The Egyptian government sends samples from people it suspects have caught the virus to the WHO for final confirmation.

The government says a total of eight Egyptians have been infected by bird flu. Two of those have recovered, while the others are still being treated.

Two sisters aged 18 months and six years were the most recent cases reported by the government, although the WHO has yet to confirm they have the virus. They are in intensive care, the official MENA news agency quoted the health minister as saying on Monday.

Bird flu has killed at least 107 people worldwide, including the deaths in Egypt, according to the most recent figures from the WHO.

The virus was first detected in Egypt in birds in February and has devastated the poultry industry. The government has banned domestic rearing of fowl, but people in poor rural areas are ignoring instructions to get rid of their poultry.

Bird flu has so far not been transmitted from human to human, but can be caught from infected birds. Although difficult for humans to catch, scientists fear it could mutate into a form that can pass easily between humans.

Such libertarian sentiments run deep in Platteville, one of many rural Colorado towns where tobacco smoke is as routine a sight in bars and coffee shops as cardboard cups in Starbucks. As Johnson's co-worker and fellow smoker Jill Frasier puts it, "Quite frankly, I think this is wrong. Fifty-eight people decided our lives are going to change, and they're just cramming it down our throats."

The smoking ban, signed by Gov. Bill Owens last week, will apply to all enclosed spaces except casinos, tobacco shops, cigar bars, the smoking lounge at Denver International Airport and private workplaces with no more than three employees. Homes, cars and ranch buildings are exempt.

In Platteville (population 2,400), a Weld County farm town on U.S. 85 midway between Brighton and Greeley, even some nonsmokers think the new law goes too far.

"I always thought it was fair all these years to have a choice. If you wanted to smoke, you could walk into a designated smoking area," says Pam Sheley, finishing a leisurely breakfast at Mussman's Main Street Cafe.

Her daughter, Samantha Grey, who is sharing the booth along with her children Tim, 5, and Allyson, 9 months, has a similarly laid-back view.

"I'm a nonsmoker," she says. "When I go to a bar, I expect to smell smoke. But I prefer nonsmoking in restaurants."

A block up the street in Del's Lounge, a watering hole known for its collection of some 3,500 gimme caps, all stapled to the ceiling in neat but dust-covered rows, veteran barkeep Velma Seaman - an ex-smoker herself - zeros in on the loophole for casinos.

"My problem is, it's the moneyed places where you can still do it," she says, getting nods of agreement on this weekday morning from three regulars, all women. "They supposedly approved this exemption because gambling and smoking are so tied together.

Well, aren't smoking and drinking just as linked?"

Across town at the Platteville chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars, patron Wayne Gill - a smoker for 50 of his 64 years - also sees a double standard in the casino exemption.

"If this is such a big health issue," he wonders, pulling out a Pall Mall, "why do we have hundreds of people up in these casinos smoking, while I can't sit here in the VFW hall and have a cigarette and a beer?"

A few bar stools away, retired machinist Paul Dadisman, a nonsmoker, gives the argument a slightly different twist.

"If smoking is bad for you, outlaw it across the board. What are we trying to say here?" he says, sipping beer from a pewter mug he has brought with him. "If a place of business wants to have smoking, it's none of the government's business."

Not everyone in Platteville is opposed to the ban.

"I'm all for it. Smoking has been proven to be bad for you, and they say secondhand smoke is bad as well," says Richard Herrman, a grandfatherly horse rancher who gave up cigarettes 20 years ago with the help of a hypnotist.

"I also don't think this will affect (the restaurant) business one bit," he adds, perusing

A rocky foreign terrain. Platoons of remotely controlled cyborg-insects sniffing out landmines, transmitting their location back to human handlers.

Can you picture it? No?

Well, that's the difference between you and the scientists, "extreme thinkers," at DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, where soldier insects are already in the works.

The agency's mandate is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military through "far-future" thinking. Its cutting-edge, some would say lunatic-fringe, researchers give new meaning to the concept of brainstorming.

But way back at the dawn of computer time, circa 1969, they developed the precursor to the Internet, known as the ARPANET. They invented GPS, global positioning systems. They're credited, in fact, with half the major innovations in the high-tech industry, not to mention the 120-plus technologies they've come up with for the military, everything from the now standard M-16 rifle to stealth aircraft.

But back to the bugs.

DARPA's current big idea is to implant tiny microsystems into insects at the pupa stage of their development, when they can be "integrated" into their internal organs.

A step or three later, they could be turned into miniature unmanned vehicles for use on military missions "requiring unobtrusive entry into areas inaccessible or hostile to humans." Osama Bin Laden's cave, say.

But first things first.

In its call for proposals from university researchers and private firms last month, DARPA said the immediate goal is "the controlled arrival of an insect within five metres of a specified target located 100 metres away. It must then remain stationary indefinitely, unless otherwise instructed ... to transmit data to sensors providing information about the local environment."

Dragonflies and moths are "of great interest," but "hopping and swimming insects could also meet final demonstration goals."

Or not. Similar research on honeybees and wasps in 2003 was, quite frankly, a wash-out.

The insects had tiny radio transmitters glued to their backs to track their movements in the hope their natural foraging behaviour could be harnessed to check for toxic substances. But the bees buzzed off, to feed and mate. In agency parlance, "their instinctive behaviours prevented them from performing reliably."

Still, researchers learned that bees can recognize individuals. Whether they could also learn to salute, as one skeptic put it, is unknown. The whole cyborg-insect idea may sound hare-brained, but to Stephen Tobe, a University of Toronto zoologist specializing in invertebrate endocrinology, it's plausible.

"If the correct microsystem was inserted, the insect's neurons could surround it. But its entire nervous system would have to be reprogrammed. It's difficult to conceptualize where they'd implant it."

The question is intriguing, says Tobe, but "whether it should be pursued, well ... I won't even go there. It's great DARPA has lots of money to throw around for blue-sky thinking."

Indeed it does: $3.1 billion this year. That compares with the $325 million Ottawa has earmarked for supposedly blue-sky research up here. The difference is more than enough to make Canadian scientists "weep with envy," says John Polanyi, the Nobel Prize-winning U of T chemist. But it's the philosophy of the research they truly envy, he adds.

"The long-term, out-of-the-box approach is why the U.S. is the world leader in science. Canada thinks in the short term. It's all about wealth creation here, having business models, setting milestones for work even before it's begun."

DARPA's staff of scientists and engineers, drawn from universities and IT companies, work on a project for three to five years before they're rotated into something fresh. Their assignment is to come up with big ideas, the most impossible-seeming referred to in-house as "hard problems" or the "unobtainiums." The actual development work is contracted out to university labs, Harvard among them, and private companies.

"Our job is to take the technical excuse off the table, so people can no longer say it can't be done," director Anthony Tether told the U.S. Congress in 2003.

The agency was created in 1958, four months after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, seriously denting American assumptions of military superiority. It coordinates with the Pentagon, but from the start has been independent and self-governing. "Failure to keep the bureaucracy at bay would have doomed the value of DARPA, and this has been consistently recognized over the years," says its website.

"These guys have the freedom to think big, run wild," says Noah Shachtman, a New York technology analyst who runs Defensetech.org.

"They know some of their more outlandish schemes won't ever happen - like maybe the armies of cyber-insects - but they pick up important pieces of knowledge in the process."

With a defence department budget of $600 billion a year, he says, "there is room for a place like DARPA, where the research is imaginative, far-out and sometimes creepy."

The insect work is part of DARPA's Controlled Biological and Biomimetic Systems Program. Biomimetics is taking an idea from nature and putting it into technology: How does a gecko climb up walls, an octopus camouflage itself, a beetle sense fire from 40 kilometres away? And how can those skills be adapted into machines, or more likely, robots?

(DARPA likes robots so much that it funds the $2 million prize for an annual robot-car race between Los Angeles and Las Vegas to foster research.)

Back in the lab, work is well-advanced on a biomimetic underwater robot that the agency calls the "robolobster." It mimics the action of its organic cousin, scurrying along the ocean floor, looking for mines and buried bombs.

Then, there's "BigDog," a "robotic beast of burden" that's being developed to haul over rough terrain at least 40 kilograms of supplies that soldiers have to carry.

And not least, the Raptor project, a "marsupial" robot aircraft that will command a squad of roving robots. In the military scenario, Raptor would be airdropped into enemy territory and, like a kangaroo spilling out her young, would release a squad of small robots. They would traverse unknown terrain using night vision lenses and laser radar and the intelligence they pick up communicated back to the Raptor for transmission to the humans at base.

DARPA isn't limiting itself to mimicking nature. It's also changing it.

The department of naval research famously pioneered the use of dolphins for military service in the Vietnam War. DARPA plans the same for sharks.

It's working on a neural implant to manipulate sharks' brain signals, allowing humans to control their movements, decipher their brain activity, possibly decode their perceptions. The "unobtainium" here is to transform the sharks into stealth spies, capable of following vessels without being spotted, sensing chemical trails and electromagnetic fields.

At least, that's the plan. (DARPA doesn't comment on the status of its projects, but word is they're still at the dogfish stage.)

Rats have already come through with flying colours. Remote-controlled electrodes implanted in their brains make them capable of searching through piles of rubble

The jury is still out on the research being funded on "brain machine interface," which would allow mechanical devices to be controlled via human thought-power. To date, a monkey has been taught to move a computer mouse and a tele-robotic arm simply by thinking about it.

It's a start. It may be the finish. But at an agency where the mantra is "high risk, high pay-off," a high failure rate is hardly a surprise. Some 85 to 90 per cent of projects don't accomplish their planned goals.

"When we fail, we fail big," wrote Charles Herzfeld, director in the mid-1960s, in summing up research disasters in an official 1975 history. "You could do really any damn thing you wanted, as long as it wasn't against the law or immoral."

On the one hand, that led to the Internet. On the other, to several fiascos, including the now-infamous mechanical elephant, part of the decade-long Project Agile during the Vietnam War.

The idea was for the early-robot Babar to penetrate through the Vietnam jungle when jeeps couldn't. But when the then-director found out about the work, he shut it down, calling it a "damn fool" idea that would destroy the agency's credibility if word got out.

Hearing in the 1970s that the Soviets were beavering away on telepathy and psychokinesis (moving objects by mental force), DARPA swiftly followed suit, searching for the magical someone who could psychically spy around the globe without leaving home.

It was a bust. Several million dollars later, the agency concluded that, if parapsychology even existed, it couldn't be tapped into on demand.

More recent debacles - but from a public-relations, if not research, standpoint - have occurred in the spate of anti-terrorism projects ignited by the 9/11 attacks. In 2002, DARPA-funded biologists built an infectious polio virus from its chemical components. The virus wasn't created as a weapon, but it prompted fears that it, or even more hazardous viruses, could be.

Its "Total Information Awareness" project, a data-mining technology aimed at detecting suspected terrorists through credit card and computer use, sparked furious outrage from privacy and civil rights advocates. "It was cancelled," says Noah Shachtman, "but sections of it are probably still going on in surveillance circles."

He says a giant surveillance blimp that would float 28,000 metres in the sky and look down on a city is still in development. "Some of the stuff can be Orwellian, but the agency really is interested in dual-use technology that benefits the military and the public, like the Internet."

And so it continues. Insects, rats, even geckos sacrificing themselves for the cause of unfettered, visionary research. Plants too: Their ability to bend and wave in a breeze is being studied for adaptation into aircraft.

Incredibly, however, DARPA has been knocked lately for being too practical. "Some people think they're not blue-sky enough," says Shachtman.

He pauses, and adds: "I don't agree."

The research determines that cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows.

Cockroaches are silent creatures, save perhaps for the sound of them scurrying over a countertop. They must therefore communicate without vocalising.

"Cockroaches use chemical and tactile communication with each other," says Dr José Halloy, who co-authored the research in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"They can also use vision," says Halloy, a scientist in the Department of Social Ecology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium.

"When they encounter each other they recognise if they belong to the same colony thanks to their antennae that are 'nooses', that is, sophisticated olfactory organs that are very sensitive," he says.

Give me shelter

Halloy tested cockroach group behaviour by placing the insects in a dish that contained three shelters. The test was to see how the cockroaches would divide themselves into the shelters.

After much "consultation", through antenna probing, touching and more, the cockroaches divided themselves up perfectly.

For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 roaches huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.

When the researchers altered this set-up so that it had three shelters with a capacity for more than 50 insects, all the cockroaches moved into the first "house".

A delicate balance

Halloy and his colleagues found that a balance existed between cooperation and competition for resources.

"Cockroaches are gregarious insects [that] benefit from living in groups. It increases their reproductive opportunities, [promotes] sharing of resources like shelter or food, prevents desiccation by aggregating more in dry environments, etc," he says.

"So what we show is that these behavioural models allow them to optimise group size."

The models are so predictable that they could explain other insect and animal group behaviours, such as how some fish and bugs divide themselves up so neatly into subgroups, and how certain herding animals make simple decisions that do not involve leadership.

Important research

Dr David Sumpter, a University of Oxford zoologist, says the new study "is an excellent paper" and "important".

"It looks both at the mechanisms underlying decision-making by animals and how those mechanisms produce a distribution of animals amongst resource sites that optimises their individual fitness," he says.

"Much previous research has concentrated on either mechanisms or optimality at the expense of the other."

For cockroaches, it seems, cooperation comes naturally.

On Tuesday, the City Council was scheduled to discuss whether to allow the Olympics-style Gay Games to hold its rowing event in this bedroom community of 40,000 about 50 miles northwest of Chicago.

One look at the angry letters to the editor that have frequently appeared in the local newspaper reveal it isn't the logistics of the race that's on residents' minds.

"Make no mistake: The purpose of the Gay Games is to legitimize homosexuality and make it appear as a wholesome lifestyle choice," wrote Tim Coakley, a critic of the games.

In the same day's paper, Perry and Christine Koste dismissed such views. After wondering if Crystal Lake's motto should be "homophobic capital of the Midwest," they asked, "How proud are we to live in such a narrow-minded, backward hateful community?"

The debate over the Gay Games was the subject of two contentious hearings before the city's park district last month. The full board ultimately voted to approve the race, sending it to the City Council.

If the City Council approves it, the race would only need permission from neighboring Lakewood, which also borders the lake, before the event can be held. Officials in Lakewood say they plan to approve the games.

One of the Gay Games' missions is to raise awareness about gays to reduce stereotypes - a point organizers kept discussing during the park district hearings, said spokesman Kevin Boyer.

"It is very difficult to disregard what these people said and just deal with how boats are unloaded and loaded," Boyer said. "You are going to say this is not right and this is why the Gay Games are needed."

Most of the events for the Gay Games are set in Chicago. Organizers have said the weeklong competition set for July is expected to draw 12,000 participants, tens of thousands of spectators and pump more than $50 million into the economy.

The games, which started in 1982 in San Francisco, are held every four years and are open to gay and straight participants. Other sports include badminton, basketball, cycling, flag football and racquetball.

The furor in Crystal Lake about the games goes to the heart of why many people say they stay in or move to such a community.

Coakley said one reason he and his family moved to Crystal Lake a decade ago was because "there is more of a family values kind of atmosphere" there.

It's the same with Sunita Stone. "Crystal Lake is a G-rated place," she said. "There's no reason to start making things racy. If you want to go to Chicago to do that, that's fine. I'm not going to go there."



Such talk doesn't surprise Al Hunter, a Northwestern University sociologist who has studied local communities. Hunter said that as suburbs have grown, a number of businesses and industries have abandoned big cities in favor of outlying areas.

That means that as people work closer to home, they travel less to the city and identify less with it, he said. The Gay Games, he said, may feel like an outside invasion.

Mayor Aaron Shepley said the Gay Games organizers have made the event more about a statement on gays and lesbians and not rowing, thus putting Crystal Lake at the center of a debate about social values.

"To the extent that part of the agenda of promoters was to draw attention to a social platform, they've been successful," he said. "And to an extent, it's been at the expense of Crystal Lake's image."

Still, Shepley believes the City Council will vote to allow the rowing competition and said Gay Games organizers will be treated like anyone else who has an event in the town.

"This is only an endorsement of the First Amendment and the anti-discrimination laws of the state," Shepley said. "That's all it is - following the law."

IT MAKES no difference who you are. Soon, opponents of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who may have been wishing for nearly a year for certain things to happen can make all the wishes they want.

The auspicious hour is at midnight on April 21.

But to better appreciate the heavens, stargazers are advised to go somewhere dark, preferably some place without street lights-but safe.

Then look up.

A keen eye could see up to 20 "falling stars" per hour, courtesy of the annual Lyrids meteor shower that has not failed to provide a spectacle every year for the past 2,600 years.

"Chinese records say 'stars fell like rain' in the shower of 687 B.C. In recent times, however, the Lyrids have generally been weak," the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) said in its astronomical bulletin.

Up to 10 meteors can be seen every night this month, but the peak of the meteor shower, which lasts less than 24 hours, will be at midnight on April 21 to early morning of April 22.

"The observation of the meteors is most favorable after midnight when the constellation Lyra, the showers' radiant, is already more than 30 degrees above the northeastern horizon," PAGASA said.

Meteors are rock particles that burn due to friction and are pulled by the earth's gravitation, causing them to appear like stars falling from the sky.

Meteor showers occur every month except for three months of the year, said Bernardo M. Soriano Jr., chief of PAGASA's Atmospheric, Geophysical and Space Sciences branch.

The brightest and most spectacular shower is the Leonid meteor shower in November. This spectacle can hurl up to 100 meteors every hour.

"Now is the best time to watch the shower because generally the sky is clear. Even if there is La Niña, the absolute value of the rainfall is still smaller than the volume during the rainy season," he said.

Soriano said the best areas to watch a shower are dark places without streetlights. Artificial lighting causes light pollution, which diminishes the visibility of the sky, he said.

Those who are in well-lit places can use black cloth to cover their peripheral vision and make holes through which they could watch the sky, he added.

But is it in the stars, Brutus?

Or in ourselves?