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PARIS — A new “supercooling” technique keeps rat livers alive three times longer than before, boosting hopes for easing shortages of human transplant organs, scientists said Sunday.

The method involves cooling the livers while flushing them with oxygen and nutrients, and preserving them in a solution containing a form of antifreeze.

The livers can be conserved at temperatures below zero degrees celsius yet not freeze and thus suffer cell damage.

All rats given livers “supercooled” for three days (72 hours) were healthy after three months, a benchmark for survival.

Of those who received livers stored for 96 hours, 58 per cent survived to the three-month mark, said study results published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Rats that received transplant livers preserved with current methods survived only for hours or days.

“To our knowledge, this is the longest preservation time with subsequent successful transplantation achieved to date,” said study co-author Korkut Uygun of the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Centre for Engineering in Medicine.

“If we can do this with human organs, we could share organs globally, helping to alleviate the worldwide organ shortage.”

Existing technology can preserve human livers well for up to about 12 hours outside the body.

Since the 1980s, donor organs have been preserved at temperatures at or just above freezing in a solution that reduces metabolism and organ deterioration.

The new method saw the addition of protective, anti-freeze ingredients to the preservation solution.

In a three-step technique, a perfusion machine was used to flood the livers with oxygen, nutrients and protective compounds before they were cooled and submerged in the preservation solution, whose temperature was then lowered to -6^oC at which the tissue was stored for either three or four days.

After supercooling, the temperature was gradually increased back to 4^oC and the livers reflushed with oxygen and nutrients before being transplanted, the study paper said.

“The next step will be to conduct similar studies in larger animals,” said Rosemarie Hunziker of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), a body of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) which supported the work.

The method will have to be thoroughly tested and refined before it can be considered for use in humans.

Some 120,000 people are waiting on donor organs in the United States alone, said the study authors.

“Extending even further the time a liver can survive outside the body would provide many benefits,” according to a NIBIB statement.

“It would allow more time to prepare the patient and ease logistics at the donor hospital site, reduce the urgency of rushing the organ to its destination, and expand the donation area to allow for transcontinental and intercontinental transplantations.”

This would boost the chances of patients finding better donor organ matches and reduce costs.

SEOUL – South Korea’s Samsung and LG on Thursday launched rival smartwatches powered by Google’s new software as they jostle to lead an increasingly competitive market for wearable devices seen as the mobile industry’s next growth booster. 

Samsung’s “Gear Live” and LG’s “G Watch” –– both powered by Android Wear –– are the first devices to adopt the new Google software specifically designed for wearables. 

G Watch –– LG’s first smartwatch –– is also equipped with Google’s voice recognition service and can perform simple tasks including checking e-mail, sending text messages and carrying out an online search at users’ voice command.

The two devices cannot make phone calls by themselves but can be connected to many of the latest Android-based smartphones, the South Korean companies said in separate statements. 

Samsung and LG are the world’s top and fourth-largest smartphone maker, respectively.

A typical smartwatch allows users to make calls, receive texts and e-mails, take photos and access apps. 

G Watch opened Thursday for online pre-order in 12 countries including the United States, France and Japan before hitting stores in 27 more including Brazil and Russia in early July.

Gear Live was also available for online pre-order Thursday.

The launches come as global handset and software makers step up efforts to diversify from the saturated smartphone sector to wearable devices.

Samsung introduced its Android-based Galaxy Gear smartwatch last year but it was given a lukewarm reception by consumers.

The second edition, Gear II, was unveiled in February and based on Samsung’s own Tizen softwear in a move to break free of its heavy reliance on Google’s Android platform. 

Samsung’s arch rival Apple is believed to be set to launch its own smartwatch soon, while Google is moving towards a wide consumer launch of its eyewear Google Glass later this year. 

Chinese smartphone maker Huawei also unveiled a connected watch called TalkBand. 

Global smartwatch sales are expected to grow this year by more than 500 per cent from 1.9 million units in 2013, according to the market researcher Strategic Analytics. 

Comparing real estate in the cloud and on earth is an interesting operation. There may be differences but there are many similarities too.

It’s all about the space you would rent, and of course the larger that space — the higher the rent. Virtual realtors are after you, trying to entice you to go with them. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Dropbox and Apple, to name the main players in the game, want you to rent their space. The least expensive is not necessarily the one that is best for you.

For instance, Dropbox currently is where the rent is highest, but the quality of the service, the functionality and the uptime are unmatched. It’s like renting an apartment in a fancy neighbourhood — it comes with countless, obvious advantages.

Where real estate in the cloud is really different from real estate on earth is in the global trend of price evolution. Whereas prices in the latter case tend to go up with time, as a general rule, those in the cloud are bound to go down, systematically. Now the average cost is about a half dinar per gigabyte per year.

Besides, if your data storage needs are not much, if you can be content with say five to 15 gigabytes, most providers will gladly give you such space for free. They bet on the fact that sooner or later you will need more space and that by then you will be willing to pay a rent. Indeed, paid cloud storage usually kicks in from 20 GB and up.

Interestingly, this week Microsoft announced that they were now giving twice the free space they used to offer consumers before, with their excellent OneDrive online storage service. In real life there is no such thing as free real estate!

Again, not all real estate is created equal. Does it offer a sea view, is it located in a quiet environment, is it a safe neighbourhood, and is the air around it clean? Translated in cloud terms it all comes down to the features and functionality that your virtual storage service offers and how easy it is to use in the end.

Dropbox for instance offers excellent, unattended synchronisation of data between all your devices, whether computers or portable devices.Moreover it provides a very easy, quick way to share contents with those users you decide to give a link to these contents. This is particularly convenient when sharing photos, files, or entire folders for that matter.

Microsoft cloud storage ensures a smooth link with their popular Office 365 online suite. Amazon has an interesting offer: If you buy their brand new Fire smartphone, you will be allowed to unlimited storage of all photos taken with the device; now that’s smart marketing and sales strategy, isn’t it?

A few weeks ago Western Digital, the hard disk maker, experienced several days of outage with its MyCloud storage it was giving its users. Nowadays an outage of more than few minutes is hardly tolerable by consumers. Being denied access to your data in the cloud is tantamount to losing your apartment’s key and being forced to go to the hotel or a relative’s to sleep.

One noticeable consequence of the increasing demand for virtual real estate is the pressure it puts on Internet traffic. This is a major contributor to bandwidth consumption and is in no way to be underestimated.

Two days ago a friend was complaining of the slowness of his home ADSL connection at night, though his is a fast 24Mbps subscription. It appeared that countless users in the country are now watching the World Cup matches online and therefore creating Internet congestion at this time of day.

Ever increasing real estate rental in the cloud is bound to put more and more pressure on the network. Hopefully the telecoms and the providers will take this into consideration in their master plan.

A last point of comparison. In real life you can buy real estate. In the cloud you can only rent it.

WASHINGTON — People who watch three or more hours of television daily may be twice as likely to die prematurely than people who watch less, according to a study on Wednesday.

The research in the Journal of the American Heart Association is the latest to describe the potential dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, which include high blood pressure, obesity, cancer and heart disease.

“Our findings are consistent with a range of previous studies where time spent watching television was linked to mortality,” said lead author Miguel Martinez-Gonzalez, chair of the department of public health at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.

The research was based on records from more than 13,000 people who had graduated from Spanish universities. Their average age was 37 and 60 per cent were women.

Researchers wanted to find out if there was any link between dying young and the amount of television watched.

They also looked at how long people spent at a computer and daily driving time, and whether these influenced death risk.

Participants were healthy when they began the study and were followed for a median, or midpoint, of 8.2 years.

Those who watched television more than three hours per day were more than twice as likely to die young as those who watched an hour or less, the report said.

The most common cause of death was cancer, which killed 46 people. Thirty-two died of other causes and 19 deaths were linked to cardiovascular problems.

Research did not find any association between computer time and premature death, or between driving and dying young.

It also did not prove that television watching caused the early deaths, just that an association could be found between more TV-viewing and a higher chance of dying, even when researchers adjusted for other potentially confounding factors.

“Our findings suggest adults may consider increasing their physical activity, avoid long sedentary periods and reduce television watching to no longer than one to two hours each day,” said Martinez-Gonzalez.

The American Heart Association recommends people do some form of moderate exercise for nearly two hours each week.

SAN FRANCISCO  — Google on Wednesday announced it is working on a low-cost smartphone aimed at emerging markets as part of an initiative called Android One.

The Android-powered handset will be built with a basic set of features including FM radio, have a screen slightly smaller than five inches and be priced at less than $100, Google senior vice president, Sundar Pichai, said at the start of the technology giant’s annual developers conference.

“We are going to be launching it around the world, but will launch in India first in the fall of this year,” Pichai said.

He added that Google was working with carriers in India to provide affordable telecom service packages to go with the smartphones, which could in many cases provide Internet access for the first time.

The Android One initiative sets out to work with smartphone makers and others in the “ecosystem” to pool resources and standardise hardware platforms to provide “turnkey solutions” for making handsets, according to Pichai.

“There are many people — billions of people, in fact — who still don’t have access to a smartphone,” he said.

“We want to change that.”

Google is collaborating with handset makers and others in the industry to field affordable smartphones that are high quality and come with reasonably priced data plans.

Handsets will be made by Google partners and launch with an initial range of “sub-$100” smartphones.

“We’ve long wondered what potential could be unleashed if people everywhere had access to the latest technology and the world’s information,” Pichai said. “It’s time to find out.”

Google and Silicon Valley rival Facebook have made priorities out of connecting with people in parts of the world where Internet connectivity is scan, unreliable, or straight-out non-existant.

Having more people tune into websites or services mean expanded opportunities to make money from online advertising or providing tools that connect shops with customers.

Google does not make money from hardware, with its own branded gadgets meant to set standards and show off software capabilities with an eye towards inspiring electronics manufacturers to raise their games when it comes to Android or Chrome devices.

Developing countries have become prime targets for smartphone makers, and Android software made available free to handset makers has proven to be popular with budget-conscious buyers.

The news came a day after Microsoft said it would sell an Android-powered Nokia smartphone at a price of 99 euros ($135), a device also apparently aimed at emerging markets customers.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is expanding its empire to cars, watches, businesses and televisions.

The technology titan laid out a sweeping vision at the opening of a sold-out developers conference in a keynote presentation streamed online to millions of people across the world.

“We are beginning to evolve our platforms beyond mobile,” Android and Chrome teams chief Sundar Pichai said of how Google’s twin operating systems are being adapted to work with one another and with new types of computing hardware.

Google’s goal, according to Pichai, is to have its software be a foundation for applications, services or digital content delivered seamlessly across the increasingly diverse array of Internet-linked screens in people’s lives.

A new LG G smartwatch and a freshly announced Gear Live smartwatch by Samsung that both work with the “Android Wear” platform debuted Wednesday at the online shop Google Play.

On-stage demonstrations included ordering a pizza in seconds, fielding reminders and messages, and using voice commands on smartwatches.

An eagerly awaited Moto 360 smartwatch is due to join the Android Wear lineup later this year.

“These are the first three watches, but there are more on the way,” Pichai said.

Android on the road 

Android Auto software for cars, synching smartphones with in-dashboard screens and controls, is being shared with automakers, and vehicles are set to be equipped by the end of this year.

Android Auto brings apps like Google Maps and Spotify music service to an “interface built for driving”, according to a freshly formed coalition of technology and car companies called the Open Automotive Alliance.

Google also announced another shot at smart televisions with Android TV software for what are typically the biggest screens in homes.

Google is giving televisions “the same level of attention that phones and tablets have enjoyed”, according to Android engineering director, Dave Burke.

Android smartphones, complete with voice command features, could be used to direct searches and more on television screens, an on-stage demonstration showed.

Games from the Google Play shop could also be played on televisions.

Expanding Google empire 

“The Google empire is trying to grow,” Gartner consumer technology research director, Brian Blau, told AFP on the sidelines of the San Francisco keynote presentation.

“Google is trying to be more like Apple; create more consistent experiences with devices that work together.”

Handset or tablet makers are free to customise free Android software to suit hardware and set themselves apart from rivals, but this has resulted in popular applications working on some gadgets and not others in a situation referred to as “fragmentation”.

Apple, on the other hand, so tightly controls software powering iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices that developers can more easily target broad audiences.

Improving how well popular services or applications work across Android devices should also entice users to “lock in” to the platform the way Apple devotees remain loyal to the Cupertino, California company’s gear, according to Blau.

“Lots of variations of Android make developers work harder to support all those devices,” the analyst said.

“A consistent experience will help Google in the long run.”

Google also showed off steps it is taking to make Android devices along with its services offered in the Internet “cloud” amenable to workplaces.

Improvements include tools for separating personal and company uses of mobile devices, as well as better handling of files made using Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint programmes.

Outside the convention centre, protesters dressed as “Star Wars” film bad guy Darth Vader to remind Google of its founding vow not to be evil.

Protests did not disrupt on-stage presentations and Pichai made a point of addressing criticism that women engineers are scarce in Silicon Valley firms.

Among those watching the conference online was a group of female developers in Nigeria, said Pichai, who noted that more than a fifth of those taking part in the conference are women.

“We are working hard to elevate women in computer sciences,” Pichai said.

WASHINGTON — A leading US doctors’ group Tuesday urged parents to read to their children starting in infancy, in order to boost language skills in an age of screens and smartphones.

Pediatricians have long encouraged reading to children, but the guidelines are the first official policy from the American Academy of Pediatrics telling doctors to talk to parents about daily reading to their children, from the first year of life until kindergarten.

It also calls on doctors and policymakers to ease the burden on poor and working families by distributing kids’ books for free to children in need.

Reading with young children “stimulates optimal patterns of brain development and strengthens parent-child relationships at a critical time in child development, which, in turn, builds language, literacy and social-emotional skills that last a lifetime”, the AAP guidelines said.

Research has shown a stark divide among economic lines when it comes to reading — just one in three children in poverty are read to daily, resulting in “a significant learning disadvantage” when they get to school, the AAP added.

Even wealthier families do not always make reading a ritual, with 60 per cent of those with incomes 400 per cent of the poverty threshold saying they read to their children from birth to age five, according to a 2011-2012 survey.

Babies can benefit
Busy schedules are a constant obstacle, and some pediatricians are concerned about the widespread use of screen technology — from televisions
to smartphones and tablets — which may be edging out reading time, too.

The AAP has previously said babies under age two should be as screen-free as possible, and that the best kind of learning takes place through unstructured,
interactive play with humans and toys.

Very young babies can get benefits from reading, even if they do not seem interested, said Peter Richel, a fellow of the AAP and chief of pediatrics at Northern Westchester Hospital in New York.

“We can stimulate greater brain development in these months and years,” said Richel.
“I do see earlier word recognition, earlier phrases and sentence formation, and singing — I always recognise that in those who are exposed to daily reading.”
In order to bridge the income gap, the AAP said it “supports federal and state funding for children’s books to be provided at pediatric health supervision visits
for children at high risk”.

Speaking at a Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Denver, Colorado, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said she supported the new guidelines.
Clinton also announced that Scholastic, a leading publisher of children’s books, would donate 500,000 books that pediatricians could distribute to families in need.

“By four years of age, children in lower-income families tend to have heard more than 30 million fewer words than children in more affluent families. Thirty million. Because they hear fewer words, they learn fewer words,” Clinton said.

“The word gap leads to an achievement gap that can have lifelong consequences.”

Clinton, whose daughter Chelsea is pregnant, said she remembered seeing her daughter’s face light up when she and her husband read to her as a child.

“Certainly we saw that when Bill and I were reading to Chelsea and we expect to do the same with our new grandchild coming in the fall,” Clinton said.

WASHINGTON — A District of Columbia couple
has sued British Airways, saying the airline ruined their vacation by booking them tickets to the Caribbean island of Grenada instead of Granada, Spain.
Edward Gamson and Lowell Canaday said in their lawsuit they wanted to travel from Washington to London and then to Granada, Spain. Gamson, a dentist, said he explained his travel plans to a British Airways agent who made the reservation.

The lawsuit said the couple received an electronic ticket that referred to “Grenada” but didn’t list the country, airport code or flight duration. The couple made it to London, but their connecting flight went to the Caribbean, not Spain. They didn’t realise the mistake until they were airborne, the lawsuit said.

Gamson said in a telephone interview Wednesday that they discovered the mistake when they looked at a back-of-the-seat television monitor showing the plane headed west on a map. They then asked a member of the airline’s crew what was going on.

“He said ‘Spain? What are you talking about’,” Gamson said.

British Airways eventually got the couple, to Lisbon, Portugal, where Gamson had planned to attend a dental conference, Gamson said. But the couple never got to see Granada’s palaces as planned.

The lawsuit said they weren’t the only passengers misrouted. When they arrived in the Caribbean, a member of the ground crew told them that “the exact same situation” had happened the week before, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit was filed in Superior Court in Washington in March and asked for $34,000 plus court costs and other expenses.

A British Airways spokeswoman said in an e-mail the airline does not comment on lawsuits. In early June, a judge denied a motion by the airline to dismiss the case.

For the last half an hour I have been moving round and round aimlessly. I traced my steps and then retraced them, but all to no avail. My reading glasses are misplaced and I am blind without them. I cannot read a thing, other than the headlines in the newspapers, and I can’t hear very well too. 

I know there is no connection between seeing and hearing. There should not be. Otherwise my ophthalmologist and the ear specialist would be one and the same. I would even save a lot of time and energy flitting from one clinic to another. But the fact remains that when I see fuzzily I hear woozily also. 

It is amazing how, the minute my spectacles are balanced precariously on my nose, there is instant clarity to my vision, hearing, thinking, inhaling, exhaling and all the rest of it. Even my faded and jaded memory comes to life and I can recall in photographic detail, whatever needs to be recollected. But without it I am lost, literally and metaphorically. 

I generally find them in the usual place, which is at the top of my head. That is where I push them when I am looking at something that is at a distance. With much practice I mastered this, because glancing through them towards a distant space results in blurred vision.  Being hyperopic has its disadvantages. 

But when the top of my head is empty, and a cursory glace at the mirror doubly confirms it, I get panic stricken. And that is because then there is absolutely no telling where I could have abandoned them carelessly. In my family, the tales of my absent-mindedness have reached legendary proportions. The more anyone talks to my relatives, the more they get trivial details about my brain-scattered behaviour. 

So, I left the car keys in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, tried to ignite the cooking gas with a ballpoint pen, found my sunglasses half buried in the potted plant, walked into a party with one white and another grey pearl earring, returned a library book with my flight tickets inside it, attempted to open hotel rooms with my credit card, almost threw the puppy out with the bath water, applied shaving foam on my toothbrush, washed my hair with insect repellent and so on and so forth. The list is exhaustive. 

My reading glasses have also had quite an adventurous time with me. I have rescued them from the bottom of the shopping trolley, behind the vegetable peel, under the newspapers, next to my gardening gloves, on top of the trash bin, in the laundry cupboard and once, inside the washing machine. 

My friends have suggested I buy a cord thingy that is attached to the two sides of the frame and allows the specs to hang around the neck when not in use.  But it fits so much into a mental image I have of octogenarians, that I would rather die than subject myself to it. As long as I hold on to vanity I will never become a senior citizen, hopefully. 

Lost in thought and finally giving up on the fruitless search, I sat on my reading chair and heard a faint crack. Jumping up I saw the sorry spectacles broken into two neat halves. 

“A string in time saves nine,” our daughter misquoted. 

“A stich in time…” I corrected her.

“Glue to the rescue, rhyme fine?” she smiled.

“Perfect,” I smiled back. 

AMMAN — Japanese auto giant Toyota on Wednesday revealed the exterior design and Japan pricing of its hydrogen fuel cell sedan, first unveiled as a concept at the Tokyo Motor Show last year.

The car will launch in Japan before April 2015, the company said in a statement posted on its website, adding that preparations are under way for launches in the US and European markets in the summer of 2015.

In Japan, the fuel cell sedan will go on sale at Toyota and Toyopet dealerships, priced at approximately 7 million yen ($70,000). Initially, sales will be limited to regions where hydrogen refuelling infrastructure is being developed, the company said. 

US and Europe prices have not yet been decided.More detailed information, such as specifications, exact prices and sales targets, will be announced later, the company said.

“Toyota’s commitment to environment-friendly vehicles is based on three basic principles: embracing diverse energy sources; developing efficient, low-emission vehicles; and driving real and positive environmental change by popularising these vehicles,” the statement said.

Hydrogen is a particularly promising alternative fuel since it can be produced using a wide variety of primary energy sources, including solar and wind power. When compressed, it has a higher energy density than batteries and is easier to store and transport. In addition to its potential as a fuel for home and automotive use, hydrogen could be used in a wide range of applications, including large-scale power generation, the company said.

Toyota said that it has been developing fuel cell vehicles in-house for more than 20 years. Toyota’s fuel cell system includes a proprietary FC Stack, which generates electricity from the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, and high-pressure hydrogen tanks. In 2002, Toyota began leasing the “Toyota FCHV”, a fuel cell SUV, on a limited basis in Japan and the US. 

Significant improvements have been made to the FC system since 2002. The fuel cell sedan Toyota revealed today, for example, features performance similar to a gasoline engine vehicle, with a cruising range of approximately 700km (according to Toyota measurements taken under the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism’s JC08 test cycle) and a refueling time of roughly three minutes. When driven, it emits only the water vapor produced by the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen.

Fuel cell vehicles contribute to the diversification of automobile fuels, emit no carbon dioxide or environmentally harmful substances during operation, and offer the convenience of gasoline-powered cars, according to the automaker.

 Toyota said it believes the fuel cell cars have a great deal of potential, and are ideal environment-friendly vehicles for promoting a sustainable mobility society.

Toyota revealed that its group companies are also engaging in other hydrogen-related initiatives, such as developing and testing fuel cells for use in homes, and developing fuel cell forklifts and fuel cell buses.