An artist walks past sculptures made out of a large chunk of ice at the Snow and Ice Sculpture Festival Brugge 2002 in Bruge. Some 30 international artists made sculptures out of 400 tonnes of snow and a quarter of a million kilos of ice to portray the world in all its diversity under the theme „A World Tour in Snow and Ice“. The festival opens on November 29 and ends on January 6, 2003. PHOTO – REUTERS

BEIJING – International panda experts have designed computer software to help the charismatic and endangered bears find their ideal mates, a newspaper reported last week. The software, developed by experts at a meeting in China, would analyse the health and bloodlines of each panda in captivity to find the best match while avoiding close relatives, the Star Daily said. Plagued by habitat loss, only about 1,000 giant pandas live in the wild atop foggy, bamboo-filled mountains in western China.

The country protects hundreds more of the adored black-and-white bears in zoos, but it has proven difficult to tempt them to mate. In the wild, female pandas usually give birth to a single cub only once every two to three years, the World Wildlife Fund said on its Web site (www.worldwildlife.org/pandas).

In April, middle-aged panda Ling Ling was sent home to Japan from a Mexico City zoo where he failed to romance three female pandas. Zookeepers said Ling Ling, on his second „Mission Impossible“ in Mexico, was not interested in his potential mates. Reuters