The M&G‘s Faranaaz Parker rounds up five odd things you may have missed this week.
China counts its citizens
If you think the South African census may turn out to be big, pricey and complicated, take a moment to contemplate the task set for enumerators in China who this week set out to find out the size of the world’s most populous country.
The Chinese government has employed over six-million field workers to administer the country’s first census in 10 years. China has an estimated population of 1,3-billion including 200-million hard-to-count migrant workers.
The census may help the Chinese get an accurate handle on how many children are in each family. Because of the country’s controversial one-child policy, which fines people who have more than one child, people often avoid registering the birth of additional children.
The Chinese government has said that families who reveal additional children during the census will face less severe penalties and that poor families will be able to pay their fines in installments.
And you thought South Africa had issues.
In-vitro organs in the offing
The American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases this week reported that scientists have for the first time successfully grown miniature human livers in a lab.
Scientists stripped the cells from ferret livers and replaced them with human liver cells. The human cells grew within the framework of the ferret livers.
The ultimate aim of the project is to use organs from pigs as the framework from which to build individualised human organs for transplant.
At this point, I’m just going to come out and say “pigoon” before going off to make detailed plans on how to survive the apocalypse.
Readers flee the Times paywall
TechCrunch this week picked apart the latest results from News Corp concerning the result of its decision earlier this year to put a paywall around its content. With the paywall, only subscribers could gain access to content on the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and the Sunday Times.
The results showed that while News Corp had 105 000 paying subscribers in addition to its existing 100 000-strong print edition subscriber base it also lost four-million unique visitors to its Times UK website. That’s a 62% drop in online readership.
Those readers, I’m sure, simply skedaddled on over to the Guardian and the Telegraph.
So did the gamble work? Analysts say no. Free content lovers everywhere would love to point and laugh at this point but we’re still left with the very real problem of how to monetise and sustain quality content online.
Jurassic Park was a lie!
A blog post from science writer Brian Switek calling for clothed dinosaurs threw me for a loop this week.
Switek points out that while the public imagination still captures dinosaurs as lumbering, leathery behemoths of the ancient world, they were more like lumbering feathery behemoths.
Recent discoveries in the archeology world prove that the dreaded Velociraptor had small round knobs on its arms that anchored long arm feathers. A relative of the Tyrannosaurus was found to be coated in downy fuzz.
All of this proves once again that in science all we can do is simply follow the best available evidence. And new evidence requires a change in mindset.
Now, how do we get Stephen Spielberg to remake Jurassic Park, this time with feathered dinosaurs?
Thinking outside the Xbox
No sooner had Microsoft released its revolutionary new peripheral, the Kinect, than an open source hardware company had put a bounty on it.
Adafruit Industries has offered $2 000 to anyone who can reverse engineer the Kinect so that it can be used with different computer systems. The Kinect allows gamers to interact with the Xbox 360 gaming console using gestures and voice commands.
Adafruit’s Phillip Torrone believes the Kinect could have many uses outside gaming, for example in education or robotics.
But Microsoft, which is notorious for the way it jealously guards its technology, has not reacted kindly. The company has warned that it will work with law enforcement agencies to protect its product.
Isn’t it time Microsoft learned to play nice? Think of the children, Steve.
Faranaaz’s interests span science, technology and development. Read her weekly wrap every weekend on the M&G and follow her on Twitter here