Biologist Yin Zhi felt like a proud new father when bright green, genetically-engineered piglets were born at his university.

This might sound like some complex prank but it is real science for a real reason. Yin Zhi, second-in-command of a research team at the Northeast Agricultural University had spent three days in a freezing stable waiting for the sow to deliver, so excited he could hardly sleep.

He said, ‘I don’t have kids, but it must be like becoming a dad for the first time. It was the fruit of two years of work.’ He was describing his feelings when the piglets turned out to be fluorescent green like their mother.

Yin’s university is located in China’s far northeastern city of Harbin and makes news in genetic engineering.

Fame first came a year ago when the sow was born fluorescent green all over, even her tongue.

Her offspring, the newly-born piglets, only show patches of green when held up against ultraviolet light, but to the scientists they are more interesting because this is a trait passed on from one generation to the next.

Yin Zhui said, ‘We plan to match them with florescent piglets from another batch of piglets we expect soon. That way, the third generation may be more fluorescent.’
I has been done before but replicating previous experiments is an important step on the road to real innovation.

The researchers manipulated just one gene to make the pigs fluorescent, and there are 20,000 others genes to move on to.

Liu Zhonghua, said, ‘Research into pigs is important because they are vessels for the generation of organs. For the foreseeable future, it will not be possible to breed organs outside living bodies, and we need to use pigs’ bodies for this purpose.’

China is rapidly increasing its spending on research and development, with funding growing by an annual average annual of 18% over the past five years, according to Science, a US journal.

By contrast, the United States, Japan and the European Union have seen annual average growth of 2.9% in the same period, the journal said. Note that Yan Shi’s pigs are real. Our illustration is fake.
Source: IOL

The world’s highest swing has been set up on a 1,100ft TV tower in Harbin city. The swing is on a 700ft-high viewing platform on the tower in Harbin city, Heilongjiang province.

Participants sit on the steel seat and swing out over the city, beyond the edge of the platform.

The Harbin Daily reports the swing is called ‘Game for brave people’.

The tower is the world’s second-highest steel tower, after the Kiev tower in Ukraine. To see how frightening this could be there is a YouTube clip showing what it is like riding the swings in the Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen.

Probably nearly as frightening.
Source: Anova

Qiao Xing Mobile, one of China’s leading domestic manufacturers of mobile handsets through its subsidiary CEC Telecom has launched a new mobile called the C7000A.

Yes, yes, it does all those mundane details that you expect in a mobile phone. Some will be better. You can speak, send text messages, store 500 phones number in the phone book, look at pictures and information on a large 3.0 inch LCD screen and the battery can run over 120 days in standby mode without a recharge. Good. Nay, excellent. Your phone is possibly much the same with the exception of the large screen and the long-life battery.

Now we come to the important bits, the differentiators.

With this mobile phone users will be able to perform a basic cardiograph, which they can send to doctors via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) through a GPRS network.

Doctors will then be able to provide medical advice by sending a text message back to the mobile phone. If there is a serious problem, doctors can call the patient directly.

No other phone that we know of will do that. And one can see that future models could possibly provide more information like blood pressure, temperature, whatever.

CECT has supplied an initial 200 trial units of the C7000A mobile handset to The People’s Insurance Company of China, which plans to provide the handset as a gift to its VIP customers.

Wu Zhi Yang, chairman of Qiao Xing Mobile,said, ‘We dedicate a large amount of resources to our efforts to develop highly differentiated handsets. The C7000A is a result of these efforts. It represents a breakthrough in the use of mobile handset technology. No longer are handsets only tools for entertainment and communication. We have been able to incorporate a piece of advanced medical technology that could possibly save lives.’

In fact, it may sound quirky (and you have to find a doctor who is willing to take the calls) but it has a serious and useful purpose. We will probably be seeing more mobiles like this which will be, in effect, health monitoring devices.
Source: Fox Business

This is a a nearly finished bamboo model of the ‘Bird’s Nest,’ also known as the Beijing National Stadium, at a Hangzhou tourism site in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province.

It looks totally wonderful; as does the original.

This one-twentieth scale model of the ‘Bird’s Nest’ needed nearly one thousand bamboo branches and took about two weeks to make.

It will undoubtedly become a tourist attraction in its own right. It is amazing how the design of the main stadium so lends itself to this style of model making.
Source: Xinhua

China has launched a crackdown on scary children’s stories including the popular Japanese Death Note comic book series.

The Xinhua News Agency and China Daily newspaper reported authorities have been ordered to seize ‘illegal terrifying publications’ from vendors ahead of China’s Children’s Day on June 1.

Communist authorities are especially concerned about the influence of foreign books, movies and other pop culture on Chinese children.

One target in the latest crackdown is Death Note, a Japanese series of comic books about a notebook that can kill people whose names are written in it.

Wang Song, an official of the National Anti-piracy and Anti-pornography Working Committee, quoted by the China Daily said the story ‘misleads innocent children and distorts their mind and spirit.

‘Death Note’ publications have been seized in Shanghai and areas across central and southern China.

Of course, Western children have been subjected to the same nonsense for many centuries. Anyone who has read Grimm’s Fairy Stories as a child will have been frightened out of their wits by the, mainly, female villains in the tales — the infamous wicked stepmothers,  the evil stepmother and stepsisters in Cinderella and the nefarious crone in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. These are, compared to Death Note, seriously scary stories.

The writer is willing to argue that Bambi, is for children, one of the most frightening movies ever made.
Source: Weird Asia News

A Chinese maker of famed stuffed buns whose Chinese name means ‘A dog would ignore it’ has cleaned up its English-language to avoid confusion.

The steamed ‘Goubuli’ buns filled with a mince of meat and vegetables are the pride of Tianjin, the port city near Beijing. Their Chinese name literally means ‘Dog would ignore it’ and is said to come from the nickname of the man who began selling them some 150 years ago.

Now the buns are sold nationwide and have attracted makers of fake ‘Dog-would-ignore-it’ buns.

Hungry for more success and apparently worried that foreign tourists may fear their name reflects the buns’ quality or contents, the Tianjin Goubuli Group Corporation has opted for a new English name — ‘Go Believe.’

Possibly sounds better in Chinese.
Source: Reuters

A program launched in China to teach traditional Peking opera in schools has drawn criticism. Some have said on the Internet that untrained teachers and forced instruction might put off students from the 200-year-old art.

(There is a parallel to this from the writer’s experience. When young he was forced to learn verses from the Bible in Welsh. The result was a permanent aversion to religion.)

The Beijing News said Classic Peking Opera items will be added to the music curriculum in 200 schools across ten provinces in China to promote traditional culture among its younger generation.

Wang Jun, a culture official in Beijing’s education bureau, said, ‘The aim of this program is to help the children to develop an interest in the nation’s unique cultural treasures.’
On the Internet people questioned how music teachers, themselves untrained in Peking Opera, would educate students in the complex gestures and trilling vocals that characterize the art.

Only 27% of some 21,000 respondents to an opinion poll carried by popular web portal Sina.com, believed the course would help promote traditional Chinese culture.

China’s education ministry has been criticized for other attempts to give students’ a broader scope of learning.

A plan to introduce compulsory dance classes aimed at improving primary and high school children’s social skills and fitness, drew fire from some parents concerned the waltz and other ballroom steps might foster puppy love between their children and dance partners.
Source: Reuters

Nothing exceeds like excess. A 999-meter-long scarlet wedding dress was displayed in a shopping mall in Dalian, Northeast China’s Liaoning Province.

The hand-knitted dress features 2,008 pieces of jade, 29 golden phoenixes and 880 peonies that took dressmakers three months to finish.

Which raises important and urgent questions:

How heavy is the damn thing?
How many train bearers are needed to keep in straight?
How many official wedding places have a straight one kilometer aisle so that the bride can be sure her train is inside when she takes her vows?

These are important questions which must be answered.
Source: China View

Xinhua reports that liquor makers in central China’s Henan province are planning a legal challenge to fight a ban on Communist Party officials and civil servants drinking alcohol at lunch during work days.

The ban was introduced in January last year. Local restaurants are complaining of fewer lunch customers and lower revenues from not selling as much alcohol.

Xinhua quoted lawyer Kang Yinzhong, representing the Henan Alcohol Association, as saying, ‘Drinking is a private affair and holding public office shouldn’t keep someone from consuming alcohol as long as it does not affect their work.’

Xinhua reported that Kang Yinzhong is ‘collecting opinions of liquor companies and would submit them to the provincial legislature demanding a revision or end to the ban’
Source: Reuters

According to market research firm In-Stat as many as 400,000 unlocked iPhones were running on China Mobile’s cellular network at the end of last year.

Apple sold 3.7 million iPhones in 2007, and more than 10% of them are in China according to In-Stat which attributed that information to China Mobile. Somewhere around 1 million iPhones are thought to have been unlocked, and 400,000 are in China.

Apple does not want the iPhone unlocked because the company has signed lucrative revenue-sharing deals with its carrier partners that don’t apply if an iPhone is unlocked from its respective network.

In-Stat said Chinese consumers want smartphones with multimedia features and Web browsing, and the iPhone fills that need nicely. And they’re willing to pay for it: 20% of smartphones sold in China last year went for RMB4,000 ($533) or more.

Apple had at one point discussed the iPhone with China Mobile although Steve Jobs says there was just one meeting although there were rumors galore that China Mobile had rejected an offer.

The iPhone looks set to open up new areas of technology. As in creating a band — sort of musical — using collective iPhones.

On iBand there is a claim: ‘We’re playing with iAno, PocketGuitar, iPhoneSynth and BeatPhone. . . .The development of instruments for the first handheld device that let’s us create pocketsized music are important to establish this scene.’

Following that lead there is an item on PocketGuitar which lets you strum on an iPhone.
There is a YouTube with someone playing the piano on an iPhone. Yes, just one octave but pretty damn impressive.

iPhoneSynth does much the same thing but is not as sophisticated but you can see the keyboard on Flickr.

BeatPhone turns the iPhone into a drum set. Endearingly the site allows the user interface is pretty damn ugly but they are working on it.

So bet on it there will be an iPhone band making recordings within the next few months. It will probably be called The Beijing iPhone All-Stars as a tribute to the first rock group in China.

I have seen the future and it is frightening.
Source: CNet News and research.