Features

GENEVA — After a century building what it calls the “ultimate driving machine”, BMW is preparing for a world in which its customers will be mere passengers, and the cars will do the driving themselves.

Days before BMW’s 100th birthday, its board member for research and development described plans for a completely overhauled company, where half the R&D staff will be computer programmers, competing with the likes of Google parent Alphabet to build the brains for self-driving cars.

“For me it is a core competence to have the most intelligent car,” Klaus Froehlich told Reuters in an interview at the Geneva Auto Show.

As a high-tech world opens new business opportunities, BMW sees its competitors as including firms like Internet taxi service Uber and sales website Truecar, which Froehlich described as “new intermediaries”.

“Our task is to preserve our business model without surrendering it to an Internet player. Otherwise we will end up as the Foxconn for a company like Apple, delivering only the metal bodies for them,” Froehlich said.

BMW will have to ramp up quickly, striking deals with a new network of suppliers, many from outside the traditional automotive industry.

“We have some catching up to do in the area of machine learning and artificial intelligence,” Froehlich said.

Today, software engineers make up just 20 per cent of the 30,000 employees, contractors and supplier staff that work on research and development for BMW.

“If I need to get to a ratio of 50:50 within five years, I need to get manpower equivalent to another 15,000 to 20,000 people from partnerships with suppliers and elsewhere,” Froehlich said, adding that German schools are not producing enough tech engineers for BMW to hire them all in house.

As software becomes as important as hardware, another cultural shift could see BMW free up resources by licensing out technology produced by its own engineers, such as drivetrains for electric and hybrid vehicles.

“Going forward we will sell electric drivetrains,” Froehlich said. “We see many smaller manufacturers who cannot afford to develop a plug-in hybrid.”

Bragging rights

Germany’s premium automakers are at the centre of the country’s global reputation for meticulous engineering. Chancellor Angela Merkel will attend BMW’s birthday bash at its Munich headquarters on Monday.

But with the expected shift in focus from a car’s body to its brains, the risk is that the expertise will accumulate in Silicon Valley or in China, rather than Germany’s carmaking regions of Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemburg.

“Bragging rights will be ‘my car is more autonomous than your car’,” said Manuela Papadopol, director, global marketing automotive for Elektrobit, a software company now owned by Continental.

BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen’s Audi are each making an effort to build a hub for automotive software and services. 

“The thinking here is: they too have weaknesses and there may be some win win situations,” Froehlich said of potential new suppliers. “Nonetheless I need to build our own in-house competence in the next five to six years.”

WASHINGTON — Scientists have been telling Americans about the benefits of healthy eating for decades, and yet more Americans are obese than ever — more than a third of the country.

Now, researchers at Harvard and Tufts Universities have laid out concrete steps officials can take by linking food prices to health effects.

Reducing prices of fruit and vegetables while raising prices for sodas and other sugary drinks could save millions of lives, according to a study released at the American Heart Association’s epidemiology and lifestyle meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.

“A change in your diet can be challenging, but if achieved through personal choice or changes in the marketplace, it can have a profound effect on your cardiovascular health,” Harvard Professor Thomas Gaziano, the report’s lead author, said in a statement.

The researchers developed a computer model that predicted a 10 per cent drop in the price of fruit and vegetables could reduce death from cardiovascular disease by 1.2 per cent within five years and nearly 2 per cent within 20 years.

The measures could decrease heart attacks by 2.6 per cent and strokes by 4 per cent over two decades, the report said.

It also found that deaths from cardiovascular diseases could decrease by nearly 0.1 per cent within five years of a price increase of 10 per cent on sugary drinks, and 0.12 per cent within 20 years.

The measures could decrease heart attacks by 0.25 per cent in both time frames and strokes by 0.17 per cent in 20 years, the report said, adding that diabetes could decrease by 0.2 per cent in five years and 0.7 per cent in 20 years.

Together, small price changes could prevent 515,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease and stop nearly 675,000 heart attacks, strokes and other events from occurring, the computer model predicted.

“These novel findings support the need to combine modest taxes and subsidies to better represent the real costs of food to health and society,” Tufts University’s Dariush Mozaffarian said.

Encouraging people to eat one more piece of fruit or one more serving of vegetables a day through food assistance programmes such as the SNAP programme — also known as food stamps — could have a significant effect, the researchers said.

Several states and cities such as New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco as well as Native American tribes have attempted imposing sales taxes on sugary drinks. They have been met with little success.

But there have been some exceptions.

The Navajo Nation last year eliminated sales taxes on fruit and vegetables, while increasing them sodas and other junk food.

The tribe — which numbers 173,600 people living in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — is spending the revenue on education campaigns and other programmes to promote healthy behaviour.

A recent study showed that Mexico’s imposition of a small tax on sugary drinks also decreased sales.

It’s not all bad news in the United States, too. Changing attitudes have helped sales of soft drinks fall more than 25 per cent over the last two decades.

A Strangeness in My Mind
Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Ekin Oklap
New York/Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015
Pp. 599

Orhan Pamuk’s newest novel charts Istanbul’s transition into modernity as experienced by Mevlut, a street vendor. The interpersonal dynamics in Mevlut’s extended family — great loves, disappointments, betrayals, grudges and intrigues — are sufficient to create a compelling plot, but the author’s passion for his native city, plus his psychological and philosophical curiosity, produce a far broader tapestry of life.

With his usual attention to detail, Pamuk chronicles the changes wrought by urban expansion, capitalist growth, globalisation and gentrification over half a century. Just as intimate as his portrait of the city’s changing landscapes are his forays into his characters’ minds. 

Much of the story is told in third-person narrative, but characters’ own voices interject from time to time, a device employed by Pamuk in “My Name is Red”, to remind that there is more than one side to every story. Also like that earlier novel, a mystery courses through the plot, but this time it’s about love, not murder. 

Other of Pamuk’s novels are like walking tours of Istanbul, but “A Strangeness in My Mind” wanders different streets and enters homes other than the middle- and upper-class ones of “The Black Book” or “The Museum of Innocence”. Instead of stately yalis on the Bosporus, or book-filled apartments in the old quarters, there is a jumble of slum dwellings hastily erected on empty hills at the city’s edge. In essence, this is the story of how the village came to the city, and changed its face forever. 

Mevlut arrives in Istanbul from his village in 1969, at the age of twelve, to finish school and help his father selling yoghurt and boza, a malt drink. At first, his father works in partnership with his brother, but soon they have a falling-out, as do Mevlut and his father later on. Though he sees his aunt, uncle and cousins on occasion, Mevlut is often alone, but by then he has become part of the city. “He loved it as a place where all manner of wonderful things seemed to be going on at the same time, no matter where he looked.” (p. 135)

It even has a special advantage for someone like him who feels set apart, for “in fact what makes a city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes”. (p. 107)

At first, Mevlut’s strangeness of mind seems like normal childhood fears or adolescent guilt, but the circumstances of his marriage magnify it. 

On one of Mevlut’s seldom returns to his home village, he attends the marriage of his cousin to the oldest of three sisters from a neighbouring village and is captivated by the eyes of the bride’s youngest sister. During his years of military service, he writes impassioned letters to Rayiha, as he is told her name is. When he finishes, another cousin convinces him to elope with her to avoid her father’s anticipated refusal.

Only upon arriving in Istanbul is Rayiha’s veil brushed to the side and Mevlut sees that she is the plain, middle sister, not the beautiful one who is named Samiha. Although Mevlut’s marriage to the resourceful and loveable Rayiha turns out to be remarkably happy, he is plagued by questions of how this happened to him and how his life could have taken a whole different course. Would he have been happier with Samiha? Which sister does he truly love? The answers remain ambiguous to the very end. 

Some of the migrants from the villages make money by hook or crook, but Mevlut suffers from the new economy where yoghurt is increasingly marketed by companies, and some areas are “cleansed” of street vendors by the military junta. But he continues selling boza in the evening all his life. Known from Ottoman times, by the 50s, it is sold by vendors “who walked the poor and neglected cobblestone streets on winter evenings crying ‘Bozaa,’ reminding us of centuries past, and the good old days that have come and gone”. (p. 18)

While boza symbolises Mevlut’s moorings in tradition, it also indicates the people of Istanbul striking a balance between the religious and the secular, for though mildly alcoholic, it is consumed by many who avoid alcohol due to their faith. (Or is Pamuk chuckling at this example of hypocrisy?)

The novel is rambling but one enjoys every minute because it gives one the feeling of participating in real life. For a long time, much remains ambiguous, especially Mevlut’s self-understanding. The whole gamut of emotions run wild in his “strange” mind, but he remains outwardly placid, trying to stay out of family squabbles and the leftist vs rightist street battles, when his ultranationalist cousins battle Kurds and Alevis.

Though serious about his faith, he also tries to steer clear of the simmering tension between Ataturk’s secular legacy and the Islamic revival. Pamuk’s rendition of political events points to divergent social visions and dreams of greatness, suggesting that Turkish identity is a conflicted, unresolved notion. In the very end, however, Mevlut knows himself and whom he loves, suggesting that human values can prevail even in shifting times. 

“A Strangeness in My Mind” is available at Books@cafe.

BALTIMORE — When scientists in Brazil suspected a link between a troubling upswing in a birth defect called microcephaly and the mosquito-borne Zika virus last fall, the hunt began for proof. Johns Hopkins neuroscientists and their partners in Florida and Atlanta now say they’ve discovered a big clue.

In lab dishes full of stem cells, they may have seen how the virus becomes the disease as cells that are the building blocks of brain development were destroyed or damaged by Zika.

“It was in a dish, not in a foetus,” said Hongjun Song, director of the Hopkins Stem Cell Biology Programme and one of the researchers. “But it fits.”

Proving the link between Zika and microcephaly is important because it would rule out other potential causes for the surge in babies being born with the often deadly birth defect and justify the massive public health response and spending on developing a vaccine.

The Hopkins stem cell study, published Friday in the journal Cell Stem Cell, was accelerated after the World Health Organisation declared a public health emergency on February 1. Zika infections are spreading rapidly throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and more babies were being born in those areas with small brains and heads.

There have been more than 100 cases of Zika in the United States among travellers.

Among those infections were nine pregnant women, four of whom either reported miscarriages and abortions after images showed abnormalities, and one who delivered a baby with microcephaly, according to public health officials. They believe mosquitoes will transmit the virus directly to Americans when warmer weather arrives, particularly along the Southern border where the carrier Aedes mosquitoes are more prevalent.

For the study, two labs at Hopkins produced the specialised stem cells that could grow into brain tissue. The cells were sent to a lab at Florida State University that infected them with Zika. Then they were sent on to a lab at Emory University for analysis.

The team now plans to replicate the effort in a so-called 3-D cell system that will more closely mimic brain development. This could finger Zika more definitively as the culprit for microcephaly or one of them. Other viruses are known to cause the abnormality, and genetic and environmental factors haven’t been ruled out.

But Zika remains the prime suspect, said Dr Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which helped fund the study. He said other investigations are under way, including an ongoing study of pregnant women.

“It does not provide definitive smoking gun proof that Zika is the cause of microcephaly,” Fauci said of the study. “But it’s another bit of information among the rapidly accumulating evidence.”

Fauci and leading microcephaly researchers who have seen brain tissue or images of foetuses from Brazil say the cell study results mirror what they’ve witnessed.

Brain tissue of stillborn babies with microcephaly showed nerve cell death and damage, which is what the study showed, adding to the “pool of evidence”, said Dr Ernesto Marques, a University of Pittsburgh microbiologist who is collaborating with Brazilian researchers.

Another study published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine found evidence that Zika can cause a range of abnormalities in pregnant women, including ones not connected previously to the virus.

Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and the Fiocruz Institute in Brazil followed 42 pregnant women who tested positive for Zika and found through ultrasounds and exams that 12 of the foetuses were subject to “grave outcomes”, including foetal death, low to no amniotic fluid, foetal growth restriction and central nervous system damage including blindness. The impacts were seen at various stages of pregnancy and some affected the foetus and others the placenta, which is the foetal life-support system.

The Hopkins team, lead by Song and Dr Guo-li Ming, his wife and fellow neuroscientist in the Institute for Cell Engineering, were using cells derived from human skin to decode other brain disorders such as epilepsy and Huntington’s disease when their students suggested they investigate Zika.

They were about to call Hengli Tang, a virologist friend from graduate school who had a lab at Florida State, to ask if he had a sample of the Zika virus when he rang first. They immediately prepared different cells, including so-called pluripotent stem cells that are made by reprogramming mature cells so they can become any type of cell in the body. One type of those cells, cortical neural progenitor cells, then develop into the nerve cells that make up the cortex or outer layer of the brain.

They sent the cells and a pair of experienced graduate students to Florida and then to Emory to assist in the research. The team found a link in the neural progenitor cells. Three days after exposure to Zika, 90 per cent of those cells were infected and churning out new copies of the virus.

The cells died or failed to divide normally, which in a foetus would stall brain development — the hallmark of microcephaly. The most severe cases, now seen thousands of times in Brazil, showed extremely small brains and heads leading to death or serious disability.

“It’s very telling that the cells that form the cortex are potentially susceptible to the virus, and their growth could be disrupted by the virus,” said Ming, a professor of neurology and neuroscience.

One doctor involved in analysing the foetuses with microcephaly, said the study’s findings “are almost predictable”.

Dr William B. Dobyns, a paediatric neurologist at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, said he saw 15 brain scans of Brazilian foetuses with the same devastating version of microcephaly in recent months. He’d only seen the same pattern two or three times before out of about 6,000 cases of microcephaly he’d reviewed over 25-30 years.

The cases linked to Zika had four things in common: They were all severe and had excess space in the skull as if the brain shrank, malformation of the developing cortex and scarring in the brain. All of that can be explained by the cell study showing cell death and damage, he said.

“It fits like a glove with what I’m seeing on children’s brain scans,” Dobyns said. “The connection between the Zika epidemic and microcephaly is beginning to look very, very real.”

If further study backs up these findings, he said it still may be tough to develop an agent to block the chain reaction into microcephaly. Zika in adults lasts less than a week, and damage likely would be done to a foetus before a women even knew she was infected. It may be more effective to develop a vaccine, he said.

Fauci said several vaccines are in development and some initial testing on humans may be done this year or next, but larger scale trials will take longer and could be stymied if the latest outbreak abates and limits test subjects.

Dobyns said Zika has been around for decades but the link to microcephaly was never made. Either the outbreaks weren’t big enough or public health infrastructure in the affected countries wasn’t sufficient to recognise and report it. Also in past outbreaks in Africa, he said people may have had Zika infections earlier in their lives and developed protective antibodies.

Researchers will continue to investigate the effects of Zika, which also increasingly appears to include another severe neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome that can lead to paralysis.

In the meantime, officials recommend that women who are pregnant or plan to become pregnant follow the advice of the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention. That includes a warning to avoid travel to more than three-dozen countries with active transmission of the virus and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio.

Pregnant women and their partners should “take any recommendation from the CDC very seriously,” Dobyns said.

LAGOS — An ambitious restaurant in Lagos is setting out to elevate Nigerian street food staples to fine dining, tapping into a growing hunger in the city for upscale West African food.

Classic West African dishes, passed down from mother to daughter for generations and served today in busy streetside canteens, are revisited in “Nok By Alara” by Pierre Thiam, a Senegalese pioneer of African cuisine. 

Thiam’s menu scours the continent for inspiration, combining ancestral know-how with elements of popular cuisine.

The result, a fragrant lobster “pepe” — Nigerian pidgin English for pepper — soup, savoury sweet potato and plantain pancakes and hibiscus tarts.

“Coming to a country that isn’t your own and presenting a cuisine that aims to be inspired by this region is a tricky endeavour,” Thiam told AFP. 

“I was expecting to meet some resistance,” he said, but was “pleasantly surprised” at the positive reaction. 

“People are so happy to have these flavours from childhood.”

It’s not just the taste that has people hooked. At last, hearty West African food, usually visually bland, is plated with a discerning eye. 

“This food that you grew up with is presented in a way that you would not expect,” food blogger Nosa Oyegun said. 

“There’s that real fine dining with Nigerian food, which we had never seen anywhere, that’s really fascinating.”

Chemistry to cooking

Oyegun and Folayemi Agusto, better known as “Nosa and Folly”, run an influential food blog “Eat. Drink. Lagos”, where they review restaurants across the city. 

Both in their 30s, they are among several thousand “repats” — people who have returned to Nigeria after studying overseas — living in Lagos. 

The well-travelled returnees want Nigerian food but with the same level of service they experienced abroad. 

Since Oyegan came back to Lagos in 2013, many restaurants have opened catering to the emerging middle class in Nigeria. 

But amid the barrage of pizza shops and burger joints, few restaurants have tried to capitalise on local cuisine. 

It’s a taboo Thiam finds ludicrous. 

“Across the continent, there is a plethora of ingredients that are nutritious and full of flavour,” said Thiam, a tall, loquacious man wearing brown metal glasses and a white chef’s shirt embroidered with his name. 

“And then we have techniques to be developed. Today, we talk about fermentation but we have known about it for thousands of years,” he said. 

A chemist by training, Thaim said he didn’t think he could turn his passion for cooking into a full-time job. 

He thought cooking was for women — until he left his native Senegal to work in New York and climbed the ranks from bus boy to chef. 

Two restaurants and two books later, Thiam can claim he introduced a Western audience to African cuisine — and hopes to accomplish a similar feat in Lagos. 

Samosa snails

As Thiam works to establish his restaurant, which opened its doors only in December, other young chefs are joining the growing Nigerian gourmet food movement. 

On a Saturday in February, 12 guests gathered for a lunch club hosted by Stranger, a trendy hybrid store selling food, art and clothing that boasts an impressive collection of Japanese whisky and a careful selection of African coffees. 

“Moving back here made me very excited just to have access to all these resources,” said Imoteda, a 29-year old recent graduate of the Cordon Bleu culinary and hospitality school in Britain. 

“But the thing about Nigerians is that we eat for sustenance, we don’t bother to make the food beautiful, you know we just toss it on a plate,” she said with a laugh. 

Yvette Dimiri, who returned to Nigeria a year ago to work in the oil industry, agrees.

Despite loving Nigerian food, Dimiri admits it can get heavy at times. 

“Most of the food here is full of oil. And it’s mostly carb-based. We used to be farmers and we used to walk for kilometres, which is not the case anymore.”

In the kitchen, Ozoz Sokoh prepares snail samosas and chicken with green curry and “scent leaves”, a Nigerian plant that resembles the Japanese herb shiso. 

During the week, Ozoz works as a geologist for Shell. But in the evenings and on weekends she’s known as “Kitchen Butterfly” and cooks delicious food for private clients. 

Her dream, like Thiam, is to introduce a more refined kind of Nigerian food. 

“I would love us in Nigeria to move from eating because we’re hungry, to celebrating Nigerian flavours, textures, colours,” she said.

“My dream would be to go to a Nigerian restaurant in Paris, maybe not with three Michelin stars yet, but to see people wowed, interested, curious about it.”

SAN FRANCISCO — At the entrance of Dolby headquarters in San Francisco, a ribbon of television screens plays synchronised videos that change in time to sound effects.

The display mirrors Dolby’s recent efforts to move beyond sound enhancement to improve what people see when they watch films.

Several of the movies that were up for Oscars were made with Dolby Vision, which has become an industry standard for image quality in movies.

Best picture nominees “The Martian” and winner “The Revenant”, as well as Pixar’s animated film “Inside Out” used the technology.

“We’re predominately known and associated with audio, but we spent the last decade working on imaging,” Dolby director of content and creative relations Stuart Bowling told AFP.

Since the company launched its Dolby Vision in 2014, an array of television makers and major Hollywood studios have adopted the technology, which produces wider ranges of colour and contrast.

Even though the number of pixels that can be captured in films has exploded, “we found something was missing everywhere: contrast”, Bowling said.

“Adding more contrast makes a significant impact on the image; it looks sharper, more vibrant, more colour-saturated and then almost 3D,” he added.

The difference becomes clear watching two high-definition televisions side-by-side.

With Dolby Vision, details jump out in a “Lego” movie scene showing car headlights, or during an explosion in “Man of Steel”, while they are crushed or blurred in the standard version of the films.

Industry standard

Dolby Laboratories was founded half a century ago by its namesake, Ray Dolby who set out to develop technology for fuller, cleaner, crisper sound.

One of the company’s early creations was noise reduction technology that made its cinema debut in the 1971 film “A Clockwork Orange”.

Dolby went on to become a de facto standard for audio quality in films, music, theatres and consumer electronics.

Now with its new Dolby Vision technology, it is setting the bar for image quality as well.

To make sure images come out well in theatres, Dolby uses a special projector with lasers rather than traditional Xenon lightbulbs to increase brightness.

This results in intense, nearly fluorescent reds, blues and greens in such films as “Inside Out”.

Dolby Vision imbues movies with “much brighter brights and much darker darks”, according to chief marketing officer Bob Borchers.

“It allows you to do things impossible before,” such as deep black in space scenes from the latest “Star Wars” film, Borchers said.

Dolby Cinema works with theatres on everything from acoustics and interior design to Vision projection gear. It also sets up its Atmos speaker systems which assign sounds to precise locations in a room, creating a real-life effect.

Theatre screens in Europe and the United States have been equipped with Dolby Cinema, and the technology is heading for theatres in China through a partnership with the country’s Wanda Cinema Line.

Dolby has even begun to offer its services for corporate meetings with a product called Voice, which builds upon technology that it designed for the movies.

Voice creates the effect of different people on a call speaking from different places in a room and eliminates background noises.

Dolby revenue was essentially flat at $967 million during its last fiscal year, which ended in September, but the company expects its conference and cinema businesses to add $20 million to its revenue this fiscal year.

Barrington Research analyst James Goss referred to Vision, Atmos and Voice as “potential stepping stones to returning to meaningful top-line growth”.

NUREMBERG, Germany — Colouring books for grown-ups may be the new lifestyle craze, promising ways to combat stress, unleash our creative spirit and generally take time out from our increasingly tech-frazzled, gadget-obsessed lives. 

But for the makers of crayons and colour pencils, the trend also poses a fundamental strategic question: is the current boom in demand just a passing fad or is it a new sustainable trend?

“I dream about crayons at night,” says Andreas Martin, who manages a factory of the manufacturer Staedtler in Nuremberg, southern Germany.

Staedtler is a small family-run firm employing a workforce of around 2,000 and has seen demand for some of its coloured pencils explode, more or less overnight. 

“These are models we’ve been making for years and demand always chugged along unspectacularly,” Martin said. 

“But then all of a sudden, we weren’t able to manufacture enough. It’s incredible.” 

Just behind him, a machine spits out yellow ink pens at a rate of around 6,000 per hour. Another next to it is currently programmed to produce orange ones.

On the next floor down, finished crayons in a kaleidoscope of different colours are packed into boxes of 20 or 36 for shipping to the United States, Britain or South Korea. 

Those are the countries at the centre of the current adult colouring craze, said Staedtler chief, Axel Marx. 

In the USA, nine colouring books are currently among the top 20 best-selling products on Amazon. 

A slice of the cake

Gradually “we’re seeing a similar development in European countries, too”, said Horst Brinkmann, head of marketing and sales at rival Stabilo Schwan, which makes fluorescent marker pens and coloured pencils as well. 

All the players in the sector are keen to get a slice of the cake. Stabilo has launched a set of crayons and book with spring motifs. Swiss upmarket maker Caran d’Ache has published its own colouring book of Alpine scenes. 

Without revealing any figures, Brinkmann said Stabilo’s sales of crayons had risen by more than 10 per cent while the colouring craze enabled Staedtler to lift its sales by 14 per cent last year to 322 million euros ($350 million). 

“That’s remarkable, in this age of digitalisation,” said Marx.

But the hype also constitutes something of a headache for factory chief Martin. 

“No-one knows how long it will last,” he admits.

“We need to strike a balance”, so as to know much to sensibly invest to be able to ride the wave, while still keeping in mind that the trend could vanish as quickly as it started. 

“At the moment, we’re making use of adjustable working hours,” adding shifts, say, at night or on Saturday mornings. In addition to the 350 regular employees, the factory had taken on around 30 temporary workers. 

But ultimately, the decision is whether to invest the 300,000 euros needed for a new machine. 

Fundamental trend?

Staedtler is ready to stump up the cash, with the hope that “if the market falls again, we can use the machines for different types of products”, Martin said. 

But rival makers are betting on the durability of the new trend. 

At Caran d’Ache, “we have invested in production equipment and extended working hours”, said President Carole Hubscher. 

The company sets great store by being a “Swiss Made” brand and “there is no question of relocating to boost production,” she said. 

Hubscher is convinced that writing and drawing “won’t disappear”.

And “our growth targets are not solely built on trends”, she argued. 

Stabilo’s Brinkmann insisted that adult colouring “is part of a fundamental and universal trend towards slowing down”. 

Nevertheless, “it’s important to continue to innovate in this area” to maintain market momentum, he said, pointing to the new “fashion within a fashion” of “Zentangling” or drawing images using structured patterns. 

Staedtler chief Marx is more fatalistic, saying that a trend such as colouring is not predictable. 

“But we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it’ll continue,” he said. 

AMULREE, United Kingdom — Tam O’Braan has had several lives. Having been a soldier, an agronomist and an entrepreneur, he now grows tea in the foothills of the Scottish Highlands, and is the envy of those who once called him crazy.

Four years since he began growing tea at Dalreoch, a former sheep farm close to the small Scottish village of Amulree, the Irishman saw his tea crowned a winner at the Salon de The Awards in Paris last year.

Now O’Braan sells his tea in luxury stores like Mariage Freres in Paris where it goes for 78 euros for 20 grammes and London’s Fortnum & Mason, where it brings £40 (51 euros, $57) for 20 grammes, as well as to famous hotels like The Dorchester.

“My neighbours thought I was mad,” O’Braan said.

“We were told categorically by people who have been working in the tea industry for 30, 40 years, that it couldn’t be done.”

Scottish 19th century botanist Robert Fortune had already shown it was possible to grow tea in Scotland but his project failed due to having the wrong plants.

Determined not to make the same mistake, O’Braan imported tea trees that grew in the foothills of the Himalayas (Camellia sinensis sinensis), before adapting them to the Scottish climate.

The plant seeds, which are similar to small nuts, are germinated outside before the plants are grown in a small unheated greenhouse.

“Those plants who originally started on the foothills of the Himalayas, that can deal with snow, are even stronger,” O’Braan said.

Revolutionary tea?

Once the tea plants have adjusted, Scotland has proved to be an ideal place for them to grow, with its fog, high rainfall, hilly landscape and rich soil.

“It’s well accepted among tea experts that the finest teas in Darjeeling or Assam come from areas which are shrouded in clouds for the majority of the year,” O’Braan said.

“Also because the plants are in what many would consider to be an unnatural environment, we’re producing a certain amount of chemical stress within the leaf. That’s responsible for the rather sweet flavour that our tea produces.”

The harvest, which is currently beginning and will continue until September, collects the youngest leaves for white tea and rougher leaves for green and black tea.

Dalreoch Estate tea is the first white tea whose leaves are smoke dried, making it “revolutionary and unique”, according to Mariage Freres.

In the Habitat cafe in the village of Amulree close to Dalreoch, owner Mike Haggerton offers sceptical customers free samples of the teas.

“We give a little bit to our clients and the reaction is never been anything other than ‘this is incredible’,” Haggerton said.

“There is the potential for so much more great tea to come out of Scotland.”

Scottish tea growers

In 2015, O’Braan produced 500 kilos of tea from his 14,000 plants and founded the Scottish Tea Growers Association in a bid to be more recognised in a land better known for its whisky.

Ten people have joined him, creating small tea plantations of about 1,000 plants each in places like the Isle of Mull and the Lowlands.

O’Braan hopes that there will be 28 tea growing sites in Scotland by 2017.

“From the same tea plant you can make 300 different types of tea. So there’s no reason why my neighbours should look to manufacture the same as I’m doing,” O’Braan said.

“In fact we should all diversify and make different types of tea.”

“We’re not going to replant Scotland. It’s always going to be boutique, artisan tea,” he said.

Members of the association can use a small tea processing plant that O’Braan is setting up on his farm.

The production of Dalreoch itself is sold out for the next four years, according to O’Braan — meaning there should be plenty of business to go around.

We use WhatsApp and we depend on it so much that we easily forget that only seven years ago it was not here at all. Even by IT standards this is an incredibly fast evolution, an unprecedented change in computing habits. Facebook, the owner since 2014 of the amazing instant messenger service, claims a little more than 1 billion users. We believe that.

Instant messaging (IM) with smartphones is now almost as frequently used as the voice phone part in your handset. The functionality and the convenience far exceed what the “traditional” SMS service that your mobile phone provider typically offers. When it comes to exchanging short messages, which is quickly becoming our favourite way to communicate, IM often beats e-mail, taking precedence over it. By including text, photos, video and audio, and by making everything a breeze and providing convenient feedback about the delivery of the messages, WhatsApp does an almost perfect job, nice and easy. 

Even if the leader in terms of community size, WhatsApp is not the only such service. Skype Messenger, Viber, Tango, Hangouts and also are widely used and very popular systems. Skype Messenger for one presents the advantage of working across a wider variety of platforms, including full-size Windows 7, 8 and 10 computers. WhatsApp on the other hand doesn’t work on these versions of Windows; it only works on mobile Windows (tablets and phones).

If WhatsApp is — for now — the undisputed king, Telegram, the newcomer and the brainchild of Russian Nikolai Durov, brings with it one advantage that may prove to be not negligible at all. Messages on Telegram can be safely encrypted and, therefore, cannot be hacked, forwarded or intercepted. It won’t even reside on Telegram servers. This is unique, a feature unseen in the field.

Telegram already has 100 million users. Though it is but one-tenth of WhatsApp, it is still impressive by any measure. And the users base of growing very fast.

Now why on earth should you want to encrypt a short message? There can be many reasons for that, especially if it’s a business text, not just a casual question you are asking your friend or a message to tell your spouse you’re going to be late for lunch. Perhaps Telegram precisely is targeting businesses. In my line of work we often need to send IMs including sensitive passwords for computers and servers. Telegram can prove to be handy in such cases.

Many argue that given the flabbergasting number of users on these networks, typically in the hundreds of millions when not in billions, who really is going to eavesdrop on your messaging? Who has the time to do it and who do you think is interested in your personal chats? Even if spying is done randomly, the chance that your messaging be intercepted is virtually zero. On the other hand, if you are specifically targeted, for one reason or another, “they” will manage to read you anyway, whatever your messaging service or security mode.

I recently installed Telegram on my smartphone, adding it to the already installed
WhatsApp and Skype. Whereas Skype behaves a bit differently, the first two are neck and neck in terms of speed, convenience and functionality, albeit with slightly different settings, again with Telegram featuring the unique “secret chat” thing. If you need this level of confidentiality Telegram is unmatched for now. And to think that all these IM services are free, truly free, without even insidious ads or annoying pop up notifications and reminders to subscribe.

Compared to WhatsApp, Telegram and the like, the old, basic SMS system that comes with your phone seems like an antiquated system, though it is still used, especially by banks and other formal services that need to send you official notifications. We probably need them all.

It is better to give a statutory warning at the beginning of this write-up: playing “social sweethearts” games on Facebook can be highly addictive. They can also be surprisingly informative because as soon as you click on their one line questionnaire, you discover things about yourself that were previously unknown. Even to your own self! 

I have learnt, for instance, that my birthstone is turquoise, I have been reincarnated 84,000 and 47 times, the profession that I was born to do is bartending, 99 per cent of the people I know envy my composure, my three lovable flaws are that I am impatient, lazy and stubborn, I have 180 secret admirers, my rainbow colour is yellow and my favourite four-letter word is “from”.  

From? What sort of a favourite four-letter word is that? It was exactly at this point of the game that I smelled foul play. I mean, of all four lettered words in the world, like, care, dare, fair, bear, dark, bark, lark, mark, take, bake, make, cake, lust, must, bust, dust, ahem, even, oven, amen, why pick “from?” I should have stopped playing these puerile games immediately. But you know how it is with flawed stubborn personalities. I became more and more curious. 

Therefore, I soon discovered that I was an active and humorous person. But wait a minute; was I not labelled lazy earlier? Maybe it meant that I was actively lazy, or in fact, lazily active? Further, heartwise I was 29 years of age but my face was that of a 15-year old. Gosh! If only “social sweethearts” had seen me at age fifteen! With braces on my teeth and thick bushy and unruly eyebrows, that was one phase I did not ever want to revisit in my life. I was losing hope when so many things were being predicted wrongly so quite listlessly I clicked the query that asked me “where would you be in one year?”

What was revealed cheered me up. “You are going straight to the top” I was told. The window that opened had my Facebook display picture perched on the uppermost hill of very picturesque scenery, which had a dark blue river snaking its way around a valley. “The image stands for your private life and your career because you will reach the peak of the mountain. Your dreams will come true and you will be completely happy and fulfilled. Your friends and family can feel this joy and will do anything to support you! Wow!” I read out. 

“Wow!” echoed the voice in my head. I suddenly got a newfound respect for the writers of “social sweethearts”. They undoubtedly knew how to engage a most reluctant player into their game. If I carried on playing for some more time there was no doubt that I would start believing in all this balderdash. But before banning myself from further play I decided to click on one last question that informed me about the type of woman I was.

“I am a role model, you know,” I beamed at my husband in the evening.

“For whom?” my spouse asked.

“For others and I’m going straight to the top,” I told him. 

“From where?” he wanted to know.

“Is ‘from’ my favourite four-letter word?” I cut in. 

“No,” he replied.

“What is it then?” I was curious.

“It’s similar sounding”, he twinkled.

“Form?” I guessed.

“Firm,” he stated.