The house is being printed from special concrete in the southern Czech city of Ceske Budejovice and is planned to float on the Vltava river in Prague in August.

"I dare say it's the first-ever floating 3D-printed building in the world," sculptor Michal Trpak, the mastermind behind the project, told AFP.

The design of the house, which can be printed in two days, was inspired by a single-celled creature known as a protozoa, he says.

As an added attraction, Trpak plans to turn the abode into a floating garden, with plants covering its roof and outside walls.

The simple 43-square metre (51.4 square yards) floor plan includes a living room with kitchen, a bedroom and bathroom. 

"3D houses will adapt to the people or the countryside. The robot doesn't care about the shape of the curve," Trpak said to the hum of a mechanic hand with a nozzle patiently piling up layer after layer of concrete strips.

"The house is intended as a leisure-time house to stand in the countryside, ideally for a couple or a small family," added Trpak, who drew inspiration from 3D-printed housing projects in the Netherlands.

- 'Trial and error' -

To finance the project, dubbed the "Protozoan", its creators have teamed up with a Czech building society.

"This one is pretty expensive because it's a prototype and we needed many tests.... But the second generation should cost around three million (Czech) crowns (112,600 euros; $127,500) and the third generation may cost about half of that amount," Trpak said.

When the robot is done, the concrete bedroom and bathroom modules will be attached to a wooden core with large windows and completed with a wooden roof.

The house will then be transported to Prague, installed on a pontoon and displayed on the Vltava river in Prague's broader centre for two months.

"We didn't have a plot of land to place it on, and anyway, to do that, you need a building permit and that takes up to two years" to secure, said Trpak.

"But if you float it on a river, you only need consent from the navigation body, which is much faster."

Trpak said the construction had not been trouble-free as the concrete is sensitive to temperature changes.

"When it's very warm it hardens faster, when it's cold it hardens more slowly so now we're adding warm water from a boiler," he added as the weather changed for the worse.

"We keep researching and developing. It's a process of trial and error."

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Two clans, the Desvas and the Ahiteys, are fighting it out for control of the local cocoa industry... and boardroom thuggery, love, betrayal and guns are the tools of their trade.

"Cacao", an Ivorian TV soap that began airing on Monday, has ambitions as outsized as the shoulder pads that Joan Collins wore in "Dallas," the 1980s drama to which it is being likened.

In one of the most lavish investments in African programme-making, French producers Canal Plus have signed up a roster of stars and splashed out on big locations, convinced of a potential audience across the continent and beyond.

Whereas the Ewing oil family feuded over black gold in Texas, the rivals in this tale are in the imaginary town of Caodji, fighting over brown gold -- cacao, the raw material of cocoa, of which Ivory Coast is the world's biggest exporter.

"Two families are engaged in a merciless fight for control of the market and the farmers," says Ivorian-French director Alex Ogou, 40, who shot to prominence with a hit series, "Invisible", about Ivory Coast's street children.

The idea for the series comes from Ivorian producer Yolande Bogui, whose father once worked in the cacao industry -- a business as flinty and competitive as chocolate is sweet and pleasurable.

The show -- which once carried the punchy working title "Guns and Chocolate" -- hit the screens after 18 months in production that involved a thousand people.

Canal Plus on Monday broadcast the first two episodes for free, hoping to hook subscribers for the following 10, to be aired every Monday.

The company told AFP it did not have the ratings for the first episode -- but reaction on social media suggested it could have a hit on its hands.

"We've only had two episodes... and it's already the best Ivorian series ever," tweeted one fan, Inzho MotO-MotO.

- Big budget -

Filming took eight months, using 90 studio sets and outside locations ranging from Abidjan, Ivory Coast's economic hub, to the port of San Pedro and the deep bush, the heart of Ivory Coast's "Cacao Belt". 

The 70-strong cast includes Ivorian stars Evelyne Ily, Naky Sy Savane, Serge Abessolo and former top model Fate Toure.

The plum role of the evil Jean Ahitey -- already a buzz on Twitter -- is being played by Fargass Assande, who gained a wide following in Africa for the 2015 "L'Oeil du Cyclone" (The Eye of the Storm) by Burkina Faso's Sekou Traore.

Ahitey is a study in ruthlessness whose incongruous sayings ("Whoever accepts birds in his mango tree should not fear the sound of their wings") seem fast-tracked to become memes.

The exceptional budget -- the figures are secret -- was put to good use, Ogou said.

The writers "spent time in the places where it all happens, so that they could get a feel for it," he added.

The plotlines touch on trigger-sensitive issues -- the destruction of a sacred wood, deforestation generally, violence by middle-men who refuse to pay peasants the minimum price set by the state, corruption, weaselly traders...

- Universal themes -

One thing he learned, Ogou said, was that "wealth never trickles down to the farmers -- unscrupulous people exploit weakness or isolation in the bush."

"There are sharks in this business but the themes are the same that you see elsewhere, wherever natural resources attract predators," he said.

Such universality -- and family tensions and loyalties familiar to everyone -- should give "Cacao" a broad appeal, he hoped.

"A film is just a pretext for telling a story. It could be in Africa, in Sweden, at the North Pole or the South Pole -- at the end of the day, you are talking about human beings, feelings, emotions, ambitions, betrayal."

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Washington, United States | Flying robots equipped with bubble guns could one day help save our planet.

That's according to a study published in iScience by a Japanese scientist who successfully demonstrated that soap bubbles can be used to pollinate fruit-bearing plants -- seen as vital to keeping the world fed in the coming decades in the face of vanishing bee populations.

Eijiro Miyako, an associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Nomi, told AFP he had been working on robotic pollinators for years, but was disheartened when the toy drones he used smashed into flowers, destroying them.

"It was too sad," he said.

The whimsical idea of trying bubbles came to Miyako when he was playing with his son in a park close to their home. 

The scientist was inspired when one of the bubbles harmlessly burst on his three-year-old's face.

Miyako and co-author Xi Yang first used microscopes to confirm that soap bubbles could carry pollen grains.

Next, they tested five solutions available in shops, finding one called lauramidopropyl betaine -- used in cosmetic products to boost foam formation -- resulted in better growth of the tube that develops from pollen grains after they are deposited on flowers.

They also added calcium to support the germination process and found the optimum pH balance.

- Drones target flowers -

The pair loaded their solution into a bubble gun and released pollen-bearing bubbles into a pear orchard -- at a rate of about 2,000 grains per bubble -- finding that 95 percent of the targeted flowers bore fruit.

"It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the... soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination," said Miyako. 

Hand pollination is a much more labor intensive process.

Finally, the researchers took their experiment to the skies -- loading a bubble gun onto a small drone programmed to fly on a predetermined route. 

Since flowers were no longer in bloom, they targeted a group of fake lilies. 

When flown from a height of two meters and at a velocity of two meters per second, the device hit the plastic plants at a 90 percent success rate.

Miyako said he was in talks with a company for future commercialization but more work was needed to improve the robot's precision, and to potentially add autonomous flower targeting. 

The study is thought to be the first exploring the properties of soap bubbles as pollen carriers, and to then link the concept to autonomous drones.

The authors wrote they hoped it sparked a renewed interest in artificial pollination to address "the decline in pollinator insects, the heavy labor involved in artificial pollination, and the soaring costs of pollen grains."

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London, United Kingdom | As long as there are still Britons alive who fought in World War II, the name of Vera Lynn will open a bittersweet floodgate of nostalgia.

The singer, who died on Thursday aged 103, achieved superstar status as "the forces' sweetheart", boosting troop morale with a string of romantic and patriotic ballads.

From the battlefields of France, the Netherlands, Italy and North Africa to the Far East, whenever soldiers gathered around a radio set or gramophone, the smooth vocal tones of Vera Lynn were sure to be heard.

It is impossible to gauge whether the outcome of the war was swayed by songs like "There'll Always Be an England", "We'll Meet Again", "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover" and "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square".

But for countless men in uniform, the lyrics and the slim, wholesome young blonde woman who sang them seemed to offer a vision of what they were fighting for.

To modern ears, the words might sound corny but at a time when Britain stood proudly against the Nazis, their patriotic appeal was irresistible.

- Symbol of Britishness -

Vera Lynn epitomised an archetypical, essentially decent Britishness, practical and fair-minded -- notions which shone through the songs she sang.

Even her version of the German soldiers' favourite song, "Lili Marlene," managed to sound like a patriotic lament, a far cry from the darker sexual undercurrents implicit in the versions by Marlene Dietrich and Lale Andersen -- ironically both of them anti-Nazis who became the German forces' sweethearts.

Vera Lynn's most famous song remains "We'll Meet Again", recorded in 1939.

Its appeal to love and stoicism -- "Keep smiling through/Just like you always do/ Till the blue skies/Drive the black clouds far away" -- made it the perfect war-time anthem.

It contributed enormously to her popularity, even though the song itself came to be much parodied and derided in the post-war years.

But it found favour again this year when Queen Elizabeth II, in a rare public address to the nation, urged Britons to remain strong during the coronavirus lockdown.

"We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again," the monarch said.

- Child star -

Vera Lynn was born in London's East End on March 20, 1917 as Vera Margaret Welch.

She began singing in local clubs at age seven and joined a child dance troupe, Madame Harris' Kracker Cabaret Kids, at 11.

By 15, she was a teenage sensation as a vocalist with the Howard Baker Orchestra.

She adopted her grandmother's maiden name Lynn as her stage name, making her first radio broadcast in 1935 with the Joe Loss Orchestra.

She worked with another of the great names of the pre-war period, Ambrose, whose clarinettist and tenor sax player, Harry Lewis, she was to marry. 

The couple had one child, a daughter.

In war-time, Vera Lynn came into her own, hosting a BBC radio programme, "Sincerely Yours", appearing in a forces stage revue, and making three films. 

She also toured Burma -- today's Myanmar and the site of major battles -- in 1944.

Lynn gave up singing after the war but was persuaded out of retirement in 1947 and began a whole new international career, with appearances in the United States in 1948. 

She became the first British artiste to have a US number one with "Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart", her most successful record, in 1952.

- Retirement and nostalgia -

Vera Lynn's career foundered in the rock and roll era and she cut back on public appearances but she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1976.

For decades, she was a beloved figure at celebrations to mark the anniversaries of the June 6, 1944, D-Day landings in France or VE Day, the end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945.

She made her last known public performance in 1995, singing outside Buckingham Palace at the golden jubilee celebrations for VE Day, but remained a vocal champion of military veterans.

In 2009, at the age of 92, she became the oldest living artist to make it to No 1 on the British album charts, with a greatest hits compilation outselling the Arctic Monkeys. 

She published an autobiography the same year, "Some Sunny Day", and threw her support behind a website recording social history, "The Times of My Life".

Lynn was also a spokesman for children with cerebral palsy, founding a charity in 2001.

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Lionel Mariani, owner of four venues in Buenos Aires that cater for birthday parties and weddings, faced closure once the social distancing measures hit.

But he converted his biggest venue into a fruit and vegetable warehouse, and his 20 employees -- formerly entertainers or sound engineers -- now deliver home orders.

"I don't think you can go back to partying as before," says Mariani.

"We will be one of the last events businesses standing, if we return. And what would a birthday be like? We would have to wrap every kid in plastic. As long as there's no vaccine, there'll be no parties." 

In his children's party event room in the Caballito neighborhood, vegetable boxes are now stacked next to a mothballed mechanical bull and inflatable castle.

- 'Bankruptcies' - 

Argentina's lockdown is stricter in Buenos Aires and its sprawling suburbs than anywhere else, as the metropolitan area accounts for 85 percent of the country's more than 25,000 cases. 

President Alberto Fernandez has allowed some businesses to reopen, but social gatherings and shows are still prohibited.

Despite millions of dollars doled out in state aid, the pandemic has pushed to the limit an economy that has been in recession since 2018.

Almost a million people work in the events sector in Argentina, according to an owners' association -- even more when related businesses like florists and entertainers are taken into account.

"There are bankruptcies," lamented Silvia Amarante, president of owners' association.

"While we are waiting for the pandemic to pass, many businesses will fall away, we won't be back until 2021," she said.

- Virtual magic -

Some event entertainers are embracing the new and taking their birthday party performances online.

From his house in Buenos Aires, Gustavo Pintos welcomes guests on his computer, greets the party's birthday boy and begins his routine as "Kaphu the Magician."

This evening his audience is 400 kilometers (250 miles) away, in the port city of Mar del Plata.

"It's not the same as having the audience present," says the magician, who has been plying his trade for 25 years.

"At first I was resisting, but now I'm doing three shows a day, a horizon of work has opened up that was unimaginable before!"

Actress and children's entertainer Any Gonzalez has taken the same view and started a new niche business.

"Now I have no limits," said Gonzalez, who was recently hired to do story shows with her puppet Lupe by people in other countries.

"I'm working a lot more than before," she says. "Families want to banish the drama and celebrate anyway."

Her services are tailored to different budgets, ranging from a brief virtual greeting to a story with puppets or a full hour of animation.

Gabriel Valino has been performing as Pirucho the Clown for 25 years. He misses the contact with laughing audiences but now performs 30 virtual shows per month.

"I know that celebrations in salons will not return, because even without the coronavirus, this way is cheaper for families who are going to be left without a peso," he says.

- 'Feather boas for adults' -

Online "adult" birthday parties are also booming, according to Natasha Szuka, who provides "pole-dancing" classes for women and sessions called "strip-dance-chair".

In a room in her home transformed by disco lighting and mirrors, Szuka contorts herself around a silver pole and encourages her clientele to mimic her movements.

"We send the client a box with a feather boa and a hat for the performance," she said as she prepared for a virtual show.

"This alternative is here to stay, now anyone is just a click away from celebrating."

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