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WEEKLY UPDATE
Get ahead in advertising
LONDON - More universal than television, livelier than billboards — London marketing whiz kids have hit upon a new advertising medium: the human forehead.
In campaign to be rolled out in the coming weeks, marketing agency Cunning Stunts said on Friday it was about to start renting advertising space on the foreheads of university students.
Students will have logos semi-permanently tattooed on their foreheads and will be paid $6.85 an hour for three hours, the amount of time they are reckoned to be “out and about” and thereby promoting the product. —Reuters
Twins for cloned goat
BEIJING: China’s first cloned goat has given birth to twins just days into the lunar new year named after the same animal.
“Yang Yang”, Chinese for sunny, gave birth to a male and a female kid on Friday. The male kid died hours later at a breeding centre in Shaanxi.
It was Yang Yang’s second successful delivery in two years. Yang Yang first gave birth to twins in August 2001.
“It has been proven that cloned goats have the same reproductive capability as normal goats,” the Beijing Times said on Sunday.
The mother, which was cloned from a goat body cell, had mated with an Angora.
The birth was China’s latest biotechnological success. Chinese scientists have regrown dog bladder tissue on the back of a mouse. China has also established a large research and development centre in Shanghai for engineering human tissues.
Analysts say the efforts, which also include boosting crop yields, could help offset food shortages. —Reuters
Biscuits for pandas
BEIJING: China has developed a high-fiber biscuit for giant pandas, whose finicky eating habits have contributed to their declining numbers. The biscuits contain enough nutrition for growing pandas and could help ailing ones with weak digestive systems. They also help prevent the spread of diseases carried by contaminated food taken from the wild.
The biscuits have been fed to pandas at the Changed Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base, China’s main research facility located in southwestern China. .
About 1,000 giant pandas survive in the wild and 110 more live in captivity throughout the world, aided by an aggressive Chinese government program to breed or even clone them. —AP
Professor working on invisibility
NEW YORK: A University of Tokyo professor claims he and his research team have developed a system that can make you ‘invisible.’
Engineering Professor Susumu Tachi demonstrated the technology through a photo of graduate student Kazutoshi Obana. It appears as if three men walking in the background can be seen ‘through’ Obana’s overcoat.
The retroreflective material of the coat acts as a screen and gives a transparent - or invisible - effect.
For the best effect - one that keeps the correct depth of focus - the observer needs to look through a pinhole.
Tachi’s second example shows the image of the skeleton being projected onto a sheet of the retroreflective material, giving the impression the body has become transparent.
The technology could be useful in medicine, where surgeons might use it during operations to avoid having their fingers or surgical tools block their view.
In aviation, cockpit floors could become ‘invisible’ to assist pilots in landing. Professor Tachi hopes to have a commercially viable system within a few years. —AP
Man-machine draw
THE SIX CHESS games between Garry Kasparov and computer Deep Junior came to an inconclusive end last night when the sixth and final contest ended in a draw. This means a tie in the match. Out of the six games, four ended in draws, but when Kasparov last night accepted a draw move, the audience got ugly and booed the result.
The prize money of $300,000 will be shared between the programmers and Kasparov, who already is getting $500,000 just for daring to play a computer again.
In 1997, Kasparov was soundly thrashed by an IBM sponsored computer Deep Blue and accepted that result then by accusing the Big Blue team of whispering sweet nothings into the registers of the Stealth-based computer’s “ears”. —Internet
Compulsive burglar
LONDON: A burglar was jailed for seven years by a London court on Friday for two break-ins, but he admitted to nearly 600 more.
Under British law, criminals often have their sentences reduced for admitting to previous crimes.
Martin Maloney, 22, concentrated most of his efforts in the capital where he was said to have averaged one burglary a day, often posing as a plainclothes police officer to con his way into the homes of the elderly.
Many of these burglaries were committed against the elderly and most vulnerable. —Reuters
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