BOGOF is used as a noun as in 'There are some great bogofs on at the supermarket' or an adjective, usually with a word such as 'offer’ or 'deal’ — 'there are some great bogof offers in store'.

      When you combine the first letters of the words in a phrase or the name of an organisation, you have an acronym. Acronyms are spoken as a word so NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) is not pronounced N-A-T-O. We say NATO. Bogof, when said out loud, is quite comical for a native speaker, as it sounds like an insult, 'Bog off!’ meaning go away, leave me alone, slightly childish and a little old-fashioned.

      BOGOF is the best-known of the supermarket marketing strategies. The concept was first imported from the USA during the 1970s recession, when food prices were very high. It came back into fashion in the late 1990s, led by big supermarket chains trying to gain a competitive advantage over each other. Consumers were attracted by the idea that they could get something for nothing. Who could possibly say 'no’?

Disponível em: www.bbc.co.uk. Acesso em: 2 ago. 2012 (adaptado).

Italian university switches to English

      Milan is crowded with Italian icons, which makes it even more of a cultural earthquake that one of Italy's leading universities — the Politecnico di Milano — is going to switch to the English language. The university has announced that from 2014 most of its degree courses — including all its graduate courses — will be taught and assessed entirely in English rather than Italian.

      The waters of globalisation are rising around higher education — and the university believes that if it remains Italian-speaking it risks isolation and will be unable to compete as an international institution. “We strongly believe our classes should be international classes — and the only way to have international classes is to use the English language”, says the university’s rector, Giovanni Azzone.

COUGHLAN, S. Disponível em: www.bbc.co.uk. Acesso em: 31 jul. 2012.

Frankentissue: printable cell technology

      In November, researchers from the University of Wollongong in Australia announced a new bio-ink that is a step toward really printing living human tissue on an inkjet printer. It is like printing tissue dot-by-dot. A drop of bioink contains 10,000 to 30,000 cells. The focus of much of this research is the eventual production of tailored tissues suitable for surgery, like living Band-Aids, which could be printed on the inkjet.

      However, it is still nearly impossible to effectively replicate nature’s ingenious patterns on a home Office accessory. Consider that the liver is a series of globules, the kidney a set of pyramids. Those kinds of structures demand 3D printers that can build them up, layer by layer. At the moment, skin and other flat tissues are most promising for the inkjet.

Disponível em: http://discovermagazine.com. Acesso em: 2 dez. 2012