Japanese Create Anti-Flu Suit
If anyone in the world could make clothing that repels the H1N1 virus, it’s the Japanese. And they have, or at least they claim they have.
Anti-Flu Suit
An added bonus is that when you put it on, you turn into a sharply-dressed Japanese man with pop idol hair.
Miniature T-Rex unearthed in China
My son will be thrilled when he hears about this – a team of paleontologists have discovered the T-Rex ‘missing link’, a 125-million-year-old miniature dino now dubbed ‘Raptorex kriegsteini’. Of course – ‘miniature’ in this case still equates to a 10-foot-long lizard armed with razor-sharp teeth. The really exciting thing about this find is that [...]
Metalhead Monkeys
So someone gave us this little Fisher-Price mirror for Gohan that plays music. The music is nursery-rhyme stuff, and the tones are pretty damn strident, so I only turned it on once. And it drove our cat batshit insane. She attacked the mirror, claws out, fangs bared. I have no idea why; maybe the awful [...]
Longest solar eclipse this century visible in Asia
Wednesday marks the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century when a large swathe of Asia, including parts of China and Japan, will be without sunlight for over 5 minutes.
The eclipse will appear first at dawn in India’s Gulf of Khambhat just north of of Mumbai.
It will move east across India, Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan [...]
Korea deploys clones to fight drug war
…well, cloned dogs, actually.
Incheon International Airport is now home to six cloned drug-sniffing dogs; their genetic stock was culled from a cham-peen Canadian narco-hound, and Korean fuzz claims that they all have their predecessors talents.
“They showed better performances in detecting illegal drugs during the training than other naturally born sniffer dogs that we have,” said [...]
Chinese dust cloud circumnavigates Earth in two weeks
Japanese eggheads have determined that a 2007 dust storm that sprang up in China circled the globe in a mere 13 days – which is impressive, moreseo when you consider that a single concentrated mass of dust particles was able to stay airborne long enough to travel around the freaking planet.
The dust cloud measured about [...]
Homo sapiens’ primate ancestor may have developed in Asia, not Africa
Huh. After decades of scientific research pinpointing Africa as the so-called ‘Cradle of Life’, one scientist now points to Asia as the home of humanity’s common ancestor…which should do wonders for the demographics of this site, if you catch my drift.
If Myanmar, formerly called Burma, is confirmed as being the ancestral homeland of higher primates, [...]
Kansas gradeschooler Clara Ma names new NASA Mars rover
12-year-old Clara Ma, who attends sixth grade in Lenexa, KS submitted the winning entry to name NASA’s new Mars rover. Her choice? Curiosity.
Here’s the winning essay in question:
Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at [...]
South Korean eggheads breed glowing dogs
Why glowing dogs, you ask? Well – it seems that this is really just a proof-of-concept test drive, if you will – proving that genes can be successfully impanted to produce ‘transgenic’ offspring…presumably with traits that are a little more useful than finding your car keys at night.
A South Korean scientist who created glowing cats [...]
Happy 200th Birthday Charles Darwin!
Nothing to do with Asian Pop Culture, but I thought it worth noting the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, father of evolutionary theory! Happy birthday, Chuck…!
Watch the rest after the jump…
Round-eyes can live a long time too!
More often than not, whenever someone labeled ‘World’s Oldest (man/woman/person)” dies, they’re Japanese. Usually this is attributed to a lifelong diet of fish, seaweed, and rice – but it also turns out that Japanese people harbor a specific gene that favors longevity.
Now it turns out that very same gene has been located in some Europeans [...]
Japanese eggheads isolate nicotine gene – make non-addictive tobacco possible
Smoking minus the nicotine seems like non-alcoholic beer to me – what’s the point? I’m not a smoker (or a drinker, for that matter) but I don’t see the purpose in indulging in a vice unless it’s bad for you. Hey – I isolated the gene that makes strippers take off their clothes! Now we [...]
What the #*ck is melamine?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year or so, you’ve undoubtedly heard about all of the contaminated food pouring in from China, a great deal of which is laced with a mysterious compound called melamine. If you’re like me, most of these warnings are met with a shrug and a quickly [...]
Plant Blog
If you think Yellow Menace is boring (Hey, we have real lives too! Much as I’d like to trawl the Internet all day…), then check out this blog by a plant in Japan.
Plant Blog
It has a little help from an engineer who wants to learn to communicate with plants. Personally, I think communicating with plants [...]
Indian teen commits suicide in fear of Large Hadron Collider
Looks like all the fearmongering regarding the operation of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has finally borne fruit. Inspired by numerous reports that the ginormous particle accelerator could potentially jump-start black holes which would then consume the planet, 16-year-old Chayya Lal took an overdose of medication to avoid dying in the ensuing cataclysm.
Chayya’s parents said she [...]
