There's Gold in That There Poop!

The thing I thought of first was gold teeth and people cleaning them.

Then I thought of lost jewelry down the toilet. It turns out its just industrial waste.

You never know what's in your sewage!

Sewage yields more gold than top mines - Yahoo! News: "A sewage treatment facility in central Japan has recorded a higher gold yield from sludge than can be found at some of the world's best mines."

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Cigarette Machines Know Your Age

Does the machine also slap you around the head and tell you not to smoke if you're under age?

clipped from news.yahoo.com TOKYO (Reuters) - Cigarette vending machines in Japan may soon start counting wrinkles, crow's feet and skin sags to see if the customer is old enough to smoke. The legal age for smoking in Japan is 20 and as the country's 570,000 tobacco vending machines prepare for a July regulation requiring them to ensure buyers are not underage, a company has developed a system to identify age by studying facial features. By having the customer look into a digital camera attached to the machine, Fujitaka Co's system will compare facial characteristics, such as wrinkles surrounding the eyes, bone structure and skin sags, to the facial data of over 100,000 people, Hajime Yamamoto, a company spokesman said. Yamamoto said the system could correctly identify about 90 percent of the users, with the remaining 10 percent sent to a "grey zone" for "minors that look older, and baby-faced adults," where they would be asked to insert their driving license.

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Chimps Have Better Memories Than College Students

I have to admit, some of my college years are a bit of a blur.

clipped from www.ananova.com Young chimpanzees beat a group of university students in a maths memory test. They remembered a series of numbers better than the undergraduates, reports the Daily Mirror. Japanese researchers pitted three pairs of five-year-old chimps and their mothers against a dozen students. Each group was shown numbers from one to nine on a touch screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch the remaining squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there. All the young chimps scored higher than the undergraduates. Researcher Tetsoro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University, said: "Young chimps have an extraordinary memory - often better than humans."

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Japanese Make Musical Roads

It's bad enough listening so the hiss of someone else's iPod when they have it too loud, without the road joining in too!

Japanese researchers have turned road noise into music after discovering that grooves etched into the surface of the road resonate inside cars as musical notes.

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Diamond Covered Christmas Tree

I have trouble putting the lights on the tree, let alone jewels!

For those with nothing better to do with their money, a Japanese department store is offering a Christmas tree with 400 diamonds for 1.8 million dollars.

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Save Money! Or This Bomb Will Go Off!

Well, it should remind you to save!

The "Savings Bomb," which goes on sale in Japan next week, "explodes" and scatters coins if users fail to save for a long time, toy manufacturer TOMY Co Ltd said Thursday.

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