<sub>Design student sued over T-shirts

       Danish student Nadia Plesner, being sued by fashion house Louis Vuitton for depicting its handbag on a T-shirt,
says her design has got more people talking about Darfur conflict than she ever thought.



      Plesner, one of the group of designers trying to raise awareness of the violence in Sudan's Darfur region,
created an image of a child victim of the conflict holding a tiny dog and a trademark patterned Louis Vuitton handbag.



      "Everyone knows the image of a small starving black child. We have seen it in so many times now, but it doesn't
work anymore," said the 26-yeard old, who is studying in Amsterdam.

-Reuter</sub>

      <sub>A Japanese man who developed the world's smallest helicopter plans a demonstration flight in the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci later this month.

      Seventy-five-year-old Gennai Yanagisawa says he will fly his one-man helicopter in the city of Vinci, near Florence, Italy, on May 25.

      Yanagisawa describes the demontration as a tribute to the Renaissance era visionary's original idea of a "aerial screw."</sub>

      <sub>Plenty of products for the last 50 years, but few have the staying power of Velcro fasteners.

      T he signature sound of Velcro hook-and-loop tape being torn apart ripped along a parade route Tuesday to mark the half a century since the Velcro brand was trademarked in the United States.

      Former and current employees of Manchester based Velcro USA lined up for more than a mile to rip apart 8-inch lengths of the company's famous fasteners.

      Lorraine Thiem, who retired 27 years was a weaving instructor then, excitedly ripped and reattached her swatch in anticipation as she waited for the wave to reach her under a tent in the company's parking lot. She left the company 13 years ago but still feels the pang of pride whenever she spots a Velcro product.

      "I think, 'I had a hand in making that," she said. "Its just wonderful."</sub>

_{At the moment I am not able to make some new art work. Bummer. I would be off line for three months. I would be online from time to time using computers on the nearby computer cafe for now. I hope I would be able to purchase a laptop computer or a desktop by August.}

      <sub>The wild. Compared to how some animals give birth, human moms do not have it so bad after all. But then again a pain is a pain, the birth of pain. Conceiving and bringing out a baby into this world.

      Sea Turtle. A mature nesting female [about 30 years old] usually returns to the same beach where it was hatched to create a nest. Using its hind flippers, it digs a hole 40 to 50 cm deep. The female will lay 150 to 200 eggs in the hole, refill it with sand and then head back to the ocean. Incubation takes two months. When the eggs hatch, these hatchings dig their way out and head to the ocean.

      African Elephant Female elephants can start breeding at age 12. Once a female becomes pregnant, the baby is born between 630 to 660 days later. This is the longest gestation period of any land animal. The baby elephant -- called a calf -- weighs about 90 to 113 kg and stands about 1 metre tall. It is able to walk only two hours after it is born.

      Giraffe Giraffes breed throughout the year, but most often after the rainy season. After gestation period of about 14 to 15 months, a two-metre tall baby giraffe, called a calf, is born. A baby giraffe will weigh about 70 kg when it drops out of its mother womb. When it's born, a baby giraffe really does drop -- almost 1.5 metres to the ground. Only 10 hours hours later, the baby will be runnning with the other giraffes.

      Killer Whale Newborns are about 2.4 metres long and weigh about 136 to 181 kg. They're born in the water and deliveries can be either head-first or tail-first. Killer whale calves nurse under water, close to surface. They nurse for about five to 10 seconds as a time, several times an hour, 24 hours a day, for about 11 months.

      Komodo Dragon Komodo Dragons live alone and look after each other for breeding. After mating, a female Komodo dragon lays about 20 to 40 eggs. Nests are dug in the ground, covered and left unguarded to incubate for eight or nine months.

      Orangutan Mothers raise one child at a time. The child is not weaned for up to three years and rides on its mother's back during at the time. Female usually have one child every six years. This approach tends to produce offspring that are given large amounts of care and nurturing.

      Octopus Within two months after mating, the female releases up to 500,000 eggs! The female will care for the eggs by gently cleaning them with her suckers. Soon after the eggs hatched, the female dies. The tiny hatchlings are carried about in the water currents where they feed on plankton. Only one or two out of 200,000 hatchlings survive to the adult stage. Now that's survival of the fittest!


Sources:graphicnews.com;houstuffworks.com;wikipedia.org</sub>

_{Happy Mother's Day [May 11] to all the mothers in the world}

      _{Before James Bond became a screen icon, he was a paperback hero. A new exhibition in London, U.K., of 007 book covers charts the changing image of the suave British spy and his world of fast cars [aston martin for example], luxury casinos [I like the original movie poster of Casino Royale as well as the animated graphic intro of the new Casino Royale], and alluring women. They're all beautiful! Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and spanning the globe __ there are Bond books in English, German, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew and even an Italian comic-book version __ the artwork reveals how Bond's unique brand of glamour has been adapted to widely differing times and places. Stir not shaken... what is James favorite drink?}

     _{M      e      m      b      e      r}

      _{I would like to thank the people, Domnx for featuring my work titled Hat Couture II. Cybababe for featuring my work titled Dolphin Dreams. A long time supporter and friend Vyletcrush for featuring Dolphin Dreams also. Appreciated!}

      <sub>One of the world's foremost physicists, Michio Kaku, has put his academic mind to some of science fiction's other concepts, such as teleportation and force fields, and is convinced that they, too can become reality.

      At Duke University, Kaku explains, researchers funded by the military were able in 2006 to render a microscopic object invisible to microwave radiation. Then, a few months ago, researchers at Cal Tech and in Germany achieved the same result with visible light.

      They were able to achieve invisibility to red and green light. Single colours of light can be bent in a way consistent with invisibility on a microscopic scale using nanotechnology, Kaku says.

      This has a huge potential on the battelfield [no wonder the military is seriously interested!]. Imagine a tank is being invisible to enemy forces. No wonder the Pentagon is bankrolling research in this field. "The next step is to do a large object at one light colour.," Kaku says. "Within 10 years, we may be able to make an object completely invicible to one colour of light."

      And that is only one of the seemingly outrageous accomplishments in the works that Kaku discusses in his new book,Physics of the Impossible.

       While the chances of someone being teleported -- as in the recent hit movie Jumper -- is highly unlikely, Kaku points out that teleportation of an inorganic molecule has already been achieved.

       And how about the fact that, while time travel poses philosophical questions [why to you want to go back or the future?] that can twist your mind like trying to squeeze water out of a soaking wet towel, on principle it does not violate the known laws of physics.

       In The Physics of Impossible, Kaku discusses phasers, force fields, teleportation and time travel. While Kaku is a fan of science fiction, his work is nothing of the sort. His conclusions are measured probabilities based on the facts.

       In the introduction of the book, he warns against ruling out great possibilities because "in my own short lifetime, I have seen seemingly impossible become established fact over and over."

       Commenting on his book, which was published in March, Kaku says: "We are taking ideas that are usually the property of science fiction and we are looking at them with a very serious analysis with the most recent advances in physics."

       "Science is doubling every 10 years -- it's almost too much information to print. As a result, the public is really quite unaware of the breakthroughs that we are looking forward to cover the next few decades."

       How is it possible to make something invisible?

       As Kaku himself writes in his month's edition of Natural History, a beam of light bends at a particular angle when it enters a given substance, such as glass, and then keeps going in a straight line. But what if you could control that angle at will, so that, for instance, it changed continuously from point to point in the glass?

       If a beam of light could create its own path -- slithering around an object's atoms like a snake -- and exit the material along the same line it entered, then the object could be invisible," Kaku writes.

       Researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and Imperial College in London were able to achieve that with microwaves in 2006.

       Kaku believes that using metamaterials, a substance with optical properties not found in nature [man made for sure or yet to be invented] scientists will be able to eventually render subjects invisble...[thus The Invicible Man in comics will come true someday!].

       Another seemingly impossible idea Kaku deals with is travel outside of our solar system. While the concept of bringing a mega-size starship with hundreds of people aboard another star is not likely, he says NASA is making advances toward sending billions of self-reproducing nanosized exploration vessels throughout the galaxy.

       Through many of these proposals are projected in the distant future, there are some more immediate changes ahead.

       A few weeks ago, Kaku was invited by Microsoft to speak before an internal audience of about 4,000 of the company's top engineers. He was there to explain his contention that the age of computers as we know them, with transistors imprinted by ultraviolet radiation onto silicon chips, will soon reach a peak. "We are coming to the point where they will not be able to go faster. We have to go to the next generation," he explains.

       Some of the changes that excite Kaku are the possibilities of computers carrying information through light instead of electricity, or computers functioning on DNA molecules [microscopic robots?].

       Another reality that may change our view of the possible is the question of extraterrestial life.

       "It's almost a certainty; microbial life for sure," Kaku explains.

       The odds that there are civilizations much more advanced than us. We can count 100 billion galaxies billion squared for the number of stars in the visible universe. The probability that one of these stars has a planet that will have life more intelligent than us, I think, is 100 percent."

       This marriage of science fact and science fiction, while existing. Kaku concedes, is nothing new. Instead, Kaku points out that they are interrelated traditions.

       "The idea of warping in space comes from Einstein not Star Trek, and the invention the atomic bomb was predicted almost to date in a H.G Wells novel."</sub>

           _{M      e      m      b      e      r}

      _{I would like to thank the people, Domnx for featuring my work titled Hat Couture II. Cybababe for featuring my work titled Dolphin Dreams. A long time supporter and friend Vyletcrush for featuring Dolphin Dreams also. Appreciated!}