Progress marches forward with cooler sheep and hotter dummies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

This magazine generally favors progress, especially when it means a new and easier way of doing something that once was a truly arduous and tedious task. Few things recently have so impressed for the people as a new development from Australia, which is the world's largest producer of wool. Apparently the Australians have found a new and very, very easy way to shear sheep--or, rather, to get the wool off the critters without doing all that shearing.

As for equipment, all that is needed is a needle to inject the sheep with a special protein and a net to catch the wool as it falls from the animal's body! What could be easier? One-quarter of a million sheep, in the total Australia-wide flock of around 110 million, already are being fleeced by the new method, according to a dispatch from Reuters.

On the remarkable invention front, for the people also notes the appearance in Hong Kong of a mannequin that perspires. Given the name "Walter," the dummy who sweats is the invention of Chinese scientists who wanted to come up with a way for clothing designers to make more-comfortable duds for hardworking types such as soldiers, athletes and space explorers.

Walter contains pipes full of heated water and sometimes seems to be more radiator than human. He nonetheless enjoys a very human body temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit. He has three layers of custom-built coating that could be called his skin, as well as motorized arms and legs.

But it's the skin that's the key to Walter's significance. "It perspires when it gets too hot under the collar," Jintu Fan, one of Walter's creators, told a reporter from Reuters. The dummy's layers of dermis have varying levels of porosity to test the mannequin's reaction to heat and "to evaluate the garment's performance in the face of varying rates of perspiration," Fan explained. He did not say whether Walter also comes with a supply of underarm deodorant.