The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Short of water, Peru’s engineers ‘make their own’ Posted: 31 Mar 2013 03:10 AM PDT
Even more intriguingly, the fresh, pure water on offer along a busy road in this dusty town some 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of Lima, has been extracted, as if by magic, from the humid air. Within the enormous, raised, double-panelled billboard inviting all takers is concealed a tube, wires and mechanical equipment that draws the water from the air and purifies it. Inhabitants from far and wide who flock here toting bottles and buckets say this purified water is a wonderful alternative to the stagnant well water that used to be the only water source for many in this town. "The water that we get in our houses very often is dirty. By contrast, here we have good water that we can use and drink without having to worry," Francisco Quilca, 52 said. His wife Wilma Flores says that it gives her peace of mind, "knowing that the water is disinfected. We can drink it and we can use it to wash our vegetables in," she said. The United Nations on Friday marked its World Water Day initiative which aims to cut water-borne diseases like cholera, dysentery and diarrhea around the world. It is a perennial problem in Lima and the surrounding area, where about one million of the more than eight million people lack reliably clean water. Faced with the ongoing water shortage, some innovators at Peru's University for Engineering and Technology hit upon the novel idea. "If the problem is water, we'll make some," said Alejandro Aponte, one of the people who worked on the project, which was both an engineering feat and a marketing challenge. Enough water is sucked from the air by this huge contraption located on the edge of a busy highway in Peru to fill a 100-liter tank each day. The system required a location where the humidity was at least 30 per cent – not a problem in Lima, where the dewpoint sometimes hits an unbearably sticky 98 per cent, despite the barren landscape where there is very little evident vegetation and not very much actual rainfall. The interdisciplinary effort required figuring out not only how to draw moisture from the air on a large enough scale, but how to let people know that the water was available for their consumption. Engineers on the project have installed five generators to suck moisture out of the air and convert it into liquid. The purification structure is sandwiched between two huge billboards which advertise the availability of the water. Once they had worked out the mechanics of extracting the moisture from the air, "the university asked us to think up this panel," said Aponte, who is creative director of the Mayo Draft ad agency. He said the project – part water generator, part advertising billboard – has filled a real need here, as "there are many people who have no access to clean water," he said. "We have seen that this has a huge potential if you get to use it in other areas of Lima, or even other countries that have many water problems," said Aponte, who said he has received overseas queries about the project. Carlos Cardenas, who works as a driver and travels regularly by the Pan-American Highway that runs along Peru's coast, stops alongside the sign, taking several glasses of water before moving on. "I often stop here to get water because it is quite good, and not nearly as polluted as it seems to be in other places," he said. – AFP/Relaxnews |
| Scientists pinpoint gene coding errors for cancer Posted: 30 Mar 2013 11:32 PM PDT
The results, which double the number of known genetic alterations linked to breast, ovarian and prostate cancer, were unveiled in a dozen scientific papers published in journals in Europe and the United States. The three hormone-related cancers are diagnosed in over 2.5 million people every year and kill one in three patients, said a Nature press statement. Teams from more than 100 research institutes in Europe, Asia, Australia and the United States said the work should in the future help doctors to calculate an individual's cancer risk long before any symptoms emerge. People with high-susceptibility mutations could be counselled against lifestyle choices that further increase their risk, given regular screening and drug treatment, or even preventative surgery. "We have examined 200,000 areas of the genome in 250,000 individuals. There is no (other) study of cancer of this size," Per Hall, coordinator of the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS), told AFP of the research. The studies compared the DNA of more than 100,000 patients with breast, ovarian and prostate cancer to that of an equal number of healthy individuals. Most were of European ancestry. DNA, the blueprint for life, comprises four basic chemicals called A (adenine) C (cytosine), T (thymine) and G (guanine) strung together in different combinations along a double helix. Researchers noted where the A, C, T, G combinations of cancer patients differed significantly from those of healthy people. They were looking for a tiny "spelling mistake" in the code, called a single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP that can cause problems in gene function. For breast cancer, the researchers found 49 SNPs, "which is more than double the number previously found", said Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, which took part in the giant study. "In the case of prostate cancer, researchers have discovered another 26 deviations, which means that a total number of 78 SNPs may be linked to the disease." For ovarian cancer, eight new SNPs were found. Everyone has inherited alterations in their DNA, but whether these mutations are dangerous or not is determined by where on the code they lie. And carrying a mutation does not necessarily mean a person will develop cancer, a disease that may have multiple causes. The researchers said further study is needed to allow scientists to translate these DNA telltales into tests for predicting cancer risk. A more distant goal is using the knowledge for better treatments. "Since there are many other factors that influence the risk of these cancers (mainly lifestyle factors), future tests have to take more risk factors than just genes into consideration," said Hall. "It will take a couple of years before we have the necessary models enabling us, with high accuracy, to predict the individual risk of these cancers." The findings were published in Nature Genetics and Nature Communications, PLOS Genetics, the American Journal of Human Genetics and Human Molecular Genetics. — AFP/Relaxnews |
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