Features

Thousands of electric cars are on the road, with many more set to join them over the next few years.

Electric planes? Not so much.

There are several small, experimental aircraft out there — NASA is building an electric-powered plane set for a test flight next year and a two-seat Airbus electric aircraft soared over the English Channel in 2015. But don’t expect an electric jet to fly hundreds of passengers anytime soon.

Battery limitations all but rule that out.

“A lot of the technical advances that happen start in smaller airplanes,” said Richard Anderson, the director of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s flight research centre and a professor of aerospace engineering. “There will be a market that stands for smaller, fully-electric airplanes.”

The concept of using electric motors to power airplane systems dates back at least to World War II, when the B-29 Superfortress bomber used electric motors to power its gun turrets.

Since then, other airplanes have replaced the ducts and hoses of hydraulic and pneumatic systems with electrical power to control such things as stabilisers and brakes. That can save significant weight and reduce fuel burn.

Using electrical power to actually propel planes, however, is a more complicated challenge.

In a conventional jet airplane, the engine sucks air in through its front, a compressor squeezes it, and fuel is sprayed in and lit, creating burning gases and forward thrust.

Electric plane power is much simpler — batteries power an electric motor that spins a propeller. It’s more efficient, but involves far less thrust, which is why electric planes tend to be slow.

Airbus’ two-seat electric plane could only go a maximum speed of about 219 kilometres per hour. A solar-powered plane that completed an around-the-world journey this summer had an average airspeed of 75 kilometres per hour. The plane, called Solar Impulse 2, had more than 17,000 solar cells that powered four electric motors.

The payoff, however, could be a quieter, greener way to fly.

According to a recent report from the US Environmental Protection Agency, aircraft were responsible for about 8 per cent of the greenhouse gas emitted by the US transportation sector in 2014. That compares to 23 per cent for medium- and heavy-duty trucks and 61 per cent for light-duty vehicles.

“As technology progresses, I think we’ll see big strides in improvements in noise, direct operating costs, reduction in fossil fuel burning and reduction in emissions,” Anderson said of electric aircraft research.

An electric plane gets its energy from batteries, generally lithium-ion. An example of that is NASA’s X-57, an experimental plane that will test how electric propulsion technology can improve performance.

A team of NASA researchers and private industry professionals is converting an Italian-designed Tecnam twin-engine plane fuselage into an all-electric plane by swapping out the original piston engines for electric motors and switching to battery power.

A later iteration of the plane, if it receives funding, would have a modified wing with 14 electric motors that would turn propellers to simulate a high-lift component, which would reduce the speed that’s normally needed to take off.

The conversion is taking place at Scaled Composites’ headquarters in Mojave, about 113 kilometres north of Los Angeles. The prime contractor is Empirical Systems Aerospace; Electric Power Systems is developing the battery system; Electric aviation start-up Joby Aviation is working on the cruise motors; and Xperimental is making the wing.

The efficiency of electric power enables other design advances, said Sean Clarke, principal investigator for the X-57 project at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base. For example, the electric motors’ smaller size and weight allowed engineers to experiment with a smaller wing and multiple engines for increased lift, said Matt Redifer, chief engineer for the X-57.

“I think that electric propulsion technologies are going to greatly improve aircraft design over the next few decades,” Clarke said.

The biggest hurdle for these projects is battery technology, particularly a battery’s specific energy, or the amount of energy it can store for a given amount of weight.

Despite improvements, planes need a lot of lithium-ion batteries to achieve significant range. In electric cars, the main problem was the cost of the batteries, which is starting to come down. In planes, the biggest challenge is weight.

The jet fuel capacity of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner is just over 100,000 kilogrammes, according to an airport planning document released in December. The estimated weight of a battery pack with equivalent energy would be 2 million kilogrammes, Anderson said.

“Unless there’s a cosmic change in the battery, it’s just not going to work for bigger, faster airplanes,” he said. “It’s going to be a really long time before batteries weigh less than liquid fuel.”

The X-57’s battery system alone weighs about 360 kilos — close to the weight of the plane’s fuselage. The weight of the entire aircraft is 1,360 kilos.

To mitigate this, Empirical Systems Aerospace decided to put the batteries in the fuselage rather than in the wings, said Philip Osterkamp, lead integration engineer for instrumentation systems on the X-57 at Empirical Systems Aerospace.

Packing lithium-ion batteries on a plane has other drawbacks. In 2014, a federal probe found that an internal short circuit in a battery cell was the “probable cause” of a 2013 fire aboard a parked Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Boeing has since redesigned the batteries.

Battery limitations grounded the Firefly, an all-electric helicopter developed several years ago by Sikorsky Innovations as a technology demonstrator. Firefly never flew and the programme is no longer active.

“It just wasn’t worth it for where the battery technology was at the time,” said Chris Van Buiten, the vice president of innovation at Sikorsky. The company continues “internal explorations and studies” on the technology’s progress, he said.

A more viable solution is a hybrid system with at least two motors: an electric motor that turns the propeller and a gas engine that drives another generator for power.

Since its English Channel crossing, Airbus has modified its all-electric E-Fan into a hybrid to improve range and learn more about that technology. The aerospace giant is also developing an E-Fan 2.0 that runs only on electric power.

NASA considered making its X-57 a hybrid, but because the plane is not intended as a commercial product, the team decided to focus simply on electric propulsion technologies, said Clarke of NASA.

The ideas may not end up working out quite as expected, but he said the plane’s development is “trying to push the limit”.

“NASA’s prepared for that kind of risk,” Clarke said. “We want to take bigger risks and learn where the technology could go.”

Slowing the rise of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” may take more than just curbing overuse of antibiotics or eliminating antimicrobial chemicals from household products like soap and cosmetics, a new study suggests.

It may also require taking a closer look at antimicrobial chemicals like triclosan that are found in indoor dust, said lead study author Dr Erica Hartmann, a researcher at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

“We need to find responsible ways to use antimicrobials and antibiotics everywhere — at home, in agriculture, and in medicine — to truly tackle the problem of antibiotic resistance,” Hartmann, who worked on the study while a researcher at the University of Oregon, said by email. 

“In some cases, like in household soaps, that may mean not using them at all,” Hartmann added. 

Hartmann and colleagues analysed dust samples from an indoor athletic and educational facility and found links between antimicrobial chemicals and antibiotic-resistance genes in microbes. 

For instance, dust samples with higher amounts of triclosan also had higher levels of a gene that’s been implicated in bacterial resistance to multiple drugs. While they found only very small amounts of triclosan — less than many household products contain — the connection suggests a need to investigate how these chemicals in dust may contribute to antibiotic resistance, the researchers conclude. 

Earlier this month, the US Food and Drug Administration banned over-the-counter bar soaps and certain other consumer products that contain triclosan and other antibacterial chemicals. The ban didn’t cover hand sanitisers or antibacterial products used in hospitals. 

The ban also doesn’t apply to lots of other products that contain these chemicals, including paints, toothpaste, baby toys, bedding, and kitchen utensils, Hartmann said.

“Right now, we don’t know how much of the triclosan we see in dust comes from soap versus other products [building materials, paints, plastics, etc.],” Hartmann said. “In a lot of cases, the antimicrobial chemical can just be omitted and the product is still just as effective.” 

The current study doesn’t prove antimicrobials in dust cause antibiotic resistance, the authors note in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. 

In addition, the study can’t tell how the potential effect of chemicals in dust would compare to the effect of other causes of antibiotic resistance, such as unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions or overuse of these treatments in livestock feed, said Tim Landers, a researcher at the Ohio State University College of Nursing in Columbus who wasn’t involved in the study. 

Still, the study rightly singles out triclosan as a potential problem, Landers said by e-mail. 

“It is important to note that not all antibacterial agents are equal,” Landers said. Some, like alcohol-based hand rubs, destroy bacterial cell walls and we don’t see resistance to these agents.”

“However, there is increasing evidence that triclosan resistance does emerge and makes the bacteria resistant to antibiotics in other classes,” Landers added. “Triclosan has been implicated as having negative impacts on the environment as well.”

It might be time to reconsider the “five-second rule” when thinking about eating food that has fallen on the floor.

Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey say in a new study that bacteria can contaminate food that falls on the floor instantaneously.

The findings were published this month in the American Society for Microbiology’s journal.

Researcher Donald Schaffner said the five-second rule is a “significant oversimplification of what actually happens when bacteria transfer from a surface to food”.

“The popular notion of the ‘five-second rule’ is that food dropped on the floor, if picked up quickly, is safe to eat because bacteria need time to transfer,” Schaffner said.

“We decided to look into this because the practice is so widespread. The topic might appear ‘light,’ but we wanted our results backed by solid science,” he added.

Schaffner’s research isn’t the first to conclude that the favourite excuse for why that yummy snack that fell on the ground is still OK to eat is wrong.

The research did find that longer contact time means more bacterial transfer, but that the type of food and surface is just as, or more, important.

The Rutgers researchers tested watermelon, bread, bread and butter, and gummy candy on stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood and carpet.

Researchers found that watermelon garnered the most contamination, while gummy candy had the least, and also noticed that carpet had very low contamination transfer rates compared to tile and stainless steel.

“Transfer of bacteria from surfaces to food appears to be affected most by moisture,” Schaffner said. “Bacteria don’t have legs, they move with the moisture, and the wetter the food, the higher the risk of transfer. Also, longer food contact times usually result in the transfer of more bacteria from each surface to food.”

Two years ago, Apple Inc. executives made the case that anyone with an iPhone would be better off also owning the company’s new smartwatch.

But as many gadget buyers remain unsure about the usefulness of high-tech timepieces, Apple this week pitched its second-edition watch to a much narrower audience.

Workout and activity tracking capabilities surged to the front and center, taking over the spotlight from messaging features and customisable timefaces. The promotional video for the Watch Series 2 featured almost only athletes: swimmers, tennis and basketball players, cyclists, skateboarders and runners.

The shift in approach reflects some major technical changes. The Apple Watch Series 2 has built-in GPS — essential to athletes who don’t want to lug their phones on runs or bike rides — and is water resistant for use while swimming and surfing.

But establishing the Watch as a fitness tracker rather than a catch-all smartwatch serves a bigger purpose too, analysts said. Thanks to smartphones and popular devices such as the Fitbit, consumers now understand how devices can track steps and monitor sleep. Emphasising those features make the Watch a more familiar device than the revolutionary communications tool Apple touted in 2014.

The “ultimate device for a healthy life” is how Apple Senior Vice President Jeff Williams summed up the Watch at a media event Wednesday. Two years ago, Apple called the Watch its “most personal device ever”.

Apple showcased games, animated messages and other features on stage this week as well, but health and fitness underlined even some of those presentations.

“You get people into the Watch through the guise of fitness, but then you get people messaging and playing games,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst at the data firm IDC.

Though Apple hasn’t released sales figures, analysts estimates upward of 12 million Watches have been sold since the original incarnation went on sale in April 2015. Some experts say the device suffered from an identity crisis. The device’s benefits weren’t clear and immediate for most.

“Personality disorder is what I would like to call it,” venture capitalist and Fitbit investor Om Malik told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “Until they figure that out, Fitbit has a clear lead and will maintain a clear lead.”

Sharpening the pitch for the Watch suggests Apple may be on its way to reining in aggressive ambitions and figuring out a clearer, albeit smaller, role for the device. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

“There’s absolutely a refocus towards fitness,” Ubrani said. “It’s the low-hanging fruit.”

A faster version of the Apple Watch Series 1 will go on sale next Friday for $269, or about $80 less than the retail price at launch last year.

The Watch Series 2 starts at $369, including a set of wristpieces with unique colours and features designed in collaboration with Nike.

Sports-centric marketing campaigns around the Watch could spur more interest in offerings from Fitbit, Jawbone and other fitness tracker makers. Their wearables generally cost less and have longer-lasting batteries than Apple Watch. Their limited apps haven’t turned off consumers, who are satisfied with just having smartphone notifications pushed to their wrist, said Ray Maker, who runs the popular fitness-device blog DCMaker.

The competitors also work in tandem with Android smartphones; the Apple Watch only syncs data with iPhones. And data suggest Apple’s rivals have plenty of room to grow as a result. Only about 25 per cent of people who purchased a Fitbit online since the start of 2014 also bought an iPhone over the Internet, according to data from receipt tracker Slice Intelligence.

Running and cycling watch companies such as Garmin sell well among endurance sports enthusiasts, but they may lose sales to Apple if consumers find the Watch Series 2 more multi-functional, fashionable and fairly priced.

Some may continue to opt against the Apple Watch because other options are better tailored for harsh weather and rugged environments, Maker said. Another big problem for many athletes is the battery. The five-hour GPS battery life on the Watch won’t hold up for some marathon runners or any Ironman competitors.

“If you’re training for a marathon or a triathlon, it’s likely you’re going to want something that you know will get you to the finish line,” Maker said. The Apple Watch battery life is “well below virtually all fitness companies’ GPS watches today on the market”.

About 25 per cent of wearable devices sold last quarter were Fitbits, with models from Xiaomi, Apple and Garmin following in the low teens and single digits. Fitbit’s dominance is expected to continue through the holiday season in large part because demand has been for affordable, lower-tech fitness trackers, analysts said. In other words, for all the robust capabilities of Apple Watch, it might be the simple things that get consumers to consider it.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
Helen Simonson
New York: Random House, 2011
Pp. 368

Just when Major Ernest Pettigrew begins to experience disconcerting symptoms of ageing, several chance encounters with the local shopkeeper, Mrs Ali, rekindle the joy of living that he fears is waning. Having both lost beloved spouses in recent years, the two are drawn together by a mutual love of classical literature, appreciation of nature and sensible approach to life. But, as their friendship develops, it raises eyebrows in their Sussex village, Edgecombe St. Mary, revealing residual prejudice despite the village elite’s claim that it is “a utopia of multicultural understanding”. (p. 6)

Roger, the Major’s twenty-something son, is also shocked by the ethnicity of his father’s new companion, as are many others who seem very modern in consumerist terms, but have obviously not come to terms with the legacy of British colonialism. 

“Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” is first and foremost the story of the gentle, old-fashioned romance between two middle-aged people, but it is also the story of Britain in transition and an exploration of cultural differences. Interestingly, these differences are not only between the “real” English and Mrs Ali’s Indian Muslim/Pakistani-origin family, but more so within the two respective communities. Sometimes, they are synonymous with the generation gap. At other times, they are the friction between a simple, locally based way of life and the frenzied, globalised world of branding, electronic communication, cosmopolitan tastes, fast travel and fast money.

Ironically, the quintessentially English Major was born in Lahore, his father having been an officer in the colonial army, while Mrs Ali was born in Cambridge, her father having immigrated to Britain after India’s partition. Mrs Ali, whose first name is Jasmina, remembers being “raised in a library of a thousand books” by a father who dreamed that the United Nations would grow into a world government and that Britain would finally accept the immigrants from its former colonies — an issue that predominates in the novel. (p. 62)

Her husband was also open-minded, but after his death, her in-laws try to restrict her independence: She should join them in North England to care for their children and elderly, while her nephew, their son, whom they have retrained in conservatism, should take over the shop. The Major is outraged at these plans, but hesitates to speak out against family obligations since he is suffering from the neglect of his only son, who is so absorbed with his career in London’s financial sector that he often seems to be “the strange adult who existed mostly at the end of the telephone”. (p. 30)

With the aid of the Major’s dry wit, the book satirises most of the English characters for their hypocrisy, hurtful prejudices, petty preoccupations and, in some cases, crass materialism and wilful ignorance. Nor are Roger’s American girlfriend and business contacts spared.

Cultural differences are revealed to be a clash of values as reflected in the novel’s various subthemes, such as the attempt of a bankrupt lord to retain his property and privilege by partnering with a US corporation to parcel out the village land for a luxury housing estate. The Major is not one to join public protests, but the prospect of pseudo-manor houses abutting his back garden makes him sick at heart — and what would happen to Jasmina’s shop in a revamped Edgecombe St. Mary? 

The brilliance of Helen Simonson’s writing is that she doesn’t describe these cultural differences directly. Her characters act them out, revealing their sentiments in zesty, realistic dialogue. What she does describe is rural beauty from the gracious, 17th century, stone houses of the village, their luxuriant gardens crisscrossed by rabbits, to misty mornings, wide-open fields and rocky seashores.

Her pen is so painterly that one easily imagines the book as a film, while eagerly turning the pages to see if the Major’s and Jasmina’s love, and the village’s tranquillity, can survive the new developments. Another way to pose this question is to ask whether their shared, old-fashioned values — a strong sense of duty, honesty, patriotism, family pride and the importance of manners and education — are still viable in the post-modern world. 

Simonson was born in Britain but has lived in the US for 20 years, qualifying her to write a truly English novel, but with the objectivity gained at a distance. In this, her first novel, she creates a set of memorable characters in a story that is by turn heart-warming, funny and slightly provocative. Though grounded in often harsh realities, her whimsical scenes and writing style make this book a great pleasure to read.

BERKELEY, California — Scientists are developing dust-sized wireless sensors implanted inside the body to track neural activity in real-time, offering a potential new way to monitor or treat a range of conditions, including epilepsy and control next-generation prosthetics.

The tiny devices have been demonstrated successfully in rats, and could be tested in people within two years, the researchers said.

“You can almost think of it as sort of an internal, deep-tissue Fitbit, where you would be collecting a lot of data that today we think of as hard to access,” said Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fitbit Inc. sells wearable fitness devices that measure data including heart rate, quality of sleep, number of steps walked and stairs climbed, and more.

Current medical technologies employ a range of wired electrodes attached to different parts of the body to monitor and treat conditions ranging from heart arrhythmia to epilepsy. The idea here, according to Maharbiz, is to make those technologies wireless.

The new sensors have no need for wires or batteries. They use ultrasound waves both for power and to retrieve data from the nervous system.

The sensors, which the scientists called “motes”, are about the size of a grain of sand. The scientists used them to monitor in real time the rat peripheral nervous system — the part of the body’s nervous system that lies outside the brain and spinal cord, according to findings published last month in the journal Neuron.

The sensors consist of components called piezoelectric crystals that convert ultrasound waves into electricity that powers tiny transistors in contact with nerve cells in the body. The transistors record neural activity and, using the same ultrasound wave signal, send the data outside the body to a receiver.

The researchers said such wireless sensors potentially could give human amputees or quadriplegics a more efficient means of controlling future prosthetic devices.

“It’s a meaningful advancement in recording data from inside the body,” said Dr Eric Leuthardt, a professor of neurosurgery at Washington University in St. Louis. “Demonstrations of capability are one thing, but making something for clinical use, to be used as a medical device, is still going to have to be worked out.”

Before implanting wireless sensors into the brain, the science of understanding how the brain processes and shares information needs to advance further, Leuthardt said.

To deliver motes, currently one millimetre in size, into the brain, the researchers would need to miniaturise the sensors further to about 50 microns, about the width of a human hair.

“It’s not impossible,” Maharbiz said. “The math is there.”

HARROGATE, England — Ji Mengyu sinks into a soft chair with her cup of tea to the sound of tinkling teaspoons and light chatter. The opulently decorated Victorian tea salon is quintessentially British, something straight out of Downton Abbey. Except it’s in Beijing.

The 25-year-old HR professional is one of a growing number of Chinese who are looking past their country’s ancient tea traditions in favour of imported British blends. For Ji, the tea has an aura of luxury and quality, and gives her a sense of partaking in the posh British culture popularised globally by TV shows and fashion brands.

“I think British people’s traditional customs and culture have a kind of classical style,” says Ji, who says she’s inspired by TV shows like Downton Abbey, but also Sherlock Holmes and Game of Thrones.

For three centuries, countries in Asia and Africa have been quenching Britons’ thirst for tea, supplying dried leaves worth millions of pounds every year. Now, that trend is showing some signs of reversing. China and Hong Kong in particular are seeing a surge in appetite for British tea blends — some of which are made with leaves from China itself, an example of the twists in trade that the globalisation of tastes can create.

Upscale tea blends from storied British companies like Twinings, Taylors of Harrogate and Hudson & Middleton occupy increasingly more space on shelves in Chinese supermarkets, restaurant menus and online shops.

Teahouses serving British afternoon tea have sprouted up in the bigger cities in China. Five years ago, Annvita English Tea Company managed 10 teahouses around China, serving imported blends and pastries in British style tearooms. The number has since grown tenfold, with more planned.

“It fits the taste of people who want to pursue a higher quality of life,” says Li Qunlou, the general manager at AnnVita English Tea House in Sanlitun in Beijing.

As a result, British tea companies selling premium blends have seen their exports to China and Hong Kong skyrocket.

In the first five months of 2016, British tea exports to Hong Kong nearly tripled in value compared with two years earlier. They doubled to the rest of mainland China, data from the UK HM Revenue & Customs show.

Shipments to China and Hong Kong only make-up 7 per cent of total British tea exports, but the share is growing quickly.

Some of these deliveries come from Harrogate, a small town in northern England that is the home to Taylors of Harrogate. The fourth generation family owned company has been selling tea to China for more than 10 years. In the past three years, sales have more than doubled every year, albeit from a low starting point.

“China produces nearly one half of the world’s tea, so on the surface you would think that there is a limited opportunity for Taylors of Harrogate,” says Matthew Davies, the head of International Sales at Taylors of Harrogate.

Tea originates from China and has been a central part of the culture for thousands of years. In Britain, tea was not introduced until the 17th century, though it has since become a staple and adapted to local tastes.

Every day thousands of tea samples arrive in Harrogate for the tasters to evaluate. The business essentially relies on their taste buds to find the right mix of leaves to maintain the signature flavours that the company bases its reputation on. Chinese customers mainly buy Taylor of Harrogate’s Earl Grey and English Breakfast tea.

“Our approach was to invest time and resources to understand consumer behaviour and we found that there are a number of Chinese consumers with a high level of discretionary income and demand for Taylors of Harrogate brands,” says Davies.

Another reason for the thriving popularity of British imported tea is the seemingly endless string of food scandals that plagues China and Hong Kong.

Greenpeace and government investigations found high levels of pesticides or poisonous earths in tea, also in some of the best known brands. Imported premium British tea brands are perceived as being safer and of higher quality.

Paradoxically, some of the British tea sold in China and Hong Kong is originally grown in China. 

It’s already 20 years that the GPS was first launched in the USA for wide public use, and about seven to eight years that Jordanians also are enjoying it, with simple devices. And yet, usage is not as widespread as one can imagine.

Eleven years ago, the Greater Amman Municipality brought a major improvement to the city. Streets were not only all clearly and systematically named, with the highly visible green signs on elevated posts at each intersection, but also and more importantly buildings were at last numbered, like virtually all major cities in the world have been for a long time.

It then became very easy to give directions to someone looking for a given address. Instead of the old — though perhaps charming — way that consisted of saying, for example: “turn right, go past the supermarket that sells delicious ice creams and fresh produce, make a left, drive for 150 metres, open the car window and ask the janitor of the four-storey building with a palm tree in the garden for more directions”, you would now just give a number and a street name. Less poetic but more efficient.

However, old habits diehard. There’s still a majority of citizens who don’t go by the “building number and street name” system. There’s also a non-negligible number who don’t know the name of street they live on and even more who don’t know their building’s number. 

Regardless of how much people depend on and use the traditional number and street address system, the GPS coordinates constitute an amazing, accurate and simple way to get to any place. Whereas it is important in a city like Amman that is growing at an unprecedented rate, it is even more important outside the city, everywhere in the country. Satellites, computers and networks have made GPS a common tool. With a smartphone you don’t even need a dedicated GPS device, but only to install a GPS app.

The number of available GPS applications for smartphones exceeds 50, and at least five of them can be rated as excellent. Most are free, if you are willing to live with ads, as usual. Maps are very frequently updated so as to reflect any changes as soon as they happen. In addition to the well-known and excellent Google Maps, MapFactor Navigator is a superb GPS navigation application, with countless features, and is relatively easy to learn. I frequently use it whenever I have to go to a place in Jordan for the first time. It works flawlessly and the voices available are pleasant and clear, giving directions in a choice of languages.

When someone gives me directions to a place for the first time, I tend to ask for the GPS coordinates instead of the street address. In most cases, my contact wouldn’t know what the coordinates of the place are, and so I look up the address on Google Earth and writes down the GPS coordinates that Google Earth shows me. I then use MapFactor Navigator on my smartphone to get there, and the app’s precision is a stunning 5 metres on the map.

One must admit that there’s one aspect of the GPS coordinates that puts the non-technically minded off and perhaps makes them reluctant to use GPS navigation. It’s the coordinates’ unit system. Coordinates can be expressed in decimal values, like for example 31.99317, 35.88771, or in their equivalent values in degrees, minutes and seconds, being in this case 31 59 35.4, 35 53 15.7, which incidentally happens to be The Jordan Times’ offices in Amman. There are also two other units that are variations of these two.

Because some applications would use one unit, when people would give you the coordinates in another, you have to keep converting the values, which is rather a tedious thing to do. Of course, there are applications that do the conversion for you, and you can always set the unit to use and display in the “Options” of your GPS app, but this doesn’t make everything always easy. GPS will receive a major boost when everybody agrees to use one single, standardised unit for the coordinates.

I checked 24 websites of companies established in Amman, at random. Only two of them show the GPS coordinates of the company’s location in the usual “Contact” page. One does it in decimal values and the other in degrees, minutes and seconds. There’s a long way to go before everyone adopts GPS coordinates as a modern, accurate and fool proof address, and before the world adopts one standard unit system.

In the meantime, good GPS systems can take you to known places, hospitals, restaurants, gas stations, landmarks and the like (called Points of Interest), simply because they are already located on your GPS map, without you having to have, to input or to convert any GPS coordinates.

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Inc. unveiled its new water and dust-resistant iPhone 7 with high-resolution cameras at its fall product event on Wednesday, and said a Super Mario game was coming to the new phone and Pokemon Go would feature on its upgraded Apple Watch.

The excitement at the Bill Graham auditorium in San Francisco was not matched on Wall Street as Apple's stock spent most of the session in negative territory before briefly showing small gains.

However, Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s US-listed shares jumped more than 20 per cent to trade around $35 after it announced a new smartphone game in the venerable Super Mario Bros series, Super Mario Run, which will debut in December on the iPhone and iPad.

The world's best-known technology company said the iPhone 7, starting at $649, would have one, zooming 12-megapixel camera. The “Plus” edition, starting at $769, would feature two cameras.

It also removed the analogue headphone jack, as was widely expected. The new headphones supplied by Apple with the phone will plug into the same port as the recharging cord, but it will also work with Apple's new wireless headphones, called Air Pods, available in late October at a price of $159.

The new phone will start shipping in major markets, including the United States and China, on September 16.

"While the camera improvements for the iPhone 7 Plus are nice, they are incremental for most and the lack of headphone jacks could offset that for others," said Bob O'Donnell of research firm TECHnalysis.

He said Apple's new glossy black finish could be more popular than any tech feature, reflecting the slowdown in major tech innovations for smartphones.

Mike Binger, senior portfolio manager at Gradient Investments LLC. in Minneapolis, said the disappearance of the headphone jack "will probably annoy a certain amount of people" but they would likely get over it.

"Every other release tends to be a better release. Most people's two-year contracts are nearing the end, so I think the iPhone 7, just from a replacement basis, will be a successful launch," he said. "We're in good shape for a nice sales cycle here, so I'm encouraged."

Apple typically gives its main product, which accounts for more than half of its revenue, a big makeover every other year and the last major redesign was the iPhone 6 in 2014.

Apple said its Apple Watch Series 2, with a swim-proof casing, will be available in more than 25 countries starting on September 16.

"I predict Watch sales will improve dramatically," said Tech analyst Patrick Moorhead. "Most of the current Watch owners are early adopters and the next wave could be 10 times the size of that market."

Apple also launched a new version of the device called the Apple Watch Nike+, in partnership with the athletic goods manufacturer Nike Inc., featuring GPS so athletes can track their runs.

Shares of Fitbit Inc., which makes activity-tracking bands, fell 2 per cent on the emergence of such a high-profile competitor.

When I lived in Bahrain a few years ago, there was not much of sightseeing to do. Other than a very long causeway that connected it to Saudi Arabia, it had one museum and one Souq. So when our visitors arrived, there was a lot of time on their hands, especially if they did not like to go shopping in the colossal malls. 

In such a scenario, I used to introduce the idea of visiting the “Tree of Life” very tentatively. In all honesty I should have made it their top priority because if you did not want to drive half distance on the causeway, before you were stopped (as you did not have a visa to visit the neighbouring country), and had already been to the museum, this unique location, was the place to go.

Also called Shajarat Al Hayat, this remarkable tree was almost 10 metres tall and had survived in impossible living conditions for approximately 400 years. There was no apparent source of water and other vegetation for miles around, and the mystery of the survival of the tree had made it into a legend of sorts. It stood alone, majestically, on top of a seven-and-a-half-metre high sandy hill, at the highest point in Bahrain, with no other natural tree nearby.

It had come to be known as the “Tree of Life” due to the fact that it existed in a hot and dry desert, which truly represented the magic of life and the power of nature. The local inhabitants believed that Enki, the mythical god of water in Babylonian and Sumerian mythology, granted the tree its longevity. Others say that it marked the location of the biblical Garden of Eden.

With this remarkable saga of mysterious and unusual vegetation in the desert, why was it not the first port of call for all my visitors to Manama? The answer was that going to visit Bahrain’s loneliest tree was like entering a puzzling maze, and to reach the spot took us a good part of the day. Every time I went there I got lost, every single time! The GPS did not have it in its list of tourist attractions, and after some distance showed brown sand in its pictorial view. The signage was missing for most of the journey and wherever it was visible, was completely misleading. Following it, you landed up onto a dirt road, which actually went nowhere.

So one had to drive by sheer instinct. The first landmark was a scrap metal yard, which suddenly appeared on the right hand side of the road. After continuing straight, and getting confused by some smaller shrubs, one finally reached the luscious tree, by turning left at Gas Well No. 371. You had to be careful about staying on the vehicle-worn path, or else the car was likely to get stuck in the soft sand.

The way back was the same story, and one reached home after several trials and errors. A distance of roughly 40 kilometres could take you from two to six hours, depending on whether lady luck smiled or not, on that particular day.

I was back in the island nation recently. On day two, I ventured out to find the “Tree of Life” once more.

“Oh mom! You got lost again?” our daughter was on the phone.

“Missed the Gas Well number something turn,” I admitted.

“Why did you go?” she asked. 

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” I confessed.