TOKYO (AP): A new game for the Nintendo DS handheld machine helps players exercise their facial muscles to have nicer smiles and livelier expressions.
"Face Training'' comes with a digital camera that fits into the dual-screen machine to show live video of the player's own face on the right screen while an animation of a woman's face illustrates exercises on the left screen.
The game went on sale last week in Japan.
The 16 types of exercises called "facening,'' designed by beauty expert Fumiko Inudo, take about two to 10 minutes each to complete. Nintendo Co., the Kyoto-based maker of Pokemon and Super Mario games, recommends playing "Face Training'' no longer than 15 minutes at a time to avoid overexerting face muscles or getting them "out of balance.''
In addition to the animation that serves as a model for players, an electronic voice like an aerobics instructor guides you to twist your mouth, drop your jaw, wink, glare at the ceiling and do other moves to tighten flabby cheeks and develop that bright-eyed look.
"Open your mouth slightly, one, two, three, four,'' the machine will say in one exercise.
Company spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa says the game is also entertaining because players end up making funny faces in the name of a better-toned countenance. Overseas sales plans are still undecided, he said.
"It certainly perks your curiosity, doesn't it?'' Minagawa said Wednesday. "The success of games is usually a question of how to engage people's feelings.''
The new game is part of Nintendo's efforts to appeal to a wider audience, including women. Nintendo has scored success with its drill-like games, such as "Brain Age.''
Nintendo's Wii home console, which comes with a wandlike remote control that has people playing virtual tennis and other sports, is also doing well, selling nearly 9.3 million worldwide since it went on sale seven months ago.
The "Wii Fit'' game, planned for later this year in Japan and next year in the U.S., offers a workout with a virtual hula hoop and yoga with a wireless plastic mat.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Sun Microsystems unveils chip to take on Intel, AMD
Sun Microsystems, the Silicon Valley company best known as a developer of severs and software, unveiled Monday its first commodity chip, putting itself in a position to compete with partners Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
The chip, which Sun touts as the world's fastest microprocessor, will be sold by the company's newly formed commodity chip business and be available sometime in the last quarter of this year.Sun formed the new unit in March to develop and sell chips to other companies, as well as for its own use.
The company currently used Intel and AMD chips in its lower-cost servers, computers that process online transactions, host internet websites and run corporate operations.
According to Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz, the company's new chip, code-named Niagara 2 and officially called UltraSPARC T2, and its new business are key to its future growth.
Having struggled to return to consistent profitability since the dot-com bust years ago, Sun reported last week a better-than- expected quarter profit.
"We are too big to have anyone be just an ally or a competitor, " Schwartz said. "We partner with Microsoft, we partner with IBM and we also compete with IBM and Microsoft."
Sun's new business has other new chips planned for later this year and next year, including an anticipated high-performance chip, code-named Rock, designed for servers running mainframe-like transactions for banks and scientific problems handled by supercomputers.
Schwartz said he also sees a market for Sun's chips in networking equipment, storage equipment, set-top boxes and other devices.
Sun hopes that Hewlett-Packard, its arch rival in server business, could use its Rock chip to replace Intel's Itanium in the company's biggest and costliest systems sometime next year.
Sun officials said the new Niagara 2 chip, which was more than three years in the making, will surpass all its competitors in processing power and energy conservation. Source: Xinhua
The chip, which Sun touts as the world's fastest microprocessor, will be sold by the company's newly formed commodity chip business and be available sometime in the last quarter of this year.Sun formed the new unit in March to develop and sell chips to other companies, as well as for its own use.
The company currently used Intel and AMD chips in its lower-cost servers, computers that process online transactions, host internet websites and run corporate operations.
According to Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz, the company's new chip, code-named Niagara 2 and officially called UltraSPARC T2, and its new business are key to its future growth.
Having struggled to return to consistent profitability since the dot-com bust years ago, Sun reported last week a better-than- expected quarter profit.
"We are too big to have anyone be just an ally or a competitor, " Schwartz said. "We partner with Microsoft, we partner with IBM and we also compete with IBM and Microsoft."
Sun's new business has other new chips planned for later this year and next year, including an anticipated high-performance chip, code-named Rock, designed for servers running mainframe-like transactions for banks and scientific problems handled by supercomputers.
Schwartz said he also sees a market for Sun's chips in networking equipment, storage equipment, set-top boxes and other devices.
Sun hopes that Hewlett-Packard, its arch rival in server business, could use its Rock chip to replace Intel's Itanium in the company's biggest and costliest systems sometime next year.
Sun officials said the new Niagara 2 chip, which was more than three years in the making, will surpass all its competitors in processing power and energy conservation. Source: Xinhua
Panda attacks zookeeper in China, man needs more than 100 stitches
BEIJING (AP) -- A zookeeper needed more than 100 stitches after a 2-year-old panda viciously bit and scratched him during feeding time at a zoo in northwestern China, a zoo official and a newspaper said Monday.
The zookeeper, surnamed Zhang, was hospitalized after the attack Saturday in Lanzhou, Gansu province, but his life was not in danger, said a woman surnamed Zhou, who is director of the zoo's office. The Lanzhou Morning Post said the man needed more than 100 stitches.
Zhang was feeding the panda from outside the enclosure, sticking his arms through the wire, when the panda, Lan Zai, grabbed his arms and began biting them and then scratched his legs, Zhou said in a telephone interview.
Lan Zai was transferred to the zoo on July 28 from Chengdu in southwestern China and had apparently not adjusted well to Lanzhou's drier climate. The panda had refused to eat for several days, Zhou said.
The panda also had not grown comfortable with Zhang during its weeklong stay at the zoo.
Last October, a panda cub bit off part of the thumb of an American visitor who was feeding the animal at a reserve in southwestern China. A month earlier, a drunken Chinese tourist bit a panda at the Beijing Zoo after the animal attacked him when he jumped into the enclosure and tried to hug it.
The zookeeper, surnamed Zhang, was hospitalized after the attack Saturday in Lanzhou, Gansu province, but his life was not in danger, said a woman surnamed Zhou, who is director of the zoo's office. The Lanzhou Morning Post said the man needed more than 100 stitches.
Zhang was feeding the panda from outside the enclosure, sticking his arms through the wire, when the panda, Lan Zai, grabbed his arms and began biting them and then scratched his legs, Zhou said in a telephone interview.
Lan Zai was transferred to the zoo on July 28 from Chengdu in southwestern China and had apparently not adjusted well to Lanzhou's drier climate. The panda had refused to eat for several days, Zhou said.
The panda also had not grown comfortable with Zhang during its weeklong stay at the zoo.
Last October, a panda cub bit off part of the thumb of an American visitor who was feeding the animal at a reserve in southwestern China. A month earlier, a drunken Chinese tourist bit a panda at the Beijing Zoo after the animal attacked him when he jumped into the enclosure and tried to hug it.
Over 400 China exporters put on blacklist
BEIJING, Aug 4 (Reuters) - China has blacklisted more than 400 exporters for violating trade rules following a series of food, drug and other health scares across thr world, the Commerce Ministry said on Saturday.
The list included two pet food manufacturers that had exported to the United States. Washington stepped up inspections of imports from China after a chemical additive in pet food caused the death of some pets there earlier this year.
Since then, poisonous ingredients have been found in Chinese exports of toys, toothpaste and fish, while the deaths of patients in Panama was blamed on improperly labelled Chinese chemicals that were mixed into cough syrup.
In the latest scare, U.S. toy maker Mattel Inc. said on Wednesday that it was recalling 1.5 million Chinese-made toys worldwide because their paint may contain too much lead.
Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng stressed the government line that Chinese products were overwhelmingly safe and of high quality, and called on foreign media not to hype the problems of a small minority of goods or companies.
But on the ministry Web site, he said 429 Chinese firms on the blacklist had been punished for violating export regulations. The Web site did not elaborate.
"China will strengthen international cooperation on the safety of products," Gao was quoted as saying.
China said on Friday it had banned seafood imports from Indonesia because many contained "toxic substances", Xinhua said.
A delegation of U.S. officials in Beijing hammered out "basic frameworks" for two agreements seeking to reassure U.S. consumers that Chinese-made goods met safety standards, Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said on Friday.
China, where the former drug and food safety watchdog chief was executed last month for corruption, has also cancelled the licences of six medicine manufacturers.
The China Daily said 270 "on-the-spot drug test" vans would soon hit the roads of rural China to weed out counterfeit drugs.
The list included two pet food manufacturers that had exported to the United States. Washington stepped up inspections of imports from China after a chemical additive in pet food caused the death of some pets there earlier this year.
Since then, poisonous ingredients have been found in Chinese exports of toys, toothpaste and fish, while the deaths of patients in Panama was blamed on improperly labelled Chinese chemicals that were mixed into cough syrup.
In the latest scare, U.S. toy maker Mattel Inc. said on Wednesday that it was recalling 1.5 million Chinese-made toys worldwide because their paint may contain too much lead.
Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng stressed the government line that Chinese products were overwhelmingly safe and of high quality, and called on foreign media not to hype the problems of a small minority of goods or companies.
But on the ministry Web site, he said 429 Chinese firms on the blacklist had been punished for violating export regulations. The Web site did not elaborate.
"China will strengthen international cooperation on the safety of products," Gao was quoted as saying.
China said on Friday it had banned seafood imports from Indonesia because many contained "toxic substances", Xinhua said.
A delegation of U.S. officials in Beijing hammered out "basic frameworks" for two agreements seeking to reassure U.S. consumers that Chinese-made goods met safety standards, Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said on Friday.
China, where the former drug and food safety watchdog chief was executed last month for corruption, has also cancelled the licences of six medicine manufacturers.
The China Daily said 270 "on-the-spot drug test" vans would soon hit the roads of rural China to weed out counterfeit drugs.
Coffee may slow memory decline in women
WASHINGTON, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Drinking more than three cups of coffee a day helped protect older women against some age-related memory decline, French researchers said on Monday, giving women more reason to love the world's most popular stimulant.
Men did not enjoy the same benefit, they said.
"The more coffee one drank, the better the effects seemed to be on (women's) memory functioning in particular," said Karen Ritchie at the French National Institute of Medical Research, whose work appears in the journal Neurology.
The researchers followed more than 7,000 men and women in three French cities, checking their health and mental function and asking them about their current and past eating and drinking habits, their friends, and their daily activities.
They used this information to sort out the specific role caffeine played in these women's lives.
They found that women who drank more than three cups of coffee per day, or its caffeine equivalent in tea, retained more of their verbal and -- to a lesser extent -- visual memories over four years.
These women had a 33 percent lower odds of having verbal memory declines and 18 percent lower odds of having visual and spatial memory declines, compared to women who drank one cup or fewer per day.
The effect also depended on age, with women over 80 reaping more benefits from these beverages than those who were 10 to 15 years younger, Ritchie's team wrote. It was unclear whether current or former coffee consumption made the difference.
Some studies in mice have suggested that caffeine might block the buildup of proteins that lead to mental decline.
Ritchie is not sure why only women benefited in her study.
"Our best guess is that women don't metabolize coffee in the same way (as men)," she said in a telephone interview.
Ritchie plans to follow the women longer to see if caffeine delays the onset of dementia -- the mental confusion that signals Alzheimer's disease and other brain disorders.
She said people should weigh any brain gains derived from caffeine against other effects of the stimulant, including raised blood pressure.
The average American drinks one to two cups of coffee a day, according to the National Coffee Association. REUTERS
Whose fault in bridge collapse?
A section of a US highway bridge in Minneapolis plunged into the Mississippi River during last Wednesday evening's rush hour in a deadly avalanche of steel and concrete, flipping dozens of vehicles into the river or onto the debris. Up to August 2, four had been confirmed dead, more than 70 injured and 30 missing. The catastrophic accident sent a huge shocking wave across the American society.
President Bush called an emergency meeting of ministers. He seemed to be in a rush and muddle, ordering the transportation secretary and federal highway director to the spot in rescue and also dispatching the first lady there to comfort families of victims and the injured. At the meeting he also decided to allocate a fund of five million U.S. dollars in immediate response to the incident.
It is necessary to build a new bridge, some Americans believe, but more important is to avoid repetition of the tragedy. Collapse of this 40-year-old bridge is by no means accidental, but due to "structural deficiencies" experts diagnosed years before. The state government submitted as early as in 2001 a "check-up" report of the bridge to the Department of Transportation, and the latter confirmed three years later "structural deficiencies". In spite of that, no substantial amends were made by related authorities.
There are reportedly 750 bridges across America using the same design. That is, they all bear "structural deficiencies". This constitutes a severe threat to life and property of the public. Some American blog writers accused the government of splashing on war but holding money back on road construction. Others pointed out that the government must take precautions by checking and repairing roads and bridges regularly, instead of being awakened when a disaster strikes.
-By People's Daily Online
President Bush called an emergency meeting of ministers. He seemed to be in a rush and muddle, ordering the transportation secretary and federal highway director to the spot in rescue and also dispatching the first lady there to comfort families of victims and the injured. At the meeting he also decided to allocate a fund of five million U.S. dollars in immediate response to the incident.
It is necessary to build a new bridge, some Americans believe, but more important is to avoid repetition of the tragedy. Collapse of this 40-year-old bridge is by no means accidental, but due to "structural deficiencies" experts diagnosed years before. The state government submitted as early as in 2001 a "check-up" report of the bridge to the Department of Transportation, and the latter confirmed three years later "structural deficiencies". In spite of that, no substantial amends were made by related authorities.
There are reportedly 750 bridges across America using the same design. That is, they all bear "structural deficiencies". This constitutes a severe threat to life and property of the public. Some American blog writers accused the government of splashing on war but holding money back on road construction. Others pointed out that the government must take precautions by checking and repairing roads and bridges regularly, instead of being awakened when a disaster strikes.
-By People's Daily Online
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
National Day 2007
Singapore celebrates its 42nd year of Nationhood this year. And for the first time, the National Day Parade will be held on the floating platform on Marina Bay.
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