A game-changer of seminal proportions

Water buffalo breeding, an industry that actually uses artificial insemination, recently started using a new variant of the procedure. It is one in which the sex of the offspring can be chosen and it is called "Sexed Semen". But sexed semen is nothing new. It actually became a reality back in 1989, when Dr. Larry Johnson and his colleagues used a flow cytometer to sort spermatozoa and detect some differences in their DNA. The X-bearing (female) sperm are sorted off in one direction, the Y-bearing (male) sperm in another, and anything of undetermined sex passes straight through as waste. Since that time, this method that bio-technically separates the sperm has been applied to many farming species. And in water buffalo, this technique was investigated by Giorgio Antonio Presicce and his collaborators in 2005. But it had never actually been used for the water buffalo species until this year, when Colbufalos, a Colombian company dedicated to buffalo breeding, obtained the first successful results.

It's one thing when sexed semen is used on animals. But human couples who are after a specific gender for their next child could come (no pun intended) to view sexed semen as a real game-changer. And in countries like India and China, where there are already more boys born than girls, many parents who are given such an opportunity would be using it religiously to make sure they never have a daughter, thereby worsening the gender imbalance.

Speaking of game-changers, McDonald's, the fast food chain that brought the hamburger to the world, is opening what may be its first vegetarian-only restaurants. The world's biggest hamburger chain said yesterday that the locations in India will serve only vegetarian food because of customer preferences in the region. The company could not immediately say when the restaurants would open or how many there would be. And just when you thought Rovio couldn't milk any more games out of its wildly popular "Angry Birds" franchise, along comes a press release announcing a new game called "Bad Piggies" slated for release on the 27th. In this game, instead of playing as the Angry Birds fighting the egg-stealing Green Pigs, you get to play from the Green Pigs' perspective in what Rovio says is an entirely new type of game play without a slingshot in sight.