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Ella Fitzgerald - Manhattan (música para ouvir e letra da música com legenda)!

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Singapore is aiming to be the world's first Smart Nation - but what does that actually entail?

You know what it's like. You're waiting for the bus on your way to work and inevitably, you're late. Enter Singapore's Smart Nation solution, which aims to merge technology into every aspect of life on the small island.

That includes some bus stops, which under this plan will now have interactive maps and wi-fi connectivity - even e-books and a swing. This is all an attempt to make the journeys of Singapore's commuters more enjoyable and efficient.

If you look at how important the bus system is to public transport here, it makes sense. With almost four million daily rides, the bus network makes up the most significant part of Singapore's transport network.

Nowhere is the scale of the project more evident than at the headquarters of the Land Transport Authority.

Using GPS data, researchers and programmers can tell how fast or slow a bus is going and how many people are on board at any given time.

"With this information we know where are the choke points at different times of the day," said Christopher Hooi Wai Yean, deputy director of the authority's communications and sensors division, as he demonstrated the movement of the buses on their screens. "[This way] we can put in measures to alleviate and dissipate the crowd at choke points across the island. This will ensure that the whole transport system is more well-oiled in that sense."

It is an approach that is being replicated across all sectors - transport, homes, offices and even hospitals.

The KK Women's and Children's Hospital is one of the biggest and busiest in Singapore. On any day, it sees scores of patients - mainly pregnant women or mums with their kids. It began trialling video conferencing for its patients in non-emergency cases in November last year.

Gladys Soo is one such mum. Her seven-year old son suffers from eczema and she started treatment for him in February.

"We went to the hospital in person for the first consultation to check for his eczema," she told me. "The follow-up was done via video conferencing."

Mrs Soo said the fact that she is a working mum was a factor in her decision to go for the video-conferencing option.

"It saves you time - I don't have to travel, I don't have to take leave. The pharmacist can actually view my son's eczema on the video conference. And he can diagnose whether it is getting better - it is like being with him in person."

Speech therapy, lactation consultation services and paediatric home care services are other aspects of medical care that KKH is using video conferencing to address.

Associate Prof Low Cheng Ooi, the chief clinical informatics officer of IHiS, the company that manages the technology infrastructure for the healthcare aspect of Singapore's Smart Nation solutions, says the plan is to phase this programme in gradually.

"We already know that public health services delivered over video and medical consultation via video works well in larger countries with rural areas," he told me. "But in Singapore we are very urban, and our citizens can get healthcare within a very short period of time.

"So we have to rationalise what it is we are trying to do with this platform. We are moving cautiously with discipline so that patients will benefit from this kind of consultation, with no risks."

It's an ambitious goal - trying to merge technology into every aspect of citizens' lives - but this grand plan may have already run into some speed bumps.

"We really are not going as fast as we ought to," said the country's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently.

To deliver results, Singapore has set up a new ministerial committee to push ahead with its Smart Nation dreams.

Vivian Balakrishnan, the minister in charge of the Smart Nation initiative, says that a sense of urgency is vital in ensuring the future success of Singapore.

"If we don't get this right, jobs are at stake," he told the BBC. "Wages are at stake and any government that doesn't prepare its people for the future and offer the potential for good jobs will be in trouble."

But Harminder Singh, a senior lecturer in business information systems at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, says the main issue with Smart Nation is that there may be too much government control over it right now for real innovation to take place.
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"Singapore's way of doing things is that the government leads, then others follow," he told me. "This might be a problem - it is too centralised and so it may take too long for plans to trickle down.

"And ideas from the ground may be neither visible to those on top nor acceptable to them, especially if they are related to the delivery of services that are traditionally handled by the government."

He adds that it is not clear why Singapore's leaders are so keen to move full steam ahead with this plan.

"Smart Nation is about building national technology infrastructure so that the government can offer new services, or do what they do now differently. The government may need to explain more clearly how the Smart Nation project will improve salaries and jobs in Singapore to get the project moving faster."

The authorities here are taking this initiative extremely seriously - it appears to be the big bet Singapore is taking for its next generation. Because of its size, Singapore has always had to stay one step ahead of the curve to survive.

This tiny island nation has always prided itself on persistence and a strong work ethic to succeed. Smart Nation is its plan for its future survival - and the shoots of innovation are beginning to show.

Singapore now has a small but growing start-up culture and home-grown companies are starting to take more risks. But creativity needs to be nurtured - and Singapore may find that its Smart Nation dreams may take time to reach their full potential.

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Singapore is aiming to be the world's first Smart Nation - but what does that actually entail? You know what it's like. You're waiting for the bus on your way to work and inevitably, you're late. Enter Singapore's Smart Nation solution, which aims to merge technology into every aspect of life on the small island.

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The night in the big city!

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The Country Life

The Silver Seas

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The Silver Seas - The Country Life (música para ouvir e letra da música com legenda)! so long to the city life / so long to the neon sign / I'm gone / I'll trade the trouble, and this drive

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New planting procedures.

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Apples are an autumn speciality, their scent rolling off farmers' market carts and inspiring pie bakers and cider makers to delicious heights. But they're available to eat all year as well, of course. There almost isn't a moment, these days, when you can't get an apple: sweet, crisp, and not at all seeming like it's spent months off the tree.

While some countries get their apples from abroad in the off-season - the UK relies on 70% imports - domestic farming still dominates in other major markets. In the US, for example, fewer than one in 10 apples come from overseas, according to a 2016 report by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). So how do farmers maintain a supply when there's nothing to harvest? It's thanks to an innovation with some interesting chemistry: a type of storage that stops ripening in its tracks.

After apples are picked, they are still alive - they continue to carry out the chemical processes of a living plant, more or less, as they take in oxygen, create energy, and get closer and closer to ripeness. The chemical reactions that lead to ripening in apples are in large part driven by a hormone called ethylene, which changes the expression of myriad genes in the fruit. Fruit that responds to ethylene - not just apples but bananas, mangoes, papayas, some pears, and others - grows more sensitive to the hormone as ripening gets closer.

The ripening reactions happen more quickly when temperatures are higher, so keeping the fruit cold, in a cellar or even a cave, will buy you some time, says James Mattheis, the research director at the USDA ARS Tree Fruit Research Laboratory in Wenatchee, Washington. And sealing the fruit in a confined space and letting it deplete its oxygen supply will also slow things down, since oxygen is necessary for the reactions to proceed. These strategies have been used in fruit storage for ages.

However, in the mid-20th Century, researchers began to experiment with something a little more radical: directly manipulating the composition of the air in storage rooms. If the air is formulated so that it has very little oxygen, they learned, ethylene will have less of an effect on the fruit, and the natural respiration process slows down. Out in the world, the atmosphere we breathe every day is about 21% oxygen. In a modern controlled atmosphere (CA) storage room, as these facilities are called, it ranges from 3% all the way down to 0.5%.

In 2013, two workers on the Earl of Selbourne's apple farm on Blackmoor Estate in Hampshire in the UK were found dead in the controlled atmosphere storage room

These nearly oxygen-less rooms, which are also temperature and humidity-controlled, can be gigantic. "Where I live in Washington state, there is capacity for half to three-quarters of the fruit produced here," Mattheis says. That's storage for two to three billion pounds of apples, all told. "That's a huge amount of physical space," he continues. "You can have three or four basketball games going on in one of these rooms - full court."

These suspended animation chambers for apples occasionally make the news when someone thinks they'll be alright if they just hold their breath while on a quick visit inside. In 2013, two workers on the Earl of Selbourne's apple farm on Blackmoor Estate in Hampshire in the UK were found dead in the controlled atmosphere storage room, and in 2015 the manager who sent them in without proper breathing apparatus was convicted of manslaughter. "[Deaths have] happened in most areas where CA has been used," Mattheis says. "Apples can still be alive after being in there but we can't."

While removing the oxygen extends apples' lives for months on its own, a molecule called 1-methylcyclopropene has also made its way into storage chambers over the last two decades. This molecule, a synthetic creation patented in 1997, fits neatly in the receptors that ethylene attaches to. It's like those plastic covers for electrical outlets, slotting into the holes and blocking the access of the prongs or, in this case, the hormone. When that happens, it doesn't matter how much ethylene is in the environment, the apples will hold steady at their current stage of ripeness. Together, low oxygen and 1-MCP can keep apples in stasis for more than six months.

So, when the apples are ready to be sold, can farmers re-start ripening by removing them from the facility? Actually, Mattheis says, starting the process again isn't as easy or consistently possible as starting it.

"For the most part," however, "people would rather have apples that are not ripe," he says. The apples that come out of storage remain essentially as they were when they came off the tree, and never develop the smells that characterise the tree-ripened fruit. But people buy them all the same - and certainly prefer them to over-ripe, mealy apples where the ethylene response has gone on too long. Something to think about when you pick up a few at the supermarket: the delicate dance of hormones, oxygen, and other substances that brings you an apple nearly every day of the year, although not quite the same apple it would be if it had stayed on the tree.

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How farmers put apples into suspended animation

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Apples are an autumn speciality, their scent rolling off farmers' market carts and inspiring pie bakers and cider makers to delicious heights. But they're available to eat all year as well, of course. There almost isn't a moment, these days, when you can't get an apple: sweet, crisp, and not at all seeming like it's spent months off the tree.

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Day in the field.

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Rounding up and tending the cattle the old school way in Mid-Michigan.

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The Country Life.