Mulsanne is a much more powerful, refined and efficient evolution.

A traditional 16-valve pushrod OHV design, the Mulsanne’s giant 6.75-litre V8 is mated to twin-turbochargers and in Mulsanne Speed guise is retuned to produce an additional 25BHP and 59lb/ft. Developing a total of 530BHP at 4200rpm, the Mulsanne Speed’s engine may be low-revving in nature and less powerful than smaller more modern engines, but is instead characterised by its enormous indefatigable 811lb/ft tsunami of torque, peaking at just 1750rpm.

Whisper quite from inside save for a distant yet deep rumble on heavy load, the Mulsanne Speed’s formidable V8 is never caught short, with an enormous torque reservoir from tick over through to a rev limit of around 4500rpm. Effortlessly launching from standstill, the 2685kg Mulsanne Speed digs in, squats and swiftly wells up with an abundant force as its turbos swiftly spool up, the Mulsanne Speed’s performance simply belies its size and weight.

Supple and sophisticated 

Crossing the 0-100km/h dash in 4.9 seconds, 0-160km/h in 11.1 seconds and capable of 305km/h, the Mulsanne Speed is effortlessly responsive and flexible, accumulated speed with disdainful ease and refinement. Putting its power down well owing to sticky rear tyres, weight and subtle electronic traction and stability controls, the Mulsanne Speed is driven through a silky smooth and sportily responsive 8-speed automatic gearbox with manual paddle shift mode for more driver involvement.

Impeccably refined and comfortable and more agile and intuitive than expected for such a grand vehicle, the Mulsanne Speed rides with a velvety suppleness. Dispatching imperfect textures with poised unperturbed fluency, the Mulsanne Speed’s ride comfort is sublime whether pottering around town or at speed. Stable, reassuring and smooth at speed, it is settled on rebound, while enormous 400mm front and 370mm rear ventilated disc brakes prove highly effective in shedding speed.

Riding on double wishbone front and multi-link rear suspension with adaptive dampers tightening for corners and softening for straights, the Mulsanne Speed features three individually selectable sport modes, including steering, engine and gearbox, and suspension. Rather than altering its character, the Speed’s sport damper mode dials out some of the waft in its ride, lends it a more buttoned down feel and tightened body control through corners, but without making it stiff, crashy or uncomfortable.

Exquisitely crafted comfort

Stiffer and weightier, sport steering mode does not provide and additional layer of connection, but is more intuitive, natural and in tune with the Speed’s character feeling in comfort mode. Turning tidily in with well-balanced weighting and chassis set-up, the Speed can be hustled through corners with more confidence and agility than expected. Weight transfer is well managed, with the Speed settling in after initial lean into a corner and digging its heels ready to exit on a wave of irrepressible torque.

Perched high in comfortable, highly adjustable and supportive seats, one has a commanding view of the road and can place and manoeuvre the massive Mulsanne with relative ease, while cabin space all round is generous. With an indulgently and delightfully airy old-world approach to luxury, the Mulsanne Speed’s cabin features an upright design with round chrome ringed dials, vents and organ-stop controls. 

Swathed in the finest and richest hand crafted double contrasting stitched leathers, woods and metals, the Mulsanne’s cabin is encased with natural materials and has a luxuriously feel good yet warm and sporting ambiance. Personalisation and choice of materials are extensive to tailor the Mulsanne to one’s personal taste. Meanwhile, equipment levels are generously high from infotainment and sound system to cabin amenities and safety features.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 6.75-litre, twin-turbo, in-line V8 cylinders

Bore x stroke: 104.1 x 99.1mm

Valve-train: 16-valve, OHV

Gearbox: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive

Top gear/final drive ratios: 0.67:1 / 2.92:1

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 537 (530) [395] @ 4200rpm

Specific power: 78.5BHP/litre

Power -to-weight ratio: 197.4BHP/tonne

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 811 (1100) @1750rpm

Specific torque: 163Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight ratio: 409.68Nm/tonne

0-100km/h: 4.9 seconds

0-160km/h: 11.1 seconds

Top speed: 305km/h

Fuel economy, urban / extra-urban / combined: 22.8-/9.9-/ 14.6-litres/100km

CO2 emissions, combined: 342g/km

Fuel capacity: 96 litres

Length: 5575mm

Width: 1926mm

Height: 1521mm

Wheelbase: 3266mm

Track, F/R: 1605/1652mm

Aerodynamic drag co-efficient: 0.33

Headroom, F/R: 1019/968mm

Legroom, F/R: 1064/1090mm

Boot capacity: 443 litres

Unladen weight: 2,685kg

Suspension, F/R: Double wishbones / multi-link, adaptive air springs

Steering: Speed sensitive power-assisted rack & pinion

Lock-to-lock: 3.3 turns

Turning circle: 12.9 metres

Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs, 400 x 38mm / 370 x 30mm

Tyres: 265/40R21

MALIBU, California — These are tough times for convertibles.

Except for a handful of performance, luxury cars or subcompacts, most of the mainstream models have disappeared. With its new Cascada, Buick is filling the gap. And the gambit appears to be paying off: In the first few months that Cascada has been on sale, 64 per cent of buyers are coming from other brands, Buick says.

Cascada is a compact droptop that has no coupe counterpart. It’s powered by a fuel-thrifty 1.6-litre, turbocharged four-cylinder engine good for 200 horsepower. Yet, it has the silky-smooth ride and quiet that drivers have come to expect from Buick, and is loaded with nifty features.

Even though it feels distinctly American, filling the convertible gap left by the likes of Chrysler’s 200, Cascada is actually a European import. It’s made by General Motors’ Opel division in Poland.

Driving around the hills above Malibu on a picture-perfect day, it’s easy to remember what’s so wonderful about convertibles. Wind blows through your hair, a blue sky and wispy clouds unfold overhead and you can greet bicyclists or walkers as you pass by them on a country road.

Cascada makes it easy. One of its most appealing features is the ability to put its fabric roof up or down at the touch of a button while driving along at speeds up to 50 kilometres per hour. We tried it multiple times and the system worked flawlessly.

To a large extent, Cascada is going to be sold based on the number of standard features it offers. Even though it’s a convertible that excels in spring and summer, those extras appear aimed at fending off cold weather. They include heated steering wheel and seats, and remote start.

There are some quirky features as well. To open the trunk, you push the Buick emblem on the back of the car. Maybe not terribly intuitive, but it sure is easy. Once the trunk is open, a second set of taillights appears underneath so other drivers can still see the Cascada on a darkened highway.

Even though the car felt like a traditional Buick as we drove it, there were some elements that are distinctly European. The power door lock button, for instance, is on the centre console. And at a time when automakers are trying to unclutter their dashboards to relieve driver distraction, the Cascada’s centre console was a maze of buttons.

Another nit: Settling deeply into Cascada’s comfortable front seats, the sides of the car seem relatively high. That might be a problem for some shorter drivers. Also, the rear seat is cramped — although Cascada is not meant to be the family car.

Buick does not see much competition for Cascada. The primary one is Audi with its A3 Cabriolet. Cascada is priced at $33,990 to start, including destination fees, about $3,000 less than the Audi. There’s also a more upscale version of the Cascada at $36,990 that adds a lot of nice safety gear, including forward collision alert, lane-departure warnings and parking assist.

To buyers of the Cascada, what will really matter is that there’s still a way to put the top down on a car and enjoy a drive on a pretty day.

What Stands Out

Droptop: Top can go up or down as you drive.

Quiet: It’s a Buick. Shhhh.

Fun: Wind in your hair. What a concept!

2016 Buick Cascada

What? A nifty compact convertible

When? In showrooms now

Where? Built in Poland

What makes it go? A zippy 1.6-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine with a six-speed automatic transmission

How big: 4.69 metres

Overall: Pure fun on four wheels

BERLIN — German regulators suspect that Italian-American automaker Fiat Chrysler, like Volkswagen, used illegal software to cheat on emissions tests, a newspaper report said Sunday.

The German Federal Motor Vehicle Office (KBA) had sent a report voicing the suspicion to the European Commission and to Italian authorities, according to Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

The news report came after Germany on Thursday blasted Fiat for its “uncooperative attitude” for refusing to meet its officials to address questions on whether their vehicles complied with emissions regulations.

German authorities launched a sweeping emissions probe after Volkswagen admitted last year to rigging its engines with so-called defeat devices to cheat pollution tests. 

Not only VW vehicles, but other major car brands, including Fiat, showed up irregularities.

Bild am Sonntag reported that testing by the KBA of a Fiat model had shown that the emission control system shut down after 22 minutes — two minutes after the end of a standard test.

This caused the dangerous pollutant nitrogen oxide (NOx) to be released into the atmosphere “at more than 10 times the permitted level”, the report said according to the newspaper.

The KBA had concluded that there was “sufficient evidence of an impermissible defeat device”, said the newspaper, adding that the automaker had declined to comment on the claims.

Fiat officials had been due to hold a meeting with German authorities on Wednesday but cancelled the talks abruptly through a lawyer’s letter, the transport ministry said in a statement.

The carmaker had declined to meet as it deemed Italian officials to be the only authority responsible on the question of whether their vehicles complied with existing emissions regulations, the ministry said.

“This uncooperative attitude of Fiat is completely incomprehensible,” said Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt.

Scientists have discovered a remarkable property of a certain type of spider silk: It acts like a solid when you stretch it, but liquid when you squish it. And they’ve proven that they understand how this “liquid wire” works by actually creating synthetic strands that can do the exact same thing — solving a decades old mystery in the process.

The findings, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal the bizarre phenomenon that may help spider webs remain taut, and could offer fresh insight for a range of technologies, including soft robotics.

Spiders spin a range of web shapes, from funnels to nests, but the classic orblike structures remain something of an archetype. Such webs typically have sticky droplets of glue on the strands of capture thread — the segments of spider silk that connect the radiating branches of these disclike webs. The glue’s primary function seems pretty clearly to help in the nabbing of an errant, tasty bug — simply part of a fly-catching device that’s been honed over hundreds of millions of years.

“If I was to tell you that [there] lives a creature the size, let’s say, of a small human that makes out of its own body a net the size of a football field to catch a small jet plane in it, you would think I’m totally mad,” said study co-author Fritz Vollrath, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University. “But that’s in effect what the spider does, if you scale it all up.”

Back in the 1980s, Vollrath noticed something strange in a dried-up glue droplet — the thread seemed to be coiled up inside it. He expected that the droplets might be acting as string storage, but when others tried to replicate the work, they could not, and they decided it must have been a peculiarity of Vollrath’s study.

But senior author Arnaud Antkowiak, a fluid dynamicist at Pierre and Marie Curie University in France, recently came across Vollrath’s paper on spider silk from 1989. Antkowiak has an interest in the ability of a liquid’s surface tension to bend other materials to its proverbial will. But those forces only work at very small scales — on the scale of spider silk, for example.

Tiny though this effect may be, it can have big consequences. For example, premature babies often have problems breathing because the fluid in their lungs has a high-enough surface tension that it can cause tiny airspaces in the lungs to collapse. Doctors have to introduce a surfactant to break up the fluid’s surface tension and help them to breathe.

Intrigued by Vollrath’s decades-old study, Antkowiak and his colleagues teamed up with the biologist to try the experiment using cobweb from living spiders. Herve Elettro, then Ankowiak’s graduate student, spent about a year in the dark of night gathering cobwebs on the banks of the Seine River to study, but with limited success; they were small, and their threads were too thin to see clearly. They had much more luck with golden orb weavers from New Guinea, which are much larger and whose silk turned out to be much easier to pick out on camera when spooled up into a liquid droplet.

“When you compress it by, say, 5 per cent, it remains taut,” Antkowiak said. “When you compress it by 10 per cent it remains taut, as well. And when you keep on pushing — and it’s really funny to see it because it feels like it’s really bizarre — when you keep on pushing, you can go up to 95 per cent compression and it still remains completely taut. So that’s really unusual… it just adapts its length somehow.”

The extra thread, it seems, was spooling inside those droplets of glue, and then unspooling whenever the thread was stretched. The phenomenon only worked at these small scales, however, when the silk was exceedingly thin and subject to the surface tension of the glue.

Think about how weird this is. If you take a ruler and push its ends towards each other, you’ll bend and eventually break it from the compression. And you can stretch a rubber band to maybe a few times its original length, but bringing the ends closer than its resting length will cause it to sag in the middle.

Imagine if, instead of sagging, that rubber band just seemed to shrink shorter and shorter as you brought the ends together — contracting just enough to remain straight.

The researchers were actually able to film the process, but they wanted to make sure that it wasn’t unique to this particular type of spider. So they carefully made the thinnest threads they could — a painstaking process — out of polyurethane and coated them with a silicone oil to mimic the glue droplets and watched what happened. Sure enough, when they brought the ends closer together, their synthetic spider silk winched in, remaining tense even when it should have sagged.

For the spider, this effect could be helpful in keeping its nest neat, preventing neighbouring strands from touching and thus turning this beautiful flycatcher into a sticky, ineffective mess. For humans, the researchers say their discovery of what’s essentially a class of composite materials could inspire and aid the design of a host of technologies, from toxin-catchers to artificial muscles for soft robots.

Bitter Almonds
Lilas Taha
Qatar: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2015
Pp. 308

From the first page of this novel, author Lilas Taha exhibits her storytelling skills, describing five-year-old Fatimah watching the birth of her brother, Omar, reflected in the rain-spattered windowpane (she was told not to turn around). The room is tense; the birth is difficult, more so because of the timing. It is spring 1948. The village is emptying out in panic, having just been bombarded by news of the Deir Yassin massacre. The neighbours, husband and wife Mustafa and Subhia, can only wait so long for the mother and her now two children to pile into their truck, to escape an expected attack.

This opening scene establishes the theme and pace of the novel, in which Taha weaves the political and the personal into an enthralling, fast-moving story, showing how Palestinians’ life events and needs might be similar to everybody else’s, were it not for the fact of their dispossession. In Fatimah’s and Omar’s case, losing their home and country is compounded by being orphaned, for their mother dies in the truck. 

The sense of urgency continues as Fatimah and Omar grow up in Damascus, raised by Mustafa and Subhia alongside their own five children. Part of the urgency comes from their determination to return to their land. Part stems from recurring crises in the expanded family’s life, whether manmade or caused by the political and socioeconomic difficulties impinging on refugees.

Through the eyes of this family, one experiences Palestinians’ recurring disappointments in their quest to recover Palestine and return home. First, Omar pins high hopes on Nasser and the short-lived United Arab Republic. Later, he enrols in the Syrian military academy and rushes to fight on the Golan Heights during the 1967 war. With each event, they imagine returning home, but reality dictates otherwise. Taha manages to convey important milestones in Palestinian history from 1948 until 1970, without plodding through every detail, for the main focus is on human lives. 

In the build-up to the 1967 war, a family crisis is also brewing. Despite Mustafa’s and Subhia’s fair, nurturing parenting, there is tension and rivalry among some of the children. While their second daughter, Nadia, develops a special bond with Omar, their son, Shareef, resents him, perhaps because Omar’s strong personality often has him functioning as the de facto eldest son of the family, whereas Shareef lacks his backbone. “Omar was living on a different plain than the one Shareef occupied. His was filled with political analysis and patriotic discussions. War loomed and darkened his skies. Shareef’s plain was anchored in normalcy.” (p. 88)

Things come to a head when Shareef has a casual affair which he shrugs off as inconsequential. But honour is important to this family, and men are considered just as responsible for upholding it as women. By this time, Mustafa’s health is deteriorating rapidly due to his gruelling factory job, and Omar steps in to force Shareef to marry the girl in question, which only exacerbates their relationship. Though Shareef seldom takes initiative to do anything positive, he now seems intent on destroying Omar. His target is Omar’s strong bond with Nadia, a bond which those two hardly understand themselves. They have been raised as sister and brother, but actually aren’t. Is the love between them that of sister and brother, or something else? Can they overcome Shareef’s machinations in time to find out? As much as the story is built on the centrality of family, it also queries the nature of blood relations and of love. 

Framed by the title and recurring references, almonds serve as a metaphor for Palestine, referring to the fertile orchards left behind and the nostalgia felt by their former cultivators. Calling the book “Bitter Almonds” expands the metaphor to cover the refugees’ disappointments and hard experience, as well as the plot’s unifying theme — a great love that must traverse a long, difficult path to be fulfilled. But it’s worth it, for: “The bitter almonds make you savour the sweet ones more.” (p. 31)

Dialogue is a strong point in Taha’s writing as she manages to articulate distinct voices for a wide range of characters, conveying their mood and personality. “Bitter Almonds” gives a realistic portrayal of the life of Palestinians in Syria, a community about which little has been written, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The book is well suited to a broad readership, including those with little forehand knowledge of the Palestinian issue. “Bitter Almonds” is available at Readers. 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Google announced four major new products, from a messaging app called Allo to a personal helper called Google Assistant, at its 10th annual developers conference Wednesday.

Each new offering will compete against established and developing products from Google competitors Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.

“We are at a pivotal moment in terms of where we are going as a company,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told more than 7,000 people at Google I/O. “It is truly the moment of mobile. There are over 3 billion people connected and they are using the Internet in ways we have never seen. They live on their phone.”

Three out of four of Google’s new products are focused on mobile devices, while the fourth, a home-based virtual assistant, is a piece of hardware powered by artificial intelligence.

The I/O conference attracts software developers who work with Google platforms across a host of fields and business sectors.

Google’s new messaging app Allo will use language recognition and artificial intelligence to advance its understanding of a particular user’s speech, habits and preferences. “It learns over time, to make conversations easier, more expressive, and more productive,” said Google engineering director Erik Kay. “Allo uses machine learning to suggest replies on the fly, anticipating what you might want to say.”

Users can search within the app, eliminating the need to go back and forth between messaging and search apps during a chat. Featuring emojis, stickers, a “whisper/shout” slider to convey emotion via text size, and predictive “smart reply” options that pop up with an incoming message or comment, Allo is coming this summer to Android and Apple iOS operating systems.

Allo will compete with Facebook’s Messenger and Apple’s iMessage.

Google also announced “the Google assistant”, intended to give each user “their own individual Google”, Pichai said. “We want to help you get things done in your real world.”

The assistant will respond to voice queries, as well as written text. Like Allo, Google assistant is AI-based, learning user characteristics to customise help offerings. Asking about times for a movie, for example, should trigger the software to present additional movie options a particular user would like, and ultimately buy tickets, Pichai said.

“If I say, ‘Sure, let’s do Jungle Book,’ it should go ahead and get the tickets and have them ready, waiting for me,” Pichai said. “Or, I could’ve asked, ‘Is Jungle Book any good?’ and Google could’ve given me the reviews and maybe showed me a trailer.”

The assistant will compete with Apple’s Siri, Facebook’s M, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. It will be incorporated into Google’s home-based assistive device, Google Home, which is to be released later this year.

With Home, Google will go up against the device that houses Alexa, Amazon’s home assistant. Home takes voice commands to perform tasks such as streaming music or controlling lights in particular rooms of a house, along with performing searches. “It’s like having a voice-activated remote control to the real world whenever you need it,” said Mario Queiroz, Google vice president of product management.

Taking aim at Apple’s Facetime, and at Microsoft’s Skype, Google’s new Duo video-calling app features “Knock Knock”, a preview function letting people see who’s calling them, and from what surroundings or context. Coming this summer, Duo is intended for use all over the world, and should switch seamlessly between wireless Internet and cellular signals, Kay said.

PARIS — A rapidly melting glacier atop East Antarctica is on track to lift oceans at least two metres, and could soon pass a “tipping point” of no return, researchers said Wednesday. 

To date, scientists have mostly worried about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets as dangerous drivers of sea level rise.

But the new study, following up on earlier work by the same team, has identified a third major threat to hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas around the world.

“I predict that before the end of the century the great global cities of our planet near the sea will have two- or three-metre high sea defences all around them,” said Martin Siegert, the co-director of the Grantham Institute and Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, and the study’s senior author. 

From the air, the contours of Totten Glacier,  roughly the size of France, are invisible because the entire Antarctic continent is covered by a seamless, kilometres thick blanket of snow and ice. Geologically, however, it is a distinct, volatile beast.

Disintegration accelerating

Last year, Siegert and colleagues revealed that the underbelly of the glacier — most of which sits below sea level — is being eroded by warm, salty sea water flowing hundreds of kilometres inland after passing through underwater “gateways”.

As it does, the portion of the glacier resting on water rather than rock increases, accelerating the pace of disintegration. 

The new study, published in Nature, used satellite data to map the hidden geological contours of the region.

The researchers found evidence that Totten similarly melted during an earlier period of natural global warming a few million years ago — a possible dress rehearsal for what is happening today.

“During the Pliocene epoch, temperatures were 2°C higher than they are right now, and CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 400 ppm,” or parts per million, Siegert said.

Sea levels during the Pliocene peaked at levels more than 20 metres higher than today.

“We are at 400 ppm right now, and if we do nothing about climate change we’re going to get 2°C more warming too,” he added.

Critical threshold

Indeed, even when pledges by 195 nations to cut greenhouse gases — submitted ahead of the landmark Paris Agreement last December — are taken into account, temperatures are still set to increase an additional 2oC, The United Nations has said.

Other scientists not involved in the research said its findings should be a wake-up call.

“Totten Glacier is a slumbering giant,” said Andy Shepherd, the director of the NERC Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds in England.

The “strong evidence” that the glacier has been unstable in the past, coupled with signs that it is melting now, are “a clear warning that changes might be on the horizon”, he said.

Up to now, estimates of how much Antarctica will contribute to global sea level rise before 2100 have been conservative.

The latest report from the UN’s climate science panel put that number at about a dozen centimetres, all of it from a relatively small section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is itself 10 times smaller than East Antarctica.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that total sea level rise from all sources — expansion of warming water, glaciers, Greenland — would probably not top a metre.

But the low figure for Antarctica has more to do with gaps in knowledge than differences of opinion.

As recently as 2000, the IPCC forecast that East Antarctica would gain mass, a scenario that few scientists believe today.

Siegert’s greatest concern is that Totten Glaciers, and other massive ice bodies, “could cross a critical threshold within the next century, entering an irreversible period of very rapid retreat”. 

The problem is that science is unable to say when that might happen — or if it has happened already.

“These are issues that we have to resolve in our society today,” he said by phone. “They are pressing right now.”

LONDON — Drug companies should agree to “pay or play” in the urgent race to develop new antibiotics to tackle a global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), according to a British government-commissioned review.

Led by former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill, the review said every sector affected by the growing threat of superbug infections — from patients, to doctors, to governments, to the healthcare industry — must be forced “out of its comfort zone” if the issue is to be successfully tackled

This should include pharmaceutical companies, O’Neill said, which should be subject to a surcharge if they decide not to invest in research and development (R&D) to bring successful new antibiotic medicines to market.

For who do decide to “play”, he said, a reward of between $1 billion and $1.5 billion should be paid for any successful new antimicrobial medicine brought to market.

“If we don’t do something, we’re heading towards a world where there will be no antibiotics available to treat people who need them,” O’Neill told reporters at a London briefing as he presented a final report from his team’s 18-month review.

He repeated the review’s previous estimation that AMR could kill an extra 10 million people a year and cost up to $100 trillion by 2050 if it is not brought under control. [

Any use of antibiotics promotes the development and spread of superbugs — multi-drug-resistant infections that evade the antimicrobial and antibiotic drugs designed to kill them.

O’Neill was asked last year by Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron to conduct a full review of the problem and suggest ways to combat it.

Launching his final report, O’Neill said it had identified 10 areas where the world needs to take action. Some of these focus on how to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics, while others look at how to increase the supply of new ones.

“Our arsenal to defeat superbugs is running out and needs to be replenished,” the review said.

Costs of action, and inaction

O’Neill’s review called for a group of countries such as the G-20 to reward companies for finding and developing new antibiotics.

“These market entry rewards, of around $1 billion each, would be given to the developers of successful new drugs, subject to certain conditions that ensure they are not over-marketed but are available to patients who need them wherever they live,” it said.

O’Neill said the review’s proposals would cost up to $40 billion over 10 years — a figure “dwarfed by the costs of inaction”. A little more than half of that — up to $25 billion — should probably come from the drugs industry, he said.

He suggested several possible funding sources, including allocating a small percentage of G-20 countries’ health spending, reallocating a fraction of global funding from international institutions, applying a “pay or play” antibiotic investment charge on drug companies who don’t invest in antimicrobial research and taxing current antibiotic use.

“Given the systemic risk to the pharmaceutical industry, the sector could contribute to supporting market entry rewards — on a pay or play basis,” he told reporters.

Industry hits back

The drug industry hit back on Thursday at a proposal and said the idea would “undermine goodwill”.

Trade associations representing British, European and international drug companies said in a joint statement that such a surcharge would be “punitive” and counterproductive.

“The potential imposition of a tax on just one segment of the life sciences sector to fix a supply-side issue will significantly undermine current goodwill, cooperation, and the large voluntary investment and initiatives that are already under way,” they said.

“We need to be working towards incentives that support additional investment rather than punitive payments.”

The world has seen very few new antibiotics in the past few decades, as industry has retreated from the field to focus on more profitable disease areas, although recently there has been some increase in investment, prompted by the superbug threat.

The industry bodies said pharmaceutical companies were currently working to develop 34 experimental antibiotics and infection-preventing vaccines.

A separate global association representing manufacturers of veterinary medicines also criticised elements of the O’Neill report, which included a call for big cuts in antibiotic use in farming, saying it was “negatively biased towards agriculture”. 

Send it as e-mail attachment? Upload it so as to share it then on Dropbox? Just transfer it via a cable from one device to the other? Use Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G? Save it on a tiny USB flash drive? Send it over WhatsApp to a group? Scan it? Take a screenshot of it or a snapshot with your smartphone? Access it through Remote Desktop Control? Post it on Facebook or Instagram for the world to see? “Cloud” it or keep it on your local hard disk?

It’s becoming too much of a good thing. There are so many ways to perform most actions with digital files nowadays, be it text documents, photos, videos, written messages or voice messages. The formats and the channels are countless and the possibilities overwhelming.

Whereas the end result will be the same in most cases, there are times when you would spend just too much time on an action that otherwise can be performed in a second if you opt for the simple, obvious method. The only advantage of the hyper-sophisticated ways is to make you appear as a very knowledgeable, up to date high-tech person. Overdoing it, however, is not the best approach. I often remember my friend Alain’s recommendation to go by the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle.

Data backup alone can be the subject of many a choice. A company in Amman was recently considering doing the daily backup of its data in the cloud. After all it is the trend, isn’t it? Upon careful study of their actual needs and given the total size of the files, they found that to upload one day of work to the cloud would take two days, even if using the fastest Internet connection available in the country! They quickly gave up on the idea and went back to using local hard disks for the security copying.

Perhaps sending to a friend a photo you just took with your phone is the action that comes with the widest choice of means. If immediacy matters WhatsApp is a great way but it reduces the quality and the size of the photo. If the last two aspects matter more, then going for e-mail attachment may be the way to go. But if the picture is really large, exceeding for example 6 megabytes, which is not uncommon with high-end phones, then posting it on a cloud shared folder within Dropbox or Google Drive would be a better solution. From there all those to whom you give access to the folder where you put the picture can download it at their convenience.

Acknowledging the need to send, receive and exchange photos in as many ways as possible, manufacturers of pro cameras like Nikon are now integrating Wi-Fi connectivity in some of their new DSLR models. In addition to the USB cabled connection already available and the fact that you can simply remove the memory card on which photos are stored from the camera to insert it into a laptop’s card reader (my preferred, fastest method), Wi-Fi extends the photo sending range of possibilities. Is it really too much? It remains a matter of opinion.

With music stored on a computer and a simple wireless home router, playing back music too can be done in so many ways. You can use a smartphone as a remote controller with an app like J River’s Gizmo for example, to play the music directly from the laptop. Or you can choose to stream it via the Wi-Fi router to your smartphone and play it from there. Or you can ask the laptop to stream it to your smartphone, but decide that the sound will actually come out from the Bluetooth speaker on the bookshelf or in the kitchen… DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) allow you to perform all these tricks. Most devices, including TV sets of course, now come fitted with DLNA.

Life used to be simple. Don’t you sometime feel like just turning on your local FM radio and listening to whatever they are broadcasting? And yes, this excludes the million Internet radio stations out there.