The airline plans to roll out new service features in business class.

Topping the list are the 29 highly customised 121 configuration Thompson Vantage XL fullflat seats that give the passenger additional private personal space and ensure a more comfortable flight experience.

Seats are designed with a gentle massage feature, an adjustable multifunctional light source and a larger storage space. The airline’s mission is to create a more distinguished, fashionable and differentiated travel experience.

Economy class incorporates a 333 layout, making more efficient use of the widebodied aircraft’s space. Optimised cabin space planning and the highly acclaimed Recaro CL3710 seat delivers legroom up to 32 inches.

A next-generation highflux onboard satellite communications system keeps the traveller constantly connected even while cruising at 30,000 feet.

The configuration management team has specially customised seven kinds of light and shadows that, in Chinese traditional thought, symbolise good fortune for the cabin and all that is within, while at the same time delivering to passengers a relaxing, easy-on-the-eyes visual experience.

Quentin Bisch, the famous perfumer from Givaudan, has created a fragrance to add a pleasing aromatic scent to the comfortably decorated cabin, while the onboard service also includes a selection of alcoholic drinks, custommade meals and special afternoon teas.

The first 787 will feature the Chinese Peony livery symbolising good fortune and will be delivered in Seattle this month. The aircraft will fly between Shanghai and Shenzhen, Sanya, Chengdu and Chongqing.

Intercontinental flights by 787 from Shanghai will to be launched in 2019.

When they say “Belly up to the bar!” at the Vana Nava Sky bar in Hua Hin, they mean way up – 110 metres above the ground. Lofty watering holes are nothing new, but this one’s got a drinking deck with a see-through floor.

Vana Nava Sky opened recently on the 27th floor of the Holiday Inn Vana Nava Hua Hin, boasting a design by renowned architect Ashley Sutton, the creative genius behind Maggie Choo’s and Iron Fairies in Bangkok and Ophelia in Hong Kong.

The 60-square-metre glass-bottomed observation deck offers not only exciting looks straight down but also fine views of the mountains, the sea and the city, so basically you don’t know which way to look first.

One of the great signature drinks, Thai Urban Iced Tea.

Proudputh Liptapanlop, executive director of Proud Real Estate, which manages the Vana Nava Hua Hin Water Jungle and Holiday Inn, greeted a huge crowd of celebrities and other honoured guests at the opening.

“What great destinations around the world have in common – Paris, London, Bali or wherever – are rooftop bars,” she said. “Tourists love places with panoramic views, somewhere they can literally drink in the sights and the liveliness of the city. And we recruited the top names in the industry to create this new icon for the city of Hua Hin.”

When you imbibe at Vana Nava Sky, you’re enjoying the vast sea, the sparkling urban sprawl and imposing Mount Ta Kiab and Mount Tao.

Proudputh Liptapanlop, second right, with some of her guests.

More frequently, though, you’re glancing at your feet every couple of minutes for another spacewalker thrill. Moving across the glass floor of the Sky Deck, despite its support base of tempered iron, feels like walking through the air. The glass is only 12 millimetres thick, but it’s specifically designed for safety and can easily hold as many as 40 people at a time.

The bar decor features a lot of mother-of-pearl, evoking the elegance of the sea, while the ceiling arches mimic the curl of waves breaking on the beach.

Celebrity bartender Geo Valdivieso has taken mixology to new heights at the destination bar.

“This, married with crafted timber ‘shell’ panels, lends the place that seaside atmosphere we all love,” said Sutton. “I also came up with a selection of Cambodian sandstone, imported European fabrics and authentic leather and white marble from Tibet to add luxury and finesse.”

Vana Nava Sky managed to snag Joseph Boroski, a celebrity mixologist, to conceive a range of refreshing cocktails that similarly bring the ocean to mind, using seasonal and local fruits, indigenous herbs and flowers. The menu has four categories – Clouds, Tropical, Solid and Easy – together entailing more than 20 drinks.

One of these, Thai Urban Iced Tea, derives from the iced tea that was once a big draw at Hua Hin’s Chatchai Market. Served in a hanging vessel, it contains 24-hour-cold-infused dry lemongrass, cinnamon, Thai lime and black tea shaken with either vodka or homemade jackfruit syrup.

While the morning or midday sun is overhead, Sky Brunch is served on the high deck, the stunning views paired with delicious food from a menu that will change monthly.

The event brings together minimalistic home decor handicrafts and fusion Isaan cuisine, which have been adapted for a chic, modern look and feel but still maintain the regional identity that has been carried down from generation to generation.

A demonstration of basket weaving and local fabric weaving, as well as indigo dying will also be available. Customers can shop for products and sample tasty and spicy food from tomorrow (October 5) through October 14 at the Main Atrium of the shopping centre on Phetchkasem Road.

“The event is held for customers and members of the public to widen their horizons and learn about Isaan,” says the mall’s Songsiriwan Lertnarong.

Visitors can also enjoy reed mat weaving demonstrations from Maha Sarakham province, basket weaving and have a go at designing their own patterns for indigo dyeing at just Bt100 per piece. Only 10 pieces will be made per day.

More than 60 vendors will be offering indigo-dyed fabric, checked harem trousers, silk fabric, checked pattern dolls, fashionable apparel made of checked fabric, home decor handicrafts, organic fermented pork, spicy seafood papaya salad, deep-fried spiced meat on stick, neck fillet steak, and much more.

For more information, call (02) 454 7777 or visit Facebook.com/SeaconBangkaeFanPage and http://www.SeaconBangKae.com.

The show is the first acrobatic adaptation from Louis Cha’s classic novel “Xiao Ao Jiang Hu” (“The Smiling, Proud Wanderer”).

Tickets for the show, which will be performed again on Saturday and Sunday and then from October 914, cost from Bt700 to Bt1,500 at Thai Ticket Major counters, online at http://www.ThaiTicketMajor.com or by calling (02)262 3838.

German gourmet treats

The World restaurant on the 24th floor of Centara Grand at CentralWorld is celebrating Oktoberfest from now until October 14 with a themed buffet of authentic Bavarian flavours including a wide variety of imported sausages, cold cuts and chilled platters and of course, lots of beer!

The buffet is priced at Bt850-plus for lunch (food only) and Bt1,690-plus for dinner including beverage packages and freeflow of Paulaner draught beer.

Book your table at (02) 649 8358.

Suds and sausages

Another venue marking Oktoberfest is BarSu on the ground floor of Sheraton Grande Sukhumvit with German craft beers and dishes such as roast pork knuckle with braised red cabbage and bread dumplings, platters of speck ham, Bavarian cheese, and Wiener sausages, and more.

It also offers three drinks packages: “Fab Five” (Bt555-net), “Grapes Five” (Bt1,000-net) and “Draft Five” (Bt500-net). They’re available nightly from 5.30 to midnight.

For more information, call (02) 649 8358, email: dining.sgs@luxurycollection.com or join the conversation at Facebook.com/barsubangkok.

Of sauerkraut and seafood

Fans of German food and beer can also celebrate Oktoberfest at the Huntsman Pub of the Landmark Hotel from today until next Sunday.

The menu includes Crispy pork knuckle with Sauerkraut, German sausages, Pork schnitzel and Meat loaf with Erdinger Beer plus a broad selection of imported and local ales.

One floor up meanwhile at The Atrium, chef Francesco Bettoli is preparing Crab Roe that he’s personally selected from Klong Klone in Samut Songkhram province and is cooking in a variety of delicious ways including steamed and stirfried with pepper. Other seafood dishes on the dinner buffet table are King Crab, Blue Crab, and imported oysters served on ice.

Round up your pals and pay just for two when coming in a group of four.

Call (02) 254 0404

With a total investment of Bt300 million, and covering 3,000 square metres, the new school will be located across three floors of the Zen Tower, CentralWorld Shopping Centre on Ratchadamri Road, Instruction at the new facility will officially start on January 14.

Siradej Donavanik, managing director of Dusit Hospitality Education, said that Dusit was delighted to be continuing its long relationship with the school, adding that the upcoming renovation and expansion of Dusit Thani Bangkok, where the school is currently located, has provided a great opportunity to build on this partnership by moving Le Cordon Bleu Dusit Culinary School to a new site with extended facilities.

“Since we made the decision to collaborate with Le Cordon Bleu International to establish Le Cordon Bleu Dusit Culinary School in 2007, the school has continuously developed and we are very proud to see its progress,” Siradej said. “The school, which has so far produced over 10,000 qualified personnel for the service and food industries, reflects the commitment of our company toi developing a talented and capable workforce. It is also proof that the path laid down by Dusit’s founder, my grandmother, Thanpuying Chanut Piyaoui, is not only the right guideline, but also a valuable approach to sustainably develop the country’s economy through the food and service industries.

“With this in mind, we will continue to develop curricula that reflect global changes in which both consumption patterns and lifestyles.The school is determined to expand learning opportunities in culinary arts that students can use to build a career and generate income, and ultimately deliver a better quality of life to consumers around the world.”

Michel Peters, joint venture director and management representative of Le Cordon Bleu International, added that he was proud to help develop this school to become a leading culinary school in Thailand and the Asean region and was committed to constantly improving the teaching and learning methods to continuously produce quality graduates.

With the new location, the school will be able to welcome approximately 600 more students each year. The new savoury cuisine and dessert courses, and management courses such as a programme in culinary management will start in April 2019. There are also short courses in culinary arts, Italian foods, sugar, and chocolate work, as well as wine, cheese, and food pairing courses to meet the demands and trends in the market.

The new school will preserve the same look and feel of the current school in terms of decor, classroom layout, and kitchen labs. Its city centre location will also provide easy access to local transportation including two BTS stations – Siam and Chidlom, and ample parking for students and visitors.

The imprints may also shed light on whether or not trauma can be passed on between generations as has long been hypothesised.

A team of researchers at the University of British Columbia examined the sperm cells of 34 adult men, some of whom had been victims of child abuse years earlier.

They found that the effects of the trauma were indelibly printed in 12 regions of the DNA of those men who had experienced varying levels of emotional, physical or sexual abuse.

Scientists believe these alterations, known as methylation, could one day be used by investigators or courts to weigh allegations of child abuse.

“If you think of genes as being like lightbulbs, DNA methylation is like a dimmer switch that controls how strong each light is — which in turn can influence how cells function,” Nicole Gladish, a PhD candidate in the university’s Department of Medical Genetics, told AFP.

“This information can potentially provide additional information about how childhood abuse affects long-term physical and mental health.”

The experiment is one of a growing number of trials looking into what turns genes “on and off” at different periods of human development, a field of study known as epigenetics.

Once thought as entirely pre-programmed from conception, some genes are now known to be activated or deactivated by environmental factors or an individual’s life experience.

‘Small piece of the puzzle’

Scientists involved in the study, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, said they still did not know how methylation affects a person’s long-term health.

In addition, due to the difficulty in extracting egg cells, the team don’t plan to replicate the experiment on women — statistically far likelier to have been victims of child abuse than men.

Scientists said the degree of “dimming” in the DNA regions were surprising — one part of the genome of the men who were abused as children was 29 percent different to those who were not.

And, because the degree of methylation changes over time, they were able to tell by looking at the men’s cells roughly when the abuse occurred.

“This might help the development of tests that could be used by healthcare workers or potentially even as forensic evidence,” Gladish said.

Although researchers still have little idea whether or not the imprints of abuse contained within sperm cells would survive fertilisation intact, lead author Andrea Roberts said the study “brings us at least one step closer” towards working out if trauma can be transmitted across generations.

“We can look at our study as one small piece in the huge overall puzzle of how intergenerational trauma works,” said Gladish.

She pointed out there are several other teams working on the conundrum, including experiments on mice and other animals.

“It is certainly possible that epigenetic changes in sperm cells play a role in the physical and mental health of the next generation, but we don’t know for sure.”

 Kelly Thomas woke up in a Florida hospital four years ago with no recollection of the car accident that had robbed her of the ability to walk. Thomas, an active college student who had barrel-raced in rodeos, moved to Kentucky for a year to try out a research study that she hoped would retrain her spinal cord on how to walk.

In February, a trainer who had been scooting along the floor at Thomas’s feet, helping her move her legs and place her feet as she used a walker, stopped and stood up.

“What are you doing?” Thomas asked, alarmed.

“You’re doing it,” the trainer, Rebekah Morton, told her. “You don’t need me.”

Thomas hesitated, and then took a step on her own. Then another. She froze.

“I’m like, ‘That just happened.’ I’ve been working so hard for four years. I got emotional,” Thomas recalled.

Thomas, now 23, is one of several people with spinal cord injuries who are standing, taking steps and – in her case – walking without assistance, thanks to an experimental combination therapy. In a research study at the University of Louisville, Thomas and three others had a device surgically implanted on their spinal cords to stimulate electrical activity, accompanied by months of daily physical therapy. In the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the University of Louisville reported that two of the subjects could stand and take limited steps at the end of the study, and two were able to walk independently – Thomas and another patient, Jeff Marquis.

A simultaneous case report published in Nature Medicine reported that a single patient with a complete spinal cord injury at the Mayo Clinic was also able to take steps and walk with trainer assistance with electrical stimulation and intensive physical therapy.

“The history of spinal cord injury research is we have 50 years or more of essentially failed trials, with no positive findings,” said David Darrow, a neurosurgery resident at the University of Minnesota Medical School who was not involved in either study but has also been implanting a stimulator device in people with spinal cord injuries. “This is sort of a new era.”

Darrow said there are caveats to the newest studies, and a slew of unanswered scientific and medical questions. This is still a tiny number of patients, with variable injuries, so it is impossible to know how well the intervention will work in the broader population of people with spinal cord injuries. There are also plenty of questions about how the technique works, which will be untangled only as a broader community of researchers begins to study the approach in more patients.

But the results are a powerful proof of concept, built on a surprising case report by the Louisville research team in 2011. Researchers took a medical device developed to manage chronic pain and implanted it to stimulate the spinal cord of a paralysed patient. After rehabilitation sessions, that patient learned to stand and regained some voluntary control of his leg movements.

Susan Harkema, associate scientific director of the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Centre at the University of Louisville who pioneered the technique in people, said that the devices are implanted well below the site of the injury. This isn’t a case of patients regrowing some severed connection in the spine. Instead, Harkema sees these studies as heralding a gradual shift in how experts think of the spinal cord – as able to learn new ways to walk, with the right combination of training and electrical stimulation.

“The basis of this work is that the spinal circuitry is sophisticated and really has the same properties that the brain does in many ways, and in the context of this study, really what is shown is it has the capability of relearning to walk essentially in the right conditions,” Harkema said.

The intervention is not like flipping a switch. First, study subjects were given about two months of intense physical therapy and training, to make sure that alone wouldn’t restore function. After they had the device implanted, they began a rigorous course of daily therapy, as a team of therapists began to train their bodies and minds on how to step again. Thomas said that it was far from intuitive at first, as she would get cues like “toe up,” or “shift your weight,” or “pull your knee up.”

She began stepping with her right leg, on a treadmill, on her third session after the implant. Getting the left leg took longer.

“It was extremely, extremely hard at first,” Thomas said. “I couldn’t talk to anybody, couldn’t look at anybody – I was completely focused on my body. Now, I can walk and talk, and it’s not as much of a struggle. It’s still not easy, and it’s not completely natural.”

Thomas has been able to integrate her new abilities into her daily life after returning home to Florida. She puts her walker into her sedan, brings the remote control that allows her to operate the stimulator, and goes out on her own to the library, to restaurants and to get her nails done.

The researchers at the Mayo Clinic saw similar results with their technique; a patient with a complete spinal cord injury was able to take steps and walk with trainer assistance.

In both studies, the patients needed the stimulator to be on to walk, helping to rule out the idea that this was spontaneous recovery. Taking steps could be done only when people were trying to move their legs.

“The important point is this technology may be able to give back functional control, to stand and take independent steps. So it really gives hope to people who are faced with paralysis,” said Kendall Lee, a neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic.

The hope is that as these techniques begin to be tested in more places and in more patients, the demand will drive the technology to be improved and tailored for the intervention. The researchers readily admit they are not engineers and hope to see a stimulator developed with this application in mind, instead of finding new purposes for an off-the-shelf device.

The technique will also need to be tried in more diverse people; the study subjects were in their 20s and early 30s, and it had been about two or three years since their injuries. Many people with spinal cord injuries are older, and more years have passed since they became paralysed.

Darrow has implanted the stimulator in someone whose injury happened 17 years ago, and the oldest subject in his ongoing study is in their late 50s. He’s interested in whether the electrical stimulation has effects on its own, without the rehabilitation – on voluntary movement, and on other health issues, such as low or uncontrolled blood pressure.

“I saw their work and thought this was really cool. There’s just tremendous potential,” Darrow said. “If we could get more effort in the area and bring the people with the skill sets to really change this field . . . you can make a lot of progress.”