Features

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday proclaimed the successful test of a wide-winged, solar-powered drone built to deliver wireless Internet service to remote spots.

The test flight of a drone prototype dubbed “Aquila” took place in Britain and was considered a milestone in an Internet.org project to bring online access to billions more people around the planet.

“Aircraft like these will help connect the whole world because they can affordably serve the 10 per cent of the world’s population that live in remote communities without existing Internet infrastructure,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook timeline.

The unpiloted aerial vehicle, or drone, has a wingspan greater than that of a Boeing 737 passenger jet and weighs about as much as a small car, Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told a packed audience at the recent social network’s annual gathering of developers in San Francisco.

“The idea is to loiter over an area for months at a time and beam down Internet service,” Schroepfer said.

Drones powered by the sun will fly at altitudes of 18,250 metres or higher and be able to remain aloft for months, according to Zuckerberg.

Schroepfer estimated that anywhere from one billion to three billion people lack access to the Internet that most of those attending the developers conference likely took for granted.

Connecting everyone to the Internet is one of the core challenges Facebook intends to tackle in coming years, according to Schroepfer.

Adding ‘teleportation’, services

He laid out a Facebook vision of efficient, massive data centres to provide online services to all of those people, along with making computers smart enough to help deal with the inevitable overload of information flooding the Internet.

Facebook made an artificial intelligence “memory network” breakthrough on a path to getting machines to recognise images or videos and give context to words, according to Schroepfer.

Facebook’s future includes conceptually teleporting social network users with virtual reality technology from Oculus, which the California company bought last year in a deal valued at $2 billion.

The latest version Oculus headgear, called Crescent Bay, was being shown off at the gathering.

“Virtual reality is potentially world changing and incredibly cool and it is really happening,” Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash told developers at the gathering.

“Sooner or later, you will want to be a part of it.”

Abrash said that Oculus would begin shipping virtual reality headgear in quantity “before too long”.

He predicted that, over time, virtual reality will incorporate body movements, nearby objects, and users’ environments.

“A lot of important pieces are not in place yet, but all that will get figured out,” Abrash said.

Getting developers to build fun, hip, or functional applications for devices or platforms is seen as crucial to success in markets.

Other virtual reality gear is in the works from Japanese electronics giant Sony, while Valve and Taiwan-based smartphone maker HTC are working together on Vive virtual reality headgear.

South Korean consumer electronics titan Samsung is fielding Gear VR headsets powered by Oculus technology.

COPENHAGEN — As hopes fade for a commodities boom in Greenland there is growing concern that an exodus of young people could cripple the economy of a territory already facing an uncertain outlook.

"People come down here to study and then they become so rooted that it's difficult to go back again," said Angunguak Egede, a 28-year-old Greenlander working as an office clerk for the Copenhagen municipality.

Together with a group of friends, Egede left home in 2004 for Denmark, Greenland's former colonial master and some 4,000 kilometres away, because "it was just the thing to do".

Danish cities offered a "fast-paced" lifestyle many young Greenlanders have only seen on the Internet, and seemingly endless options for recreational activities compared to home: The remote territory's first public swimming pool opened in 2003, five years after Coca Cola became available.

"If you go to the cinema in Nuuk, the capital, you have one option," Egede said in a bustling Copenhagen coffeeshop.

The same goes for the number of jobs available and higher education. "In general there is just much more to choose from in Denmark," he said.

Over the past 25 years Greenland has had an average annual net emigration of 500 people, many of whom are young and well educated.

With a population of just 55,000 and widespread social problems, it is an exodus the Arctic territory can scarcely afford, as a 2012 survey found that 62 per cent of 16 to 18-year olds had dropped out of school.

Greenland Prime Minister Kim Kielsen told AFP that there "should be no doubt that we want our young back to Greenland after an education in Denmark or abroad”.

To that end, financial aid has been made available to help them repay student loans if they return, and Greenland job fairs held in Denmark's major cities, he said in an e-mail.

But there are many like Egede.

Twisting a single polar bear claw that he wears around his neck, Egede said he wants to move back to Nuuk at some point. He just doesn't know when.

'Death gap'

A 2009 agreement allows Greenland to secede from Denmark completely, but to do that it needs to wean itself off an annual 3.6 billion kroner (483 million euros, $526 million) subsidy from Copenhagen, representing more than half of the home rule government's budget.

Adding to its problems is what observers call "the death gap" — a widening chasm between a shrinking economy and the rising cost of an ageing population.

Kielsen's predecessor Aleqa Hammond, who had to step down in September following a corruption scandal, had promised economic independence from Denmark based on exploitation of the territory's oil and mineral riches, but the plunging price of commodities has put a damper on those plans.

The territory's unemployment rate, twice that of Denmark's at around 10 per cent, mostly affects unskilled workers and there is demand for those with an education in some sectors, Kielsen said.

However, he admitted that if the economy continued to deteriorate it could eventually lead to even higher emigration.

"But that is currently not believed to be the case," he said.

But Torben Andersen, an economics professor and the head of the Economic Council of Greenland, said there was already "an element of brain draining”.

The most common reason for Greenlanders to move to Denmark was to pursue an education not available at home, followed by those moving for jobs, he said.

"Up until now we have seen that emigration patterns mirror economic development," he added.

 No future 

Thomas Johansen, a 28-year old engineering student in Copenhagen from the western Greenland town of Ilulissat, said many young Greenlanders in Denmark felt "a certain responsibility to give something back to Greenland" but that at the same time "there are better opportunities abroad”.

"I think it's a problem. I think there is a brain drain," he said.

Naja Motzfeldt, a 28-year-old management student, said that after her studies she planned to go back to the southern town of Qaqortoq with a population of just 3,200.

"I know a few people who plan to stay here. They don't see any future in returning to Greenland," she said.

But as much as jobs it was the Danish lifestyle that was keeping them from returning, with Greenland sometimes feeling "very small", she added.

"Everyone knows each other and rumours spread quickly. Things can also get a bit boring, you can't just drive from one town to the next like in Denmark. You have to sail or fly," she said.

As for herself, she said any culture shock upon returning from the Danish capital would be manageable.

"Creative people never get bored," she said.

WASHINGTON — When three buildings collapsed and ignited a blaze in New York on Thursday, a smartphone app brought the live video feed to anyone online wanting to watch.

The disaster took place, coincidentally, the same day as the launch of Twitter’s new livestream app Periscope, which became a window for the breaking news event.

The event showed how Periscope and rival app Meerkat, which can deliver live video through Twitter to anyone online, could become an important tool for citizen journalism.

By feeding live video through Twitter to anyone online, these apps eliminate the need to upload to YouTube or transfer to broadcasters like CNN to get a wide audience.

While social media has empowered citizen journalism for years, the use of live video could become a powerful tool for these reporters and change the way people get news.

“It’s not just that you can upload your video, but you can upload it to the social network, which is vastly more powerful than the Web because of that network of relationships and the virality,” said Jeff Howe, a Northeastern University professor who specialises in media innovation.

“This offer a great advantage to citizen journalists.”

Howe said some earlier streaming video applications like Bambuser helped spread information during the Arab Spring and Occupy protests, but that he sees “a more real-time, immediacy aspect” to the new apps like Meerkat and Periscope.

Unexpected events

Dan Gillmor, an Arizona State University journalism professor and author of a book on citizen journalism, agreed that these easily used tools can raise the profile for citizen journalism.

“When something newsworthy is happening where it is unexpected, the odds that a professional journalist holding a camera or video camera are small. But the odds that a regular person will be there are close to 100 per cent.”

The New York fire highlighted the potential for these tools, Gillmor said, but some situations could be even more dramatic.

“Suppose we had real-time video from someone who was in the front of that [Germanwings] plane [which crashed] over the Alps, showing us a video of the captain trying to get into the cockpit,” Gillmor told AFP.

“We would have a much more graphic and quite terrifying understanding of what happened.”

Although technology for live streaming has been available for years, the widespread use of smartphones, improved networks and the integration with Twitter could make these tools more potent, analysts say.

“There’s nothing quite like live video to put people in the moment when it comes to breaking news,” said Josh Stearns, who follows citizen journalism at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

And Stearns said the apps offer a “more intimate connection” because “they allow people to interact, to ask questions, to get a different view. They aren’t just passively watching.”

Meerkat, which debuted in February, and newly launched Periscope both offer live streaming, while only the latter allows the footage to be archived for later use.

After Meerkat’s spectacular launch, Twitter limited access to its network to make it harder to spread through the microblogging service. But Meerkat appeared unfazed and unveiled a fresh $14 million in funds to fuel expansion.

Human rights tool?

The Periscope team hinted at possibilities for journalistic use of the platform, with a blog saying, “What if you could see through the eyes of a protester in Ukraine?”

A key question is whether the growth in live smartphone video will shed fresh light on key events, such as shootings involving police in the United States or human rights abuses in totalitarian countries.

“It would have been helpful to have footage of the Ferguson shooting,” Howe said of the Missouri killing of unarmed black youth Michael Brown which sparked national protests.

An open question is whether these new technologies will help the flow of information in countries with repressive regimes such as North Korea and Cuba.

Gillmor said he believes that activists who stream live video from one of these countries would be “dumb, given that mobile networks are either part of the government or intertwined with it”.

But Howe said the technology will eventually bring more abuses to light, “because it’s going to become harder to shut down the information flow”.

NEW YORK — With a voice that soars to startling highs and an ease in taking new roles, tenor Bryan Hymel has quickly found himself in the league of top opera stars — and is pushing full speed ahead.

The 35-year-old New Orleans native recently released a first solo album titled “Heroique”, in which he devotes his robust yet expressive voice to valiant arias from the French opera tradition.

Hymel demonstrates the power of his instrument on “Heroique” with his mastery of high Cs — the prized note at the top of a tenor’s range, which was famously associated with the late Luciano Pavarotti.

Over a 73-minute album, Hymel hits no fewer than 19 high Cs — and goes even further with two high C-sharps and, on Meyerbeer’s “L’Africaine”, a high D.

The album, released by Warner Classics, marks a bold prediction that Hymel can prove to be a hit outside the doors of opera houses as few opera singers — and even fewer of them Americans — achieve commercial success through CD sales.

Hymel has kept a hectic schedule. Switching to Italian, he is performing “La Boheme” this month at the Dallas Opera and will take a short break in April when he expects his second child with his wife, Greek soprano Irini Kyriakidou.

“Every direction in my life right now is going 100 kilometres an hour,” Hymel told AFP with a hearty laugh.

Dramatic Met debut

Hymel, a jovial man who sports a tidy beard, achieved the sort of heroics he usually portrays on stage when, in late 2012, he made his professional debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with literally a moment’s notice.

He had just finished a production at London’s Royal Opera House when the Met offered him the starring role of Aeneas in Berlioz’s epic “Les Troyens” — and booked him on a flight the following morning.

Hymel — who had previously played the role, known for its challenging range, in London — rehearsed just once with the New York cast on Christmas Eve before going live and winning a lengthy ovation.

“It was a hell of a way to make a Met debut,” Hymel said.

The opera, based on Virgil’s epic poem about the Trojan hero, has become Hymel’s defining work. He sings from it on his album and will perform “Les Troyens” again on stage in June at the San Francisco Opera.

“This time I’ve had months to know it’s coming,” Hymel said.

Singing, not speaking, French

Raised in the birthplace of jazz, Hymel didn’t grow up with opera and started as a musician with the trumpet. But teachers encouraged him to sing — at first, because braces made playing brass instruments difficult.

Instructors at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia turned him on to French arias, which he discovered “fit me in a real specific way” as compared with Italian opera.

Hymel recorded “Heroique” with the Prague Philharmonic under French conductor Emmanuel Villaume. The album revolves around the theme of heroism and combines both classics — Verdi, Rossini, Berlioz — with works of comparatively obscure composers such as Alfred Bruneau.

“I think you have to split the difference between what is marketable and what is also equally artistic,” he said.

Despite his growing reputation as a master of French opera, Hymel said that he only speaks basic French. Hymel said that his French singing coach had actually discouraged him.

“He thinks that if I get too used to the way people say it, if that bleeds into my singing, it will no longer be as free and as clear as it was, because I would then be cognizant of the fact that people don’t really speak it that way,” Hymel said.

“I don’t know if I agree or disagree with him, but I have to take his word for it,” he said.

Hymel will make his debut at the Paris Opera in December with Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust”.

Hymel said he was beyond the point in his career of experiencing stage fright — and he has performed before other French audiences, including at the new Philharmonie de Paris. But he is still extra cautious in France.

“As an American, a non-native speaker, I know that my French has to be as good as humanly possible,” he said. “But mostly, I see this as an honour.”

DECEPTION ISLAND, Antarctica — Deep below the ice, far from the playful penguins and other animals that bring tourists to Antarctica, is a cold and barren world that by all indications should be completely void of life.

But recently, scientists researching melting ice watched a 15-centimetre-long fish swim by. Not long after that, they saw shrimp-like creatures.

In even more remote places on the continent, areas that haven’t been exposed to sunlight for millions of years, scientists found a surprise right out of an alien movie: the DNA of a microscopic creature that looks like a combination of a bear, manatee and centipede.

Life that is simultaneously normal and weird, simple and complex thrives in this extreme environment. To the scientists who brave the cold and remoteness to find life amid the ice, it’s a source of surprise and wonder. For extreme life experts, it’s a testimony to the power of evolution.

“It really shows how tenacious life is,” said Reed Scherer, a micropaleontology professor at Northern Illinois University. “The possibilities are just beyond our prediction.”

Scientists look at creatures found in harsh Antarctica and ask: If life can survive here, why not on Mars or one of the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn where water lurks beneath the frozen surface? Maybe we aren’t alone.

Certainly not here.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to look around and see how extreme this environment is,” biochemist Jenny Blamey said, pointing to the black, volcanic rock covered by ice all around her on Deception Island. She wore a red parka with a black hood that was blown by the hard wind. While she spoke, her glasses fogged up and droplets of rain gathered on them.

“This is really like a desert, where you have extreme low temperatures,” said Blamey, research director at the Biosciences Foundation in Chile who is studying the genetic material of microorganisms, essentially microbes that can’t be seen.

Deception Island is a volcanic crater off the Antarctic Peninsula that used to be a refuge for whalers at the turn of the 20th century. It was evacuated many years ago after a handful of eruptions. Yet it is a garden compared to the spot where Ross Powell stopped to talk.

Powell had trekked across a separate part of the vast continent, hundreds of kilometres away from any buildings or research post, in a National Science Foundation mobile base camp. Speaking by satellite phone at the armpit edge of the Ross Ice Shelf in January, the professor from Northern Illinois University described what he and colleagues saw when they stuck a remote-controlled submarine more than half a kilometre under the ice to look at the leading underground edge of one of Antarctica’s melting ice sheets.

It is an area of total darkness, 1,000 kilometres from the nearest ocean and with just 9 metres of liquid water under the ice. The water is -2oC, but the saltiness keeps it from freezing.

Scientists turned on the cameras and were astonished to see a fish, thin and almost translucent, darting around and at times seeming to be playing peekaboo with the camera. Orange-shelled creatures called amphipods also drifted by.

When the scientists in the makeshift control room on the ice first saw the fish, they “started screaming and yelling and clapping”, Powell said.

By the time a couple of days had passed, Scherer said the fish had become so common that “we got to the point of, ‘Oh, there’s another fish,’ instead of, ‘Oh my God! There’s a fish!’”

As a joke, someone had brought a fish cage from New Zealand. But now it was no joke. The scientists tried to catch a fish using a giant net attached to the submarine’s camera system and making leftovers out of bait from the previous night’s supper.

They never caught a fish, but they did nab some of the amphipods. Still, Scherer, who loves seafood, wasn’t tempted to nibble. “I thought they smelled kind of baity,” he said.

Powell and Scherer are now trying to figure out where the animals came from and, even more importantly, where they get the food to survive.

The search for life has also taken scientists to Lake Vostok, considered the most remote place on Earth. The mostly freshwater lake is buried under 3.7 kilometres of ice, and hasn’t been near open air for 15 million years.

A couple of years ago, scientists took water samples from the lake and tested them for traces of life. They found genetic sequences for 3,507 recognisable species as well as about 10,000 species not yet known to science, said Scott Rogers, a professor of microbiology at Bowling Green State University, who worked on the study.

“It seems like most of [the species] were alive recently” and not fossils from thousands of years ago, Rogers said.

About 94 per cent of the species they could identify were bacterial, essentially simple microbial life. But there were also fungi and even a couple of genetic traces of microscopic animals. That included DNA from tardigrades, also known as water bears, the tiny creatures that look like one-eyed extraterrestrial grizzlies when seen under an electron microscope. There were even indications that there might be small fish elsewhere in the chilly lake.

When unexpected creatures are found under the ice, “you start to wonder if that couldn’t happen on an icy moon or exoplanet”, said Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer and director of the Institute for Pale Blue Dots at Cornell University.

AMMAN — Decorative yet functional, ornate yet minimalistic, imaginative and highly artistic are some attributes one can tag on Katia Al Tal’s works on display at Wadi Finan Gallery.

Originally a sculptor, it came easy and normal to Tal to work with clay and produce the “Nuwa Creations” ceramics series, pure of colour and line, delicate but sturdy and surprisingly sculptural for such practical everyday objects.

Using German clay, “the best”, Tal simply glazes it, maintaining its white purity. 

Hollowing the objects to create beautiful calligraphic patterns, mostly sunbuli, inspired by the script in the book “The ring of the dove”, by Ibn Hazm, the artist creates airy, sensual, mysterious and elegant objects that seem to radiate light even when they are not specifically created for that purpose, like the lamps.

Random letters meet in fluid, graceful and artistic calligraphy; they combine to form lacy ornamental pieces. 

At times, black lettering is used by way of decoration, as is gold, sparingly on objects but covering entirely some elongated hugging silhouettes, perhaps hinting at rich, giving love.

“Nuwa” means core in Arabic, or love of some sorts. The theme of the exhibition, if one wishes to find one, is largely love. But the lying stylised bodies could also denote death and sensuality, togetherness and oneness, serenity or passion.

“The human body,” says the artist, “is the most beautiful thing, especially when it is in harmony with its environment and itself”.

The often playful, sensual bodies hanging head down, with legs in the air, are decorative objects in themselves, but could also become practical objects and serve as hangers of sorts, for jewellery, for a tie, a scarf or a belt.

Supplicant hands that come in pairs, as hands should, make for graceful sculptures in themselves, but can also work as support for light things or turn out to be lamps emitting light through the cut out intricate letters.

The two mysterious objects that project beautifully against their background — white ceramic letters meeting at odd angles overlaid with black writing are a surprise discovery: they serve as teapot and milk jug, two highly artistic functional articles one would hesitate before using for the purpose they were created for.

Surprises are aplenty for, besides the clearly serviceable, classic, tea or coffee cups or pots, and saucers, lamps or multipurpose bowls, one is delighted to discover torsos bending in a strange embrace serving as a tray, a woman’s bent body as a bowl for nuts or hugging figures as a candle holder. 

Two willowy stylised silhouettes, objets d’art in themselves, “hide” coasters that after use, puzzle like, will require careful attention to restore.

It is up to the users’ imagination to “interpret” the objects and use them accordingly — if they have the heart to. 

Sculptural and aesthetic, multifunctional and decorative, and, above all, creative, Tal’s works find appreciation with a wide range of consumers.

Her creations are in private collections, but also in the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar. They can please a household but also the most exigent art critic.

The works can be seen until April 13.

Is it the end of acquiring and using software by buying and paying for licences the traditional way? It may well be.

If you are following the trend and are happily keeping up with IT terminology then Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) should now be part of your vocabulary. More than just the acronym, what lies behind it is a very interesting concept that is gaining ground each day that passes. It is slowly but surely, radically shaping the way we will be dealing with software applications and programmes in the near and distant future.

SaaS actually is nothing but one of the aspects of working online across network, and in the cloud more particularly, the greatest network of them all. Essentially we do two things in the cloud, we store our data that consists of digital files of various types (documents, multimedia, etc.), and we run software that is not installed on the very computer or mobile device we are using, but in the cloud. The implications and the advantages are many and are significant. Naturally, there are also a few trade-offs that go with all that.

Adobe and Microsoft, to name only two of the big players, already offer SaaS. Instead of buying a licence that lets you legally install and use software on your computer, such as Photoshop, Windows or Office, you pay a “service” or subscription fee to the owner of the product (Adobe, Photoshop, etc.) and then can use it by accessing it from your computer over the web.

Advantages are many and are significant. You never have to worry about doing the necessary but so tedious updates or losing sleep about making backup copies. They do it for you, online, silently, transparently and professionally. This is priceless.

The trade-off? You need a fast and reliable Internet connection otherwise, well, you just can’t do much or your work leads you to frustration. More importantly, you end up pay good money for the service. Microsoft’s online Office 365 service through SaaS, as great and convenient as it may be, is not cheap. The typical subscription to the service is $7 per month and per machine for home use. For office use it is $10 instead of $7. Given that the price of the traditional licence you would buy for a local installation is about $450, this means that over a period of a little more than three years what you would have paid for Office 365 is equal to that of a full licence to install it locally on your computer. But again, with Office 365 you always have the latest, the newest copy of the software application.

Adobe’s online services are more or less comparable to Microsoft’s. For personal use, the celebrated Photoshop will cost you $10 per month per machine, and for business use a good $20. The company proposes an interesting bundle for its suite of products (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) for $30 per month.

Current prices are just not enough to encourage the vast majority of us to move to SaaS subscriptions and give up traditional licence buying. If Office 365 or Photoshop were say $5 per month each, per machine and for business, not home use (i.e. 50 per cent less than the current rate), I would not hesitate. For now I have adopted a “wait and see” attitude. I expect and I hope that prices will soon go down in a noticeable manner.

Adding up even if only the essential applications you need in your daily computing can easily reach $100 to $150 per month. Again, this is per machine! Won’t you rather buy real licences once and for all?

If the trend certainly is going up unabated, another thing is sure: we will keep paying for software significant money, one way or another. More than ever the prediction of the late 1990s is confirmed: soon the price of the machines will be nothing compared to that of software and services.

Besides, even buying traditional licences has always been some form of service and was never ownership. The developer has always been the owner of the product granting the user the simple right-to-use through the license, not the ownership. What SaaS is doing is merely changing the service from one that is locally installed on your computer to one that is delivered to you in the cloud. Not necessarily a bad thing.

PARIS — Humans have long been fascinated by chameleons changing colour to dazzle mates, scare rivals and confuse predators.

Scientists said they uncovered the mechanism of the feat, and that the results of their investigation astounded them.

Rather than use pigments to switch colour, nanocrystals in the lizards’ skin are tuned to alter the reflection of light, they found.

“We were surprised,” Michel Milinkovitch, a biologist at the University of Geneva told AFP.

“It was thought they were changing colour through... pigments. The real mechanism is totally different and involves a physical process,” he added.

Colour-switching in chameleons is the preserve of males.

They use it to make themselves more flamboyant to attract mates and frighten off challengers, or duller to evade predators.

The mature panther chameleon used in the study, for example, can change the background colour of its skin from green to yellow or orange, while blue patches turn whitish and then back again.

Skin analysis revealed that the change is regulated by transparent nano-objects called photonic crystals found in a layer of cells dubbed iridophores, which lie just below the chameleon’s pigment cells.

Iridophores are also found in other reptiles and amphibians like frogs, giving them the green and blue colours rarely found in other vertebrates.

In chameleons, however, nanocrystal lattices within the iridophores can be “tuned” to change the way light is reflected, the university said in a statement.

“When the chameleon is calm, the latter [crystals] are organised into a dense network and reflect the blue wavelengths” of incoming light, it said.

“In contrast, when excited, it loosens its lattice of nanocrystals, which allows the reflection of other colours such as yellows or reds.”

The team used biopsies of chameleon skin, pre- and post-excitement, combined with optical microscopy and high-resolution videography to study the phenomenon.

They also discovered that chameleons have a second, deeper layer of iridophore cells.

These contain “larger and less ordered” crystals that reflect infrared wavelengths from strong sunlight — in essence, a clever heat shield.

“The organisation of iridophores in two superimposed layers constitute an evolutionary novelty,” the team said.

“It allows chameleons to rapidly shift between efficient camouflage and spectacular display, while providing passive thermal protection.”

NEW YORK — In America, businessmen shake hands. In Japan, they bow. But all over the world airline executives engage in a greeting that is all their own: the exchange of model airplanes.

When airlines start flying to new cities, make deals with other carriers or finance new jets, these high-quality models — typically one to two feet long — provide the perfect photo backdrop, can help break the ice or serve as a cherished “thank you”.

While a business card might be quickly stuffed away in some desk drawer, models remain prominently displayed on the desk of politicians and industry power brokers. Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García-Padilla, has models from JetBlue, Lufthansa, Avianca and local airline Seaborne in his office. Each has established or expanded service to the island since his 2013 inauguration.

“It’s one of these gifts that people get and don’t put in the closet,” says Jeff Knittel, who oversees aircraft leasing for financier CIT Group Inc.

European aircraft manufacturer Airbus took in 1,456 passenger plane orders from 67 airlines around the world last year. It also placed 30,000 of its own orders — for model Airbus jets.

Multimillion-dollar plane purchases are decided on the fuel efficiency of a jet, its maintenance costs, how much cargo it holds and how far it can fly. However, desktop models help start the conversation, says Chris Jones, the vice president of North American sales for Airbus.

“Putting a model on the table won’t sway a deal but it might get their attention,” Jones says. After the sales pitch, the model is left behind for the most-senior person. “It’s a little bit of a teaser.”

The tradition of exchanging model planes has been around for decades. Walk through the headquarters of any airline and rows of models — including those of competitors — can be spotted.

Gerry Laderman, senior vice president of finance and procurement at United Airlines has collected his fair share after 30 years in the business. There’s no room left in his Chicago office, so new acquisitions are displayed on the hallway windowsill.

“I stopped counting after 100,” Laderman says. “My wife doesn’t let me bring home models anymore.”

Model planes have their roots with aerospace engineers, who used them in an age before computers to design planes and then test them in wind tunnels.

Then in 1946, two workers from the Douglas Aircraft Co. started Pacific Miniatures with the encouragement of the aircraft manufacturer. It was right after World War II and Douglas faced a major challenge in getting nervous travellers to fly.

“They were tasked with promoting the romance and luxury of air travel,” says Fred Ouweleen, Jr., current owner of the company affectionately known as PacMin.

The company, based in Fullerton, California, created large cutaway models that showed aircraft interiors to a public that had — for the most part — never stepped foot on a plane. Those models would become a mainstay of travel agencies for decades.

Soon there was demand for smaller models that could fit on people’s desks and bookshelves. Today it is those models, scaled to one hundredth of the size of a jet, that PacMin is best known for.

“In the case of a fire, I think those would be the first things grabbed and taken out of the building,” Ouweleen says.

PacMin produces the planes for more than 4,000 customers around the world with the typical order just being a handful of planes. “A large order for us is 100,” Ouweleen says. Still, more than 15,000 models are sold a year ranging in price from $130 to $1,500 each, depending on the size, speed and difficulty of the order. Privately-held PacMin employs 165 people and sees $10 million in annual sales.

Members of the public generally can’t buy PacMin models, although plenty end up on eBay, with sellers generally asking $200 to $400.

Mark Jung estimates he has spent $45,000 buying model planes over the past 45 years. He now has more than 1,000. A few are PacMins but many are more affordable models made by competitor Gemini.

Jung, a former airline worker, now processes badges at Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s main airport. Every employee — those who work in stores, restaurants or for the airlines — must pass through his office to get their credentials.

During his 10 years there, many airlines have thanked him with a model. There are now more than 100 in the office; others are displayed at the airport’s museum. (As a public employee, Jung can’t accept gifts; he just holds onto the models on behalf of the airport.)

Airline executives sit in his office, see the row of planes and ask: “Where’s ours?” A model arrives shortly after.

“It’s a really great icebreaker,” Jung says, adding that he tries to avoid making the badging process feel like a trip to the department of motor vehicles.

Even those in charge of a fleet of real jets like to collect the models.

WASHINGTON — Scientific literature traces manhole cover explosions back nearly a century, but a series of such incidents in the Midwest city of Indianapolis has authorities looking for a quick solution.

A combination of power system design, winter road salt, older electrical cable insulation and basic chemistry have triggered underground explosions in older downtowns, launching 160-kilogramme manhole covers high in the air. One Georgia Tech engineering professor calculated the explosions could have the force of three sticks of dynamite.

"These things have been known to be launched 10 stories; they have found a manhole cover on top of a building in a certain downtown city," said Daniel O'Neill, who advises several utilities on the problem. "They are dangerous things. There are hundreds of these things happening every year."

The nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute's lab in Lenox, Massachusetts, has spent the last 25 years setting off what officials there call "manhole events". It's not for fun. Engineers are trying to find a way to keep manhole covers from flying.

"We're disappointed to say we've not yet solved the problem," said Matt Olearczyk, manager of distribution research for EPRI. He said, his team will keep at the problem "or we're going to die trying to fix it".

The EPRI team has come up with partial solutions, such as latching manhole covers to the ground with a hook-and-piston system. When there's an explosion, those covers lift a few inches to let off some pressure, but not so much as to let in oxygen to stoke the explosion.

Experts do know how and why these explosions happen amid thousands of kilometres of tightly bundled electrical cables.

It starts with the way electrical power is distributed in older downtowns underground. Cables are linked so that if one fails, others take over, O'Neill said.

Cable insulation can fray or kink due to age, wear and tear, high power loads during the summer and corrosive road salt. That exposes wiring, which can spark and smolder. Especially when the insulation is older and consists of an oily paper, that releases gases, including hydrogen, methane, acetylene, carbon monoxide and ethylene, O'Neill and Olearczyk said.

Then, salty or dirty water gives the electricity a path to the ground and the spark to set off explosions, O'Neill said.

That's why O'Neill and Olearczyk say they see more blasts events during the winter and in more northerly cities. The salt is a key ingredient. Consolidated Edison once compared manhole explosions to the streets where road salt was used and found a good correlation, O'Neill said.

The expensive process of replacing the cables with plastic insulated modern cables works well, Olearczyk said.