The Ministry of Defence has been left with egg on its face after a much-vaunted seizure of 1.3 tonnes of poppy seed turned out to be mung beans. The food crop was taken during Operation Panther Claw, breathlessly reported as a major strike at the heart of Afghanistan’s terror network.

After having the seeds tested by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Kabul, the Guardian reports that officials have acknowledged their error and promised to return the mung beans to their rightful owner.

At the time, Colonel General Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s minister of counter-narcotics, claimed the beans were a strain of “super poppy”. For your benefit, I’ve attached images below for comparison.

Can you tell which is which?

Today the motion for creating a dedicated committee to oversee science policy across Government was discussed in Parliament. Good news, we’re getting it back. The Campaign for Science & Engineering had this to say:

The Campaign for Science & Engineering (CaSE) warmly welcomed the House of Commons’ decision to establish the Science and Technology Committee. CaSE lobbied for it to be established following the merger of DIUS and BIS. In today’s debate Phil Willis MP commended CaSE’s efforts to bring back the Science and Technology Committee.
Commenting Nick Dusic, CaSE’s Director, said:

It is great news that the Science and Technology Committee will be able to investigate science and engineering issues that cut right across government, including the science budget.
Today’s decision showed that there is strong support for proper scrutiny of science and engineering within Parliament. It is critical that future changes to government do not result in the abolition of the Science and Technology Committee. Today’s decision corrects the mistake made in 2007 of abolishing the Committee.
I look forward to working with the Science and Technology Committee in scrutinising the Government’s science policies.

The Committee will be able to conduct wide-ranging inquiries, covering the full scope of science policy and related matters including the science budget.

9, a new animated feature produced by Tim Burton and directed by Shane Acker, comes out in September (09/09/09, naturally). Details are sketchy, but it’s safe to say in the world of 9, something has gone horribly wrong, the world has been destroyed, and the only survivors are some cute little sack people and an army of murderous machines. One can’t help but think that a few squiddies from the Matrix somehow tunnelled into Little Big Planet.

Anyway, it tickles my fancy, if only because it checks the requisite boxes of “post apocalyptic dystopia” and “technopunk machinery”. Which is good, because some of the people behind the film have been nice enough to send me these ludicrously high res images of the Fabricator, a factory robot with misfiring synapses that has been building the war machines. Click on the pictures below for full size images – they really are massive.

Here’s the beast!

The above image is a down scaled crop from this texture plan:

Underneath the texturing are the bones of the machine, as lovingly illustrated in this artwork:

This is just a detail from the above graphic, and yet it’s big enough that I could make it into a desktop wallpaper, just for you:

I’ve also been given an exclusive piece of artwork showing 3 and 4, two of the small “stitch punks” at the centre of the film’s plot. The PR bumf says:

Communicating visually, not verbally, 3 and 4 are the scholarly twins who voraciously catalogue everything they can see and find, recording and building a massive database for the group of the world that surrounds them and the history that led up to their creation.

To which producer Tim Burton adds:

“3 and 4 go back to the original experience of non-speaking characters. I think it works for them, it makes them different from the others, and I can relate to those characters because I didn’t speak when I was a child either.”

Err, okay Tim. Anyway, click on the below image to see the full artwork. It will be available as a collectible card, my sources tell me that San Diego’s Comic-Con 09 would be a good place to start looking for them, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Stay tuned – if you like these images I’m sure I’ll be able to get you some more.