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WASHINGTON — It starts out laying flat, like a sheet of paper. Then it springs up, almost lifelike, and folds into moveable parts much like origami art. And then it crawls away.

This new kind of robot could someday be used in space exploration, to slide into collapse sites to aid search and rescue, or to speed up manufacturing on assembly lines, experts said Thursday.

While this particular machine’s march to the world market is still years away, the report in the journal Science said the latest advances open the way to a new frontier in personalised robotics.

Not only is the material cheap — it cost just $100 — it could be easily reprogrammed from one task to another, said Sam Felton, a researcher at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“In the same way that if you have a Word document and you want to change few words, you just reprint it at your home computer, you could take a robot’s digital plan, change a few things and reprint it,” Felton told reporters.

The thin robot is built of layers, including paper, a middle layer of copper etched into a network of electrical leads, and an outer layer of shape-memory polymer that folds when heated.

Once the batteries and motor are activated, the robot folds itself much like a child’s Transformer toy, and scuttles away like a crab.

Felton said the total start-up costs for equipment used to make the robot were around $11,000.

The origami machine itself cost $80 for batteries and motor, and $20 for materials.

“If we were to build a new one it would cost another $100,” he said.

Other potential uses could include self-assembling furniture, or even shelters that build themselves in disaster zones.

“The exciting thing here is that you create this device that has computation embedded in the flat, printed version,” explained Daniela Rus, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“And when these devices lift up from the ground into the third dimension, they do it in a thoughtful way.”

The team hopes that commercial uses for the robots will grow in the years to come. In the meantime, its early tasks and functions may be incremental in nature.

“Since we are an academic lab, we try and come up with the most interesting and challenging problems, not necessarily the most practical,” said Felton.

“In space, maybe it would be too hard to build a completely self-folding satellite but maybe you would just have the solar panels deploy using shape memory materials, and that would be a very easy and short-term addition.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Research at Harvard, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The researchers plan to present their work at the Sixth International Meeting on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education in Tokyo from August 10-13.

It’s long been known that faulty BRCA genes greatly raise the risk for breast cancer. Now scientists say a more recently identified, less common gene can do the same.

Mutations in the gene can make breast cancer up to nine times more likely to develop, an international team of researchers reports in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

About 5 to 10 per cent of breast cancers are thought to be due to bad BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. Beyond those, many other genes are thought to play a role but how much each one raises risk has not been known, said Dr Jeffrey Weitzel, a genetics expert at City of Hope Cancer Centre in Duarte, California.

The new study on the gene — called PALB2 — shows “this one is serious”, and probably is the most dangerous in terms of breast cancer after the BRCA genes, said Weitzel, one of leaders of the study.

It involved 362 members of 154 families with PALB2 mutations — the largest study of its kind. The faulty gene seems to give a woman a 14 per cent chance of breast cancer by age 50 and 35 per cent by age 70 and an even greater risk if she has two or more close relatives with the disease.

That’s nearly as high as the risk from a faulty BRCA2 gene, Dr Michele Evans of the National Institute on Ageing and Dr Dan Longo of the medical journal staff write in a commentary in the journal.

The PALB2 gene works with BRCA2 as a tumor suppressor, so when it is mutated, cancer can flourish.

How common the mutations are isn’t well known, but it’s “probably more than we thought because people just weren’t testing for it”, Weitzel said. He found three cases among his own breast cancer patients in the last month alone.

Among breast cancer patients, BRCA mutations are carried by 5 per cent of whites and 12 per cent of Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jews. PALB2 mutations have been seen in up to 4 per cent of families with a history of breast cancer.

Men with a faulty PALB2 gene also have a risk for breast cancer that is eight times greater than men in the general population.

Testing for PALB2 often is included in more comprehensive genetic testing, and the new study should give people with the mutation better information on their risk, Weitzel said. Doctors say that people with faulty cancer genes should be offered genetic counselling and may want to consider more frequent screening and prevention options, which can range from hormone-blocking pills to breast removal.

The actress Angelina Jolie had her healthy breasts removed last year after learning she had a defective BRCA1 gene.

The study was funded by many government and cancer groups around the world and was led by Dr Marc Tischkowitz of the University of Cambridge in England. The authors include Mary-Clare King, the University of Washington scientist who discovered the first breast cancer predisposition gene, BRCA1.

WASHINGTON — Researchers Thursday unveiled a powerful new postage-stamp size chip delivering supercomputer performance using a process that mimics the human brain.

The so-called “neurosynaptic” chip is a breakthrough that opens a wide new range of computing possibilities from self-driving cars to artificial intelligence systems that can be installed on a smartphone, the scientists say.

The researchers from IBM, Cornell Tech and collaborators from around the world said they took an entirely new approach in design compared with previous computer architecture, moving towards a system called “cognitive computing”.

“We have taken inspiration from the cerebral cortex to design this chip,” said IBM chief scientist for brain-inspired computing, Dharmendra Modha, referring to the command centre of the brain.

He said existing computers trace their lineage back to machines from the 1940s which are essentially “sequential number-crunching calculators” that perform mathematical or “left brain” tasks but little else.

The new chip dubbed “TrueNorth” works to mimic the “right brain” functions of sensory processing — responding to sights, smells and information from the environment to “learn” to respond in different situations, Modha said.

It accomplishes this task by using a huge network of “neurons” and “synapses”, similar to how the human brain functions by using information gathered from the body’s sensory organs.

The researchers designed TrueNorth with 1 million programmable neurons and 256 million programmable synapses, on a chip with 4,096 cores and 5.4 billion transistors.

A key to the performance is the extremely low energy use on the new chip, which runs on the equivalent energy of a hearing-aid battery.

Sensor becomes the computer

This can allow a chip installed in a car or smartphone to perform supercomputer calculations in real time without connecting to the cloud or other network.

“The sensor becomes the computer,” Modha told AFP in a phone interview.

“You could have better sensory processors without the connection to Wi-Fi or the cloud.

This would allow a self-driving vehicle, for example, to detect problems and deal with them even if its data connection is broken.

“It can see an accident about to happen,” Modha said.

Similarly, a mobile phone can take smells or visual information and interpret them in real time, without the need for a network connection.

“After years of collaboration with IBM, we are now a step closer to building a computer similar to our brain,” said Rajit Manohar, a researcher at Cornell Tech, a graduate school of Cornell University.

The project funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) published its research in a cover article on the August 8 edition of the journal Science.

The researchers say TrueNorth in some ways outperforms today’s supercomputers although a direct comparison is not possible because they operate differently.

But they wrote that TrueNorth can deliver from 46 billion to 400 billion “synaptic” calculations per second per watt of energy. That compares with the most energy-efficient supercomputer which delivers 4.5 billion “floating point” calculations per second and per watt.

The chip was fabricated using Samsung’s 28-nanometer process technology.

“It is an astonishing achievement to leverage a process traditionally used for commercially available, low-power mobile devices to deliver a chip that emulates the human brain by processing extreme amounts of sensory information with very little power,” said Shawn Han of Samsung Electronics, in a statement.

“This is a huge architectural breakthrough that is essential as the industry moves towards the next-generation cloud and big-data processing.”

Modha said the researchers have produced only the chip and that it could be years before commercial applications become available.

But he said it “has the potential to transform society” with a new generation of computing technology. And he noted that hybrid computers may be able to one day combine the “left brain” machines with the new “right brain” devices for even better performance.

NEW YORK — Last week’s news that a Russian crime ring has amassed some 1.2 billion username and password combinations makes now a good time to review ways to protect yourself online.

The hacking misdeeds were described in a New York Times story based on the findings of Hold Security, a Milwaukee firm that has a history of uncovering online security breaches.

Hold Security, called the data “the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials.” Hold’s researchers did not identify the origins of the data or name the victim websites, citing nondisclosure agreements. The company also said it didn’t want to name companies whose websites are still vulnerable to hacking, according to the Times report.

Hold Security didn’t immediately respond to inquiries from The Associated Press.

If there’s reason to believe any of your passwords might have been compromised, change them immediately. One of the best things you can do is to make sure your passwords are strong. Here are seven ways to fortify them:

• Make your password long. The recommended minimum is eight characters, but 14 is better and 25 is even better than that. Some services have character limits on passwords, though.

• Use combinations of letters and numbers, upper and lower case and symbols such as the exclamation mark. Some services won’t let you do all of that, but try to vary it as much as you can. “PaSsWoRd!43” is far better than “password43.”

• Avoid words that are in dictionaries, even if you add numbers and symbols. There are programmes that can crack passwords by going through databases of known words. One trick is to add numbers in the middle of a word — as in “pas123swor456d” instead of “password123456.” Another is to think of a sentence and use just the first letter of each word — as in “tqbfjotld” for “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

• Substitute characters. For instance, use the number zero instead of the letter O, or replace the S with a dollar sign.

• Avoid easy-to-guess words, even if they aren’t in the dictionary. You shouldn’t use your name, company name or hometown, for instance. Avoid pets and relatives’ names, too. Likewise, avoid things that can be looked up, such as your birthday or ZIP code. But you might use that as part of a complex password. Try reversing your ZIP code or phone number and insert that into a string of letters. As a reminder, you should also avoid “password” as the password, or consecutive keys on the keyboard, such as “1234” or “qwerty.”

• Never reuse passwords on other accounts — with two exceptions. Over the years, I’ve managed to create hundreds of accounts. Many are for one-time use, such as when a newspaper website requires me to register to read the full story. It’s OK to use simple passwords and repeat them in those types of situations, as long as the password isn’t unlocking features that involve credit cards or posting on a message board. That will let you focus on keeping passwords to the more essential accounts strong.

The other exception is to log in using a centralised sign-on service such as Facebook Connect. Hulu, for instance, gives you the option of using your Facebook username and password instead of creating a separate one for the video site. This technically isn’t reusing your password, but a matter of Hulu borrowing the log-in system Facebook already has in place. The account information isn’t stored with Hulu. Facebook merely tells Hulu’s computers that it’s you. Of course, if you do this, it’s even more important to keep your Facebook password secure.

• Some services such as Gmail even give you the option of using two passwords when you use a particular computer or device for the first time. If you have that feature turned on, the service will send a text message with a six-digit code to your phone when you try to use Gmail from an unrecognised device. You’ll need to enter that for access, and then the code expires. It’s optional, and it’s a pain — but it could save you from grief later on. Hackers won’t be able to access the account without possessing your phone. Turn it on by going to the account’s security settings.

No matter how high-tech the world we’re living in already is, it seems like we are always looking for more, for science fiction ideas to become reality. Short of achieving teleportation nothing would surprise us anymore.

Sending scents across networks as easily as sending text and multimedia messages, computer screens that free you from prescription glasses, rechargeable batteries that are at least four times more efficient than they are now, and globally available wireless charging of mobiles devices, these are a few of the innovations that we can, very reasonably, expect to see and use sooner that we think.

Forget about the “i” and the “e” prefixes that we have become accustomed to in most technology neologisms, here comes the “o”. Vapor Communications is working on the oPhone, a device that can “transmit” odours (hence the “o”). It will be the “first scent-based mobile messaging platform for iPhone users worldwide”. 

For now it is limited to owners of iPhones. It will require the addition of the oPhone device and of course the software application that goes with it. Inventors David Edwards and Rachel Field (Wyss Institute, Harvard University) say they will make a version for the Android system later. From a starting set of 32 basic scents the system can transmit, actually recreate, a combination of 300,000 scents.

From the warm and salty air of a Mediterranean beach to the evocative aroma of cookies out of the oven, you will be able to add significant impact to your photos or messages, thus enhancing the emotional aspect of the communication.

To prove that this is not just an idea in the lab, a commercial release date and a price tag have been announced: sometime in 2015 and at $150. Get ready for the most sophisticated, upcoming “nose job”.

Researchers want to be kind not only to your nose but to your eyes as well, at least if you wear prescription eyeglasses. An average 62 per cent of the world population wear glasses or contact lenses (CBS — Statistics Netherlands Institute). For them a futuristic monitor technology is being developed jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley and Microsoft. 

The concept consists of having your vision corrected by the screen you are looking at, not by your glasses, therefore freeing you from having to wear glasses when working at the computer monitor or at any other mobile device screen for that matter. It would come as a dream especially that we all tend to spend hours looking at various screens every day. Being able to do so without wearing glasses would bring unprecedented comfort. 

It’s like passing on your ophthalmologist’s prescription to the screen. It is certainly one of the smartest, most useful ideas in the last 10 years or so, though the actual wide scale implementation may take a while. It also prompts a few questions. How will it practically work since in most cases, and for one given person, each eye requires different corrections? What will happen if two people want to look at the same computer monitor at the same time? Wait and see (no pun intended).

Rechargeable batteries are still at the heart of mobile devices. When on battery, and in the typical case, a laptop will run for three to five hours, a tablet for 8 to 10, and a smartphone for 14 to 20. With the ever increasing usage this has proved to be hardly enough. Add to it the hassle to fetch and to connect a charger, to remain tethered to the charging outlet and to wait till charging is done and you reach the unacceptable frustration point. 

Despite some improvements in the last five to six years with batteries lasting a bit longer and connectors being more or less standardised by the industry, we are still far from what users have the right to expect and actually need.

Two innovations may bring more than just a mild pain relief. Researchers at Stanford University are working on a prototype of pure lithium anode (one of the two poles or terminals of a battery). If the prototype succeeds the industry will be able to manufacture batteries that will be at least four times more efficient than what is available today. Imagine running your laptop 24 hours on battery! 

At the same time work on global wireless recharging of devices is being seriously pushed forward by WiTricity Corp. (wireless electricity). Marin Soljacic, one of the founders of the startup company, declares: “It’s probably a dream of any professor at MIT to help change the world for a better place.”

Global wireless charging would let you recharge your mobile device as easily as you would connect to an available wifi hot spot today. Just being anywhere near it will do. At one point in the future wireless charging will serve not only mobile computing devices and smartphone but electric cars as well. 

The combination of longer lasting batteries and wireless charging will constitute nothing less than a new revolution in the realm of mobile computing and communications.

HELSINKI — Besides saunas and Nokia cellphones, it may very well be Finland’s most successful export item ever: the Moomin universe, peopled by a group of bulky, white creatures resembling hippos.

A century after the birth of their creator, the late Tove Jansson, the odd charm of the quirky Moomin books and cartoons has won over millions in all age groups and dozens of languages from Czech to Chinese, Estonian to Esperanto.

The nuclear family — Moominpappa, Moominmamma and Moomintroll — and their coterie of other eccentric characters living close to nature offer a strangely attractive and sometimes eery alternative reality that draws people in, despite cultural differences.

“The forest was heavy with rain and the trees were absolutely motionless,” wrote Jansson in the 1971 book “Moominvalley in November”.

“Everything had withered and died, but right down in the ground the late autumn’s secret garden was growing with great vigour straight out of the mouldering earth, a strange vegetation of shiny puffed up plants that had nothing at all to do with summer.”

Tamami Yamaguchi, a 50-year-old sales assistant from Yokohama near Tokyo, is one of many devotees around the world who flock to Finland to feed their passion.

“Moomin lets you escape the bustle of Japanese life and enter a world of animated characters who make you feel relaxed,” she said.

Yamaguchi makes an annual pilgrimage to the Nordic country, which has its own Moomin theme park. And like many Japanese fans, she is the proud owner of a variety of things Moomin from pyjamas to pillow cases to crockery.

The Moomin spin-off industry today is estimated to be worth eight million euros ($10.5 million), with Moomins on everything from stamps to huge passenger planes.

‘Multidimensional’

The world was quite a different place when Moomin creator Jansson was born into a family of artists on August 9, 1914, when Finland was still ruled by the Russian tsar.

The precocious girl — a member of Finland’s Swedish minority — looked destined for a career as a painter, attending schools in Stockholm, Helsinki and Paris.

But the outbreak of World WarII changed her fate as Finland was drawn into battle, twice fighting the Soviet Union. Some 100,000 lives were lost as well as large swathes of Finnish territory.

“We can actually thank the war for the birth of the Moomin family,” said Tuula Karjalainen, a curator at the Ateneum Museum of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

“Tove Jansson created them because she wanted other things to think about.”

She drew inspiration from her background and the people she knew. Moominmamma — patient and wise — is said to be based on Jansson’s own mother.

Her first book about the Moomin and their Moominvalley was published in 1945 and was a hit from the start. The most translated Finnish author of all time, her nine Moomim books have appeared in more than 30 languages.

What people like about the Moomins is their “philosophical attitude to life,” said Karo Haemaelaeinen, editor of Finland’s leading literary magazine “Parnasso”.

“The stories of the Moomins are multidimensional,” he added, appealing to adults on an intellectual level and to children on an emotional plane.

“They are full of adventures, but they don’t conform to the conventional narrative patterns of children’s entertainment.”

Mega-boom

The real mega-boom came in the 1990s, when a 104-part TV cartoon series was released in Japan. The public — even those who hadn’t or couldn’t yet read the books — was hooked.

It helped that the Moomin, in their international version, eschewed some of the slightly unsettling eeriness — evoked particularly by the dark, moody illustrations — found on the pages of the Finnish original.

“The Japanese version is more fun — less dark — than the original,” said Yamaguchi, the Yokohama fan.

Her annual trip includes a stop at Moomin World, a theme park in southern Finland visited by hundreds of thousands each year. But soon she won’t have to travel so far since a similar park is scheduled to open in Japan next year.

Though extremely lucrative, today’s Moomin industry is somewhat removed from the original spirit of the Moomin universe as conceived by Jansson, who died in 2001.

“Tove Jansson wrote stories for herself and adults, but the Moomin world is designed for children, this is the biggest difference,” the Finnish park’s manager Tomi Lohikoski told AFP.

Few outside of Finland know that Jansson was also a painter. She considered this her main calling and saw herself as an artist who happened to write books about Moomins.

She also ended up ambivalent about her global success.

“She was very critical of the commercialisation of the figures,” said Karjalainen. “But she was delighted that she could give joy to the children.”

Like Rebecca, the exotic heroine of Daphne Du Murier’s story, “last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”, I must confess that I have never seen this rambling estate with the palatial villa called Manderley that was brilliantly brought alive in fiction. But I did visit a monument in Cyprus where the author stayed for ten months while writing her novel. 

Of all the things from the bygone era, what I miss most is the fuss that ladies made with their elaborate dressing-up ritual. Men dressed up formally too for dinner parties, extravagant weddings and also while travelling. See any black and white pictures of people emerging from an airplane and notice how immaculately dressed they all were about forty years back. A far cry from the tracksuit and faded jeans-clothed untidy passengers of today.

Going overseas on a steamer-ship or by air, was dignified business and travellers took the trouble of turning out in their best clothes for the occasion. Women wore smartly tailored dresses accessorised with elegant jewels. Men, almost all of them, wore dark suits and polished shoes. Decorum was maintained with no pushing or shoving between the queues and people, arriving after several days of travel, looked perfectly spruced up and fresh as daisies. 

When I was little I loved seeing my mother and other women dress up. I would watch in fascination as they expertly applied their make-up, which subtly transformed them into ultra glamorous divas. Each of them had a dressing table with a huge mirror, in front of which they used to sit on a cushioned chair. My favourite aunt used to notice me standing by her side and would flick a perfumed feather like powder-puff on my cheeks. A thin coat of the glittering dust would sprinkle on my face and I would refuse to wash it off for the rest of the evening. 

Without blinking, I would observe the trickiest method of how they went about applying a dark shade of lipstick. One coat would be smeared generously with the mouth puckered to a soundless “O”. Smudging it a bit by pressing a tissue paper to the mouth would follow this. An imprint of the painted lips would come off on the napkin but this was better than having the lipstick smear a teacup or a wine glass. That was considered sacrilege for a lady. Another coat of the crimson colour would be daubed, with extra attention paid to the cupid bow shape of the upper-lip. Lipstick bleeding into the corners of the mouth was checked instantly with some more dabbing of the tissue and the last step was the examination of the front teeth to banish any stains that could have appeared there. 

If she got ready before time, my mum would apply some lipstick on my childish mouth also. The family joke was that it was the best way to make me shut up because I would refuse to talk with the colour on my lips and would only reply in monosyllables. 

Last week I was babysitting my boisterous four-year-old niece. When all efforts to make her go to bed failed, I approached her with a tube of red lipstick. 

“Why are you doing?” she asked.

“Say ‘O’,” I instructed.

“My mummy says children cannot wear lipstick,” she announced

“They can wake up with make-up,” I said circling her mouth in crimson. 

“Goose nice,” she lisped giggling.

“Goose nice,” I giggled back 

NEW YORK — Drugmakers’ use of the tobacco plant as a fast and cheap way to produce novel biotechnology treatments is gaining global attention because of its role in an experimental Ebola therapy.

The treatment, which had been tested only in lab animals before being given to two American medical workers in Liberia, consists of proteins called monoclonal antibodies that bind to and inactivate the Ebola virus.

For decades biotech companies have produced such antibodies by growing genetically engineered mouse cells in enormous metal bioreactors. But in the case of the new Ebola treatment ZMapp, developed by Mapp Pharmaceuticals, the antibodies were produced in tobacco plants at Kentucky Bioprocessing, a unit of tobacco giant Reynolds American.

The tobacco-plant-produced monoclonals have been dubbed “plantibodies”.

“Tobacco makes for a good vehicle to express the antibodies because it is inexpensive and it can produce a lot,” said Erica Ollmann Saphire, a professor at The Scripps Research Institute and a prominent researcher in viral haemorrhagic fever diseases like Ebola. “It is grown in a greenhouse and you can manufacture kilogrammes of the materials. It is much less expensive than cell culture.”

In the standard method of genetic engineering, DNA is slipped into bacteria, and the microbes produce a protein that can be used to combat a disease.

A competing approach called molecular “pharming” uses a plant instead of bacteria. In the case of the Ebola treatment, Mapp uses the common tobacco plant, Nicotiana benthanmianas.

The process is very similar. A gene is inserted into a virus that is then used to infect the tobacco plant. The virus acts like a micro-Trojan Horse, ferrying the engineered DNA into the plant.

Cells infected with the virus and the gene it is carrying produce the target protein. The tobacco leaves are then harvested and processed to extract the protein, which is purified.

ZMapp’s protein is a monoclonal antibody, which resembles ordinary disease-fighting antibodies but has a highly specific affinity for particular cells, including viruses such as Ebola. It attaches itself to the virus cells and inactivates them.

Approval process

The drug so far has only been produced in very small quantities, but interest in it is stoking debate over whether it should be made more widely available to the hundreds of people stricken with Ebola in Africa while it remains untested.

“We want to have a huge impact on the Ebola outbreak,” Mapp CEO Kevin Whaley said in an interview at company headquarters in San Diego. “We would love to play a bigger role.”

Whaley said he was not aware of any significant safety issues with the serum. He would not discuss whether the company has been contacted about providing the drug overseas.

But he did note the novel manufacturing process carries its own risk, and would have to be cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration as part of the approval process.

The FDA would, for example, have to be satisfied that the plant extraction process had not led to contamination of the resulting drug.

The tobacco plant grows quickly, said Reynolds spokesman David Howard, and “it takes only about a week (after the genes are introduced) before you can begin extracting the protein.”

He declined to say how much medication each plant can yield or whether Kentucky Bioprocessing is in a position to produce ZMapp in significant quantities.

Scripps’ Saphire said it can still take anywhere from one to three months to produce the ZMapp serum for wider use given the complexities of the process.

Pentagon funding

In 2007, Kentucky Bioprocessing entered into an agreement with Mapp Biopharmaceutical and the Biodesign Institute of Arizona State University to refine the tobacco-plant approach. The approach attracted funding support from the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

For all the hope, however, the plant technique has delivered few commercial products. In 2012 the FDA okayed a drug for the rare genetic disorder Gaucher disease from Israel’s Protalix BioTherapeutics and Pfizer. Called Elelyso, it is made in carrot cells, and is the only such drug to reach the market.

Other companies have fallen far short, though it is not clear if the technique was to blame. Calgary-based SemBioSys Genetics Inc., which used safflowers to produce an experimental diabetes drug, folded in 2012 before it finished clinical trials.

Even Kentucky Bioprocessing, which at one point was developing monoclonal antibodies against HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), C. difficile bacterial infection, and the human papillomavirus, has dropped the last two projects, Howard said.

Last year Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corp. acquired a majority share of Quebec City-based Medicago, which is developing influenza and other vaccines using the tobacco-plant technology. The other 40 per cent is owned by tobacco giant Philip Morris International.

TOKYO — Messaging app launched in the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Line is moving towards a possible dual listing in Tokyo and New York as it jostles for space in an increasingly crowded and imaginative market.

Combining instant messaging with shopping, gaming and other features such as letting users send each other cute cartoon “stickers”, Line is hugely popular in Japan, particularly among teenagers.

But competition is fierce when it comes to expanding into emerging markets.

Its plans for a reported $9.8 billion Tokyo listing would help on that front — coming after February’s rush of deal making, including Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp for as much as $19 billion and Japanese online retailer Rakuten’s $900 million spend on Viber.

Other rivals include WeChat, owned by Chinese giant Tencent Inc., and South Korea’s Kakao Talk — both of which have also developed their own popular cartoon “emoticon” messages.

“Competition among messaging applications is heating up worldwide,” said Hitoshi Sato, senior analyst at InfoCom Research, Japanese telecom giant NTT group’s research arm.

“Line’s challenge is how to diversify its sources of profit in the future.”

Sato said a roughly $10 billion value for Line was reasonable given that its finances eclipse some of Japan’s most successful smartphone game developers.

Line, which says it has more than 400 million registered users in Japan and other parts of Asia, lets users make free calls, send instant messages and post photos or short videos. It combines attributes from Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp.

About 88 per cent of Japanese smartphone owners use messaging apps including Line, according to a survey by the Communications and Information network Association of Japan.

“I get in touch with friends mostly through Line — for example, when I want to go somewhere together with them,” Kanako Baba, a 25-year-old Japanese translator, told AFP.

“I don’t use e-mails very often,” she said. “Line is toll-free and handy.”

Sticky business

Line’s messaging service was launched in 2011 by the Japanese unit of South Korean Internet service provider Naver Corp. after the quake-tsunami tragedy damaged telecoms infrastructure nationwide, forcing millions of people in Japan to resort to online resources to communicate.

But boosting its user base alone is not enough to generate profit, say analysts. More than 60 per cent of its revenues come from games, but what differentiates Line from some of its rivals like WhatsApp is one of its main selling points — its stickers.

Users can post these to friends after purchasing them from Line’s online store for a fee of around $1-2. Many feature a rabbit called “Cony” and her bear boyfriend “Brown”, allowing users to express themselves with pictures as much as words.

A new service launched this year allows people to create their own stickers and sell them to each other on the platform. Line collects 50 per cent of sales revenue as commission.

While analysts see Line’s initial public offering providing funds for developing new game titles, they warn that the industry is particularly fickle.

“Success in gaming can be elusive. One game title can be a blockbuster hit, but this may mask several other unprofitable titles,” said Sato.

Targeting non-IT types

Line’s plans for an IPO in New York is seen as an attempt to tap the North American market, said Toshiaki Kanda, IT journalist and social media consultant.

“What made Line grow at this rapid pace is that from the beginning the company has targeted the mass market comprising people unfamiliar with IT technologies, rather than the IT savvy,” he said.

“There is nothing new in free messaging functions — that already existed in Skype, for example. But it launched a huge TV commercial campaign and the ‘stickers’ service” in Japan.

“Line will probably take the same strategy in the US market, targeting teenagers there,” he said, adding the planned share offering “would provide it with much needed capital with which to launch advertising”.

Neha Dharia, senior analyst at technology research firm Ovum, said in a report that the listing “makes perfect sense as it will not only raise its profile further in the market, but it will also provide them with adequate funds to strengthen their product offering”.

Analysts said messaging app users are fickle, jumping from one app to another.

“At the moment, Line has good revenue from game and stickers. But the other messaging apps can easily and quickly imitate and take the place of Line’s current position,” Sato said.

Line gave no further details on its initial public offering, including the possible size of the deal.

Dow Jones Newswires has cited a source as saying Line could list in Tokyo as soon as the autumn.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook and most other social networks are built on the premise that just about everything should be shared — except the money those posts produce.

At least two services are trying to change that. Bubblews, a social network that came zout of an extended test phase last week, pays users for posts that attract traffic and advertisers. Another company, Bonzo Me, has been doing something similar since early July.

“I just feel like everyone on social networks has been taken advantage of for long enough,” says Michael Nusbaum, a Morristown, New Jersey surgeon who created Bonzo Me. “Facebook has been making a tonne of money, and the people providing the content aren’t getting anything.”

Bonzo Me is paying its users up to 80 per cent of its ad revenue for the most popular posts.

Bubblews’ compensation formula is more complex. It’s based on the number of times that each post is clicked on or provokes some other kind of networking activity. To start, the payments are expected to translate into just a penny per view, comment or like. Bubblews plans to pay its users in $50 increments, meaning it could take a while for most users to qualify for their first paycheque unless they post material that that goes viral.

“No one should come to our site in anticipation of being able to quit their day job,” Bubblews CEO Arvind Dixit says. “But we are trying to be fair with our users. Social networks don’t have to be places where you feel like you’re being exploited.”

Bubblews is also trying to make its service worthwhile for users by encouraging deeper, thoughtful posts instead of musings about trifling subjects. To do that, it requires each post to span at least 400 characters, or roughly the opening two paragraphs of this story.

Technology analyst Rob Enderle believes Bubblews, or something like it, eventually will catch on.

“I don’t think this free-content model is sustainable,” Enderle says. “You can’t sustain the quality of the product if you aren’t paying people for the content that they are creating. And you can’t pay your bills if all you are getting are ‘likes’.”

Gerry Kelly of San Francisco has already earned nearly $100 from Bubblews since he began using a test version in January. His Bubblews feed serves as a journal about the lessons he has learned in life, as well as a forum for his clothing brand, Sonas Denim.

Though Facebook is by far the largest social network, it has a history of irking users. People have complained when Facebook changed privacy settings in ways that exposed posts to a wider audience. They have criticised Facebook for circulating ads containing endorsements from users who didn’t authorise the marketing messages.

More recently, people were upset over a 2012 experiment in which Facebook manipulated the accounts of about 700,000 users to analyse how their moods were affected by the emotional tenor of the posts flowing through their pages. Facebook apologised.

Kelly still regularly posts on his Facebook page to stay in touch with friends and family, but says he is more leery of the service.

“They just take all your information and make all the money for themselves. It’s insane,” Kelly says.

Despite the occasional uproar, Facebook Inc. has been thriving while feeding off the free content of its 1.3 billion users. The Menlo Park, California, company now has a market value of about $180 billion, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg ranks among the world’s wealthiest people with a fortune of about $30 billion, based on the latest estimates from Forbes magazine.

Advertisers, meanwhile, are pouring more money into social networks because that is where people are spending more time, particularly on smartphones. Facebook’s share of the $140 billion worldwide market for digital ads this year is expected to climb to nearly 8 per cent, or $11 billion, up from a market share of roughly 6 per cent, or $7 billion last year, according to the research firm eMarketer.

Although it still isn’t profitable, short-messaging service Twitter is also becoming a bigger advertising magnet, thanks largely to its 255 million users who also provide a steady flow of free content. Twitter’s digital ad revenue this year is expected to rise to $1.1 billion, nearly doubling from $600 million last year, according to eMarketer.

Facebook and Twitter have become such important marketing tools that celebrities and other users with large social-media followings are being paid by advertisers to mention and promote products on their accounts.

Bubblews wants to make money, too, but it also wants to ensure that everyone using it gets at least a small slice of the advertising pie.

Dixit, 26, who started Bubblews with his college buddy Jason Zuccari, says the service got about 200,000 users during a “beta” test phase that began in September 2012. The service unveiled a redesigned website last week as it finally moved out of testing.

Bonzo Me is even smaller, with just a few thousand users since the release of apps for the Web, iPhones and Android devices in early July. The service has paid about $30,000 in ad revenue to users so far, according to Nusbaum.

Sandy Youssef of New Brunswick, New Jersey, likes being on Facebook, but she also intends to start posting video on Bonzo Me just in case she shares something that becomes a big hit.

“We are living in an age when the things you post on the Internet can go viral, so you may as well get paid for it,” she says. “It’s time to spread the wealth.”