Partner pursuit

The city government of Tokyo is coming up with its dating app to encourage Japanese singles to hook up and possibly get married.

The $1.28 million matchmaking project is intended to address the country’s low birth rate and replenish its decreasing adult population. Officials are ensuring that the app will be fool-proof so users will find genuine singles and not pretenders.

Another matchmaking project is being conducted by Britain’s University of Southampton in South Africa. The objective is to find a “female” in a forest using drones powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Initial drone flights were already done in 2022 with tens of thousands of images taken, but the target was not found. The new hunt was launched hoping that AI technology could better recognize what researchers are looking for. So far, more than 481 hectares out of 24,700 hectares have been scoured with no findings.

“I’m hopeful there is a female out there somewhere, after all, there must have been at one time. It would be amazing to bring this plant so close to extinction back through natural reproduction,” said Dr. Laura Cinti, who is leading the project with AI expert Dr. Howard Boland and conservation scientist and drone pilot Dr. Debbie Jewitt, Independent Reports.

If the hunters don’t find in Ngoye Forest a partner for the lone male cycad plant E.woodii that was discovered in 1895 and is kept at the Kew Gardens in London, Cinti said she is preparing to resort to chemical or physiological manipulation to change its sex into female so it can reproduce, according to Independent.

While the plant was cloned, the samples created were also males so researchers were unable to induce natural reproduction.

“There have been reports of sex change in other cycad species due to sudden environmental changes such as temperature, so we are hopeful we can induce sex change in the E.woodii too,” Cinti said, according to Independent.

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