| Sports |
Japanese firm develops glove that ‘feels’
3D images
TOKYO, - Ever dreamed of being drawn
close to a smiling Marilyn Monroe or feeling the muscles of
fitness guru Billy Blanks?
A Japanese firm on Wednesday unveiled a system that enables you to
feel “the shape and softness” of three-dimensional images using a
sensor-loaded glove.
The “tangible 3D” system creates graphics that seem to burst out
of a screen and has a glove that allows users to “feel” them,
according to NTT Comware, the software development unit of telecom
giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.
Without any need for awkward 3D glasses, users could feel a
far-away object as if it were right in front of them, NTT said at
a virtual reality exhibition.
The developer was exploring commercial applications which could
include video phones, said engineer Shiro Ozawa.
“You would be able to take the hand, or gently pat the head, of
your beloved grandchild who lives away from you,” he said.
If a person linked to the system moves in another place, his or
her three-dimensional image also moves in real-time. The user
would feel as if they were being pulled along if the image moves
while grasping your hand.
The dead could also be “resurrected” by the system and museum
visitors could “touch” precious exhibits sealed in showcases, the
firm said. – AFP
Buck’s ‘Good Earth’ manuscript surfaces,
lost 40 years
NEW YORK, - A typewritten,
hand-corrected manuscript of Pearl S. Buck’s novel set in China,
“The Good Earth,” surfaced in a Philadelphia auction house 40
years after it disappeared, US authorities said.
The auction house had been asked to estimate the value of the
manuscript, but took it to the FBI, instead.
“The manuscript is considered to be priceless,” said an FBI
statement.
It was known to have been missing from the writer’s archives since
at least 1966.
The book was published in 1931 as the first of three volumes about
the life of a Chinese farm family, and made Buck the first woman
to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1932.
Other documents belonging to the author were found with the
manuscript, including a 1933 printing of the book with changes
marked for a later edition, as well as a file of letters addressed
to the novelist, including US president Harry Truman and first
lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Police said they planned no further investigation and a
representative of the auction house told the Philadelphia Inquirer
daily that the person who delivered the manuscript did so “with
all innocence and good faith.”
At the time of its disappearance, the manuscript was at Buck’s
home, outside Philadelphia. – AFP
Spanish capital a haven for young gays from
Latin America
MADRID, - Rejected as teenagers, a
growing number of young gays from Latin America are moving to
Madrid where they hope to be able to live their sexuality openly
as well as find a better-paying job.
“We feel freer here, you can walk in the streets holding hands
with your boyfriend,” said 29-year-old Peruvian doctor Miguel
Leclerq who works as a volunteer in his spare time to help gays
from Latin America, mainly from Colombia and Ecuador, to settle in
the Spanish capital.
Spain has become a world leader in gay rights since Socialist
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero came to power in 2004.
The country became only the third member of European Union after
the Netherlands and Belgium to allow same-sex marriages in July
2005 with
a new law that also legalized adoptions by gays
and lesbians.
Earlier this year another law came into effect which allows
transsexuals to change their name and official gender without the
need for an operation.
Only a generation ago under right-wing dictator Francisco Franco,
whose rule was blessed by the church in heavily Roman Catholic
Spain, homosexual acts were illegal and thousands of gays were
shipped off to institutions.
Spain’s emergence since Franco’s death in 1975 as a “tolerant”
country has attracted gays from Latin America who are often the
victims of aggression and persecution in their own more socially
conservative countries, said Alberto Martin-Perez, the
vice-president of Spanish gay-rights group COGAM.
“The social and religious pressure in Latin America is very
strong, they feel a great deal of guilt,” he said.
“Many can’t get a job, they were thrown out of the house by their
parents, they feel condemned to being decorators, makeup artists
or hairdressers and sometimes are forced into prostitution just
for being gay,” added Leclerq.
“More than a job, they arrive in search of a place to be free,” he
added.
The arrival of gays from South America in Madrid is part of a
wider wave of immigration from the continent, which has historic
and linguistic ties to Spain.
There are just over 1.5 million Latin American immigrants living
in Spain, a nation of some 45 million people, according to figures
from national statistics institute INE.
Lizethe Alvarez Echeverry, a 39-year-old Colombian transsexual who
works in an office in a Madrid suburb, remembers the
disappointment her father felt when he realized his son was not
like other boys. – AFP
Dracula’s revenge: rabies deadly, but not
for bats that carry it
PARIS, June 28, 2007 (AFP) - A person
bitten, clawed or licked by a bat infected with rabies could die
as a result, but the guilty party — shades of Transylvania — will
likely live on with impunity, according to a study published
Wednesday.
Based on an unprecedented 12 years of bat-watching on the island
of Mallorca, the Franco-Spanish investigation into whether the
world’s only flying mammals pose a public health hazard is
simultaneously unnerving and comforting.
First the bad news: A virus (EBLV-1) commonly carried by the
Myotis myotis species, native throughout Europe, “can cause a
fatal illness, indistinguishable from classic rabies, in
non-flying mammal species, including humans,” the study says.
It gets worse. In contrast with their victims, “the survival model
shows no variation in mortality after EBLV-1 infection of M.
myotis.”
Translation: diseased bats can get away with murder.
Though infected with the same virus that induces
frothing-at-the-mouth delirium in “non-flying mammals,”
radar-equipped bats are largely immune to their own poison.
This was undoubtably an exciting discovery for lead researchers
Hevre Bourhy of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Jordi
Serra-Cobo of Barcelona University, who published their findings
in the Web-based science journal PLoS ONE.
But even these ardent bat defenders were forced to acknowledge
that their findings “have considerable public health implications
... and confirm the potential risk of rabies transmission to
humans.”
The good news? A Lyssavirus-carrying specimen of the greater
mouse-earned bat — one of several common names for M. myotis — is
“only” infectious for a short period, 5.1 days on average.
For Bourhy, this narrow window of rabies-sharing opportunity,
combined with other factors, is reassuring enough to tip the
scales in favor of protection rather than persecution.
“The dynamic of bat infection ... supports the decision taken in
Europe to protect these animals and not to destroy the colonies in
which rabies is present,” he said in an interview.
“The only reasonable measure today is to forbid — as is done in
the Balearic Islands — access to caves harboring bats that might
be contagious.”
Indeed, M. myotis has been hunted to the point where it is now on
the World Conservation Union’s red list of threatened species.
Rabies, which is fatal if not treated, causes some 50,000 deaths
around the world every year.
Most infections, however, come not from bats but from rabid dogs,
one of several domestic animals that can transmit the disease. In
the last 20 years, there are only four confirmed cases of humans
contracting rabies directly from bats: one each in Finland,
Russia, Ukraine and Scotland.
There are approximately 1,100 species of bats on the planet,
accounting for more than 20 percent of all mammals. Besides
rabies, the nocturnal mammals are a reservoir for other diseases
too, including Ebola, as well as the Hendra and Nipah viruses,
first identified in the 1990s.
Despite their blood-sucking reputations, only a couple of bat
species actually sustain themselves on a steady diet of blood from
vertebrates. The greater mouse-eared bat is not one of them. – AFP
Wilderness almost non-existent on planet
Earth: study
SAN FRANCISCO, - Humans have
domesticated the planet to such a degree that few untouched spots
remain, researchers report in a review article published in the
journal Science.
Earth is so tamed that conservationism should shift focus from
protecting nature from humans to better understanding and managing
a domesticated world, the authors said.
“There is no such thing as nature untainted by people,” writes
Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, a
US-based non-profit group. “Facing this reality should change the
scientific focus of environmental science.’’
As of 1995, only 17 percent of the world’s land area remained
truly wild — with no human populations, crops, road access or
night-time light detectable by satellite, the authors reported.
Half of the world’s surface area is used for crops or grazing;
more than half of all forests have been lost to land conversion;
the largest land mammals on several continents have been
eliminated; shipping lanes crisscross the oceans, according to the
paper.
In Europe, 22,000 kilometers of coastline are paved.
Due to extensive damming, nearly six times as much water is held
in artificial storage worldwide as is free-flowing, according to
the article.
Beyond the obvious signs of human influence, other more subtle
changes are evident everywhere, Kareiva said.
Natural selection has been supplanted by human selection, meaning
that certain species — such as companion pets — thrive, while
others — such as river trout — have been altered specifically for
human consumption, often to their detriment.
In the African nation of Namibia, overfishing has allowed large
jellyfish to bloom. Prior to 1970, fishermen rarely snared large
jellyfish in the Benguela ecosystem off the northern coast of
Namibia.
Today, three times more jellyfish are caught than commercial fish
in this region, according to the paper.
Altering ecosystems leaves them vulnerable to disturbances and
less resilient, Kareiva said.
Carving out parkland hasn’t worked either, the authors argue.
Protecting nature through national and state parks has only
domesticated these regions. The Nature Conservancy’s leading
mission is protecting private lands.
The Fuji-Hakone-Izu Park in Japan, among the world’s most popular
parks, for instance, has more than 100 million visitors a year and
includes spas, hotels, golf courses and trams. – AFP
 
|
