February 19, 2008

‘Personal Impressions': Photographer Cristina Piza discusses her prints on plastic, a small selection of which adorns the bathroom of Galería Amón, in San José's Barrio Amón. The recently opened “ Impresiones Personales ” exhibition shares the gallery's space with a separate showing of acrylic and silkscreen works (see the latest Tico Times for a review). The photos capture nude female forms, printed on translucent plastic sheets. Some are anonymous, faceless busts, while one, a more personal installation special for Amón, captures the face and full front of a woman whose form almost takes on three dimensions as the plastic sheet floats on water in the gallery's great white bathtub.

Harmony Reforma | Tico Times

Pintas ring true: A woman shelters herself with an umbrella yesterday afternoon during a downpour in San José, a rarity for Costa Rican summers. Some took it as proof of las pintas – it rained Jan. 2, so, says folklore, it'll rain in February, the second month of the year. Not so for meteorologist Rebeca Morera, who called the legend “not very scientific.” There is a low-pressure system over the Pacific, she said, forecasting more rain this afternoon over the Central Valley and the Pacific. The Caribbean coast should stay sunny, she said.

Ronald Reyes | Tico Times

The government of South Korea has joined the rush to “bioprospect” the country's wealth of biodiversity.

According to online encyclopedias, bioprospecting is the collection of samples from animals, plants and microorganisms to be used to create new drugs, crops or industrial products.

Representatives from the South Korean government announced a partnership with the National Biodiversity Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to cataloguing and facilitating the exploitation of the country's dizzying variety of wildlife and plant species.

Bioprospecting manager Lorena Guevara said the South Koreans are investing $643,000 to expand the Institute's current facilities in Santo Domingo de Heredia and another $1 million in projects, specifically tied to plant research. At least one Korean scientist will also be added to the staff.

With multinational corporations, such as Eli Lilly, Merck, Bristol-Mayer, and universities such as Harvard already partnering with the institute, Guevara said South Korea decided it was time to get on board.

Guevara said the best-known commercial results from bioprospecting so far in Costa Rica include two products – Quassia, a tree extract that helps with hangovers, and Estilo, an herb that serves as a sedative.

“Our mission is the systematic search for genes, molecules, chemical compounds that can be of pharmaceutical, agricultural or biotechnology use,” she said. “We have found some very interesting compounds, especially from microorganisms.”

The manager said the Institute is working on identifying compounds that could be used as cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, AIDS, malaria and asthma.

Tourism growth continued to be strong in January, despite fears that an economic slowdown in the United States might put a damper on this year.

Measured by traffic at the Juan Santamaría and Daniel Oduber Quirós international airports, tourism was up 13.7% over January 2007.

In raw numbers, that's 145,145 tourists that arrived last month at those airports, a figure Tourism Minister Carlos Benavides described as “getting off on the right foot.”

Visitors to Costa Rica in 2007 increased 11.5% over the previous year's numbers.

The National Emergency Commission announced construction has started on projects to repair damage caused by last October's heavy rains. The rains resulted in mudslides that killed 18, left 3,100 without homes and caused an estimated $130 million in damage to the country's roads, bridges and dikes.

Authorities said even though they are short about $24 million to complete all the needed projects, they had already started spending the roughly $43 million raised by the government and donors, which includes about $20 million from China.

Commission President Daniel Gallardo said about $14 million is being spent to repair 136 bridges in all the country's provinces, with another $6 million dedicated to repairing over 350 kilometers of highway.

He also said more than $12 million was dedicated to dike repair in Corredores, Parrita, Filadelfia, Río Claro, Las Vegas, Caño Seco, Matina and Siquirres.

Under Gallardo's plan, there are also three stages of projects to construct housing for families whom the floods rendered homeless. The plan calls for spending about $15 million to build homes in Corredores, Golfito, Cañas, Aserrí, Desamparados, Cartago, Atenas, Matina, Aguirre de Puntarenas and Talamanca canton.

Delta Air Lines announced the launch of nonstop flights between New York's JFK International Airport, and San José and Liberia international airports, in central and northwest Costa Rica, respectively. The flights are scheduled to begin this week, according to the airline's press release.

With the new service, Delta is offering a total of 31 weekly flights to Costa Rica from the United States, including routes from Atlanta, Los Angeles, and now, New York, a press release said yesterday.

Delta's flights come on the tail of an announcement last week that low-cost carrier ATA Airline would begin direct flights from Miami to San José, slated to start March 15.

Spanish will be the second global trading lingua franca in the next decade and could later surpass English in the number of native speakers, according to a study released yesterday in Madrid by Spain's telecom giant Fundación Telefónica.

The study “Economy of Spanish: An Introduction” came out along with the announcement of the “Atlas of the Spanish Language in the World,” which sets the world's Spanish-speaking population at 438 million.

Both volumes are part of a broader investigation into the economic value of Spanish begun by six Spanish universities in late 2005 with sponsorship from Telefónica. The complete study, which will be contained in 10 books, will be finished within the next 18 months.

Spanish is the third-most spoken language in the world, after Chinese and English and, according to the atlas, it could overtake English by 2050.

Among the motivations behind the study, according to co-author professor José Luis García, is the “lack of Spanish as a language of science and technology and as a language of computer communications.”

“The economy of Spanish will only gain ground in the world market if the economies that sustain it make themselves more competitive and (if they are) more solid democracies in the countries making up the Pan-Hispanic community,” he said.