OLYMPIC INNOVATION:As the Olympics head east, preparations in the Chinese capital run from the breathtaking to the amusing to the downright bizarre

1 CLOUD SEEDING

Beijing temperatures rise into the 30s during August, and it's also the only time of year that it rains in the capital: there is a 50-50 chance of rain for the opening and closing ceremonies. High steel prices meant the Olympic authorities got rid of the sliding roof on the Bird's Nest stadium, so to make sure rain doesn't dampen spirits during the Games, organisers are planning to control the weather by blasting any dark, ominous clouds with rockets.

The weather bureau will launch rockets containing silver iodine and dry ice high into the atmosphere, where they will force rainclouds to burst long before the fanfare starts at the stadium.

Cloud-seeding, where chemical-infused rockets are fired into clouds to induce rain, is a feature of life in Beijing because of the ongoing water shortage. Rain prevention is a much tougher challenge.

2 ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE

While the use of poorly translated English is often in itself innovative - face creams that penetrate your "bottom horny layer", or signs warning you against burglars, which say "Protect your private", or my long-time personal favourite, "The slippery are very crafty" (meaning "Watch your step") - it is not the image the Beijing government wants to present to hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Which is where the "Beijing Speaks to the World Committee" comes in. Its job is to address the problem of ludicrous English phrases, poorly translated from Chinese, on billboards and road signs before half a million foreign guests arrive into town. They are gathering examples of poor "Chinglish", which means no more signs saying "Avoid catching fire" and "Forbid to vomit the sputum anywhere".

Taxi drivers, who generally have no English, have been heavily pressured into learning a few words, although it is literally just a few words, it must be said.

So expect a greater level of English spoken at the Games than China has ever seen, even if it is occasionally eccentric.

3 NO FLIES ON ME

A Beijing restaurateur has looked to the past for an innovative way to make sure the city is germ-free for the Games. Guo Zhanqi is buying flies for two yuan (around 20 cent) each to help promote public hygiene for the Games, in a move that is eerily reminiscent of Great Leap Forward and Chairman Mao Zedong's campaign against the "Four Harms" in the 1950s, which targeted rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes, when citizens were ordered to kill sparrows and other pests.

Mr Guo is giving out cash to anyone who presents him with the dead insects, and is trying to encourage a nationwide anti-fly campaign. "Buying flies is not my ultimate purpose. I want everybody to start killing flies," he said.

4 THE WATER CUBE

One of the truly groundbreaking developments for the Games is the National Aquatic Centre, or Water Cube as it is more popularly known, and the basic geometric principle on which the structure is based was developed by two professors at Trinity College Dublin. The building is a giant blue block, based on the geometry of soap bubbles isolated in 1993 by Professor Denis Weaire, head of the Physics Department at Trinity, and his research student Robert Phelan.

The shape the two Irish scientists at Trinity came up is the most efficient "ideal" structure for foam, one with the least possible wasted space between individual, identical bubbles.

They were following up on a challenge laid down more than a century earlier by the Belfast-born physicist William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin: to divide space into equal volumes, all with a minimum surface area. It's great for dealing with earthquakes, always an issue in Beijing.

The skin of the building is made of a Teflon-like material called ETFE (ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene), which allows the building to breathe like a greenhouse.

5 SWIMMING TIMING DEVICE

The Swiss watch company Omega has been doing the timings for Olympic swimming since Los Angeles in 1932, and with only a fraction of a second separating the top athletes in every discipline, getting the timings right is crucial. For the Beijing Games, Omega is introducing new starting blocks in the Water Cube, which have built-in sensors linked to advanced false-start detection technology, and a digital camera used as a back-up system.

It's all about getting the right push, and the new technology means swimmers can maximise their push when they dive in at the start of the race. The blocks will have an angled section at the back, a bit like track and field starting blocks, and will allow swimmers to keep their knees at a 90-degree angle, to further enhance the push. The blocks also have a speaker linked to the starting gun, so that every contestant hears the signal at precisely the same time.

6 MIND YOUR MANNERS

This innovation is in the cultural sphere, but it is set to change the city in a fundamental way. Beijing city authorities have instituted campaigns against spitting, littering and queue-jumping in order to improve the environment in the Chinese capital before the Olympics. There are signs all over the city telling Beijing residents to behave like citizens of the capital - appealing to the snobbishness of Beijingers is always a good tactic. Spitting has a different cultural role in China: it is not considered rude to hawk and spit, particularly during periods of the year when people have colds, as the belief is that you should clear your nose and throat to get better. But citizens have been told that Westerners find this unsightly and thus it should be avoided. There are special days on which people have to queue up at bus stops, and get on in an orderly fashion. Other etiquette messages include instructions to say "hello" and "thank you" to foreigners visiting the city for the Games.

7 MULTIPLE MASCOTS

Sporting mascots have become big business at international events - remember Misha the Bear at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. But why have just one Olympic mascot when you can have five? Beijing has introduced the Fuwas: five symbols each with a rhyming two-syllable name, which is a way of affectionately addressing children in China. Beibei is the fish, Jingjing is the panda, Huanhuan the Olympic flame, Yingying the Tibetan antelope and Nini the swallow. When their names are put together - Bei Jing Huan Ying Ni - they spell "Welcome to Beijing". There is a deeper symbolism, of course: they represent the five elements of nature - the sea, forest, fire, earth and sky - and they are all designed with deep traditional influences from Chinese folk art. And each one also symbolises a different blessing - prosperity, happiness, passion, health and good luck. The mascots also have a Japanese manga look to them and a TV show to accompany the mascots has been a big hit, with soft toys selling well from a specially introduced chain of licensed stores. There are pirate copies available - but the Olympic brand is so closely guarded they have their work cut out for them.

8 FACE MASKS

Sales of face masks are hard to assess in Beijing, and with pollution such a sensitive subject in the capital ahead of the Games, don't expect the capital's face-mask makers to be issuing press releases about record sales. The initial build-up to the Games has focused on how polluted Beijing is - and the city is prone to its bad days as millions of cars clog the streets and the smoke from hundreds of coal-burning power stations and major factories fills the air. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge has said some of the endurance events may have to be rescheduled if Beijing authorities do not get a grip on the smog, but don't expect any marathon runners wearing face masks during the Games. The city says it will shut the biggest polluters for the months around the Olympics and this year, so far, the air quality has been better than in previous years. I predict the air will be perfectly fine once the Games roll around.

9CAR TROUBLE

Now, this is true innovation in a city where there are three million motorised vehicles which daily clog the capital's increasingly sclerotic arteries. We had a taste of it in August when, for a week, drivers with odd or even number plates could only drive on the corresponding odd and even days. Driving became a pleasure; it even improved the mood of the commuters, who did unthinkable things like giving way to people changing lanes, avoiding using their horns and not cutting in on you for no reason.

There are 1,000 cars registered every day, and the impact of the week-long test was not immediately obvious, but the sky has gotten better in recent months. This could also be down to the fact that the old fleet of banger Xiali cabs has been replaced by Mitsubishis and there are more new cars on the road which meet Beijing's very strict emission standards. Pulling 1.3 million motor vehicles off the roads for a period should reduce emissions by 40 per cent. And people started using the subway.

10 OLYMPIC TORCH

The Olympic torch started out life as a fiery rag atop a stick of wood, but these days the torch is a seriously high-tech piece of kit. The Beijing Games torch was designed by the IT company Lenovo and is called the Cloud of Promise; it is based on a Chinese scroll, and incorporates cloud imagery from traditional art into a polished aluminium-magnesium alloy torch, 72 cm long, weighing only 1kg.

The handle has been specially designed using rubber-based paint to "emulate the unique sensation of one hand holding another", and it took 30 designers from seven countries more than 10 months to design it.

The official torch lighting will take place in Olympia, Greece this month and will arrive in Beijing on August 8th for the start of the Olympic Games.