We don't know about you but we sure love Tabula Rasa logos. It's pretty cool to befuddle your non-TR gaming friends with these, they look so professional. As for now the Benefactor Stone project uncovers two new logos. SI Research Labs have received and processed these.

The first one appears to be a logo for "location". It looks like a sniper gun's cross hairs. It's a circular shape divided by a cross that has a dot in the middle. The next logo appears to be four squares arranged in a table, three of which has a dot in the center with the upper right hand square having no dot inside. It's a logo that means "most / many"

These logos are meant to interest would-be TR enthusiasts and fan interaction. If you're wondering who's to be credited with the nice designs of these logos, it's game designer Richard Garriott. There are more than a hundred of these logos, the complete set of which will be released as soon as TR launches - so watch out.

Guess what the deadliest mental sickness is. Schizophrenia? Depression? Nope. It's anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder in which the sufferer does not eat correctly, due to an obsessive fear of gaining weight. The disease has been linked to some trends in the fashion community. The sufferers have an irrational desire to be very thin, thinking only then will they become happy or normal.

We're not sure why the disease hasn't been given much attention. It's been said that only 10 percent of anorexics get help. And of all anorexic sufferers, 15 percent are sure to die. They say that the reason why there are so many anorexics who die is because anorexia is very difficult to diagnose and the victims are not often aware of how gravely ill they already are.

In this regard, the UK government decided to release UK£ 2M (US$ 3.9M) to fund a research project that will help anorexia victims in the country. Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry say that they're going to use the money to find ways of diagnosing and treating victims before the disease takes hold. The study will also develop new forms of cure aimed for victims with special needs, including mothers, and women with reproductive problems.

The fund has been given to the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, in partnership with the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and eating disorder charity Beat. Researchers hope that the study to be funded by this grant will enable to have new treatments for anorexia in five years.

Amidst the controversy that addles the gaming community, here's a ray of light shining on the industry. Choices UK, an entertainment retailer in Britain, announced that games sales helped them boost their sales figures by up to almost 10.4 percent. To further illustrate, because of games in their inventory, Choices UK revenues increased from the equivalent of US$ 154.85 M to US$ 170.9 M.

Losses were also cut down from US$ 5.7 M to US$ 526,091. These stats are for the period of 28 weeks ending in February 10. It helped that the retailer closed down 31 loss making and non-trading stores during the period. There were 162 healthy stores left for the chain, and says the company, it looks like their up looking income condition is set to continue. They just found the answer for this trend: games.

Why couldn't just other media and entertainment retailers follow suit? In a company statement, Choices UK declared that:

As part of the strategy for our stores we have rationalised the product range, discontinuing mobile phones, portable electronic goods and a range of impulse lines. This has enabled a renewed focus on our core ranges where we have substantially increased our offering of games hardware and software, as well as revamping our DVD and sell-thru sections to ensure strong value messages throughout the stores.

Choices UK also believes that the recent Playstation 3 launch would up their market share by 6.5 percent.

Okay, here's the latest stats on the Japanese gaming market. For the week ending 1 April 2007, the stats didn't really show significant changes. Nintendo still leads the hardware sales with a total of 16,073,997 units sold and dominating 38.4 percent of the console market. The Wii, still from Nintendo, comes next at a sales figure of 2,052,397 units while composing 24.2 percent of the market.

Next in the console sales count are PSP, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, GBA and Gamecube composing 19 percent, 8.1 percent, 8 percent, 1.5 percent, 0.6 and 0.1 percent respectively.

When it comes to software sales, meanwhile, DS software sold the most, representing 51.7 percent software sales. The rest of the software sales stats are as follows:

• PS2: 33 percent
• Wii: 8.8 percent
• PSP: 3.3 percent
• PS3: 2.8 percent
• Xbox 360: 0.4 percent

We might say that the changes occurred in the game title sales count. The top 10 games sold in Japan for the week ending April 1 are as follows:

1. Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix by Square Enix (PS2)
2. Musou Orochi by Koei (PS2)
3. Digimon Story Sunburst / Moonlight by Bandai (DS)
4. More English Training for Adults by Nintendo (DS)
5. World Puzzle Mojipittan DS by Namco (DS)
6. Pro Baseball Spirits 4 by Konami (PS2)
   
7. Yoshi Island DS by Nintendo (DS)
   
8. Prof. Layton and the Mysterious Village by Level 5 (DS)
   
9. Tamagotchi Splendid Rainbow Venture by Bandai (DS)
   
10. Monster Hunter Freedom 2nd by Capcom (PSP)
    

Sometimes it's nice to spend some alone time in the company of the sail, the sea and the surf. But could you actually survive alone time of 1,000 days at sea? This is a goal that New York artist and sailor Reid Stowe would like to achieve.

Stowe would not exactly sail alone. He will be accompanied by mate Soanya Ahmad in his quest to spend 1,000 days aboard Schooner Anne. For a thousand nights, they will not land, take on supplies, nor refuel. They plan on setting sail April 21st, and they hope to break the record set by Australian Jon Sanders, who spent 657 days circumnavigating the globe three times during 1986-1988.

Because of the the isolation and physical challenges that this sailing plan presents, the duo dubs their project as "The Mars Ocean Odyssey". Stowe says that sailing like he plans has some analogies to a lengthy space mission.

They will have a 3-year supply of food on board, to be augmented by rainwater and fish caught, as well as sprouts grown on deck. Mate Ahmad says that they will have a garden on board just to remind themselves of land.

The course of Schooner Anne on "The Mars Ocean Odyssey" will be across the North Atlantic Ocean, south past the equator then west to the coast of Brazil. The sailors would even sail in a heart shape pattern as an artistic statement. They will record this 1,000-day voyage, hoping that their example will influence people in extending possibilities of what is achievable.

It comes out as no surprise sometimes when two great firms partner with each other. MCV is a respected trade magazine in the UK that focuses on the video gaming industry. Famitsu is the most widely respected video game news magazine in Japan. Recently, the two establishments announced that they will continue corresponding with each other in securing video games data.

MCV managing editor Lisa Foster said that they are delighted to able able to continue their mutually beneficial association with Famitsu. Famitsu will continue to provide MCV with authoritative marketing data as well as industry leading analysis and news. MCV in return will supply Famitsu with the latest trends, data and stories from the European market.

Ricky Tanimoto of Famitsu says that they are honored to be able to use MCV's content in their publications and online product. He further elaborates that their knowledge of games marketing in Europe has been enriched in the last two years, as attention towards the emerging European game market, especially in the UK, has continued to increase in Japan.

We're glad for this announcement. Both publications, like we said, are quite known in their fields and it's always nice to have a collaboration.

A game reviewer from Ars Technica decides to do a bit of activism and wrote and open letter to developers to have them stop making minigames. The weary writer shares,

Frankly, I think it's time for developers to ease up on these types of games (minigame compilations). I've focused on Nintendo, but all the platforms are guilty of the criminal overuse of this genre. Unless the collection is going to give us a completely diverse set of revolutionary new minigames, please don't bother.

Frank Caron relates that on his Wii alone, he's already plowed through Rayman Raving Rabbids, Super Monkey Ball, Warioware  and Sonic, with Mario Party. He laments the presence of some mini-game compilation of just about every other game he owns on the DS. According to him, although there are some interesting approaches to the genre as well as some enjoyable lighthearted plays, minigames has become a fad meant to cash in on brand and character loyalty.

So we try to decipher why there are minigames in the first place. Could it be that there are some of us who actually like 'em? Maybe somebody should just stop forcing this guy to play tons of minigame compilations in the first place and start making him play some real games, those that he like. Otherwise, well it's a free country. Developers are free to develop their sort of games the way gamers are free to buy theirs.

Indie developers will be happy to hear that Simply Gaming PR is back. Founder Joseph Helm says that there are just tons of kick-ass indie games out there and they'd like to do their part to help these indie developers to get the word out about them. They just put up a website and any indie games maker could gain exposure from Simply Gaming for free.

Joseph Helm elaborates that he's had great opportunity to work with Jay Moore and Benjamin Bradley at GarageGames. Helping out at the 2005 Garage Games">Garage Games booth also helped Joseph gain new insight. Indie developers are welcome to contact Simply Gaming PR and Joseph Helm.  Here are some of the services that Simply Gaming can offer to independent developers:

• PR and marketing - including regular press releases and media sent out to gaming journalists, banner on front page of Simply Gaming PR, arranging previews / reviews in magazines and websites, adding the game vid to download sites
• Banner Exchange Program - in return for showing other banners on your site, earn the right to show banners on another site in exchange
• Web hosting - provides free website hosting on Simply Gaming's US based CPanel server; just provide your domain name
  

It looks like the Apple TV is going to feature Tux on its hood beside the pervasive Apple logo. Some ingenious hackers claim that they have wrought a custom Linux kernel on Apple TV's boot loader. The info is still incomplete but as it is, the kernel and the set-top box seem to have WiFi, SpeedStep and EFI. Other kernel status statistics:

• EFI is not working fully
• USB works with the "irqpoll" kernel commadnline option
• nv Xorg driver works
• nvidia's propritiary driver also works with full 3D accel
• Speedstep seems to work. The CPU Clock gets down to 600 MHz
• Wlan is working with ndiswrapper
• Sound works fine

Just for fun, we'd like to quote to you the spoof Apple marketing campaign that appeared on the Linux users' site when Linux was hacked into a Mac Book.

The Intel chip... For months, it's been trapped inside a Mac, inside a pretty little box, dutifully performing pretty little tasks when it could have been doing so much more. Starting today, the Intel chip will be set free, and get to live life in a Mac... running Linux. Imagine the possibilities.

There is no cure for cancer. It can only be treated by a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and even those can't cure you 100%. After treatment, it's not uncommon for tumor cells to still spread. Doctors say it's because of the compound TGF-beta, caused by radiotherapy. TGF-beta makes possible the spread of tumor cells.

Going on this line of thinking, doctors developed an antibody to combat TGF-beta from cancer treatment. They experimented with mice. The doctors exposed mice infected with breast cancer cells under radiotherapy. This brought a high level of TGF-beta in their blood. So the doctors treated the mice with an antibody-suppressing TGF-beta. The spread of tumor cells stopped.

It's like this, cancer treatment brings in TGF-beta and TGF-beta encourages cancer spread. So suppressing TGF-beta, a cancer treatment, will suppress cancer spread. There must be something essential here, and scientists are trying to figure this out. There may be other chemicals involved with cancer spread, and the researchers are doing their best to study them. Figuring out TGF-beta is just the tip of the iceberg.