News Friday, January 15, 2010 D Heres the new symbol we all need. Yeah, right A wonderful gift: The SarkMark FIRST there was ;) and :( to show our feelings and now our language is to have the wonderful gift of upside- down @s to display sarcasm. Sarcasm Inc has come up with the punctuation mark, which looks like a flipped @, to help make our e-mails (and news stories) more intelligible and less prone to misinterpretation. And theyre only charging $1.99 for the right to use it. A $2 (1.30) punctuation mark sounds like great value to us here at Metro Herald. Were going to use it all the time. Sarcasm Inc said: Statements have the period [full stop]. Ques- tions have the question mark. When you see the newest punctuation mark for sarcasm, youll know the writer of that sentence doesnt liter- ally mean what theyre writing; theyre being sarcastic. Just to make this possibly the great- est idea of all time they called it the SarkMark. And if you think this article was written in a serious manner, then you probably need the SarkMark. By Miles Erwin breathe easy: Air flows one way through the lungs of alligators, just as it does in birds. This link may explain how their common archosaur ancestors survived the mass extinction 251million years ago, evolving later into dinosaurs. This helped archosaurs cope with the very low oxygen levels in the early triassic period, said Prof CG Farmer of the University of Utah. LOOK sharP: Ways of looking for things could be improved by doing a simulated search beforehand. Airport staff on the lookout for weapons in baggage could get better results by doing a pretend search before they begin their real one. The system could also be useful to radiologists who are searching for tumours in patients, says the US study in Current Biology journal. herb cOde: The genetic code of a plant used to tackle malaria has been unravelled. Scientists now believe they will be able to produce millions of high- yield crops ready to plant within two years. MINICOSMSCIENCE & DISCOVERY IN BRIEF index.html2.html3.html4.html5.html6.html7.html8.html9.html10.html11.html12.html13.html14.html15.html16.html17.html18.html19.html20.html21.html22.html23.html