Category: Brief

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My four cats, including a new family member, Koko, really like tuna in cans. We spent a lot of money to buy a canned tuna brand that they like. It is no surprise that Japanese like fresh tuna to make sushi and other sashimi.  As a regular lover of sushi myself, a fresh tuna is a dish to be enjoyed with soya sauce and wasabi.

It was reported by the London Times on January 9^th, 2023 that the Japanese had developed a method to determine the freshness of tuna meat. Researchers from Tokai University in  Tokyo, in partnership with the major technology company, Fujitsu, have found a way of using ultrasound scanners to check the freshness of frozen tuna., the most popular component of sushi and sashimi.

When commercialized, the new technology will allow a person with a hand-held scanner to grade tuna, a job which is presently done by a relatively small number of experts, using knife, eye and instincts acquired through experience.

Although the Japanese consume less fish than previous generations, they remain the world’s biggest consumer of tuna, eating a quarter of the global catch, mostly raw. Much of it is caught far from Japan and frozen on huge factory vessels, preserving it, but making it difficult to judge its quality before it is defrosted. The flesh of fish left for too long before being frozen loses tenderness.

Until now, the job of grading has been done by cutting of the tuna’s tail and securitizing the exposed flesh and its layers of fat. According to Fujitsu, “cutting the tail  of the tuna often damages and ultimately lowers the value of the fish, and the process relies heavily on a limited number of experts to accurately conduct quality inspection”.

A high quality tuna is expensive. At the recent 2023 auction at the Toyosu fish market in Tokyo, a 467-pound fish of the highest quality was sold for 36 million Yen (US$281,000), a valuable fish indeed.

The researchers experimented with scanning frozen tuna using ultrasound , analysing the results using artificial intelligence. Some ultrasound frequencies failed to achieve the desired results. They eventually found that low frequency waves wee reflected back very intensely by the spine of the fish that were past their best.

“By analysing the waveforms using machine learning, we developed the world’s first method to determine the freshness of frozen tuna without the need to cut the product,” the team reported.

“The new technology thus offers a new method to inspect the quality of frozen tuna without  lowering its value, and may one day contribute to greater trust and safety in the global distribution of frozen tuna and other food products.”

The scientists’ goal is eventually to develop hand-held tuna scanners that can be used to identify bad fish with more than 70 per cent accuracy. The device may also be able to spot other defects that reduce the value  of a  fish, such as blood clots and tumours.

The technology has the potential to be sold outside Japan, where demand for tuna is rising. The market research firm Global Information estimates that global tuna sales will grow from $40.7 billion in 2021 to $48.8 billion in 2027.

“In Southeast Asia, it’s common for tuna to be shipped as cheap canned products,” Akira Sakai of Fujitsu Artificial Intelligence Laboratory told the Mainichi newspaper. “The fish is worth four times more when prepared for fresh eating.”

At the Tokyo University in Japan, researchers had discovered that rats can pick out the tempo of a song and nod their heads in time to the beat. They bop to songs by Queen, Mozart and Lady Gaga.

Professor Hirokazu Takahashi and his team conducted a new study of “beat synchronization”. They found that rats can pick out the beat in a piece of music in the same way humans can and move in time to it, even if they have never heard before.

He fitted ten laboratory rats with wireless miniature accelerometers that could measure the slightest head movements , and recruited human participants who were a larger version of the same device.

The rats were monitored as the Takahashi’s’ researchers played Lady Gaga’ Both This Way, Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, Michael Jackson’s Beat It, Maroon 5’s Sugar and Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K448 at four different tempos.

According to Professor Takahashi: ”To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on innate beat synchronization in animals that was not achieved through training or musical exposure.”

One-minute excerpts from five pieces were played at four different tempos—25 per cent slower, the original tempo, twice as fast and four times the original speed. The accelerometer measures whether the humans and rats moved in response to the music.

The results showed  that the rats’ beat synchronization was clearest in the range of 120-140 beats per minute. The team also found that both rats and humans jerked their heads to the beat in a similar rhythm. Professor Takahashi said: ”rats displayed innate—that is, without any training or prior exposure to music—beat synchronization ,most distinctly within 120-140 beats per minute, to which also humans exhibit the clearest beat dyssynchronization.

The optimal nodding tempo was found to depend on the time constant in the brain—the speed at which it can respond to something—which is similar across species. This means that auditory and motor systems’ ability to interact  and move to music maybe widespread in animal.

What next?

The researchers have stated that they want to reveal how other musical properties such as melody and harmony relate to the dynamics of the brain, as understanding how music stimulates the brain may help scientists uncover how it can be used to trigger an emotional response.

“I am also interested in how, why and what mechanisms of the brain create human cultural fields such as fine art, music, science, technology and religion,” Professor Takahashi said.

Professor Takahashi said he and his team also believe that their results could eventually lead to the creation of AI music that can sync more easily with the brain.

“I believe that this question is the key to understand how the brain works and develop the next-generation AI. Also, as an engineer, I am interested in the use of music for a happy life.”

About Professor Hirokazu Takahashi  

He is Associate Professor, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo

Professor Hirokazu Takahashi received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. After working as a research associate at Department of Engineering Synthesis, the University of Tokyo, and as an assistant professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, he has been an associate professor at Department of Mechano-Informatics, the University of Tokyo, since 2019. His current research interests include areas of biomedical engineering ranging from rehabilitation engineering for restoring lost functions to experimental neurophysiology for understanding fundamental brain functions. 

Source:

The Times London, November 12^th, 2022

This week I had two close relatives succumbed to Covid in less than 5 days of being tested positive. In Malaysia, this week also witnessed a high infection rate of over 7,000 daily and a death rate of over 100 patients.

Other countries, such as Britain, are considering lifting restrictions. In the country, three milestones were announced last week in Britain’s bid to beat the coronavirus: zero Covid deaths were reported on Tuesday, three-quarters of adults had received a first dose by Wednesday, and half of all adults had been fully jabbed by Thursday.

Yet, at the same time, doubts are increasing among scientists and politicians that the remaining social restrictions should end as scheduled on June 21^st, so-called Freedom Day. So why, with vaccination going so well, are we still in a pandemic? The answer, as ever, lies in the numbers.

New variant, new danger
Britain’s current rules on social distancing, combined with immunity in the population, might have been enough to control the original virus and even the more infectious Kent variant. Unfortunately, the Indian variant appears to be up to 70 per cent more infectious. This means it “out-competed” the Kent variant to become the dominant strain in Britain, which is why the weekly growth rate in Covid cases has risen in the past seven days from 13 per cent on May 22 to 35 per cent on May 29 with more than 4,000 cases a day.

Herd immunity is further away
The goal of British governments wrestling with a pandemic is “herd immunity”, where so many people have protection the virus has nowhere to go. The safest way to get there is through vaccination.

Under the original Wuhan strain, one infected person passed it to three others: scientists say it had a natural R value of 3. If two out of those three people, or 67 per cent, are vaccinated or become immune through infection, the virus stops growing. This is called the “herd immunity threshold”.

The Kent variant was a third more transmissible, meaning one person gave it to four others. If the Indian variant is 50 per cent more transmissible again, one infected person would infect six others.

This means five out of six people, about 83 per cent, would need to be protected through vaccines or prior infection if we want the virus to die out. Britain is  getting closer: the Office for National Statistics thinks that about 75 per cent of adults now have Covid antibodies. But because just 79 per cent of people are adults, we may need to vaccinate teenagers to reach population immunity. That is now firmly on the government’s agenda after the Pfizer vaccine was approved for children on Friday.

The race to double-jab
Last week the British government celebrated vaccinating almost 40 million people with one dose, that’s 75 per cent of adults, or about 60 per cent of the UK population.

However, a Public Health England report on May 22 suggested that one dose may only be 33 per cent effective against the Indian variant after three weeks.

Getting two vaccine doses is vital. Only 40 per cent of the UK population has been double-jabbed, leaving some 40 million people with a degree of vulnerability.

The good news is that protection after two doses does seem to be enough to ward off any variants. In another Public Health England report, on Thursday, just 3.8 per cent of Indian variant cases were among twice-vaccinated people. This could have a significant effect on unlocking society.

Young spreaders
The UK rightly prioritised older people because they were at greater risk of death or needing hospital treatment. However, adults under the age of 40 account for 39 per cent of Covid cases even though they make up only 29 per cent of the population, mainly because they are more likely to mix socially.

So far less than half of adults under 40 have received a first dose and less than 20 per cent are fully vaccinated. Getting vaccines to more people in this group bracket this month will help reduce Covid transmission. Immunity, though, takes a few weeks to build up: we will not see the effect until July.

Why do rising infections matter?
Even though most vulnerable people are protected, a more transmissible virus means more people will need hospital treatment.

About 98 per cent of Covid deaths occur in people aged over 50: 700,000 of them have not been vaccinated and these people threaten to put pressure on Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).

Vaccines are not 100 per cent effective at stopping hospitalisation, even after two doses. There is some evidence that the Indian variant has mutated enough to “escape” the protection offered by existing vaccines.

This variant may not only be more transmissible. Last week Public Health England said the risk of hospitalisation could be up to 2.6 times higher than the Kent variant.

Source: The Times London, June 6^th, 2021

Dedication:

We would like to dedicate this article to our uncle, Pak Cik Aziz, and our sister- in-law, Norfidah Ahmad. Both passed away so sudden this week due to Covid.    

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My mother in-law is 85 years old and watches her diet carefully. She sees her physician at a Malaysian government clinic regularly. My wife takes care of her well-being like any daughter would do. She is the oldest among her siblings, who grew during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War. She also saw how the British rubber planters lived in her small town of Rantau, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. In the 1960’s she saw at every evening British rubber planters and their wives congregated at a club house in the centre of the town till the early hours. We hope she can live till 100 years.     

We read an interesting article by Damian Whitworth in the Times London on September 30^th on advances made in the area of ageing. He reported research works done by geneticist David Sinclair, who is a longevity expert who believes we will soon be able to boost our genes to defy the ageing process

He interviewed David Sinclair who is a professor at the Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, USA.  He is a 50-year old and believes that the pioneering work he and other human biologists are doing could help him to live for another 80 years. He is an author of a book, Lifespan: Why We Age-and Why We Don’t Have.

The following is an extract of the interview.

David Sinclair, an expert on ageing, has some extremely eye-catching things to say about  how long we might live and what that means for the future of our species. He would like to see the 22nd century. “That would mean making it to my 132nd year. To me, that is a remote chance, but not beyond the laws of biology or way off our current trajectory,” he writes in Lifespan, his new book about how medical science is changing our futures.

Jeanne Calment, who is believed to have lived longer than any other recorded person, died in France at the age of 122 in 1997. By the turn of the next century a 122-year-old will be thought of as having led a full life, but not a particularly long one, Sinclair says. Hitting 150 may not be out of reach. And then? “There is no biological law that says we must age.” We are, he says, about to “redefine what it means to be human, for this is not just the start of a revolution; it is the start of an evolution”.

Sinclair runs a laboratory  at Harvard Medical School, where he is a professor in the department of genetics and a co-director of the Center for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging. He runs a sister laboratory at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where he grew up. He made his name in the mid-2000s when he demonstrated that the natural chemical resveratrol mimicked calorie-restriction in yeast and made the cells live longer. In 2013 he made headlines with his work to stimulate longevity genes in mice so that the effects of ageing were reversed and old mice found new vitality.

I had been expecting, after reading his book with its bold claims, to encounter a grand figure, but Sinclair is relaxed and understated in conversation. Clearly, though, he is not shy of making the sorts of assertions of which many scientists are usually wary.

“Well, the world, in my view, is sleeping on the job,” he says. “I’ve just spent the last two years seeing results in my laboratory and in my colleagues’ laboratories that I thought I’d never see; finding that there’s a back-up hard drive of youthfulness. In 50 years’ time it’s really impossible to imagine the kinds of advances that’ll be possible.”

Sinclair works on sirtuins, which have been dubbed “longevity genes”. There are seven sirtuins in mammals, made by almost every cell in the body. They control health, fitness and survival, and require a molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). The diminishment of NAD as we age is understood to be a primary reason why our bodies develop diseases when we are older. Longevity genes can be activated by exercise, intermittent fasting, low-protein diets and exposure to cold temperatures, Sinclair says. “But over time, diet and exercise are not sufficient. We need more than that.”

That’s where science comes in. NAD increases the activity of all seven sirtuins. Sinclair’s research has found that old mice that were fed nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), an NAD-boosting molecule, suddenly started running ultra-marathons.

NAD boosters extend the lives of mice. There are indications that NAD boosters may restore the fertility of old mice, and positive signs from another trial in mares. The implications are enormous if women can look forward to extending their fertility window. Sinclair is careful to say that what happens in mice might not necessarily happen in humans, but “if that works in women the way it’s working in mice and in horses, then women can start to think differently about their lives”.

Sinclair predicts that another key path to prolonging youth will be cellular reprogramming, in which ageing cells are reset — like DVDs that have had their scratches removed and lost information restored. Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 2012 for discovering that a set of genes could turn adult cells into pluripotent stem cells, which can become any other cell type. Sinclair’s team is working on developing this “switch” to reset cells in the petri dish and then, he hopes, in the body. He envisages a day when we could be administered a specially engineered virus carrying reprogramming genes that are switched on by an antibiotic. A person in their forties would feel 35 again. Then 30 and 25.

“Theoretically you could reset tissue or the entire body every ten years,” he says. “We don’t know how many times we can reset, but that’s one of the exciting areas of the field.” The very significant downside could be that the process causes cancers. “But I’ve been pleasantly surprised that we reprogrammed mice with a virus last year and those mice are still fine — no evidence of any downsides.”

A third part of the approach that Sinclair outlines in his “information theory of ageing” is attacking senescent, or “zombie”, cells. These are cells that have stopped dividing, but aren’t dead. They can cause inflammation, and while restoring them would be a tall order, a class of drugs — senolytics — are being developed to kill them, which should aid rejuvenation, according to Sinclair.

He is not a medical doctor, so he won’t give advice, but he does share details of how his knowledge of the frontline research on ageing shapes his daily life. His aim is to walk a lot of steps each day, take the stairs, and lift weights and run at the weekend at the gym, where he also takes a sauna and dunks in an icy pool. He tries to stay cool during the day and when sleeping.

His diet is plant-heavy, but he’ll eat meat after he has done a workout. He tries to miss one meal a day or have one very small one. His sugar, bread and pasta intake is low, and he gave up desserts a decade ago. Every few months he has his blood analysed for biomarkers and makes adjustments to his diet and exercise if anything shows up. He doesn’t smoke and avoids microwaved plastic, excessive exposure to UV, x-rays and CAT scans.

As well as daily doses of vitamin D, vitamin K and aspirin, he takes a “triple combo” of anti-ageing supplements. NMN is made by our cells and found in avocados, broccoli and cabbage. It increases the levels of NAD in the body, but you’d need to eat an awful lot of avocado toast to achieve the same effect as the gram that Sinclair takes at breakfast.

Metformin, a derivative of French lilac, is used as a diabetes medication, but shows signs of prolonging vitality. In studies it has been seen to increase the lifespan of mice, and among human users it apparently reduced the likelihood of dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, frailty and depression.

Sinclair takes a gram of that too, along with a gram of resveratrol in his homemade yoghurt. Resveratrol, which is found in red wine, protects against many diseases and extended the lifespan of yeast cells and fruit flies. Is this good news for boozers? Not really. The dose Sinclair takes “would be the equivalent of about 500 glasses of wine for breakfast”. He drinks the occasional glass of red wine.

Sinclair was a co-founder of a company that was set up to test resveratrol, which he promoted as “close to miraculous”. The company was sold to GlaxoSmithKline, which allegedly ended the research because the results were underwhelming. Sinclair, who made a reported $8 million from the sale, says that he would love to “reinvigorate” the programme.

His sprightly 80-year-old father is on the same regimen as Sinclair, who has even put the three family dogs on NMN. He shows me the ring he wears that monitors his heart rate, body temperature and movements. This is just the beginning of the way in which we will monitor ourselves as companies read our genomes and monitor our glucose, the oxygen levels in our blood, vitamin balance and hormones, and diagnose neurodegenerative diseases from subtle changes in our movement long before symptoms are noticeable.

Is there not a danger that all this data will result in losing some of the fun of life?

“You can combine fun and fact,” Sinclair says. “It’s not for everybody. A third of the population, at a rough guess, is really interested in their long-term health and would love to have some additional incentives.”

He has done some “conservative” maths about what scientific developments will achieve over the next 50 years. DNA monitoring will soon be alerting us to diseases long before they become serious, allowing us to start treating cancer and other conditions earlier — that could give us an extra ten years of life.

Eating fewer calories and fewer animals, doing more exercise and getting cold enough to boost the development of “healthy” brown fat, which research suggests correlates with longevity in rodents, could add another five years. Molecular treatment to turbo-charge our longevity genes could add another eight.

Then we could reset our epigenome — the control systems and cellular structures that govern which genes should be turned on and off — with molecules or genetic modification, destroy senescent cells with drugs or vaccinations and replace worn-out organs with those from genetically altered farm animals or 3D printers. All this might add another decade.

That’s 33 years added to the roughly 81-year life expectancy of a person in the UK. And we won’t be decrepit old people; we will be full of vitality.

Yet will a life expectancy of 114 be just for the rich? Sinclair warns that we stand on the brink of a world in which the wealthy could ensure that their children, or even their pets, live far longer than the children of those living in poverty.

“Some of these medicines might be very expensive initially, though they’ll come down in price.”

And don’t those rejuvenated people eventually become incapacitated? “They will,” he says, but the research suggests they’ll die quicker. The expensive people are the ones who are sick for a long time.

Sinclair is unusually energetic, and you can imagine him carrying that into deep old age. But what if millions and millions of the rest of us are quite happy to be ancient and fit, but just want to sit around? “We can’t retire at 65 and live another 65 years,” he says. “It’s just not tenable. It’s not fair to the younger people. There will have to be adjustments.”

We’d have to address our levels of consumption to make living on our planet sustainable and to avoid the environmental crisis becoming further exacerbated by a growing, ageing population. Our social security systems can’t support half a life of retirement. “We are flying blind into one of the most economically destabilising events in the history of the world,” Sinclair says. He doesn’t have all the solutions.

Critics suggest that there is a temptation for those in the highly lucrative field of longevity research to over-hype what is possible, although Sinclair tells me that “income to my family from my inventions is put back into medical research and innovation”.

Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, this year criticised the publicity on longevity studies. “If you say you’re a terrific scientist and you have a treatment for ageing, it gets a lot of attention,” he said on the website Kaiser Health News. “There is financial incentive and inducement to overpromise before all the research is in.”

What Sinclair says he wants more than anything is for everyone to expect to meet their great-great-grandchildren. By knowing future generations, he argues, we will feel more accountable for our actions today. “It will compel us to confront the challenges that we currently push down the road,” he says. “To invest in research that won’t just benefit us now, but people 100 years from now. To worry about the planet’s ecosystems and climate 200 years from now.”

Note: 

Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To by David Sinclair is published by Harper Thorsons.

In The Tines London on September 7^th, 2019, Simon Parkin analysed the British video games industry. He is the author of A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Secret Game that Won the War, which would be published in November 2019 by Sceptre. The analysis is published below.

When Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, the founders of the video game company Riot Games, began planning its sprawling, multimillion-dollar campus in Los Angeles, they knew that it had to be luxurious. In the early days Beck, 36, and Merrill, 38, former room-mates at the University of California, were content to moonlight out of poky office rooms. However, when their first project, League of Legends, became one of the most widely played games in the world they had started to compete with Google, Facebook and the like to entice the brightest and best engineers in the world to work for them. At one point Beck offered to buy a Ferrari for a programmer whom he was desperate to recruit.

In 2015 the pair installed a vast cafeteria as the centrepiece of the new complex, with a battalion of chefs cooking cuisines from around the world for Riot’s 2,500-strong staff. An orange grove was planted near an outdoor chessboard with human-sized pieces. Rather than fell trees to deter pigeons from gathering around the campus, Riot hired a falconer to scare them off. No expense, in other words, was spared.

Such extravagance is possible in a business that, for the winners at least, can be unimaginably profitable. Recent figures show that the video-game market in the UK alone is worth £5.7 billion, more than the nation’s film and music industries combined. And while film production companies and record labels must regularly release new products, many games outfits, including Riot, concentrate on one, which they nurture and grow over many years – more like a social media company than a Hollywood studio.

Sustaining a game with millions of players requires a king’s ransom in funds, which often come from surprising sources. Riot, for instance – in which the Chinese conglomerate Tencent bought a majority stake for $231 million in 2011 – has made its fortune principally from the sale of “skins”. These are digital costumes that change the look of one’s character, much like paying a few pounds to dress your chess pieces in a different outfits. The outfits bestow no tactical advantage – they are purely cosmetic. And yet the sale of virtual fashions is, by all accounts, preposterously profitable. The digital fashion industry was pioneered by Riot Games, which made an estimated $1.6 billion in 2015, much of which came from the sale of virtual clothing.

Digital fashion is only one of the factors that make today’s games industry almost unrecognisable to anyone who grew up playing video games in the Eighties. Where games once came on temperamental cassettes or cartridges, most now are bought from digital retailers and stored on hard drives. Socialising was once done around wooden Pac-Man or Space Invaders cabinets in arcades that smelt of beer and truancy. Today players can go on month-long quests together, via the internet, without stepping foot in each other’s countries. While in the Eighties there were no international video-game tournaments, today young men and women join well-paid professional teams and live together in luxurious penthouse training dojos with dieticians and psychologists on hand to improve their chances of winning glittering prize pots.

Success came quickly to the video-game medium. In the early Seventies games spilt from the room-size university mainframe computers on which they were invented into bars and arcades, where they often made fast fortunes for their creators. However, the market crashed in 1983, a year after Atari paid $25 million for the rights to Steven Spielberg’s E.T.; the game was terrible and duly tanked – thousands of unsold copies were buried in the New Mexico desert.

The subsequent recovery of the business has been steady and stratospheric, propelled by advances such as 3D graphics, online play and virtual reality. One recent market report estimates that consumers will spend $138 billion on games in 2019. This success has been agitated by scores of video-game companies – and not just those based in North America. Analysts reckon that Grand Theft Auto V, which has been at the top of the charts since its release in September 2013, has earned more revenue than any book or film in history, with more than 95 million units sold, making $6 billion. GTA’s creators, Sam and Dan Houser, are the sons of Walter Houser, who co-owned Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, and the actress Geraldine Moffat. They grew up in London and their games are principally developed in Edinburgh.

The industry’s ever-expanding commercial clout has not, however, been matched by an upswing in cultural status. The stereotypical image of the lone teenage boy twiddling his thumbs in a darkened bedroom has persisted, while a readiness to blame violent crimes on the influence of games has focused attention on the baser aspects of a medium that is far richer in theme and substance than tabloid headlines suggest.

Yet this image may be shifting. Many who started playing games in their teenage years have continued to play into adulthood, and the rise of smartphone games has broadened the demographic of game-players; a 2017 report found that 32.4 million people in the UK play games on a regular basis, and that almost half of the players of mobile games are women. As game-players age, developers are increasingly investing in games that appeal to a more mature audience – not in terms of sex or violence, but via game experiences that explore more complex subject matter, such as grief and parenthood.

As the industry has evolved, a raft of hitherto unimagined and hugely lucrative positions have emerged. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who is 28 and has hair that is routinely dyed the colour of toxic waste, is in perhaps the most famous of these newly coined roles: video-game streamers broadcast their game-playing live to a global audience via live-streaming services such as Microsoft’s Mixer or the Amazon-owned Twitch.

The idea of watching someone else play video games seems counterintuitive, but in March last year, when Blevins played Fortnite with the musician Drake, the rapper Travis Scott and the Pittsburgh Steelers athlete JuJu Smith-Schuster, footage of the play session broke the record for the most-viewed live event yet staged on the internet. Close to 650,000 viewers concurrently logged on to watch the match.

Streaming is making stars of young men and women who, in a previous era, might have followed a career into traditional broadcasting. Alastair Aiken, the 25-year-old British streamer better known by his online alias Ali-A, is a hero to British teenagers, who know him principally not from his appearances as a presenter on CBBC, but for his YouTube videos playing Fortnite, which have been watched more than 959 million times, earning him up to a million dollars.

Top-flight streamers such as Blevins and Aiken often stream for six hours or more at a time and command influence over millions of young fans (Blevins has 4.7 million Twitter followers). Blevins, whose six-day honeymoon last August was his first holiday in eight years, reportedly earned almost $10 million in 2018 through streaming. He has little time to enjoy his earnings, however – his manager and wife recently told ESPN that the couple can’t leave their million-dollar home inside a gated community about an hour outside Chicago without enduring a Beatles-esque mobbing. Moreover, Blevins feels a pressing need to always be streaming. A weekend off could cost him tens of thousands of subscribers and there is an army of streamers – 2.2 million on Twitch, in fact – desperate to usurp his position at the top.

As game worlds have increased in fidelity thanks to technological progress, so the costs – human and financial – of game creation have risen sharply. GTA V cost an estimated $137 million to make, with an additional $128 million spent on marketing. Some of the top-level members of staff at Rockstar, the game’s publisher, worked 100 hours a week during the final weeks of its latest game’s development.

These figures represent a significant risk to financiers. Then there is the issue of discoverability. With 300,000 games for sale on Apple’s App Store, convincing anyone to play your game is as significant a challenge as building it. A host of angel investors are constantly on the lookout for what might be the next big thing, but in an industry in which fashions are fickle it can be difficult for them to know where to place their bets. Last year Jay Chi, who spent 11 years at the management consulting company McKinsey & Co, leading its global video-games practice, co-launched the Makers Fund with an initial pot of $180 million to invest in projects with the potential to become the next League of Legends or Fortnite. (The team is yet to announce the fund’s performance.)

As more developers seek to make their games permanent fixtures in players’ lives, detractors fear that the wider ecosystem suffers, crowding out those whose aspirations lean towards the artistic or political, rather than the commercial. Games such as That Dragon, Cancer, an autobiographical game created by a mother and father that looks at what it is like to live with a child dying from terminal illness. Or Journey, an elegiac exploration of death and intimacy in which players drift into and out of one another’s stories, engaging in fleeting moments of care and tenderness.

These games explore emotional territory away from the sports-like texture of League of Legends and Fortnite. They too can prove enormously successful (the puzzle game Papers, Please sold 1.8 million copies) and are often more likely to be picked up by critics and awards panels on the lookout for games that demonstrate the artistic range of the medium, not just its money-making capability. And yet, while the significant profits are – this month, at least – to be made in the sale of digital costumes for virtual avatars, few of the big game publishers are focusing their investment and efforts on these kinds of personal expression.

This will, long term, have a restrictive effect on the industry. As Robert Yang, a professor at New York University’s Game Center, recently put it, the medium is in the process of reverse-engineering an art form from an entertainment business. For games to evolve into the art form that they have the potential to become, he said, “we have to convince funding bodies and governments that games are worth more than their sales numbers”. This has been a medium defined by restless change and technological momentum. There are more ways to make a fortune from games than ever, whether it is building, broadcasting or investing in them. Care must be taken to ensure that profit-chasing doesn’t hold this, the most complex, thrilling and arguably engaging medium yet invented, back from its full potential.

My son, Mohd Harfiq, is a man of fast pace. He rides mountain bikes during weekends and play video games for most nights. During week days, he organizes many events, such as youth events and eSport tournaments. I ask how big is the eSport in Malaysia and globally. He said eSport is very big!!

My wife, Datin Azimah, is a keen free-to-play game of Candy Crush. She often “ignores” me for hours when she is playing against other players on the internet.

Recently, a 16-year old, Kyle Giersdorf, won US$3.0 million at the Fortnite World Cup tournament in New York. This week, a team of five teenagers shared US$15.6 million at the Dota 2 International tournament in Shanghai.

According to market research company, SuperData (superdataresearch.com) , the top ten free-to-play game revenue for 2018  were as follows:

No.	Games	Developer	Revenue US$ million
1	Fortnite	Epic Games	2,400
2	Dungeon Fighter	Nexon	1,500
3	League of Legends, Riot Games	Tencent	1,400
4	Pokemon Go	Niantic	1,300
5	Crossfire	Noewiz Games	1,300
6	Honour of Kings	Tencent	1,300
7	Fate/Grand Order	Aniplex	1,200
8	Candy Crush Saga, King	Activision Blizzard	1,100
9	Monster Strike	Mixi	1,000
10	Clash Royale, Supercell	Tencent	900

The other segment of the digital game industry is the premium games market, which was about US$17,800 million in 2018, according to SuperData.

The premium games market by revenue for 2018 was as follows.

No.	Games	Developer	Revenue US$ mill.
1	PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds	Bluehole	1,028
2	FIFA 18	Electronic Art	790
3	Grand Theft Auto V	Take-Two Interactive	628
4	Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII	Activision Blizzard	612
5	Red Dead Redemption 2	Take-Two Interactive	516
6	Call of Duty,WWII	Activision Blizzard	506
7	FIFA 19	Electronic Art	482
8	Monster Hunter, World	Capcom	467
9	Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege	Ubisoft	440
10	Overwatch	Activision Blizzard	429

 The digital games industry is not only for casual gamers like my wife. There are a large number of professional gamers who participate in regional tournaments in the US, Asia and Europe. They can make huge monies by winning major tournaments like the Fortnite World Cup, its first world cup. The Fortnite World Cup is a 3-day tournament with a prize pool of money of US$30 million, shared among 200 final participants. To enter the Fortnite World Cup, about 40 million of Fortnite’s more than 250 million registered players competed in an online qualifying over 10 weeks for the opportunity to come to New York. The 200 finalists, with an average age of 16 years, came from 34 different countries. Fornite is technically a video game, and one with a simple premise. At the start, players are dropped onto an island and shoot at each other until one person is left standing. Each match lasts about 20 minutes and slowly, the numbers wittle down. A storm approaches, making the map smaller and smaller. If a player jumps the island, he/she dies.

Fortnite is so popular that it becomes more than just a game. Today, it’s a social media platform in its own rights, driving pop culture among teenagers, from clothing to dance crazes. It is at the forefront of eSports, competitive online gaming that is attracting more sponsors to sell bigger sponsorships. It is estimated there are more than 250 million users across the globe.

The main attraction is that the winner in the recent Fortnite World Cup, Kyle Diersdorf, won more money than  Egan Bernal, the cyclist who won the Tour of France, a gruelling 21-day riding competition.

eSport have exploded in recent years, helped by the popularity in Asia, which is more than half of world’s 454 million fans. eSports generated more than US$500 million in revenue last year according to consultancy company, New200. Games companies like Epic Games generate most of their income from virtual outfits to kit out their characters. In addition, the team that have grown around the games are also having real-world merchandize. A popular team, 100 Thieves, has created a premium streetwear brand.

Employment of video games industry

According the US Entertainment Software Association (theesa.com), in 2018, the video games industry in the US generated US$43.4 billion. Playing video games has become a leading form of entertainment and an integral part of the American culture. The industry directly employs about 60,000 and indirectly more than 200,000 people. The video games industry employs significant number of people in Japan, South Korea, China and Europe. Tencent of China is the world’s leading games company with millions of players in China. It is also a major investor in Epic Games, the developer/publisher of Fortnite. The video games industry had always been very big in Japan, home of Nintendo and Capcom, initially developers of arcade games.   .    

Tracking the eSport index

An index has been developed to track the performance of global video gaming and eSport segment. Known as the MVIS Global Video Gaming and eSports index, it includes companies with at least 50 per cent (25% for current components of their revenues from video gaming and/or eSports). These companies may include those that develop video games and related software/hardware, streaming services and are involved in eSport events. The MVIS Global Video Gaming & eSports index covers at least 90 per cent of the investable universe. Currently, the MVIS Global Video Gaming & eSports have 25 components.

My conclusion

The video games and eSport industry is likely to go bigger as children, future gamers, are exposed to video games at early age. In our family gatherings, our young members are usually absorbed with their tablets to play simple video games. I am also quite happy that my wife has yet to purchase virtual outfits using my credit card. 

Lastly, this is the only industry that creates teenager millionaires on a regular basis. Hopefully, not every teenager wants to be professional gamers at the expense of doctors and engineers!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

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My Iranian MBA students proudly said that Iran produces the best caviar from sturgeons caught in rivers near the Caspian Sea. These sturgeons are now bred in commercial farms as wild sturgeons are declining in number. With the caviar selling at expensive prices in fancy restaurants, and travelers in first and business classes of airlines such as Singapore Airlines and Emirates are served caviar, many entrepreneurs in several countries are entering the aquaculture of sturgeons to harvest their eggs. An example was a commercial sturgeon farm in Malaysia, using South Korean expertise, which was started several years ago but failed.

Recently, it was reported by Jane Flanagan in The Times on July 6^th, 2019,    that now there are successful sturgeon entrepreneurs in Madagascar.  

A lake in the highlands of Madagascar has become an unlikely source of caviar in the race to meet demand for the delicacy amid a worldwide shortage.

Entrepreneurs in Madagascar have produced a tonne of caviar after a painstaking process that began six years ago using the fertilised eggs of rare sturgeon imported from Russia.

“We took the time to prove that this is serious,” Delphyn Dabezies, the head of Rova Caviar, said, admitting that the enterprise was rather a gamble.

Producers in the Caspian Sea still boast the most prized caviar from Beluga sturgeon but steadily constricting quotas in response to dwindling stocks of fish have led to farms springing up outside Russia. Lower supply and higher demand has only increased caviar’s currency as a symbol of wealth and prestige.

The French entrepreneur, who has lived on the island for years, sold her first harvest within weeks — at £90 per 100g — half the price or less compared with caviar farmed in Europe. Her customers are luxury shops and restaurants in Madagascar and its neighbours Mauritius, the Seychelles and Réunion.

The world’s most expensive caviar, from albino sturgeon caught off the coast of Iran, regularly fetches up to £2,000 for 100g.

Lake Mantasoa, which is perched at a cool altitude of 1,400 metres and east of the capital Antananarivo, was identified as an ideal place to develop a nursery to hatch the imported eggs. Three hundred staff have been trained to manage the exacting process of raising the sturgeon until they weigh 1.5kg, when only the females are kept until their eggs are ready to be harvested.

The quality and taste of the caviar tests the skill of Gaston Sovani’i Thomas, 23, who, knife in hand, has no margin for error as he extracts the precious black eggs from each fish. “At first I was afraid to destroy or contaminate the eggs, but now everything comes automatically,” he said.

We hope the venture would be hugely successful. Visitors would now be able to enjoy spoons of caviar after spending time at Madagascar’s parks to watch lemurs, which are the island’s famous tourist products.