■ ENVIRONMENT
Volunteers clean beaches
More than 3,000 volunteers collected 60 tonnes of garbage from an 18.5km stretch of Taipei County beaches yesterday to mark Earth Day, which falls on Tuesday. Some 3,091 volunteers scoured northern beaches for two hours looking for trash and recovered 14 tonnes of recyclable resources. The activity was organized by the Environmental Protection Administration, the Taipei County government and eight townships along the northern coast, including Jinshan (金山), Bali (八里) and Tamsui (淡水). The local activity drew foreign guests, such as Panamanian Ambassador Julio Mock Cardenas, Saint Kitts and Nevis Charge d’Affairs Jasmine Elise Huggins, American Institute in Taipei Deputy Director Robert Wang and German Trade Office Deputy Director Andy Gursch. More than 600 employees from Hotai Motor Co also participated.
■ TRANSPORT
Taxi quota needed: official
The Taipei City Government should impose a quota on the number of taxis operating in the city to resolve the problem of low occupancy rates, a city councilor said on Friday. Taipei City Councilor Chen Yung-te (陳永德) said during a question-and-answer session at the council that seven out of 10 cabs are regularly unoccupied. Citing statistics for 2004 to 2006, Chen said that local taxi drivers picked up an average of 14.53 passengers a day and that drivers worked about 24 days per month. Chen also said that 1,984 cases involving unregistered taxi drivers were reported last year. Luo Shiaw-shyan (羅孝賢), head of the city’s Department of Transportation, attributed the city’s oversupply of cabs to an inflow of taxis from Taipei County, Keelung City and Ilan County. There are more than 60,000 taxis in the four cities and counties, Luo said. The city government has suspended issuing business licenses to cab drivers, Luo said.
■ SCIENCE
Virtual animal lab planned
A government-run lab is developing an imagery database of guinea pigs that will allow “virtual animal testing,” reducing the cost of drug development and the demand for live laboratory animals, sources at the National Applied Research Laboratories said yesterday. The 3D virtual guinea pig system was developed by the National Laboratory Animal Center, which used true-color image algorithms to reconstruct guinea pigs in a digitized environment. Researchers said they have finished establishing the image data and that the system is almost ready for practical applications. Researchers said that after parameters are entered, the system projects the interaction between a drug and the animal based on the guinea pigs’ sectional images, physical information and biological characteristics. Researchers said such a process would allow labs to replace some live animal experiments, saving the lives of laboratory animals and the cost of buying guinea pigs.
■ CULTURE
Taipei theme contest open
The Taiwan Design Center launched a promotional theme design contest yesterday for the 2011 International Design Alliance Congress to be held in Taipei. The promotional theme design should reflect the city’s uniqueness and culture and be representative of the times, the center said. The first, second and third-place winners will receive NT$30,000, NT$20,000 and NT$10,000, the center said. The theme of the congress will be “fusion,” blending East and West as well as technology and tradition, the organizers said.
Foreign tourists who purchase a seven-day Taiwan Pass are to get a second one free of charge as part of a government bid to boost tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. A pair of Taiwan Passes is priced at NT$5,000 (US$156.44), an agency staff member said, adding that the passes can be used separately. The pass can be used in many of Taiwan’s major cities and to travel to several tourist resorts. It expires seven days after it is first used. The pass is a three-in-one package covering the high-speed rail system, mass rapid transport (MRT) services and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle services,
Drinking a lot of water or milk would not help a person who has ingested terbufos, a toxic chemical that has been identified as the likely cause of three deaths, a health expert said yesterday. An 83-year-old woman surnamed Tseng (曾) and two others died this week after eating millet dumplings with snails that Tseng had made. Tseng died on Tuesday and others ate the leftovers when they went to her home to mourn her death that evening. Twelve people became ill after eating the dumplings following Tseng’s death. Their symptoms included vomiting and convulsions. Six were hospitalized, with two of them
DIVA-READY: The city’s deadline for the repairs is one day before pop star Jody Chiang is to perform at the Taipei Dome for the city’s Double Ten National Day celebrations The Taipei City Government has asked Farglory Group (遠雄集團) to repair serious water leaks in the Taipei Dome before Friday next week, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said yesterday, following complaints that many areas at the stadium were leaking during two baseball games over the weekend. The dome on Saturday and Sunday hosted two games in tribute to CTBC Brothers’ star Chou Szu-chi (周思齊) ahead of his retirement from the CPBL. The games each attracted about 40,000 people, filling the stadium to capacity. However, amid heavy rain, many people reported water leaking on some seats, at the entrance and exit areas, and the
BIG collection: The herbarium holds more than 560,000 specimens, from the Japanese colonial period to the present, including the Wulai azalea, which is now extinct in the wild The largest collection of plant specimens in Taiwan, the Taipei Botanical Garden’s herbarium, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition that opened on Friday. The herbarium provides critical historical documents for botanists and is the first of its kind in Taiwan, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute director Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said. It is housed in a two-story red brick building, which opened during 1924. At the time, it stored 30,000 plant specimens from almost 6,000 species, including Taiwanese plant samples collected by Tomitaro Makino, the “father of Japanese botany,” Tseng said. The herbarium collection has grown in the century since its