HEALTH
Cancer cases increasing
One person was diagnosed with cancer in Taiwan every 5 minutes, 6 seconds in 2014, 12 seconds faster than the previous year, according to Health Promotion Administration data released on Thursday. In 2014, Taiwan saw 103,147 new cancer patients, an increase of 4,004 from the previous year, the agency said. For the ninth consecutive year, colon cancer was the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the nation, followed by lung, breast, liver and oral cancer, the agency said. It was the first time new breast cancer cases have outnumbered liver cancer cases. Rounding out the top 10 were prostate, gastric, skin, thyroid and esophageal cancers, the agency said. The age-standardized incidence rate was 303.8 out of every 100,000 people that year, or 341.4 out of every 100,000 men and 271.4 out of every 100,000 women. The 10 most common cancers among men were colon, liver, lung, oral, prostate, esophageal, gastric, skin and bladder cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Among women, the top 10 were cancer of the breast, colon, lung, liver, thyroid, uterine corpus, ovaries, cervix, skin and stomach.
FISHERIES
FRI releases baby crabs
The government-run Fisheries Research Institute (FRI) on Wednesday released 150,000 baby Portunus pelagicus crabs, more popularly called the flower crab or sand crab, into the ocean off Penghu County’s Magong City as part of an ongoing effort to promote the sustainable use of marine resources. The baby crabs, each about 1cm to 2cm in size, were bred by the institute, FRI director Lin Chin-jung (林金榮) said. With its nutritious sweet meat, the sand crab is considered a delicacy, Lin said. At local markets, the crab sells for up to NT$700 per kilogram.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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