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Stockholm - Rather than bury or burn bodies after death, a Swedish company has come up with a chilling alternative; freezing them in liquid nitrogen, then using sound waves to smash the brittle remains into a powder.

Concerns about the environmental impact of cremation, where a
body is incinerated at high temperature, and burial, in which a body can take many years to decompose, has led Swedish firm Promessa Organic AB to the new solution.

The process involves flash-freezing bodies to -18C, then dipping them in liquid nitrogen with a temperature of -196C. The bodies, extracted from the super-cold solution, are brittle as glass and broken down with bursts of sound to leave a powder substance.
From there, all water is removed in a vacuum chamber before the remains are moved through a metal screen that filters away any precious metals in fillings or remnants of pacemakers and other implants that may have survived the freezing process.

"The method is based upon preserving the body in a biological form after death, while avoiding harmful embalming fluid," said Susanne Wiigh-Maesak, a biologist and head of operations at Promessa, based in Goteborg, 475km southwest of Stockholm.

She said the authorities in nearby Joenkoeping were ready to start operating its first freeze-drying facility in the next couple of years. She has also applied for a patent for the process in 35 countries.
The remains, she said, could be then cremated or buried in a coffin crafted from corn starch. The small casket could be placed in a
shallow grave - about 30cm deep - where oxygen and bacteria would take about a year to break them down and return them to the soil.

"On top of the grave you can set a plant, that is taking advantage of the nutrients in the 'compost'," Wiigh-Maesak said, adding that she herself would very much like to become a white rhododendron.
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'Junior' or 'The second' was probably too normal for the son of an American computer programmer. His newborn son goes through life as Jon Blake Cusack 2.0

Version 2.0 was born last Thursday (29-01-2004) in Holland, Michigan. "Jon Blake Cusack 2.0 looks a lot like 1.0, but has gotten a few extra functions from his mother Jamie", wrote the proud father in an e-mail to family and friends.

Cusack wanted to name his son a little different then just Jon Blake. He had the idea to give his son a serial number for some time now. The trick was to convince his wife! Jamie Cusack agreed on the idea only a week before giving birth. "I got to choose the design of the baby's room and a few other things, so Jon could pick the name".
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San Francisco - Researchers found a gene responsible for drunkenness in worms after plying thousands of the tiny creatures with booze, a discovery that could boost the fight against alcoholism.

The experiment was conducted by University of California and San Francisco researchers.

Because it is believed that alcohol affects all animals similarly, humans, like worms, may also possess a single gene responsible for drunkenness.

"Our end goal is to find a way to cure alcoholism and drug abuse," Dr. Steven McIntire said. "We hope to develop effective therapeutics to improve the ability of people to stop drinking."

After six years of work on the project, McIntire can now spot a soused worm about as well as a highway patrol trooper can spot a drunken driver.

He and the other scientists dosed hundreds of thousands of worms with enough alcohol that they would be too drunk to drive legally (if they were humans with the same blood-to-alcohol level).

The drunken worms moved slower and more clumsy than sober ones, and laid fewer eggs. Teetotaler worms form a neat S shape to power propulsion while the bodies of drunken worms were straighter and less active.

Researchers found that the sober worms had the same mutated gene that appears to make them immune to alcohol's intoxicating effects.

The natural job of the gene they found is to help slow down brain transmissions. Alcohol increases the gene's activity, which slows down brain activity even more. But if the gene is disabled, as it was in the mutant worms, the brain never gets the chance to slow down.

Still, McIntire and other addiction experts caution there's much research left to do before the leap to people can be made.

"Humans are a lot more complicated than the worm," said neurobiology professor Steven Treistman of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Treistman said many other genes are probably involved in helping people get drunk and that McIntire's work with worms couldn't measure other human intoxicating effects such as slurred speech and loss of inhibition.

Nonetheless, Treistman said the findings of McIntire are important because they highlight an important new target in the fight against alcoholism.

According to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 14 million Americans abuse alcohol.

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The Americans put the first man on the moon and the first tourist in space. Now the Russians could make one wealthy couple the first members of the 240-mile-high club.

In its latest attempt to develop space tourism, Russia is offering a pair of newlyweds the chance to swap Venice or Paris for a cosmic honeymoon on board the international space station.

For $65 million - the cost of a pair of space return tickets - the couple could become the first to experience the uncharted joys of sex in zero gravity.

"It would bring the mile-high club to new heights," said Rob Volmer of Space Adventures, the company that has teamed up with the Russian Aviation and Space Agency to offer the trip.


"The international space station is as large as a football field. There are plenty of nooks and crannies where a couple could hide. If Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck want to get away from it all on their honeymoon, we have the perfect solution."

Sergei Gorbunov, of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, said the chosen couple would have to be in good physical condition and prepared to undergo a rigorous 10-month course to train for space travel.

The pair could be blasted aloft aboard the Soyuz spacecraft that was used by Denis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, the wealthy businessmen who paid $25 million each to become the first tourists in space.

Space Adventures and the Russian agency have signed an agreement for up to four more space tourists to go into orbit. Officials said the first newlyweds could be in space by 2006.

Sex has long been a space taboo. A US married couple spent eight days as cosmonauts on Russia's Salyut space station in 1992, but one always slept while the other worked.

But as regular stints on the international space station can last up to six months, the chances of cosmonauts becoming sexually involved have increased.

In his book Living in Space, G. Harry Stine, a NASA technician who died in 1997, wrote that agency staff at the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, had used a buoyancy tank that simulated low-gravity conditions to test the possibilities of weightless sex.

"It was possible but difficult," he wrote, "and was made easier when a third person assisted by holding one of the others in place."

Pierre Kohler, a French scientific writer, claimed in another book that NASA had tested 20 positions by computer simulation and then arranged for two people to try the best 10 in zero gravity.

Only four were possible to reach without "mechanical assistance", according to Kohler. An elastic belt and an inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag, were needed for the other six.

"One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible," he wrote.

NASA denied such tests had taken place.

It is unclear whether the Russians have carried out research on sex in space. Valery Polyakov, who holds the space endurance record for a 14-month stint on the Mir station that ended in 1995, denied he had had space sex with his wife and fellow cosmonaut Yelena Kondakova.
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