Tokyo, Japan | With just days until Japan ushers in a new era with the crowning of a new emperor, one entrepreneurial company is cashing in by selling cans containing "the air of the outgoing era" -- a breeze at $10.

The can filled with "the air of Heisei" -- the 30-year reign of current Emperor Akihito -- hit the shelves on Monday at the ambitious price of 1,080 yen ($9.60), with producers hoping to sell as many as 1,000 units.

"Air is free of charge but we hope people will enjoy breathing the fresh air of Heisei after the new era comes, or just keep it as a momento," company president Minoru Inamoto told AFP.

The cans have been produced in the central Japanese village of Henari, which is written using the same characters as those used for "Heisei", he said, adding that the cans can be snapped up at a roadside station in the village and online.

They contain nothing but "the air of the current era" and a five-yen coin, often considered a lucky charm.

Firms around Japan are scrambling to produce memorabilia from the outgoing era before the country enters the "Reiwa" era on May 1 when new emperor Naruhito ascends the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Oval gold coins engraved with Heisei are selling like hot cakes at Tokyo department stores, while confectionery makers are bringing back blockbuster sweets popular during the Heisei era.

Henari is seeing an influx of visitors and merchants there are selling everything from chocolate to polo shirts and alcohol bearing the name.

Businesses targeting the new era are also picking up, launching Reiwa-labelled goods such as stickers, smartphone covers, t-shirts, pins and commemorative bottles of the Japanese tipple sake.

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Nantar, Myanmar | Clad in elaborate headdresses representing dragons and wizards, Myanmar's ethnic Pa'O fire huge, homemade rockets into the sky -- an annual call for plentiful rains and a chance for a windfall of cash. 

The Pa'O are one of the largest of the country's minority groups, numbering around 1.2 million people and living mainly in Shan state's highlands.

They are overwhelmingly Buddhist but many intertwine animism with their faith, believing they descend from a she-dragon and a wizard with mystical powers, known as a "weiza".

Twelve days after Myanmar's new year celebrations, as temperatures rise to over 40 degrees, Pa'O communities travel to Nantar village for the annual rocket competition, which ends on Wednesday. 

"Calling the rain like this every year means we get bumper rice harvests," co-organiser Rike Kham tells AFP at the Pwe Lu Phaing festival's 144th edition.

- Dragons and wizards -

People dress in their finest, donning dark tunics and trousers in mourning for the kingdom they lost to the Bamar (Burmese) nearly 1,000 years ago.

But their headwear make up for their sombre attire.

Many women opt for a traditional bright orange cloth, symbolising the dragon.

Others, like Nan Pyone Kha Cho, 21, choose a more modern approach, sporting turbans of scarlet, gold or silver.

A golden hairpin is the "mother dragon's fang", she explains.

Men wear rolled-up cloth of various hues on their heads in the image of the "weiza" as they parade singing and dancing into the village, holding aloft their homemade rockets.

- 'Safety first' -

In the past, these were crafted entirely from bamboo and would carry up to 40 kilos of explosives.

Now they are made with bamboo-wrapped metal, holding five different grades of gunpowder.

For "safety reasons" the maximum length is three feet (0.9 metres) and the diameter must not exceed three inches (eight centimetres).

A monk blesses each device, praying for a safe and long flight, then one-by-one the teams are called to the 10 metre-high bamboo firing rig.

The rocket is laid in position, the trajectory carefully adjusted.

The team captain takes a drag from a cigarette then uses it to light the fuse, before clambering down the bamboo rungs as the rocket lifts off with a deafening roar.

They can land up to seven or eight kilometres away, creating craters 1.5 metres deep in the fields.

A team of "linesmen" note the landing positions so they can later be collected.

- High stakes -

Accidents are rare, says Rike Kham. 

Aside from an unlucky water buffalo hit in 2016, nobody has been hurt since two people died ten years ago after "badly mixing the gunpowder".

The whole village celebrates a good flight -- they after all clubbed together to fund the rockets that cost around $170 each.

Judged by distance, the villages behind the top three placed rockets each take a share of the pooled entry fees.

With 75 rockets in this year's competition, the prize money amounts to some $4,000 -- enough to upgrade a road, build a bridge or connect more homes to the grid.

- Girl rocket power -

One group of women is challenging the traditionally testosterone-driven festivities.

They dance into the village for the second year holding high their own rocket, albeit full of donation money rather than gunpowder.

But next year they will take part with "real rockets", Mhoe Phar Ohon Ye, 67, said smiling, adding that women from other villages are following their lead.

As the sun sets and the rockets fall silent, the next generation is in training.

Groups of boys set off fireworks to squeals of delight and fire toy guns into the air in celebration.

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Austin, United States | 

They may never be able to fill a stadium for a rock concert, but computers are making inroads in the music industry, capable of producing songs -- and convincingly so -- as illustrated at the South by Southwest festival in Texas.

Already, an album featuring eight tracks has been produced entirely with artificial intelligence, an unprecedented feat.

"I Am AI" was released last fall by YouTube star Taryn Southern, who doesn't know how to play any instruments.

"For my first music video in 2017, I had a lot of friction as a non-musician," the young artist told a panel discussion. "I wrote lyrics, I had a melodic line but it was difficult to compose and record the actual music."

The pop artist said she began experimenting with AI two years ago, working with Amper, an artificial intelligence music composition software.

"In two days, I had composed a song that I could actually feel was mine," Southern said. "It means that I don't necessarily have to rely on other people."

Founded in 2014 in New York by a group of engineers and musicians, Amper is part of about a dozen start-ups using artificial intelligence to break with the traditional way of making music.

The company's co-founder and CEO, Drew Silverstein, said the aim is not to replace human composers but rather to work with them to reach their goal.

He said the company relies on tons of source material -- from dance hits to classical music -- to produce custom songs.

"The idea of Amper is to enable everyone to express themselves (through) music regardless of their background and skills," Silverstein said.

The Amper app allows a user to pick a genre of music (rap, folk, rock) and a mood (happy, sad, driving) before spitting out a song. The user can then change the tempo, add instruments or switch them out until the result is satisfactory.

Two songs created by Amper at SXSW -- using the public's choice of pop and hip hop as the genres and tender or sad for the mood -- clearly aren't likely to top the charts. But the pieces were pleasant enough to the ear and perfectly usable as background music to illustrate a video or a computer game.

Such songs are described by Amper as "functional music" as opposed to "artistic music."  

- "A creative tool" -

Southern said she reworked the music in her own album dozens of times before she got the right tune.

"For me, it's just a tool I can use in my creative process: I'm still the editor, I'm still in the driver's seat," she said.

She acknowledged, however, being terrified her album would be panned when it came out, as was the case with other innovations in music, like synthesizers or software to help artists sing right.

Jay Boisseau, a computing technologies leader and strategist, predicted that more and more music will be generated by computers in the future but the machine was unlikely to totally replace the human touch.

"We're going to hear a lot of music composed by computers and there's nothing wrong with that," he said. "But computers are not very good at creativity ... they are 0 and 1.

"They can find patterns, but they're not, like humans, particularly good to go beyond what they've been trained for. They are tools."

For Lance Weiler, an American filmmaker and writer who uses AI in his work, the collaboration between machine and artist should not be sneered at.

"It mainly enables you to improve the way you work, to augment your skills in expressing creative thoughts," he told the panel discussion.

He added there was no question that AI had its limits and inevitably fails somewhere.

"It's like interacting with a toddler," he joked. "It can be very temperamental. You need to put patterns so it doesn't hurt itself."

Silverstein underlined that while AI was useful to experiment with an objective goal, "a yes or no answer," when it came to artistic experimentation, it was far from perfect.

For some, such arguments are not convincing, as attested by a British musician at SXSW who didn't appear happy with the competition and questioned whether the word creativity even applied when speaking about music generated by a computer.

"It's still an algorithm," Boisseau conceded. "It's doesn't mean people won't enjoy it, but it's not completely new.

"With the current state of the art, it cannot be 'creative,'" he added.

To which Silverstein quickly replied: "Not yet."

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On board the San Raffaele, Colombia | As a white ship chugs through the muddy waters of the San Juan River, pirogues from the jungle glide toward it almost reverently, bringing their sick to healers they liken to angels.

For hundreds of miles along Colombia's Pacific coast, with its thick, lush jungle, there are no hospitals, and medics and medicine are rare.

And so, the San Raffaele hospital ship, when it arrives, is treated like a ghostly miracle by the poor indigenous and Afro-Caribbean communities that dot this violent region.

"The proper medicines are not coming in. They are too expensive," says Yenny Cardenas, weaving a basket as she waits in her hut, which is built on stilts over the riverbank. Its roof thrums under heavy rain.

Cardenas, an ethnic Wounaan, is waiting to board a skiff that will speed her across to the ship with her baby boy, her fifth child. She's worried about his skin which, for months now, has been covered in sores.

"My son was fine, nice and chubby, but now he's not eating," said Cardenas, 44, a teacher in nearby Balsalito, an indigenous reserve on the banks of the San Juan where it sweeps down from the Andes to the sea.

On the other bank is the wharf at Docordo, a majority Afro-Colombian town lost in the country's poorest department, Choco -- where nearly 50 percent of the population live in extreme poverty, compared to 17 percent nationally.

Dozens of patients have gathered around Docordo's wooden wharf since dawn. The area has just one medical dispensary, supplying 16,000 people.  

-2,000 waiting for care-

For that reason, all eyes are trained on the ship. Bearing a white cross on its hull, it's anchored mid-river, as if honoring its neutrality between these two neighboring communities -- indigenous and Afro-Colombian -- which do not mix. 

Another sign -- featuring a machine gun with a 'X' over it -- warns that carrying firearms on board is prohibited.

People line up, waiting their turn to be seen by the doctors and nurses. Some have their hands on their stomachs, some are bent over with age, some are young pregnant women with their kids in tow -- all wait to tell their woes and receive free treatment. Locals call the medical staff their "Angels of the Pacific."

"Some of these people have not been able to see a doctor for years," said Ana Lucia Lopez, 51, director and co-founder of the Monte Tabor Foundation, which operates this 80-foot (24-meter) hospital on the water. 

On Docordo's teeming pontoon, Lopez manages the anxious crowd from behind a school desk on the wharf that doubles as the hospital's reception area. 

For a 12-day mission she has a list of 2,000 people for appointments and 150 patients for surgery that a forward party of medics screened in a triage operation two weeks previously.

It's a mountain of work for the little ship with a big heart, but on Colombia's west coast, there is no alternative.

The ship features 25 doctors and nurses, some paid and some volunteer, including a gynecologist, a dentist, a pediatrician and a psychologist. A crew of seven operates the ship itself.

Hailing from the port of Buenaventura, the San Raffaele has been plying the 865 mile (1,300 kilometers) length of Colombia's Pacific coast all year round since 2009, from the Panamanian border in the north to Ecuador in the south.

"Already over the past few years, 65,000 people have been seen and more than 4,000 operations have been carried out," said Diego Posso, 49, a paramedic expert in trauma and the founding president of Monte Tabor.

Posso himself designed the ship with help from a naval architect. All it has ever been is a floating hospital. 

- Neutral amid conflict -

It's a risky business, coming here. 

The local communities had to negotiate with several armed groups to ensure safe passage for the San Raffaele. 

Gunmen of one kind or another have held sway here for decades -- from National Liberation Army rebels to narco-trafficking gangs like the feared Gulf Clan -- effectively making it a war zone.

Three years on from a landmark peace agreement with FARC rebels, peace is far from being a reality on this coast, strategic to cocaine-shippers and clandestine gold miners alike.

Local security forces patrolling the river with outboard-powered boats attest to frequent firefights, bodies floating in the river, wounded locals and displaced families terrorized by violence.

"Sometimes it has been difficult to reach the villages where there have been clashes, bombs," says Lopez.

She recalled a group of wounded taken hurriedly aboard one evening, including a paramilitary guy with his arm hanging off. 

A few months later, in the village further up the coast, someone grabbed her by the shoulder. "I was startled. But it was him! And he said, 'Thank you. Thanks to you I still have my hand.'"

-Contamination, infections -

From dawn until late into the night, small skiffs ferry people to and from the riverbank. 

Eventually, it's Cardenas' turn to climb onto the deck, holding her son close. Up on the ship, shaded by a plastic sheet, the waiting room is overflowing.

There is no let-up for pediatric surgeon Carlos Melo, 55. He follows surgery with surgery, and not only for children. 

"These people have nothing. Everything is so far away. We're talking six, eight hours by canoe. There are no doctors," says Melo, a pioneer of minimally invasive abdominal surgery known as laparoscopy, who has volunteered on the ship for the past five years.

At the end of the corridor, in a small pastel-colored room, Maria Isabel Lozano examines Carderas' baby and diagnoses a skin infection. It's a common diagnosis here, where communities are exposed to the polluted waters of the San Juan. 

Posso says the pollution is caused by chemical waste from cocaine production and run-off water from illegal mining.

Many also suffer from diarrhea and respiratory illnesses, said Lozano.

The San Raffaele is a small white speck on an ocean of despair, bringing with it specialist doctors and nurses on 12-day missions every second month.

Now, thanks to a 350,000 euro grant from the European Union, it can take to the seas every month, at least for another year.

"There are many projects, huge dreams," says Posso.

One of them is to bring a bigger and better equipped ship from the United States, given to them by entrepreneurs, 

It already has a name: "Archangel."

Athens, Greece |

A team of Greek and Spanish doctors announced  the birth of a baby using DNA from three people after a controversial fertility treatment that has provoked intense ethical debate.

The team used an egg from the infertile mother, the father's sperm and another woman's egg to conceive the baby boy, transferring genetic material with chromosomes from the mother to the egg of a donor whose own genetic material had been removed in a process its creators hailed as a medical "revolution".

A similar DNA-switching technique was used in Mexico in 2016 to avoid transmission of a mother's hereditary illness to her child.

But the case in Greece is the first time an IVF (in vitro fertilisation) technique using DNA from three people has been deployed to allow a mother otherwise unable to conceive to have a child. 

The baby, born Thursday and weighing in at 2.96 kilos (6.5 pounds), was delivered by a 32-year-old Greek woman who had undergone several unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilisation, Greece's Institute of Life said in a statement.

Institute of Life president Dr Panagiotis Psathas, stated: "Today, for the first time in the world, a woman's inalienable right to become a mother with her own genetic material became a reality.

"As Greek scientists, we are very proud to announce an international innovation in assisted reproduction, and we are now in a position to make it possible for women with multiple IVF failures or rare mitochondrial genetic diseases to have a healthy child."

Dr Psathas added: "Our commitment is to continue to help even more couples facing fertility issues to have children with their own DNA, without having recourse to egg donors." 

- 'Will help countless women' -

His scientific collaborator of the Institute of Life, Dr Nuno Costa-Borges, also hailed the news.

"The completely successful and safe implementation of the Maternal Spindle Transfer method -– for the first time in medical history -– is a revolution in assisted reproduction," Dr Costa-Borges said.

He added that "this exceptional result will help countless women to realise their dream of becoming mothers with their own genetic material."

In the Mexican case, the mother had been suffering from Leigh syndrome, a rare illness which affects the developing nervous system and can be fatal. In her case, the disorder had previously caused the deaths of two of her children. 

Using the triple DNA technique to aid in infertility cases raises complex ethical issues, however.

Tim Child, Oxford University professor and medical director of the Fertility Partnership, expressed his concern.

"I'm concerned that there's no proven need for the patient to have her genetic material removed from her eggs and transferred into the eggs of a donor.

"The risks of the technique aren't entirely known, though may be considered acceptable if being used to treat mitochondrial disease, but not in this situation," said Child.

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