Features

TORONTO – Fashionistas envious of clothing, shoes and accessories worn by strangers or seen on websites can turn to new apps for hassle-free shopping to find, and buy or rent, similar items.

Like the music app Shazam, which identifies songs based on sound clips, new fashion apps use photos and image recognition technology to find similar clothing.

“People see items they like on the street but can’t really go up to the person wearing them and ask where they got them,” said Daniela Cecilio, the chief executive of London-based start-up Asap54.

“Or they might see items they like on Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter, but can’t really click through to buy them,” she added, referring to the social media websites.

With the Asap54 app for iPhone, which was launched last month, users take a photo of an item, or upload an existing one, and describe what it is to help the app identify it. The app recommends something similar from more than 150 retail partners across the United State, Europe and other countries.

The Style Eyes app for iPhone and Android also uses a photo to find the desired or a similar item, which can be purchased  from its catalogue of 600 retailers in Britain and 300 in the United States.

Mark Elfenbein, chief digital officer of Toronto-based start-up company Slyce, said its image recognition technology integrates with retail brands so shoppers can find things by taking a photo with their iPhone or scanning an image from their desktop.

“The way brands are trying to communicate with customers is changing. Historically, they would lure customers to their stores or websites, but now we’re seeing that brands want to create transactions in other places too,” Elfenbein said.

The technology recognises information such as how far apart  buttons are, and fabric and stitching to help power visual searches.

But image recognition is still inexact and depends on the quality of the photo and other factors, such as lighting. To overcome the drawbacks Elfenbein said, Slyce uses a mix of technology and crowd sourcing to improve its search results.

Other apps making shopping easier include Pounce for Ios,  created by Tel Aviv-based company BuyCode Inc. It allows consumers to buy items directly from retail advertisements from stores such as Lord & Taylor and office supply company Staples, Inc. by hovering their smartphone camera over an image.

With the eBay Fashion iPhone app users in the United States and Britain can upload an image to find similar items available for sale on eBay.

For consumers more interested in renting than buying, Rent the Runway’s iPhone app uses a photo of an item seen in a store to find something similar that customers can rent instead.

One of the grandest of American cars, Lincoln — rather than Cadillac — had for a long time in the not distant past, supplied presidential limos to a succession of US presidents. However, there has perhaps been a lack of focus at Lincoln in recent years, which has had to compete with American, Japanese and European prestige brands, and to a certain degree it’s Ford parent company’s very own line-up of ever more stylish, up-market and well-resolved cars, on which Lincolns are based. Which is where the recently introduced mid-size MKZ executive car comes in, as the first in a more stylish and luxurious Lincoln line-up.

With an emphasis on high tech infotainment systems and strong design language, the new Lincoln MKZ would seem to be aiming at younger, professional and well-to-do clients with a more individualist outlook — not far off niches that Saab and Audi would have occupied in the past. Not seeming to have an overtly German sports saloon chasing approach, the strikingly elegant Lincoln MKZ refines Lincoln’s recent design language and styling cues into more futuristically sleek, but distinctly American look. The MKZ distinguishes itself clearly from the handsome Ford Mondeo/Fusion platform it is based on and points to a better resolved Lincoln design language for coming models.

Sculpted and sleek

With tight, deliberate and sharp design lines, the long and low Lincoln MKZ looks like a more concise and trim car than its 4.9-metre length, and in charcoal-black paint, cuts a particularly distinguished and classy figure. Sporting a crisper and revised version of the brand’s eagle wing style grille and stretched back diamond-shaped lights browed by the bonnet, the MKZ looks eager and assertive, especially when viewed in the flesh. Defined bonnet and flank creases detract from the high waistline, while a hunkered down roofline subtly merges with the rear deck, while huge 245/40R19 alloy wheels stylishly fill out its wheel-arches.

Best looking from rear angles, the MKZ high boot deck includes a sharp built-in spoiler and is flanked by chiseled and broad haunches. Slim rear lights running across the MKZ rear fascia are perhaps its most evocative design and at once seem to look futuristically sophisticated and classically inspired, while quad chrome-tipped exhaust ports are integrated into the bumper assembly and have contribute a sense of flourish while maintaining the sculpted and tightly packaged design sensibility. Remote-opening, the MKZ boot lid isn’t especially long owing to the heavily slanted roofline, but offers reasonably good access to a generous and uniformly spaced 549-litre boot. 

Sporty, smooth and seamless

More interesting for drivers is however the Lincoln MKZ eager and revvy 3.7-litre “Cyclone” V6 engine under its sculpted bonnet. The range-topping of a three-power-train line-up that includes Ford’s superbly powerful and efficient two-litre Ecoboost and a hybrid version, the 3.7 “Cyclone” is a sporty, smooth and seamlessly urgent engine that has also seen service in the Ford Mustang pony car and the more exotic Ginetta G60 sports car. A light modern engine with intake side variable camshaft timing, the MKZ 3.7 feels responsive and spins eagerly through peak 277lb/ft torque at 4,000rpm and peak 300BHP at 6,500rpm and onto its haughty 6,750rpm redline.

Delivering power to the front wheels, the MKZ springs off the line with momentary tyre chirp and a faint but fun dose of torque-steer at full throttle launch, with 100km/h arriving somewhere above 6.5- but lower than seven-seconds. Though revvy and happy to be wrung hard, the “Cyclone” feels refined and smooth at cruising speeds and provides healthy but progressively accumulative low- and mid-range torque for on-the-move flexibility. With meaning full urge from low revs on, the MKZ V6 build power cleanly and quickly, and with its progressive nature and high rev limit, allows for precise throttle control to dial in as much power is required.

Agile and alert

Mated to a six-speed automatic gearbox with dash-mounted push-button gear selection and steering-mounted sequential paddle shifters, the MKZ 3.7 makes smooth and timely changes in its default mode. “Sport” mode sharpens kickdown shift responsiveness, holds gears longer before up-shifts and stays in gear when using the paddle shifters for a sportier driving experience. Through the vehicle menu one can tailor gearbox response settings independent of three suspension settings, which include supple “comfort” firmer “sport” and a well-judged default mode that delivers just the right blend for most circumstances. Optional four-wheel-drive offers better poor weather traction, but the front-drive car driven felt nimble and agile.

Though it isn’t overtly marketed as a “sports” saloon in the vein of a rear-drive BMW or Cadillac, the Lincoln MKZ however benefits from Ford’s current knack for making some of the most engaging, responsive and alert front-drive chassis. Stable and reassuring at speed and light and maneuverable in town, the MKZ however never feels lumpy or heavy, but rather feels light on its feet and responsive through corners. Superbly light and quick steering delivering more nuanced, crisp and clean feel, which communicates well the cars limits, road conditions, and ultimately inspires confidence to push the MKZ to its grip and dynamic limits.

Control and clarity

Turning in tidily and eagerly, the MKZ’s front-end doesn’t feel weighed down like many other V6 front-drivers, but with almost hot hatch-like nimbleness and agility. Pushed too hard to under-steer, the MKZ gets back in line with throttle lift-off and subtle stability control corrections. Best in its default suspension setting for a fluid, smooth and supple ride comfort over imperfect roads, and good body control, the MKZ leans through a corner more than a hard-riding sports saloon, but grips tightly, communicates its abilities and limits with clarity, and feels balanced, alert, responsive and controlled as it pounced out of a corner and onto the next. 

Indulgent, classy yet fresh inside, the MKZ cabin features a healthy measure of soft touch dash textures, quality leathers and metallic accents, while the centre storage and infotainment unit uses good quality black plastic. There are numerous creature comforts including remote engine ignition, a full-length panoramic roof and touch control SYNC infotainment system, and many other gadgets. It takes a few minutes to adapt to the SYNC system’s 14-speaker stereo, navigation, climate control and various function menus, but soon it becomes intuitive. Highly adjustable seats and steering allow a good driving position, while backseat leg-space is good and rear headspace better than many rivals with similarly rakish rooflines.

PARIS – Beneath its Sun-scorched exterior, the planet Mercury is cooling, which is causing it to shrink ever so slightly, scientists said Sunday.

Over the last 3.8 billion years, the planet has shrunk by up to 14 kilometres (8.8 miles) to reach its present diameter of 4,800km (3,032 miles), they said.

Mercury, like Earth, is believed to have a super hot metallic core.

But unlike Earth, it has no tectonic plates which bump and jostle and slide in response to the stress that heat loss causes on the planet's crust.

Instead, Mercury has just a single, rigid top layer, which means the stress is transmitted directly to the planet's surface, causing it to "wrinkle" into gouges and ridges as the planet cools.

Planetary geologists led by Paul Byrne at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington used a tally of these features to get a yardstick for the planet's thermal contraction, the term for shrinkage through heat loss.

They studied nearly 6,000 landforms recorded by NASA's Messenger spacecraft to look for these telltales.

Earlier estimates based on images of only 45 per cent of the planet suggested a contraction of 1.6 to six kilometres (one to four miles) over the course of its history.

The starting point for the measurement is the end of the "late heavy bombardment" of the Solar System — a period that ran from around 4.1 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, when our star system was a shooting gallery of comets and other icy bodies which smashed into the nascent planets.

The study appears in the journal Nature Geoscience.

BOSTON – It won't be nearly as much fun as eating candy bars, but a big study is being launched to see if pills containing the nutrients in dark chocolate can help prevent heart attacks and strokes.

The pills are so packed with nutrients that you'd have to eat countless candy bars to get the amount being tested in this study, which will unroll 18,000 men and women across the US.

"People eat chocolate because they enjoy it," not because they think it's good for them, and the idea of the study is to see whether there are health benefits from chocolate's ingredients minus the sugar and fat, said Dr JoAnn Manson, preventive medicine chief at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

The study will be the first large test of cocoa flavanols, which in previous smaller studies improved blood pressure, cholesterol, the body's use of insulin, artery health and other heart-related factors.

A second part of the study will test multivitamins to help prevent cancer. Earlier research suggested this benefit but involved just older, unusually healthy men. Researchers want to see if multivitamins lower cancer risk in a broader population.

The study will be sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and Mars Inc., maker of M&M's and Snickers bars. The candy company has patented a way to extract flavanols from cocoa in high concentration and put them in capsules. Mars and some other companies sell cocoa extract capsules, but with less active ingredient than those that will be tested in the study. Candy contains even less.

"You're not going to get these protective flavanols in most of the candy on the market. Cocoa flavanols are often destroyed by the processing," said Manson, who will lead the study with Howard Sesso at Brigham and others at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle.

Participants will get dummy pills or two capsules a day of cocoa flavanols for four years, and neither they nor the study leaders will know who is taking what during the study. The flavanol capsules are coated and have no taste, said Manson, who tried them herself.

In the other part of the study, participants will get dummy pills or daily multivitamins containing a broad range of nutrients.

Participants will be recruited from existing studies, which saves money and lets the study proceed much more quickly, Manson said, although some additional people with a strong interest in the research may be allowed to enroll. The women will come from the Women's Health Initiative study, the long-running research project best known for showing that menopause hormone pills might raise heart risks rather than lower them as had long been thought. Men will be recruited from other large studies.

Manson also is leading a government-funded study testing vitamin D pills in 26,000 men and women. Results are expected in three years.

People love vitamin supplements but "it's important not to jump on the bandwagon" and take pills before they are rigorously tested, she warned.

"More is not necessarily better," and research has shown surprising harm from some nutrients that once looked promising, she said.

WASHINGTON – It was an elusive planet that for 200 years appeared to explain Uranus’s wobbly orbit. And there was the sister sun theorised to be near our solar system that caused asteroids to swerve toward Earth.

There is just one problem: Neither “Planet X” nor “Nemesis” ever existed, researchers now say.

Or probably not.

“The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet (“Planet X”), or a small, companion star (“Nemesis”),” concluded University of Pennsylvania astronomer Kevin Luhman, who directed the study using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope.

The results were published in the most recent edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

Most theories had estimated Planet X to be up to four times the size of Jupiter — the biggest planet in our solar system.

They suggested it would be found some 1,486 billion kilometres (923 billion miles) from the sun, or about 10,000 times farther than the Earth’s orbit.

But the images gathered by the telescope did not detect any object larger than Jupiter.

Luhman doesn’t rule out the possibility that a planet is lurking somewhere in the asteroid belt. 

It would be hard to find if it were closely aligned with a bright star that blinds the telescope or were much smaller than had been theorised.

But after this latest survey, Luhman said the odds of finding one are very unlikely: “That is like a one in a hundred chance.”

History of Planet X 

Scientists first imagined the existence of Planet X in 1781, when they discovered Uranus, a gas giant that astonished astronomers with its orbital variations, apparently incompatible with Newton’s laws of gravity.

Observers concluded that these irregularities could be explained by the existence of another, unknown planet that was exerting its own gravitational force.

Attempts to track this mysterious Planet X led to the discovery of Neptune in 1846. But the estimated mass of Neptune couldn’t explain the deviations of Uranus’s orbit. 

That led astronomers to continue their search for Planet X — which, in turn, led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930. But the dwarf planet was also too small to explain Uranus’s irregular path around the sun.

Finally, in the 1990s, researchers determined that they had slightly overestimated the mass of Neptune, which meant the planet could in fact be the reason for Uranus’s orbital behaviour.

Yet Planet X believers were still not convinced.

Sister sun killed dinosaurs? 

The existence of Nemesis, a sun-like star nearby, was first posited in the 1980s. The star, by occasionally coming closer to the sun, interfered with the orbit of comets and asteroids leading them to occasionally hit the Earth.

Collisions like these are blamed for the five mass extinctions over the last 540 million years — the most recent being the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago.

“So over the years, there have been different pieces of evidence suggesting there might be something there,” Luhman explained to AFP. 

But the WISE telescope didn’t find anything.

The hunt for Planet X and Nemesis may have turned up empty, but the study did uncover 3,525 stars and brown dwarfs — celestial objects whose mass puts them between a star and a large planet — within 500 light years of the sun. 

“Neighbouring star systems that have been hiding in plain sight just jump out in the WISE data,” said Ned Wright, a University of California, Los Angeles astronomer who contributed to the study.

Green Politics in China: Environmental Governance and State-Society Relations

Joy Y. Zhang and Michael Barr

London: Pluto Press, 2013, 159 pp

The sheer size of China’s land mass, population and contribution to the global economy mean that the state of its environment has international repercussions, but “Green Politics in China” focuses mostly on the domestic scene. It is, after all, the Chinese people who are hardest hit by the pollution and environmental degradation caused by rapid industrialisation, yet they are also prime beneficiaries of the resulting development. This is one of the paradoxes facing Chinese environmentalists for, until recently, few ordinary citizens were concerned about the environment. Another paradox concerns how to relate to the authoritarian state which has a green policy, but lacks transparency and sometimes fails to enforce its own regulations due to preoccupation with economic advancement. These factors lead the authors to describe China’s green movement as “a juggling act between development and social stability”. (p. 6)

This highly informative book takes the reader inside China’s green movement to meet the activists involved in environmental NGOs
(ENGOs) and learn about their goals, methods and programmes. The movement grew out of nature clubs formed in the 90s, which monitored air and water pollution, and pooled their findings with information gleaned by academics. Today, some ENGOs organise bird watching; others offer free nature photography lessons and low-budget field trips in the hope that people will reconnect with nature, start to notice changes in their surroundings and become more involved. Still other groups stress public education, monitoring pollution on site, advancing solutions for specific problems, and enforcing existing environmental protection regulations. In all cases, the aim is to reach out to ordinary citizens, and counteract the effects of abrupt urbanisation, including the notion that what is man-made is better than what is natural. 

Those familiar with the radical tactics of environmentalists in other places might term the Chinese activities “harmless” — so non-confrontational as to be ineffective, but the authors caution against hasty, out-of-context judgments. The priority of Chinese environmentalists is not to confront the state, but to cultivate an informed public that can question policy, hold the government accountable and eventually influence decision making. According to Zhang and Barr, the ripples created by Chinese environmentalism are far broader than seen at first glance, extending to the country’s newly emerging civil society. “Public questioning of authority, at least on environmental issues, is an increasing phenomenon in China… the trend towards public disclosure of environment information and the general defence of the ‘right to know’, are both empowering and daring.” (p. 28 & 12) The ripples go beyond environmental issues to readjust the relation between state and society, and “to help pluralise the political process”. (p. 12)

In view of China’s preeminent place in global manufacturing, international factors do intervene in local environmental issues, not least as “developed countries dislocate their environmental burden by consuming goods produced in China.” (p. 33) In this respect, the book recounts an interesting story that also highlights the juggling in which ENGOs must engage. Since 2000, southern China has become a hub for making branded IT products for international companies, and such factories are big polluters. By 2009, illegal dumping by IT manufacturers was identified as an increasing threat to the soil; 41 Chinese ENGOs banded together to form the Green Alliance, which contacted 29 international IT companies whose local suppliers had been shown to contribute to the pollution. Only Apple Inc. did not respond, viewing the identity of its subcontractors as a business secret. Eventually, with the help of a California-based NGO, Apple was pressured into holding transparent discussions with the Green Alliance, but the latter’s campaign met with local resistance, “especially those young consumers who embraced Apple’s brand culture… It soon dawned upon Chinese ENGOs that to win support for their campaign, they not only needed to analyse the pollution statistics, they also had to understand and respond to the values held by domestic consumers.” (p. 82) 

 One can only wonder what public reaction would be to a similar case here in Jordan or many other countries, for that matter. The Apple case shows that despite the particularity of China’s environmental movement, which the authors quite correctly expound, there are many commonalities with green issues the world over, and many lessons to be learned from this book. 

Sally Bland

NEW YORK – Pregnant women who have been exposed to high levels of second-hand smoke have a higher rate of miscarriages, stillbirths and foetal deaths, a new study suggests.

“We often think of the diseases that second-hand smoke causes as diseases of older people,” epidemiologist Andrew Hyland told Reuters Health. “The results of this study show that second-hand smoke can affect even unborn babies.”

Hyland led the study at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. He and his colleagues found the pregnancy risks associated with women’s second-hand smoke exposure were almost as high as the risks related to their own cigarette smoking.

The study was the first to investigate the effects of second-hand smoke using quantified, lifetime exposure levels. The analysis arms clinicians like Dr Maurice Druzin, from Stanford University Medical Centre in California, with facts to try to persuade expectant fathers and others living with pregnant women to refrain from smoking at home.

“This is excellent ammunition for us to emphasise what we’ve known for a long time, but now we’ve got data to support it,” Druzin, who was not involved in the study, told Reuters Health.

“This is the first study that shows that second-hand smoke has the same effect as being a primary smoker,” he said. “That is a game changer.”

Hyland’s team used data from a study of 80,762 women between the ages of 50 and 79 years old. Researchers asked the women about their own smoking and the amount of second-hand smoke they were exposed to as children and adults, as well as about their history of pregnancy problems.

Among women who never smoked themselves, the chances of having a stillbirth were 22 per cent higher for those who were exposed to any tobacco smoke than for unexposed women. That was after the researchers took into account other potential contributors, including women’s weight, education and alcohol drinking.

For women who were exposed to the highest lifelong levels of second-hand smoke, the risk of having a stillbirth was even greater — 55 per cent higher than among unexposed women.

The researchers defined the highest level of exposure to second-hand smoke as at least 10 years of exposure during childhood, at least 20 years during adulthood and at least 10 years in the workplace.

At that level, a woman’s risk of a tubal ectopic pregnancy was 61 per cent higher than among unexposed women, and her risk of a miscarriage was 17 per cent higher.

“We’re not talking about an elevated risk of a rare event,” Hyland said of the miscarriage finding. “We’re talking about something that happens all the time.”

Nearly one-third of women in the study reported at least one miscarriage, 4.4 per cent reported at least one stillbirth and 2.5 per cent reported at least one tubal ectopic pregnancy, according to findings published in Tobacco Control.

Ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilised egg attaches outside the uterus, usually in one of the fallopian tubes. Tubal pregnancies are the leading cause of maternal death during the first trimester of pregnancy, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers cannot draw firm conclusions about cause and effect from observational studies, like the current one. But the study results point to the benefits of minimising exposure to second-hand smoke, Hyland said.

“There’s a biological plausibility that second-hand smoke could have an impact on these reproductive outcomes not only during the reproductive years but throughout the lifetime of a woman,” he said.

“The take-home message is these never-smoking women who had the highest levels of exposure to second-hand smoke had the highest risks,” he said. “These risks were generally comparable to the risks for women who ever actively smoked.”

Prior research firmly established that smoking during pregnancy is associated with a higher risk of foetal death, the authors write. Smoking during pregnancy also has been linked to infertility, premature birth, low birth weight, birth defects and sudden infant death syndrome, they add.

The American Cancer Society estimates that 10 to 15 per cent of women smoke during pregnancy and that as many as 5 per cent of infant deaths could be prevented if pregnant women did not smoke.

AMSTERDAM — Hundreds of years after wealthy merchants began building the tall, narrow brick houses that have come to define Amsterdam’s skyline, Dutch architects are updating the process for the 21st century: fabricating pieces of a canal house out of plastic with a giant 3-D printer and slotting them together like oversized Lego blocks.

Hedwig Heinsman of architect bureau Dus says the goal of the demonstration project launched this month is not so much to print a functioning house — in fact, parts of the house will likely be built and re-built several times over the course of three years as 3-D printing technology develops.

Rather, it is to discover and share the potential uses of 3-D printing in construction by creating new materials, trying out designs and testing building techniques to see what works.

“There’s only one way to find out,” she says. “By doing it.”

She envisions a future in which personalized architecture may be custom-crafted on the spot, or perhaps selected from an online store for architectural designs, downloaded and tweaked.

At the core of the project is a 6-meter (20-foot) -tall printer dubbed the Kamermaker, or “room-builder”. It’s a scaled-up version of the open-source home 3-D printer made by Ultimaker, popular with hobbyists.

It takes the Kamermaker about a week to print each massive, unique, honeycomb-structured block, layer by layer. The first block, which forms one corner of the house and part of a stairway, weighed around 180 kilogrammes.

The blocks will later be filled with a foam material, still under development, that will harden like concrete to add additional weight and bind the blocks together.

Dus expects to add more printers and change designs along the way, with help from Dutch construction company Heijmans, German chemicals manufacturer Henkel, and anybody else who wants to participate and can make useful contributions.

The construction site in northern Amsterdam is also an exhibition, open to the public for 2.50 euros ($3.00).

NEW YORK — Shaped like a lopsided headband, Google Glass is an unassuming piece of technology when you’re holding it in your hands. You feel as if you can almost break it, testing its flexibility. Putting it on, though, is another story.

Once you do, this Internet-connected eyewear takes on a life of its own. You become “The Person Wearing Google Glass” and all the assumptions that brings with it — about your wealth, boorishness or curiosity. Such is the fate of early adopters of new technologies, whether it’s the Sony Walkman, the first iPod with its conspicuous white earbuds, or the Segway scooter. Google calls the people who wear Glass “explorers”, because the device is not yet available to the general public.

With its $1,500 price tag, the device is far from having mass appeal. At the South By Southwest Interactive tech jamboree in Austin this week, I counted fewer than a dozen people wearing it, including technology blogger Robert Scoble, who isn’t shy about posting pictures of himself in the shower, red-faced, water running, wearing the device.

Google, like most successful technology companies, dreamers and inventors, likes to take a long view on things. It calls some of its most outlandish projects “moonshots”. Besides Glass, these include its driverless car, balloons that deliver Internet service to remote parts of the world and contact lenses that monitor glucose levels in diabetics.

There’s an inherent risk in moonshots, however: What if you never reach the moon? Ten years from now, we may look back at Google Glass as one of those short-lived bridges that takes us from one technological breakthrough to the next, just as pagers, MP3 players and personal digital assistants paved the way for the era of the smartphone. Fitness bands, too, may fit into this category.

In its current, early version, Google Glass feels bulky on my face and when I look in the mirror I see a futuristic telemarketer looking back at me. Wearing it on the subway while a homeless man shuffled through the car begging for change made me feel as if I was sporting a diamond tiara. I sank lower in my seat as he passed. If Google is aiming for mass appeal, the next versions of Glass have to be much smaller and less conspicuous.

Though no one knows for sure where wearable devices will lead us, Rodrigo Martinez, life sciences chief strategist at the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO, has some ideas. “The reason we are talking about wearables is because we are not at implantables yet,” he says. “(But) I’m ready. Others are ready.”

Never mind implants, I’m not sure I’m even ready for Google Glass.

Specs in place for the first time, I walked out of Google’s Manhattan showroom on a recent Friday afternoon with a sense of unease. A wave of questions washed over me. Why is everyone looking at me? Should I be looking at them? Should I have chosen the orange Glass instead of charcoal?

Ideally, Google Glass lets you do many of the things we now do with our smartphones, such as taking photos, reading news headlines or talking to our mothers on Sunday evenings — hands-free. But it comes with a bit of baggage.

Glass feels heavier when I’m out in public or in a group where I’m the only person wearing it. If I think about it long enough my face starts burning from embarrassment. The device has been described to me as “the scarlet letter of technology” by a friend. The most frequent response I get from my husband when I try to slip Glass on in his presence is “please take that off.” This is the same husband who encouraged me to buy a sweater covered in googly-eyed cats.

Instead of looking at the world through a new lens on a crowded rush-hour sidewalk. I felt as if the whole world was looking at me. That’s no small feat in New York, where even celebrities are afforded a sense of privacy and where making eye contact with strangers can amount to an entire conversation.

NEW YORK – Breastfeeding is credited with a long list of benefits, but one downside of extended and intensive breastfeeding may be a higher risk of cavities in baby's first teeth, according to a new study.

The more frequently a mother breastfed her child beyond the age of 24 months during the day, the greater the child's risk of severe early tooth decay, researchers found.

"The No. 1 priority for the breastfeeding mother is to make sure that her child is getting optimal nutrition," lead author Benjamin Chaffee of the University of California, San Francisco told Reuters Health.

Chaffee completed the study as a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley.

He and his team looked at a possible link between longer-term breastfeeding and the risk of tooth decay and cavities in a survey of 458 babies in low-income families in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Because the study lasted more than one year, most babies were eating various kinds of solid food and liquids in addition to breast milk.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that babies are fed breast milk exclusively for the first six months of their lives, with solid foods added to the diet at that point. However, the WHO also recommends continued breastfeeding up to age two and beyond, the authors note.

For the study, the researchers checked in on babies when they were about six, 12 and 38 months old. At six months, the study team gathered data on the number of breast milk bottles the baby drank the day before and any other liquids, like juice.

At the 12-month mark, parents reported whether they fed their babies any of 29 specific foods, including fruits, vegetables, beans, organ meat, candy chips, chocolate milk, cookies, honey, soft drinks or sweet biscuits.

Two trained dentists examined all of the babies at each of the visits.

Nearly half of the children had consumed a prepared infant formula drink by age six months, the researchers write in the Annals of Epidemiology, but very few still drank formula by age one.

The researchers found that about 40 per cent of children breastfed between ages six and 24 months had some tooth decay by the end of the study. For babies breastfed for longer than two years and frequently, that number rose to 48 per cent.

"Our study does not suggest that breastfeeding causes caries," Chaffee said.

It is possible that breast milk in conjunction with excess refined sugar in modern foods may be contributing to the greater tooth decay seen in babies breastfed the longest and most often, the authors speculate in their report.

More research is needed to determine what's going on, but the findings are in keeping with professional dental guidelines that suggest avoiding on-demand breastfeeding after tooth eruption, they write.

"There are two aspects of breastfeeding — the actual human milk, which has some, but very little, ability to promote tooth decay," said William Bowen, professor emeritus in the Centre for Oral Biology at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York.

"The second is the physical aspect of breastfeeding, or even bottle-feeding, and that's where the problem arrives," he said.

Bowen was not involved in the new study.

When a baby sucks on a mother's breast or from a bottle, the baby's teeth are sealed off from saliva in the mouth. This physical barrier prevents the saliva from breaking down bacteria, and increases the chances of tooth decay, Bowen said.

Even though participants in the study came from poor backgrounds, "bad habits can form at any socioeconomic level," Bowen told Reuters Health.

About 16 per cent of babies in the U.S. were still exclusively breastfed at age six months last year, according to the National Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

The good news, Bowen said, is that it's very easy to clean an infant's teeth.

A simple wipe in the mouth with a water-dampened cloth or Q-tip can effectively remove food before the baby's first teeth, he said, adding: "It's important to get the excess food out of the mouth."

One not-so-good habit is allowing infants to stay on a mother's nipple throughout the night, Bowen said. This usually means very little saliva circulates in the baby's mouth, which can increase the risk of decay.