In December 1999, Professor Chia Tet Fatt from Singapore’s National Institute of Education’s National Science Academic Group succeeded in producing the world’s first successful bioluminescent flowers, using a white-petalled strain of Dendrobium orchid known as the Dendrobium White Fairy #5. Utilising particle bombardment, he transferred biologically active DNA containing the luciferase gene from fireflies into the orchid tissues, and then propagated them, eventually yielding stable, transgenic orchids retaining the firefly gene. These bioluminescent orchids emit a greenish-white light not just from the petals but also
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Since 1993, Scottish hotel owner Campbell Aird, who had his right arm amputated in 1982 after doctors diagnosed muscular cancer, has been trying out a new bionic arm created by a team of five bio-engineers at the Margaret Rose Hospital, Edinburgh, UK. Two other motorised artificial arms have been developed in America, but these were essentially only powered elbows.
The first female to be fitted with a bionic arm is Claudia Mitchell of Ellicott City, Maryland, USA, who had lost her left arm at the shoulder following a motorcycle accident. Her bionic arm was designed by medics and engineers of the the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, USA, and allows Ms Mitchell to control parts of the limb by thought. Ms Mitchell revealed her arm at a press conference in Chicago, USA on 14 September 2006.
The world’s first bioluminescent primate was a rhesus monkey Macaca mulatta called ANDi (whose name is the abbreviation for inserted DNA written backwards), created in 2000 by a team of researchers led by Gerald Schatten and Anthony W.S. Chan at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center at Oregon Health Sciences University. They inserted a glowing gene obtained from bioluminescent jellyfishes into 222 monkey eggs, of which 126 grew into embryos in laboratory dishes. Forty of these were then transferred to 20 surrogate mothers (two embryos
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Erik Weihenmayer (Hong Kong) was born with retinoschisis, an eye condition that left him totally blind by the age of 13. Despite this, on 25 May 2001, he reached the summit of Mount Everest, the first – and so far only – blind man ever to have done so. Erik’s other notable feats include his 2002 completion of the Seven Summits – climbing the highest peak on each of the seven continents of the world. Erik is also an accomplished rock climber, skier and paraglider.
The first advertising blimp was the ‘Suchard’ Airship, a human-driven airship financed by the Swiss chocolatiers, Suchard, and which in 1912-13, was built to fly the Atlantic east to west from the Canary Islands to the USA. Whilst the crossing failed due to financial and operating difficulties, it was the first time a commercial airship was sponsored for advertising purposes.
The earliest fossil bird is known from two partial skeletons found in Texas, USA in rocks dating from 220 million years ago. Named Protoavis texensis in 1991, this pheasant-sized creature has caused much controversy by pushing the age of birds back many millions of years from the previous record – that of the more familiar Archaeopteryx lithographica found in Jurassic sediments in Germany. It is still unclear whether Protoavis will be widely accepted as a true bird, making Archaeopteryx, the 153-million-year-old crow-sized flier, the earliest
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Sir Paul McCartney and Wings – with the help of producer Sir George Martin (all UK) – created perhaps the best ever Bond theme song with “Live and Let Die”, the first to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song (1973), It charted at no.2 in the USA and no.7 in the UK, and lost the Oscar to “The Way We Were” from the movie of the same name. To date, no Bond music has won an Oscar.
Draughts, known as checkers in North America, is believed to have originated on the French/Spanish border in the 12th century, when backgammon pieces were placed on a chess board and moved as in the well-known game of the time, alquerque. The earliest book on the game was by Antonio Torquemada of Valencia, Spain in 1547. Information from Archives (e.g. 1994). Submitted for use in Scholastic’s Modern Marvels.
The earliest brain-training video game was Mind Quiz. Ubisoft opted voluntarily to have their brain development gameremoved from the shelves of UK games stores when it was revealed that players scoring poorly were categorised as “super spastic”. The game was developed in Japan, where the word was overlooked during quality assurance testing.