Asia

While the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project has taken on the aura of a charity – if you believe what you read in the mainstream media – the hard numbers tell a different story. Analysts say the component suppliers that have taken a gamble on the project stand a fair chance of coming out winners.

A system that can guess a person's age just by looking at their face could be used to keep underage kids and teenagers out of video game arcades and liquor stores, its inventors believe. It could also help detect unwanted adults entering schools.

The Japanese-developed technology takes only 0.2 seconds to put an approximate age to any face picked up by its cameras.

US astronauts who claim to have spotted the Great Wall of China from space must be imagining things, Chinese scientists say. The Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space, because the human eye cannot resolve such fine detail, a team of academics stated in a recently published paper.

At least two US astronauts say they spotted the Great Wall from earth orbit – above 150km. They include last man on the moon, Gene Cernan; and international space station crewmember Ed Lu.

Scientists have successfully taken control of a bird's flight by implanting electrodes in its brain. They were able to use radio signals to force a pigeon to fly in any direction they chose, Chinese researchers report.

Triggered by radio waves, the electrodes mimicked natural brain signals that control movement of the bird's wings. The scientists had sufficient control to steer the animal through the air, they said. They also performed a similar experiment on mice in 2005, according to local media reports.

Researchers in Korea are close to combining monkey DNA with cow cell to create a man-made stem cell, they claim. The scientists believe they will ultimately be able to implant human DNA into an animal ova  to make an artificial stem cell which avoids some of the current ethical issues surrounding stem cell 'harvesting'.