Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of new Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, is quite a character. According to the BBC:
Japan’s new first lady is something of a Renaissance woman: designer, former actress, cookbook author, television personality—and perhaps most controversially a self-professed space traveller who has visited Venus with aliens.
If that were not enough, she also claims to have met Tom Cruise in a former life, when he was Japanese.
Hatoyama was quoted in a book called Most Bizarre Things I’ve Encountered as saying:
While my body was sleeping, I think my spirit flew on a triangular-shaped UFO to Venus…It was an extremely beautiful place and was very green.
Granted, Japan’s new first lady isn’t always the most, er, cautious with her words. Among her other quotations are:
“When the sun is up, I always eat it… I tear it off and eat if like this,” she said on the chat show, joking with the host.
“Yum, yum, yum,” she said. “That gives me great power.”
Perhaps something is lost in translation?
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Image: iStockphoto
Showers (as in, actual showers) of dead tadpoles, fish and even frogs have confused scientists, meteorologists, and officials in central Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture, located on the Japan Sea Coast. One resident found 13 dead carp, each around 3 inches long, on and around his car. Another reported hearing a strange noise in a nearby parking lot, then found 100 tadpoles covering cars in the lot.
Various objects and animals do occasionally fall from the sky: It’s called “Fafrotskies,” short for “fall from the skies.” These events generally occur when water spouts, storms, and strong winds suck objects from bodies of water and deposit them on land. But because there had been no reports of strong wind, many officials and meteorologists say this explanation can’t explain the torrent of tadpoles.
An alternative explanation is that birds who eat tadpoles and fish carried the animals in their mouths, then dropped them while flying. Still, some bird experts say that if this had happen, the tadpole carnage would have covered a more sizable area.
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Imagine a device that’s like The Clapper on speed: A smile, finger gesture, or wink can start up your washing machine. Or control your iPod. Or tell your cell phone to call your mom. Now, this wonder-remote is a reality. A new gadget that looks just like a pair of ear buds can measure facial expressions to control electronic devices—so winking your right eye, for example, will change the song on your iPod.
The “Mimi Switch,” developed by Kazuhiro Taniguchi, a Japanese scientist, uses infrared sensors to measure movements inside the ear, which are triggered by various facial expressions, and then transmits signals to a micro-computer that controls electronic devices. It’s pretty much a hands-free remote control for anything electronic. It stores and can even interpret data, allowing it to customize itself to individual users, as Taniguchi told AFP: “If it judges that you aren’t smiling enough, it may play a cheerful song.” (more…)
• Recycleable toilet paper—not as gross as it sounds, actually (particularly when the alternative is mass deforestation).
• Bad news for…humanity: We judge our leaders on how they look, not on how well they lead.
• Jailbreak! When an octopus executes the great escape.
• Ever wonder who’s driving your subway train? It could very well be a computer.
• And hey, herbs are science: The pot revolution hits Japan.
Does blood type really matter? If you’re Japanese, the answer, at least right now, is yes. The importance of blood type is so ingrained in Japanese culture that potential employers regularly ask about it during job interviews. There’s also the Nintendo DS game that asks players their blood type to help them rediscover themselves, the Japanese department stores that sell “lucky bags” of women’s accessories that are tailored to blood types, and a new dating show that lets women pick men based on whether they’re an A negative or B positive.
Perhaps the biggest measure of the country’s obsession is in its books: Japan’s largest book distributor has reported that four out of the top ten books sold last year were on the ways a blood type determines a person’s personality.
In the bestselling series, there’s one book for each of the blood types, which are categorized as follows:
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Just as the Census of Marine Life announces the existence of amazing new wonders in the Southern Oceans, a battle over the oceans’ largest inhabitants rages on. While many have criticized Japanese whalers for illegally terrorizing (and slaughtering) whales, the Japanese are now turning the tables and accusing the television channel Animal Planet of terrorizing their whaling ships.
The accusations stem from Animal Planet’s new seven-part series, Whale Wars, which documents the militant anti-whaling escapades of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The Sea Shepherds have been using harsh and combative— though, they insist non-violent—strategies like hurling stink bombs, throwing acid, and spreading propeller-tripping steel cables to stop Japanese whaling ships from doing their job. The group says they prevented 300 whale deaths last winter. Japanese whalers have killed thousands of whales since the 1980s, and claimed they were in the name of research.
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For around the price of a laptop ($1,400), you can protect your grandmother from falling down. Prop, a Japanese based company, has created the perfect present for those elderly relatives: an inflatable airbag, which they displayed at the International Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition in Tokyo. It’s only 2.4 pounds, but it looks like a fanny pack and is currently available in Japan.
The airbag works like this: When a person wearing the bag is about to fall backwards, electronic sensors signal the airbag system to pump 3.9 gallons of gas into each of the two bags, just in time to carefully protect the person from falling on their head and rear end.
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Last week we covered the paper released by the Japanese Whale Research Program (JARPA) showing that minke whales in the Antarctic were getting thinner, and we also covered their research methods—taking measurements from more than 4,500 slaughtered whales. This week National Geographic has an update, interviewing two American researchers who say that killing the whales wasn’t necessary for the research.
Scott Baker, from Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, said researchers could have made the same finding by genetic testing, biopsy—removing a small piece of tissue for sampling—or simply through photographic evidence. And Stanford University’s Stephen Palumbi disagreed with the Japanese scientists over the importance of the finding, saying that whales getting a little skinnier might not matter that much, and the study’s findings weren’t statistically significant enough to be useful.
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Japan’s legendary vending machines dispense everything from batteries and hot ramen to alcohol, cigarettes, porn, and panties purportedly worn by school girls. But these instant gratification sin machines aren’t selling their wares ad libitum—well, at least not all of them.
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