News of Interest

China 'losing edge' as low-cost manufacturer, says KPMG

2011-09-15T07:41:00.001-07:00

15 September 2011 Last updated at 08:11 GMT

China 'losing edge' as low-cost manufacturer, says KPMG

China is losing its edge as the world's cheapest place to manufacture goods, a new report suggests.

Indonesia and Bangladesh are benefiting most as rising costs in China force firms to switch production, it says.

The report by consultants KPMG says that minimum wage levels in China are now four times greater than other places in South and South East Asia.

However, the report says China can defend its position because of its productivity and infrastructure.

China is still dominant in the production of goods such as consumer electronics and furniture.

But the report says that production of clothing and footwear is now more widely dispersed across Asia, with Indonesia and Vietnam specialising in the production of footwear and India developing a niche in hand-stitched fabrics and metalware.

According to KPMG estimates, Indonesia's footwear exports grew by 42% in 2010 to $2.1bn (£1.3bn), while Bangladesh saw textiles exports grow by 43% to more than $18bn in the year to July 2011.

"Sourcing goods in China purely because of ultra-low costs is a thing of the past," said Nick Debnam, KPMG's Asia-Pacific chair.

"With demand still soft in many Western consumer markets, it is also proving difficult for companies to pass on higher costs to consumers. This changing environment is forcing companies to reassess sourcing strategies."

Rising wages

China is battling its highest rate of inflation in three years although the latest consumer prices data from August suggests that the rate is beginning to ease.

While much of China's manufacturing has begun to migrate westwards from the south and east of the country to cheaper provinces such as Sichuan, the report says the cost advantages from such moves inland may be short-lived.

KPMG says that China's increasing manufacturing costs are more to do with the country's demographics.

China's one-child policy has resulted in a "sudden and serious" shortage of the labour that gives workers in both the richer coastal provinces and poorer inland areas the leverage to demand higher wages.

The report was based on interviews with 12 major multinational companies including Ikea, B&Q-owner Kingfisher and Hong Kong's Li & Fung, which sources goods for big-name clients including Wal-Mart.

Will 3D printing revolutionise manufacturing?

2011-07-29T06:09:00.001-07:00

By Peter Day Presenter, In Business
27 July 2011 Last updated at 23:09 GMT

With the creation of many products - including building materials - now possible at the touch of a button, will 3D printing sound the death knell for mass production?

In a way there is nothing new about 3D printing.

For several decades it has been called "rapid prototyping": a quick way of making one-off items from fused plastic or metal powder, using expensive computer-controlled lasers that are at the heart of the "printers".

But now 3D printing is coming into its own, and is being taken seriously as a manufacturing process by very big corporations.

For 100 years, the manufacturing industry has been dominated by the idea of mass production.

That was devised by Henry Ford in Detroit in the early 1900s to tackle a severe shortage of skilled labour when he wanted to start making the revolutionary Model T automobiles.

Ford's factories melted iron ore, stamped out car bodies, used interchangeable parts to turn out millions of cars in, as the famous phrase has it, "any colour so long as it's black".

The moving production line came to be the emblem of the new manufacturing era, generating torrents of products and foods for a new mass market of consumers.

But now 3D printing is beginning to change the mass production model that so dominated the 20th century.

It is now called additive manufacturing, to distinguish it from old-fashioned subtractive manufacturing, that is the shaving away or moulding blocks of raw metal to make engineered components.

You might have laughed if 100 years ago In Business had come back from Detroit convinced that Ford had successfully combined the idea of interchangeable parts from the American small arms industry with the moving line from the slaughterhouses of Chicago meat packers to create a revolutionary system of mass production that would be adopted almost everywhere else in business.

But what Henry Ford started was no joke, and nor is 3D printing today.

You get some sense of the potential from the pioneers at Loughborough University.

'Cost effective'

Neil Hopkinson is senior lecturer in the Rapid Manufacturing Research Group.

His lab is full of impressive 3D printing machines, decked out with samples of the work they are trying out.

From demonstrating trial components, it does not take long before he is talking about the huge impact the process could have on the way businesses work.

"It could make off-shore manufacturing half way round the world far less cost effective than doing it at home, if users can get the part they need printed off just round the corner at a 3D print shop on the high street.

"Rather than stockpile spare parts and components in locations all over the world," he argues, "the designs could be costlessly stored in virtual computer warehouses waiting to be printed locally when required."

Just across the Loughborough campus at the Civil and Building Engineering Department is Neil's colleague Richard Buswell, who shows me an extraordinary three-storey rig designed to "print" buildings.

It squirts concrete out of a nozzle controlled by a computer, using the concrete just like a conventional printer would use ink, but in three dimensions, building up a structure layer by layer.

The construction industry is rather conservative; many building sites still look much as they did in Roman times.

If Richard and his colleagues can prove it works at Loughborough - and convince potential users - additive manufacturing could change the industry.

One potentially big change, in construction as in other activities, is to place designers right at the centre of activity.

"Rapid manufacturing is all about putting the power of making things back in the hands of the architects," says Richard Buswell.

"Young architects currently training are the ones who will take the techniques through into mainstream architecture."

The EADS aircraft plant near Bristol is already exploiting this technology, and announced earlier this year that it had used additive layer manufacturing to produce a bike.

When I was there I saw machines turning out complex satellite parts which are lighter in weight and cheaper to make than conventionally-machined components.

'Disruptive' potential

"It's new materials, it's new design processes, it's a new way of looking at manufacturing," says Ian Risk, head of Innovation Works at EADS in the UK.

"We have had the processes of subtractive manufacturing built into our ways of working, the way we think about components from the outset. We could change things significantly, and save money."

But first entrenched companies will have to wake up to the potential of the process.

That may be an uncomfortable experience for most business people, trained and practiced in the mass production way of doing things.

Engineer Will Sillar is a partner at the Legerwood management consultancy which advises companies on 3D printing, something he believes has all sorts of disruptive potential:

"Up to 50 percent of the working capital of a business is currently tied up in stock and working capital," he says.

"Eliminate that, and the finance director is going to be the happiest man in the world."

But introducing disruptive change is not an easy thing to do, warns Stuart Jackson, UK manager of the German company EOS, a leading maker of 3D manufacturing machines.

"If you've spent years in your career to establish a manufacturing process, and then something comes along that could throw it out of the window, it's not necessarily attractive.

"It needs to be an open mind to actually take it on board."

3D printing may have reached that vital threshold. Now it needs companies and people who are open-minded enough to turn upside down the traditional ways of making things and, eventually, of running businesses.

Folha artificial pode gerar energia para alimentar casas

2011-04-01T08:36:00.001-07:00

Químico do MIT consegue hidrolisar água com materiais acessíveis
Folha artificial pode gerar energia para alimentar casas
30.03.2011 - 20:11 Por PÚBLICO

Um pedaço de sílica do tamanho de uma
carta de jogo, quatro litros de água, um
catalisador e o Sol é tudo o que é preciso para
dar energia barata a uma casa ao longo de
um dia. A mini-obra de engenharia foi
apresentada recentemente pelo químico do
MIT Daniel Nocera na Reunião Anual da
Sociedade Americana de Química, na
Califórnia.

O processo assemelha-se ao que acontece nas folhas das árvores. As plantas utilizam a energia
do Sol para produzir compostos orgânicos, um processo chamado fotossíntese. Durante este
processo conseguem hidrolisar a água – transformar uma molécula de água (H20) em oxigénio e
hidrogénio – e libertam oxigénio.
A folha artificial da equipa de Nocera é também capaz de hidrolisar a água. É feita de três
bandas de sílica. O material tem que estar submerso em água e directamente exposto ao Sol.
Quando isso acontecer, capta a energia do Sol, o que provoca a hidrólise da água. O começo da
reacção acontece devido a um catalisador que a equipa desenvolveu e está presente na folha
sílica.
Depois, é necessário recolher este hidrogénio e oxigénio para produzir electricidade a partir de
células de combustível. O que ainda não foi desenvolvido. "Tem que haver algum truque de
engenharia para recolher os gases que vêm da sílica", disse Nocera durante a apresentação.
"Ainda não sabemos como é que isso se faz."
O conceito não é novo. O primeiro aparelho semelhante foi construído em 1998 por John Turner,
do Laboratório Nacional de Energias Renováveis dos Estados Unidos, em Boulder, no Colorado.
"Mas usava materiais realmente caros", disse Nocera. "Coisas que a NASA utilizaria."
Neste caso os materiais são mais baratos e não é necessária água pura. "Pode-se usar água
vinda da natureza, o que é muito importante em partes do mundo em que é caro obter este tipo
de água", disse.
A equipa já testou durante 45 horas seguidas as placas de sílica e elas mantêm a mesma
actividade. De acordo com o cientista, este sistema é capaz de converter 5,5 por cento de
energia do sol em combustível de hidrogénio. Segundo os cálculos, serão necessários 3,78 litros
de água para gerar energia para uma casa durante um dia.
Para já, o catalisador desenvolvido para estas folhas artificiais já vai ser utilizado para dar
energia no terceiro mundo através dos painéis solares convencionais que ficam mais baratos
com esta nova tecnologia. O grupo internacional Tata, sediado na Índia, já fez um contrato com
Nocera e está interessado na tecnologia. "No final de 2011, vamos ter protótipos destes painéis,
provavelmente na Índia", disse o químico.

Vêm aí os micróbios programáveis

2011-01-18T02:29:00.001-08:00

Vêm aí os micróbios programáveis

Investigadores da Universidade da Califórnia e da Life Technologies estão a desenvolver um software que permite programar micróbios para a execução de diferentes funções.

A bactéria E.coli pode tornar-se programável em breve

A investigação liderada pela Universidade da Califórnia tem por objetivo o desenvolvimento de um sistema que permite criar automaticamente "circuitos genéticos" em micróbios, informa a Technology Review.

Com a inclusão destes circuitos, os investigadores norte-americanos acreditam poder controlar os volumes e a variedade de genes, proteínas ou biomoléculas que são consumidos ou transportados por organismos microscópicos. Desta forma, torna-se possível determinar as tarefas que cada micróbio ou outro ser minúsculo deverá executar em cada momento ou cenário.

O desenvolvimento de um software específico tornaria mais fácil a vida aos bioengenheiros que têm como missão programar organismos microscópicos. Atualmente, a equipa liderada pelo investigador Christopher Voigt tem vindo a testar o novo conceito em bactérias E.Coli (responsáveis por intoxicações alimentares e afins), tendo já criado componentes que servem de circuitos básicos que, mais tarde, poderão ser usados pelo software que está a ser desenvolvido em parceria com a Life Technologies.

Quando o novo software estiver concluído, programar um micróbio será muito parecido com o que já se faz ao desenvolver uma nova aplicação, garantem os investigadores norte-americanos. A Technology Review publicou um vídeo sobre a investigação.

China assalta Internet durante 18 minutos

2010-11-18T03:42:00.001-08:00

China assalta Internet durante 18 minutos

Especialistas em cibercrime encontraram indícios que provam que a China controlou a Internet durante 18 minutos em abril, tendo absorvido 15% do tráfego global, incluindo informação do exército amerciano.

De acordo com a Gizmodo, no dia 8 de abril de 2010, os servidores da empresa de comunicações estatal China Telecom, enviaram mensagens a ISPs que declaravam que a sua rede era a mais rápida do momento.

Tendo em conta que a transmissão de informação na Internet funciona de acordo com uma política de confiança entre ISPs que visa a eficiência e rapidez da transmissão de conteúdos, outros servidores redirecionaram o tráfego de informação para a rede chinesa.

A enorme quantidade de informação absorvida pela rede chinesa foi, seguidamente, devolvida sem atraso e sem problemas nas redes de comunicações, o que pode afastar a hipótese de acidente. Pensa-se, assim, que esta ação tenha sido deliberada, de forma a capturar o máximo de informação possível.

Ainda não são conhecidos quais os motivos que levaram a China Telecom a absorver tanta quantidade de dados, nem o que aconteceu à informação propriamente dita enquanto esteve sob alçada chinesa.

China's C919 passenger jet wins first orders

2010-11-16T23:04:00.001-08:00

16 November 2010 Last updated at 12:01 GMT

China's C919 passenger jet wins first orders

BBC

A breakthrough first order has been made for 100 Chinese-made jetliners.

Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (Comac) has taken its first orders for the C919 passenger planes from three domestic airlines and General Electric's leasing arm.

The orders are being seen as a vote of confidence in state-owned Comac.

The move may also mark a challenge to the dominance of Boeing and Airbus who have virtual control of the trillion dollar aircraft industry.

Comac expects to sell more than 2,000 C919s over the next 20 years.

Huge market

China is the world's fastest growing major economy and its domestic air travel market is set to expand rapidly over the next decade.

A billion Chinese are predicted to be flying for business and leisure in the near future and China is keen to reduce its reliance on foreign planes.

"The customer signing lays a market foundation for the C919, which has smoothly entered the engineering development phase," Comac chairman Zhang Qingwei said in a statement.

Speaking at a Comac press conference to announce the order, the company's chief accountant, Tian Min, said: "In the future we expect to see 3,000 new planes here in China and more than 30,000 new planes globally. So this is a very big market."

The model, which has 166 seats competes with Boeing's 737 and the Airbus A320.

According to estimates by Boeing, this segment of the market could be worth $1.7trillion over the next 20 years.

But neither Airbus nor Boeing showed signs of being troubled by the entry of the Chinese into their market.

Speaking at the Zhuhai Air Show in China, Laurence Barron, Airbus's top China executive, said: "We were born into competition 40 years ago and now we are number one. Frankly we are used to it. Where's the big deal?"

And Jim Simon, Boeing's vice-president for China commercial sales, said: "It makes the industry better, frankly, because it makes us sharper at our game."

Comac expects to start building the aircraft next year, followed by a maiden flight in 2014 with first delivery in 2016.

Operadora móvel norte-americana rejeita fabricantes chineses

2010-11-08T22:56:00.001-08:00

Operadora móvel norte-americana rejeita fabricantes chineses

A operadora móvel norte-americana Sprint rejeita os fabricantes chineses Huawei e ZTE devido ao aviso da alegada falta de segurança feito pelo governo norte-americano.

A Sprint, a terceira maior operadora móvel norte-americana, que pretende renovar a rede de comunicações, rejeitou as propostas das empresas chinesas Huawei e ZTE, segundo a Computerworld.

Apesar de terem apresentado o projeto mais barato relativamente aos rivais Alcatel, Ericsson e Samsung, as propostas da Huawei e ZTE foram rejeitadas devido ao receio de possíveis ligações das empresas com o governo e o exército chinês. Ligações que, alegadamente, poderiam representar perigo para a própria rede de comunicações norte-americanas.

Germans argue over 'failure to integrate'

2010-11-08T05:15:00.001-08:00

Germans argue over 'failure to integrate'

news | 16:59 UK time, Sunday, 7 November 2010

Thilo Sarrazin is not charismatic, but he has become a man of influence. He has changed the debate over immigration in Germany.

In his view "suppressing emotion is even more dangerous" than broaching subjects that were recently largely off-limits.

Others, like analyst Prof Klaus Kocks, have issued a note of caution. "As a German," he told me, "you have to be more careful than others. You have to accept our history."

I met Thilo Sarrazin at his old school in Recklinghausen. He was there to promote his book, Germany Abolishes Itself. He is both reviled and admired for its controversial thesis.

Outside the school were a handful of protesters. One banner accused Mr Sarrazin of acting like the Nazis. There were many more, however, who had bought tickets to hear him. His book has sold close to a million copies.

His essential message is that Muslims are either "unwilling or unable to integrate" into Western society. "If the majority of migrants from non-Muslim countries don't have any obvious problem integrating," he told a packed hall, "then the failure to integrate on the part of migrants from Muslim countries can't be due to a fault on our side - because all are treated equally. It has to be because of a characteristic of Muslims themselves."

He is not a great speaker. He deals in statistics. He recognises that some Muslims have integrated, but he believes Germany has gone too far in trying to accommodate them. "People who obey laws are welcome to live here," he told me, but he wants to end Muslim immigration.

For those already in Germany, welfare payments would be dependent on learning German and acquiring language skills. Parents who do not send their children to school (for religious reasons) should be fined. Forced marriages should be forbidden. His message is that Muslim migrants must accept German laws, the constitution and the values of their new society.

His comments have set off a huge debate. "We have a very serious shift in discussion," Prof Kocks told me. What makes his book sales all the more extraordinary is that Thilo Sarrazin said, as part of the publicity for the book, that Jews had a certain gene. He was condemned by mainstream politicians and the remark led to his resignation from the board of the Bundesbank. Even so, the public made his book a bestseller.

Last month, Chancellor Angela Merkel said multiculturalism had "failed utterly". What she meant was that some immigrants and others who had lived in Germany for some years were not integrating. Last week at a regional conference for her party in Essen she said: "Of course integration has changed our society, but not at the expense of our core values... We are Christians and this informs everything we do... We are for diversity but we will not abandon our basic beliefs."

What seems to be changing is what is expected from immigrants. The past idea of multiculturalism was that migrants could live in their new societies much as they had done previously in their home countries. Now the emphasis is on them adapting. The fear is that otherwise there will be separate, parallel communities.

So mainstream politicians are speaking out. Joachim Herrmann is the interior minister in Bavaria. His party, the conservative CSU, is in coalition with that of Angela Merkel. He told us in an interview: "You have to accept our laws... Just because you come from a different culture where a man can treat his wife differently, you can't do that here. There can be no compromise."

The premier in Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, has called for an end to immigration from "Turkey and other Arab countries".

Muslims are fearful of where this new tone is heading. Nurhan Solkan is general secretary of the Council of Muslims. She says that the views of the far right have now entered the political mainstream. She points out that many immigrants have integrated well. Many will tell you how when they first came to Germany, no one wanted them to integrate. They were guest-workers. They were barred from citizenship. Nurhan Solkan said more and more people of Turkish origin were moving back to Turkey.

Dr Kocks told me: "I don't want to go back to nationalism again." He does not think that is happening. There is no growth in far-right parties. But he says there is a deep anger in society over stories, for instance, that some female teachers have been shown disrespect by Muslim boys.

Prof Jurgen Habermas, writing in the New York Times last week, said Germany was being roiled by "waves of political turmoil over integration, multiculturalism and the role of the 'Leitkultur', or guiding national culture." He said it was reinforcing trends towards xenophobia. He sees clear dangers in getting immigrants to assimilate "the values of the majority culture and to adopt its customs".

But that is the new mood and, judging by the success of Thilo Sarrazin's book, it seems that many Germans want minorities to positively embrace being German.

Análise: A China "é uma boa amiga"

2010-11-06T03:41:00.001-07:00

Análise
A China "é uma boa amiga"
Por Teresa de Sousa

Como olha a China para Portugal? Talvez fosse melhor começar por perguntar como olha a China para a Europa. Do ponto de vista político, as relações entre os dois colossos económicos não atravessaram nos últimos tempos o seu melhor momento. Há dois anos, quando os líderes europeus que contam aos olhos da China receberam o Dalai Lama, Pequim reagiu nos seus padrões de fúria diplomática habituais. As relações esfriaram. Hoje, as autoridade chineses procuram "estabilizá-las". Hu Jintao chega a Lisboa depois de três dias de visita cordial ao seu homólogo Nicolas Sarkozy. Em 2008 cancelou uma cimeira com a União Europeia durante a presidência francesa.

Há ainda duas "pedras" no relacionamento entre Pequim e Bruxelas. A primeira é o embargo da venda de armas, decretado pelos EUA e pela Europa depois de Tiananmen. Quando, em 2005, por iniciativa do então Presidente Chirac, a Europa colocou a questão sobre a mesa, a pressão americana foi suficiente para a fazer recuar. Hoje, essa pressão é menor mas há divisões dentro da União e um consenso sobre a necessidade de coordenar a decisão com Washington.

A segunda questão é europeia. A UE ainda não concedeu à China o estatuto de economia de mercado, que lhe abriria ainda mais os mercados europeus. Tem ainda quatro anos para utilizar esta arma. Em 2014, as regras da OMC, à qual a China aderiu em 2001, garantem-lhe automaticamente esse estatuto.

Em pano de fundo, há um clima difuso de desconfiança mútua que Jonathan Holslag, investigador do Institute of Contemporary China Studies de Bruxelas, resume assim ao PÚBLICO: "A Europa tem a percepção de que a China está a ficar cada vez mais arrogante. Os chineses não acreditam que sejamos um protagonista de uma ordem mundial em mudança." A crise reforçou ambas as percepções.

Mas a China não deixa de ter interesse "na estabilidade monetária" da Europa", porque a Europa é o principal mercado para as suas exportações, diz ainda Holslag. "Há uma real preocupação em Pequim com os problemas das economias americana e europeia e a forma como isso pode afectar o desenvolvimento económico do pais". Outros analistas dizem que não quer estar sozinha diante da omnipresença do dólar.

2. E isso leva-nos até à presente crise a à forma como Pequim está a desempenhar o papel de "melhor amigo" das economias mais vulneráveis da Europa. Holslag de novo: "Pequim desencadeou uma espécie de ofensiva de charme em relação a alguns Estados individuais. Os chineses pensam que Bruxelas está a ser demasiado dura nas questões do comércio e querem reverter esta tendência através dos Estados-membros."

"A China utiliza os seus investimentos na Grécia, na Hungria ou na República Checa como ponto de partida para construir a sua credibilidade junto dos actores mais poderosos da União", diz François Godement, de Sciences Po, ao Monde. Poder-se-ia acrescentar à lista Portugal ou a Irlanda. Holslag acrescenta que "a crise é também vista em Pequim como uma oportunidade para que as empresas chinesas penetrem no mercado europeu". Pequim não se limitou a comprar dívida soberana à Grécia, Espanha, Portugal e Irlanda. Ofereceu investimentos e negócios. Quando Wen Jiabao, o primeiro-ministro chinês, chegou em Outubro a Atenas, foi recebido com passadeira vermelha. Lembrou depois em Bruxelas que a China tinha "agido como um amigo" quando outros investidores fugiam. Tem reservas gigantescas de divisas e estes países precisam desesperadamente de investimento estrangeiro. Isto não significa, dizem fontes diplomáticas portuguesas, que o interesse chinês se concentre apenas neste países. "Quer colocar um pé na Europa. Comprou a Volvo na Suécia. Está no Leste." O que não deve ser visto com desconfiança: "A China está à procura de oportunidades. A crise é uma oportunidade."

3. Pode Portugal aproveitar essa oportunidade? É um dos países da UE com uma pareceria estratégica com a China. Os outros são a Alemanha, França, Espanha e Itália. Os laços históricos explicam esta relevância nas contas de Pequim. Lisboa tem-se mostrado uma amiga "fiel". O Presidente que agora recebe Hu Jintao não recebeu o Dalai Lama nem a diplomacia portuguesa gosta de fazer muito barulho com os direitos humanos. É pelo levantamento do embargo de armas e defende uma conclusão rápida das negociações para o estatuto de economia de mercado. A China é recebida hoje como "uma grande amiga".

Lonely Planet acaba de editar um guia de viagens com as suas escolhas

2010-11-04T01:13:00.001-07:00

Editora lança guia com sugestões para 2011
Nova Iorque e Albânia entre os melhores destinos turísticos segundo o "Lonely Planet"

O Lonely Planet acaba de editar um guia de viagens com as suas escolhas dos melhores locais para visitar em 2011, com listas de cidades, países, regiões, locais com melhor custo-benefício e experiências "a não perder".

No livro "Best in Travel 2011" há valores seguros como Nova Iorque – a primeira escolha na lista de cidades – e surpresas como a Albânia – número um na lista de países a visitar. A escolha da Big Apple é justificada com a abertura do memorial nacional do 11 de Setembro, enquanto o país dos Balcãs vale pelas suas "praias azuis, boa cozinha, locais históricos, vida nocturna, aventuras não muito caras e a possibilidade de viagens não planeadas à moda antiga com locais que recebem turistas, ainda uma novidade, de braços abertos", explica o guia.

Na lista das cidades, Tânger, em Marrocos, e Telavive, Israel, ocupam os lugares seguintes. A "cidade branca" marroquina, na costa, "está reluzente, já tem menos charlatões nas ruas e até os taxistas são bem-educados", garante o Lonely Planet. "Uma nova Tânger com estilo tem uma comunidade de arte dinâmica, edifícios renovados, bons locais para compras e novos restaurantes chiques."

Já em Telavive "há mais bares do que sinagogas, Deus é um DJ e o corpo de toda a gente é um templo", descreve o guia de viagens. A cidade mais cosmopolita de Israel é conhecida pelo hedonismo, cena gay e é ainda o local onde floresce a maioria da arte, filme e música do país.

Seguem-se ainda Wellington, Nova Zelândia (4º lugar: "tem mais bares, cafés e restaurantes per capita do que Nova Iorque" e o país vai receber o mundial de Rugby em 2011), Valência, Espanha (5ª posição, uma cidade à beira do Mediterrâneo cada vez mais internacional que "gozou a sua idade de ouro dois séculos inteiros antes do resto de Espanha"), e Iquitos, Peru (6ª lugar, a "megápolis do Amazonas peruano", "um antigo posto de comércio para as tribos da floresta, em que o caos do mercado e o tráfego rápido dos barcos fluviais conspiram para encher a cidade de uma energia viciante").

Para o final do 'top ten' ficam Ghent, na Bélgica: "pode ser a melhor cidade europeia que nunca pensou visitar, num país que continua a ser criminosamente ignorado"; Deli, na Índia, renovada após os jogos da Commonwealth e que comemora este ano o centenário da sua fundação; Newcastle, Austrália, e ainda Chiang Mai, a cidade da cultura da Tailândia.

Entre Cabo Verde, Vanutau ou Japão

Mas se a lista das cidades começa com um valor seguro, a lista dos países dá preferência a um destino "off the beaten track". À Albânia segue-se o mais popular Brasil, "que está a ter uma enchente de novos projectos com investimento de milhares de milhões de dólares" na preparação para o campeonato do mundo de futebol de 2014 e as olimpíadas de 2016, e em terceiro lugar aparece Cabo Verde, "um arquipélago que parece ter nascido de uma mãe caribenha e pai africano".

O Panamá, que está "na encruzilhada entre o século XXI e as idades mais antigas", está no quarto lugar e a Bulgária em quinto por ser "uma alternativa mais barata para europeus que procuram praias desertas", locais históricos e uma crescente indústria de vinho. Mais exótico é Vanuatu, em sexto lugar: 83 ilhas no Oceano Pacífico, um destino bom para quem procura "experiências autênticas".

Itália ocupa o sétimo lugar – por mais problemas políticos ou económicos que tenha o país continua a ser uma escolha sólida –, e a Tanzânia em oitavo, porque para além da "panópolia de vida selvagem africana", tem ainda uma "colecção inigualável de parques e reservas naturais".

Em nono lugar surge a Síria, país árabe que começa a sair do isolamento em relação ao ocidente e que é um dos mais seculares da região, e o Japão, em décimo, porque "apesar dos bifes de carne de Kobe a cem dólares e o ocasional momento 'Lost in Translation', o Japão é surpreendentemente acessível e fácil de usar".

Para além destas listas centrais, o livro inclui ainda os dez melhores destinos preço-qualidade do próximo ano (o primeiro é o Bangladesh), as dez melhores regiões (o Sinai, no Egipto) as dez melhores coisas para fazer em 2011 ("Abraçar uma árvore na Amazónia") e mais de 35 acontecimentos apresentados mês a mês, do Carnaval do Mindelo à passagem de ano em Copacabana, no Rio de Janeiro.

Portugal, um país à deriva

2010-11-02T05:41:00.001-07:00

Um excelente retrato do estado do nosso país, pelo que deve ser lida esta análise. Efectivamente, Portugal tem sido governado, desde 1974, por uma série de políticos incompetentes, muitos dos quais formados em Direito ou Engenharia, que nada sabem de Economia, Gestão ou Finanças... Eis o resultado!

João Rodrigues

Portugal, um país à deriva

31.10.2010 - 11:43 Por Nuno Fernandes

Na data deste artigo, a dívida pública nacional atinge um valor superior a 130 mil milhões de euros. Em números, é algo como 130.000.000.000 euros. É um valor assustador.

Os mercados internacionais continuam a demarcar-se do Estado português e da sua dívida. Vale a pena analisar alguns dados. Portugal é neste momento o sétimo país do mundo mais arriscado. Pertencemos actualmente a um top 10 de risco que reúne nomes ilustres como Venezuela, Dubai, Grécia e Iraque. Portugal é considerado actualmente como duplamente mais arriscado que Rússia, Israel ou Colômbia.

Face a este panorama, o Governo nacional demorou mais de seis meses a reagir. Alega o nosso primeiro-ministro que não estava claro para ele que fosse necessário tomar qualquer medida, pois eventualmente, a situação internacional melhoraria, e seriam então desnecessárias quaisquer medidas reformadoras do nosso sistema fiscal moribundo. Em finanças, este tipo de atitude tem apenas um nome - especulação. Só que, infelizmente, neste caso, a especulação foi efectuada com o dinheiro dos cidadãos e empresas. As implicações reais culminam na quase impossibilidade de qualquer empresa portuguesa obter financiamento internacional.

Entre 2011 e 2013, Portugal terá de emitir cerca de 60.000 milhões de euros de dívida pública (75% visam substituir dívida que entretanto chegará à sua maturidade, e os restantes 15.000 milhões visam pagar os défices públicos que irão existir entre 2011 e 2013). Só em 2011 Portugal terá de emitir cerca de 40.000 milhões de euros de dívida pública, dado que tem sucessivamente insistido em emissões de curto prazo, que chegarão à sua maturidade em 2011, e terão de ser renovadas. A estes valores somam-se mais de 15.000 milhões de euros de emissões de dívida a ser emitida pelos principais bancos nacionais. Contudo, estes que dependem a quase 100% da credibilidade da República. Se a nossa situação se deteriorar, os mercados internacionais podem ficar completamente fechados para alguns destes bancos, o que terá consequências muito nefastas na economia real.

Portugal paga hoje mais 4% de juro anual do que a Alemanha. Em 2007 este spread era de apenas 0,4%. Como qualquer família com crédito bancário compreende, um aumento de mais de 3% no juro a pagar tem um forte impacto no orçamento familiar. No caso de Portugal, relativamente a 2007 e a manterem-se os valores actuais de risco do país, iremos pagar anualmente mais 4000 a 6000 milhões de euros em juros adicionais. Em termos reais, isto significa que o custo do descalabro orçamental em que nos encontramos, é superior ao custo de um novo aeroporto de Lisboa por ano.

Neste contexto, o que foi feito entretanto? Uma redução das despesas onde é mais fácil (salários de funcionários públicos), e um aumento do imposto mais penalizador da classe média - o IVA. Ao mesmo tempo, em 2009 Portugal foi um dos países do mundo que mais contratou parcerias público-privadas (PPP). Como exemplo, em 2009, Portugal registou um volume de PPP três vezes superior ao da França. Infelizmente, o investimento público directo foi praticamente cancelado, e as PPP passaram a ser a regra em vez da excepção. Contudo, estas PPP têm encargos para os contribuintes muito superiores, e fazem também parte da dívida pública indirecta. Em finanças, chama-se a isto engenharia financeira. Ao entrarem sucessivamente em PPP do tipo empréstimo subprime, os sucessivos governos massajam as estatísticas, enganam a Comissão Europeia, mas acima de tudo, penhoram o futuro do país, e qualquer réstia de esperança em melhorar a nossa competitividade e nível de vida. Nos mercados internacionais, este comportamento vem agravar ainda mais o problema da dívida pública. A passagem do fundo de pensões da PT para o Estado tem também custos futuros elevadíssimos para o Estado. Quando a gestão da PT aplaude e os seus sindicatos se congratulam, parece claro que todos ficam a ganhar à excepção do contribuinte. Uma vez mais, a busca do lucro especulativo de curto prazo (redução do défice com medidas artificiais), sobrepõe-se como habitual à busca de uma solução criadora de valor de longo prazo.

Estamos num caminho insustentável. Estamos há 10 anos a divergir da UE. Fomos ultrapassados por 9 dos últimos 10 países que aderiram depois de nós. Quanto tempo mais vamos ter de divergir para que os nossos governantes deixem de seguir a solução fácil, engenharia financeira e transferência de riqueza para determinados grupos da nossa sociedade? Estimativas internacionais apontam apenas para 2037 a entrada no grupo dos países com dívida pública inferior a 60%. Efectuando algumas simulações em cenários bem mais optimistas (assumindo que as medidas apresentadas pelo Governo têm sucesso; a partir de 2013-2014 se atinja um balanço equilibrado; crescimento económico volte a atingir os 3% dentro de 4 anos) só em 2021 Portugal entrará novamente na lista de países com menos de 60% de dívida pública. Estes cenários revelam custos elevadíssimos, se o novo regime de procedimentos automáticos contra países incumpridores e reincidentes em matéria de indisciplina orçamental for aprovado pela União Europeia.

Em conclusão, parece evidente que as medidas de curto prazo apresentadas recentemente não são uma solução duradoira para os graves problemas da nação. Portugal tem de agir, e comunicar ao mercado que irá a partir daqui ter uma gestão financeira rigorosa. É tempo de parar com engenharias financeiras destruidoras de valor. Por que não utilizar algumas das boas práticas das nossas melhores empresas para a gestão do património público? Foi desastrosa a gestão da imagem pública da República nos mercados internacionais este ano. No entanto, temos várias das nossas empresas reconhecidas como excelentes em termos internacionais, e a receberem prémios de excelência em investor relations. Também a Espanha teve um comportamento exemplar este ano, com um roadshow muito bem sucedido, e elaborado com um elevado nível de profissionalismo. Em Portugal o que foi feito?

professor de Finanças na IMD, escola de gestão suíça

Terão de pagar no prazo de 30 ou de 60 dias às pequenas empresas alimentares

2010-10-26T00:35:00.001-07:00

Terão de pagar no prazo de 30 ou de 60 dias às pequenas empresas alimentares
Grandes retalhistas obrigados a pagar a horas a partir de
Janeiro
26.10.2010 - 07:27 Por Raquel Martins

As relações entre as grandes empresas de
distribuição e os pequenos fornecedores e
produtores vão ter novas regras a partir de
Janeiro do próximo ano.

Os hipermercados e os supermercados terão que pagar no prazo máximo de 30 ou de 60 dias
às micro e pequenas empresas que lhes fornecem produtos alimentares, sob pena de pagarem
uma multa.
O diploma que institui as novas regras foi publicado ontem em Diário da República e obriga que
os contratos de compra, venda ou fornecimento de bens alimentares tenham prazos de
pagamento relativamente curtos, desde que o credor seja uma pequena ou microempresa (cujo
estatuto tem que estar certificado pelo Instituto de Apoio às Pequenas e Médias Empresas e à
Inovação. Quando estiverem em causa produtos alimentares perecíveis, o pagamento deve
ocorrer no prazo de 30 dias, após a entrega dos bens e da factura. Nos contratos de
fornecimento de bens não perecíveis o prazo é de 60 dias.
Nos casos em que é acordada a prática de resumo de facturas entre o fornecedor e os grandes
distribuidores e desde que esse período não exceda um mês, o prazo é contado a partir do final
do período a que o resumo das facturas diz respeito. Ficam obrigadas a estes prazos de
pagamento mais apertados as empresas com mais de 50 trabalhadores "cujo volume de
negócios anual seja superior a dez milhões de euros". Quem não cumprir terá que pagar juros
de mora, além de uma coima que oscilará entre os 150 e os 3740,98 euros para as pessoas
singulares, e entre os 500 e os 44.891,81 euros para as pessoas colectivas. E caberá à
Autoridade de Segurança Alimentar e Económica (ASAE) efectuar a fiscalização das novas
regras.
As medidas agora publicadas vêm responder aos apelos dos pequenos fornecedores da
indústria agro-alimentar e da própria Confederação dos Agricultores de Portugal (CAP), que
antes do Verão tinham pedido ao Governo que impusesse às grandes superfícies um prazo
máximo de pagamento mais curto.
Agora, o Governo vem reconhecer que no sector alimentar é "especialmente notório o pesonegocial desproporcionado que algumas empresas adquiriram, o que lhes permite impor aos
fornecedores prazos de pagamento dilatados e dificilmente conciliáveis com as suas
necessidades de liquidez a curto prazo". Nesse contexto, o diploma pretende "criar melhores
condições económicas para as micro e pequenas empresas fornecedoras de bens alimentares",
além de "promover o equilíbrio entre produtores, industriais e distribuidores".
As novas regras apenas se aplicam às transacções comerciais efectuadas após a entrada em
vigor do Decreto-Lei n.º 118/2010, que tinha sido aprovado no início de Setembro. Na altura, a
Associação Portuguesa das Empresas de Distribuição (APED) afirmou que, "com intervenções
legislativas com esta, limitando a iniciativa privada na organização empresarial", havia "o risco
de diminuir a competitividade e atractividade das empresas portuguesas".

Presently there are three major firms that are leading the research into hair cloning:

2010-10-21T08:11:00.001-07:00

Intercytex

The company closed in the end of 2009 and sold most of it's assets to ARI.

Intercytex was a major UK based Company that researched how to develop stem cells related products. It was also a major fundraiser for hair cloning research.

ICX-TRC is the company's most anticipated product which was hoped to become the 'permanent solution to hair loss'.

The idea of ICX-TRC takes the basics of hair cloning techniques where it will make use of the multiplied dermal papilla cells in order to help stimulate the formation of new hair follicles as well as triggering weakened follicles to grow again. This is done via injecting the cells directly into your scalp at specific locations where the stimulation will take place.

Aderans Research Institute

Aderans Research Institute (ARI) is a company based in Atlanta and Philadelphia. It function as a branch of the BOSLEY Group which is one of the major hair transplant network in the United States. ARI research team is lead by Dr. Washenik and Dr. Stenn, both very well recognized within the field of hair biology and hair restoration.

ARI is currently performing phase II trials of their technique which called 'follicular neogenesis'.This method involves the growing of dermal papilla cells and combining them in culture dishes with Keratinocytes.

ARI is considered the leading company in the research for hair cloning technology.

Follica Bio Labs

Follica is an American company that works under a worldwide license for their technology from the University of Pennsylvania. for developing a new hair cloning technology which is able to provide stimulation for the formation of new hair follicles.

The company is researching a fascinating new approach. The discovery was made by the company's founder, Dr. George Cotsarelis. He found that following a cut to the skin, it is possible to alter the repair cells to perform other tasks in addition to healing the cut, such as the triggering the formation of new hair follicles.

It is a complicated process which by applying a complex protein network known as WNT to small cuts to the skin, new hair begin to sprout out from an area where there was no hair previously.

Histogen Labs

Histogen is a new company that was established in 2007 and seems to have the best chance to be the first to release a preliminary hair cloning product into the market.

The company's flagship product is called Regenica. It is Under the supervision of Dr. Craig Ziering, a top hair transplant surgeon. The product comes as a proprietary liquid that utilizes newborn fibroblast cells which are cultivated in their self made embryonic chamber. After which harvesting the cell's secretion of embryonic proteins with bio factors and growth factors.

Studies have pointed to the fact that when applied onto the skin, these embryonic cells trigger the formation of new hair follicles. But there's more good news, as it also pointed to an increase in diameter (thickness) in existing hairs as well as increasing the amount of hairs growing out from the base of each hair follicle.

At the moment the company focus on obtaining more human safety data in order to allow for further human trials prior launching the product into the market.

Hair Cloning - The future of hair transplants is almost here.

2010-10-21T08:09:00.001-07:00

Losing your hair is something that affect most men and some women. While the treatment options are very expensive
and limited, a new method is currently under heavy research and it looks very promising indeed.
Losing your hair is something that affect most men and some women. Besides the obvious effects on appearance, it can have profound impact on
your self-esteem, self confidence and to an extent how other communicate with you. This is exactly why so many people who lose their hair start
searching for solutions. Currently the options are very limited as you can choose between going bald, spending some money on meds (Minoxidil,
Propecia) that slow down and slightly reverse hair loss or the more permanent although expensive, hair transplant. Although hair transplant can
provide you with an excellent permanent solution, it is very expensive and limited as no new hair is being given to you but instead the hair
follicles are moved from the back of the head into the thinning areas. There are also attempts to extract body hair such as unwanted chest or back
hair and have it transplanted to the head while the transplanted hair takes the hair properties of the region it is transplanted in.
While hair transplants are not a bad option, it does costs a lot of money and even after a few transplants, you may still be limited as to the
density that your hair can be restored to.
Hair cloning is a new concept currently researched mainly by companies like "Aderans Research" and it's recently purchased "Intercytex".
The idea is simple: any cell in our body can multiply. By extracting a relatively small amount of hair follicles, and letting them seat in special
laboratory conditions where they are encouraged to multiply, we can produce unlimited new amount of hair follicles. After 6-8 weeks from the
extraction, the follicles multiply and are ready to be transplanted back into the head. Once this method is perfected, the benefits are countless:
-The hair is yours and therefore it will gain the same properties as the rest of your hair and wouldn't look different. It wouldn't be rejected by
your body as it includes your own genetic markers.
-It is expected that once on the mainstream, the cost for the whole operation would be considerably lower than traditional hair transplants since
there is no need for a big team of surgeons to perform the operation.
-Maybe most importantly, you can have all the hair you can dream of, as there is no limit of newly cloned donor hair. Even better, as you get the
hair density just right, with one procedure and you know it will look natural or better.
Clinical studies are now being taken across several cities in England and the US. The research is currently on the second phase and results are
looking promising. It is estimated by many that before the end of 2012, the procedure would be widely available to the public.
Look here for new press releases on the subject:
HealthKeeper.net aims to deliver up to date information about conditions and their treatments. Due to the huge
complexity of these subject, our aim is to simplify the medical language and summarize the content as much as
possible so ordinary readers could get a quick understanding of the subjects.
Anne Hughes from www.HealthKeeper.net, 13/05/2010

O Powerpoint fomenta a estupidez, diz investigador francês

2010-10-21T08:08:00.001-07:00

Com o livro O pensamento Powerpoint, Franck Frommer queria lançar uma pedrada no charco - e acertou na
Microsoft.
O jornalista francês acaba de lançar um livro que elenca vários episódios e queixas sobre o papel perverso que o
Powerpoint (e, presume-se que também as aplicações equivalentes) têm na transmissão e análise de ideias.
As conclusões do livro são pouco abonatórias tanto para os produtores da aplicação como para os mais de 500 milhões de
potenciais utilizadores do Powerpoint: "Procura-se mais a exibição do que a demonstração e há uma tentativa de hipnotizar
o público e limitar a sua capacidade de raciocínio", declara Franck Frommer, em entrevista ao El Pais.
O autor francês salienta que do ponto de vista tecnológico, o Powerpoint nada tem de errado - é antes o uso viciado da
aplicação que estará a limitar multidões inteiras de pensarem bem no que veem durante conferências, apresentações,
reuniões ou debates.
Fromer dá como prova da capacidade estupidificante do Powerpoint a facilidade com que as pessoas discursam sobre um
determinado tema, quando estão em público. Até porque muitas dessas pessoas simplesmente têm de decorar o slogans e
frases curtas que acompanham os diapositivos que são apresentados.
"Em muita organizações, quem usa uma apresentação em PowerPoint não se sente responsável por aquilo que diz. Essas
pessoas consideram que não estão comprometidas com o que dizem porque simplesmente não foram elas que criaram
essas aplicações", acrescenta Frommer, lembrando que o uso de apresentações criadas por terceiros já é um hábito
generalizado nos países desenvolvidos.
O livro agora editado retoma e dá voz a críticas que várias personalidades conhecidas proferiram no passado sobre o
PowerPoint (do general Stanley McChrystal que considera o PowerPoint o maior inimigo do exército dos EUA no
Afeganistão ao investigador Edward Tufte que admitiu que a explosão do vaivém Columbia poderia ser evitada caso não se
abusasse dos programas de apresentações).
Em jeito de balanço, Frommer alerta para os perigos do uso do PowerPoint em salas de aula: "anula o intercâmbio e não
permite a interação".
***Este texto foi escrito ao abrigo do novo acordo ortográfico***
Subscreva

Merkel says German multicultural society has failed

2010-10-16T20:50:00.000-07:00

Merkel says German multicultural society has failed

German Chancellor Angela Merkel: "lmmigrants should learn to speak German"

Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

In a speech in Potsdam, she said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work.

Mrs Merkel's comments come amid recent outpourings of strong anti-immigrant feeling from mainstream politicians.

A recent survey showed that more than 30% of Germans believed Germany was "overrun by foreigners".

The study - by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think-tank - also showed that roughly the same number thought that some 16 million of Germany's immigrants or people with foreign origins had come to the country for the social benefits.

Foreign workers

Mrs Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on Saturday that at "the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country... We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone', but this isn't reality.

"And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."

In her speech, the chancellor specifically referred to recent comments by German President Christian Wulff who said that Islam was "part of Germany" like Christianity and Judaism.

Mrs Merkel says Islam is part of Germany but more must be done on integration

While acknowledging that this was the case, Mrs Merkel stressed that immigrants living in Germany needed to do more to integrate, including learning to speak German.

"We should not be a country either which gives the impression to the outside world that those who don't speak German immediately or who were not raised speaking German are not welcome here," she said. "That would do great damage to our country."

By speaking now, Mrs Merkel has now joined the increasingly hot debate on multiculturalism, coming down on the side of those who are uneasy about immigration, says the BBC's correspondent in Berlin, Stephen Evans.

Her comments come a week after she held talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which the two leaders pledged to do more to improve the often poor integration record of Germany's estimated 2.5 million-strong Turkish community.

Earlier this week, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, CSU, said about integration that it was "obvious that immigrants from different cultures like Turkey and Arab countries, all in all, find it harder".

"'Multikulti' is dead," Mr Seehofer said.

In August, Thilo Sarrazin, a senior official at Germany's central bank, said that "no immigrant group other than Muslims is so strongly connected with claims on the welfare state and crime". Mr Sarrazin has since resigned.

Such recent strong anti-immigrant feelings from mainstream politicians come amid an anger in Germany about high unemployment, even if the economy is growing faster than those of its rivals, our correspondent says.

He adds that there also seems to be a new strident tone in the country, perhaps leading to less reticence about no-go-areas of the past.

Portugal está mal, podemos agradecer aos políticos que temos!

2010-10-09T03:36:00.001-07:00

Crise

FMI avisa que Portugal será a pior economia da União Europeia em 2015

09.10.2010 - 08:19 Por Ana Rita Faria

É o país que vai crescer menos, que terá o pior défice orçamental e externo da zona euro e uma das taxas de desemprego mais elevadas. Até a Grécia estará melhor.

Daqui a cinco anos, Portugal será o país que vai ficar pior na fotografia da Europa tirada pelo Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI). Depois de entrar em recessão no próximo ano, a economia vai voltar a crescer em 2012, mas a um ritmo mais lento do que qualquer outro país da União Europeia (UE). Além disso, terá o maior défice orçamental e externo, a quarta pior taxa de desemprego e a quinta maior dívida pública da UE. E já nem mesmo poderá consolar-se com a situação da Grécia, que voltará a crescer acima de dois por cento já em 2013.

Nas suas previsões semestrais apresentadas na passada quarta-feira, o FMI reservou para Portugal o seu cenário mais pessimista. A própria previsão de estagnação para 2011 foi revista em baixa por um dos directores da organização, por não incluir as novas medidas de austeridade anunciadas pelo Governo. Mas, mesmo sem contabilizar o impacto que a nova dose de contenção orçamental terá na economia, as previsões do FMI são já as mais pessimistas de toda a União Europeia.

Logo a partir de 2012 e até 2015 (que é até onde vão as projecções do FMI), Portugal será o país que vai crescer menos na UE. Daqui a cinco anos, o Produto Interno Bruto (PIB) aumentará uns tímidos 1,2 por cento, menos de metade da média prevista para os 27 países da UE (2,77 por cento). A Espanha e a Irlanda, dois países que, tal como Portugal, têm sofrido o ataque dos mercados internacionais sobre a dívida pública, vão regressar ao crescimento já no próximo ano e, em 2015, estarão a crescer 2,01 e 3,49 por cento, respectivamente.

Até a Grécia, que desencadeou a turbulência nos mercados internacionais da dívida pública e teve mesmo de recorrer à ajuda da UE e do FMI, vai recuperar mais rapidamente do que Portugal. Após um plano agressivo de austeridade que manterá o país em recessão no próximo ano, a economia grega terá um crescimento duas vezes superior ao da economia portuguesa em 2015. Nos anos anteriores, a diferença entre os dois países será pouco menor.

Do mesmo modo, a Grécia conseguirá reduzir progressivamente o seu défice até 2015, à semelhança de outros países que estiveram no epicentro da crise da dívida pública como a Espanha e a Irlanda. Portugal só conseguirá atenuar o desequilíbrio das contas públicas até 2013. A partir de 2014, ano em que começam a cair as primeiras facturas das parcerias público-privadas relativas às cinco novas subconcessões da Estradas de Portugal, o défice voltará a subir. Em 2015, atingirá 5,82 por cento do PIB, o pior nível da UE e bastante acima do compromisso de três por cento firmado com a Comissão Europeia.

Uma trajectória semelhante será seguida pelo défice externo português que, já no próximo ano, deverá ultrapassar o da Grécia como o pior entre os países da UE. O cenário vai manter-se até 2015, apesar de o défice ir baixando ano após ano. Na dívida pública, Portugal vai manter-se um dos países com piores indicadores em 2015, apresentando o quinto maior nível de endividamento do Estado na UE, depois de Grécia, Itália, Bélgica e Irlanda.

Recorde no desemprego

Quanto ao desemprego, é e continuará a ser o calcanhar de Aquiles da economia portuguesa. O FMI prevê que a taxa de desemprego bata um novo recorde em 2012, atingindo os 11,6 por cento da população activa. Só a partir daí, o número de pessoas sem trabalho começará a diminuir, atingindo 10,8 por cento em 2015. Ainda assim, esta será a quarta pior taxa de desemprego da UE, depois da de Espanha (15,3), Grécia (13,4) e Letónia (13).

Os dados do FMI mostram ainda que Portugal é um dos quatro países da zona euro que mais viu aumentar o número de desempregados entre 2008 e 2015. No espaço de sete anos, a taxa de desemprego subiu 3,1 pontos percentuais. Nos países da moeda única, só a Grécia, a Espanha e a Irlanda tiveram aumentos superiores.

A agravar o cenário, Portugal não conseguirá recuperar os postos de trabalho perdidos na sequência da crise económica e financeira dos últimos anos, chegando a 2015 com uma taxa de desemprego bastante superior à registada em 2008 - 10,83 contra 7,74 por cento.

Partindo dos actuais números da população activa, isso significa que, daqui a cinco anos, haveria 604 mil de desempregados, ou seja, mais do que os actuais 590 mil. O próprio Banco de Portugal, quando lançou anteontem as suas últimas previsões para a economia, alertou que o desemprego iria continuar a subir "num futuro próximo". Isto irá estrangular o consumo privado e o investimento, comprometendo o crescimento da economia.

A piorar a situação, as previsões de desemprego do FMI não contabilizam o impacto das novas medidas de austeridade, anunciadas na semana passada pelo Governo. Com um corte de cinco por cento na massa salarial da função pública, com o congelamento das pensões e com um aumento do IVA para 23 por cento, entre outras medidas, dificilmente o mercado de trabalho conseguirá dar sinais de retoma nos tempos mais próximos.

In Público

Austeridade "não toca na gordura do Estado e nos interesses da oligarquia"

2010-10-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

Governo "dificilmente evitará a vinda do FMI"

Austeridade "não toca na gordura do Estado e nos interesses da oligarquia"

04.10.2010 - 07:27 Por Cristina Ferreira

Henrique Neto tem 74 anos e é militante do PS há cerca de 20. Mas é também um empresário da Marinha Grande, tendo criado a Iberomoldes em 1975, uma exportadora de moldes, de componentes para automóveis e de engenharia de produtos.

Em entrevista ao PÚBLICO, voltou a não poupar críticas às políticas económicas deste Governo. Diz que só os estadistas sabem ouvir os "críticos" e acrescenta que o chefe de governo utilizou um optimismo "bacoco e inconsciente" para esconder os problemas.

Desde o Governo de António Guterres, tem participado nos congressos do PS apresentando moções críticas para as políticas na área económica, por as considerar desajustadas das necessidades do país. Como vê a actual situação?
Com grande preocupação. Como português que gosta muito do seu país, não posso deixar de lamentar as oportunidades perdidas e os erros cometidos. Infelizmente, os nossos governantes não sabem da importância de ouvir os críticos, que é uma qualidade que está apenas ao alcance dos estadistas.

Como é que explica que, apesar dos avisos, o Governo tenha ignorado o impacto que a crise financeira iria ter na economia nacional?
Não há uma resposta simples para essa questão. Penso que é um misto de falta de sentido de Estado, de ignorância, de voluntarismo e de teimosia e, porventura mais importante, de falta de convicção sobre o interesse geral a que muitos chamam patriotismo.

Como avalia as linhas gerais propostas pelo Governo para reduzir o défice do Estado em 2011?
Pelo que se ficou a saber, certo é apenas que os portugueses pagarão, em 2011 e nos anos seguintes, os erros, a imprevidência e a demagogia acumulada em cinco anos de mau Governo. É por isso que, nestas circunstâncias, falar da coragem do primeiro-ministro e do ministro das Finanças, como alguns têm feito, é um insulto de mau gosto a todos os portugueses que trabalham, pagam os seus impostos e vêem defraudadas as suas expectativas de uma vida melhor. As medidas propostas, sendo inevitáveis, dada a dimensão da dívida e a desconfiança criada pelo Governo junto dos credores internacionais, não tocam no essencial da gordura do aparelho do Estado e nos interesses da oligarquia dirigente. Mas o pior é que estas medidas, pela sua própria natureza, não são sustentáveis no futuro e não é expectável que, com este Governo, se consiga o crescimento sustentado da economia.

Acredita na execução orçamental de 2010?
Tanto quanto se sabe, o Governo não cumpriu as medidas acordadas com o PSD, do lado da despesa, no PEC (Plano de estabilidade e Crescimento)1 e no PEC 2. Mas, como todos sabemos, a contabilidade governamental é elástica e algumas das medidas agora apresentadas terão efeito ainda este ano, pelo que seria um absurdo indesculpável o Governo não cumprir o objectivo do défice para 2010.

Quais os efeitos das medidas anunciadas na economia real?
Os livros de Economia ensinam que estas medidas matam qualquer economia, e essa é uma razão adicional para as evitar em tempo útil, com bom senso e boa governação. Em qualquer caso, temos a vantagem de ser um pequeno país e acredito que as empresas têm condições para salvar a economia portuguesa. Mas, para isso, precisam de uma estratégia nacional clara e coerente, um Estado sério e competente que defenda o interesse geral e uma profunda reforma ao nível da exigência educativa. O objectivo principal terá de ser subir na cadeia de valor através da inovação e de recursos humanos mais qualificados.

Continua a haver risco de Portugal necessitar da intervenção do FMI?
Um Governo que deixou chegar as finanças à presente situação, dificilmente evitará a vinda do FMI.

Partilha da opinião dos que defendem que o melhor contributo que o Governo pode dar à economia é consolidar as contas públicas?
A consolidação das contas públicas é uma condição necessária mas não suficiente. Apenas o crescimento sustentado da economia abrirá novas perspectivas aos portugueses. Mas, neste domínio, José Sócrates iludiu, durante cinco longos anos, todos os reais problemas da economia através de um optimismo bacoco e inconsciente.

Não o fez apenas por ignorância, mas para servir os interesses da oligarquia do regime, através da especulação fundiária e imobiliária, das parcerias público-privadas, dos concursos públicos a feitio, das revisões de preços e de uma miríade de empresas, institutos, fundos e serviços autónomos, além das empresas municipais. Regabofe pago com recurso ao crédito e sem nenhum respeito pelas gerações futuras.

Como se resolve o dilema: estimular a economia e equilibrar as contas públicas?
Nas actuais condições de endividamento, dificilmente se conseguirão ambas as coisas. Por isso a dívida pública que os últimos governos deixaram acumular deveria constituir crime público. Porque nos tornou dependentes dos credores internacionais e coloca em causa o bem mais precioso de qualquer país, que é a independência nacional. Que, no caso de Portugal, tem mais de oito séculos e custou muito sofrimento. Aliás, por isso, e talvez não por acaso, infelizmente, são cada vez mais frequentes as tiradas vindas de alguns sectores apregoando que o país não é viável e que os portugueses não se sabem governar, ou que a solução dos nossos problemas passaria por uma qualquer união ibérica.

É possível cumprir as metas orçamentais sem aumento de impostos que permitem receitas imediatas?
Teria sido possível se a previsão fizesse parte do léxico do Governo de José Sócrates. Mas como, a três meses do final do ano, o ministro das Finanças ainda precisa de medidas adicionais e pede à oposição que lhe indique onde cortar na despesa, a resposta é não, no curto prazo, os impostos adicionais são inevitáveis.

Das declarações do Governo, ficou com ideia de que ele deixou cair o investimento público associado às grandes obras, TGV e aeroporto?
A ideia com que se fica é que o primeiro-ministro não leva em conta o interesse nacional, mas os interesses dos grupos de pressão dos sectores financeiro e das obras públicas, o que é a única explicação para a dimensão dos erros cometidos. Estamos a construir mais auto-estradas que ficam vazias e sem carros e um TGV com um traçado que não favorece a economia, ao mesmo tempo que nada foi feito para termos um porto de transhipment e transporte ferroviário de mercadorias para a Europa, investimentos cruciais em logística, para podermos ambicionar atrair mais investimento estrangeiro e desenvolver uma verdadeira capacidade exportadora. Em qualquer caso, contra toda a sanidade económica e financeira, o Governo não parou a maioria das obras programadas e utilizará o fantasma das indemnizações aos empreiteiros para as não parar.

Durante as últimas eleições, Passos Coelho desalinhou com a liderança do PSD da altura e veio também defender os grandes investimentos públicos como o TGV?
Infelizmente, Portugal está na senda de escolher jovens primeiros-ministros que não sabem do que falam. O que é agravado pela inexistência de uma estratégia nacional integradora das grandes decisões de investimento público. Desta forma, os investimentos são encarados como obra pública avulsa, o que conduz a cada cabeça cada sentença. Pedro Passos Coelho é parte desse problema, que, além disso, permite as constantes mudanças de opinião.

O que diz é que o jogo político entre as altas figuras que lideram o PS e o PSD se tem sobreposto ao desenvolvimento do país?
É inegável que existe um bloco central inorgânico na política portuguesa, que defende interesses privados ilegítimos e permite a acumulação de altos e bem pagos cargos na administração do Estado e nas empresas do regime. O que é facilitado pelo chamado centralismo democrático praticado nos diversos partidos políticos e pela habitual passividade e clubismo do povo português. Nesse capítulo, atingimos o ponto zero da moralidade pública e não vejo como será possível colocar a economia portuguesa no caminho do progresso e do crescimento, com algumas das principais empresas e grupos económicos a poderem ter relações privilegiadas com o poder político e a ser-lhes permitido fugir da concorrência e dos mercados externos, por força do clima de facilidade e de privilégio que detêm no mercado interno.

Nos últimos anos, chamou várias vezes a atenção para a promiscuidade dos grandes interesses privados com altas figuras do Estado. O cidadão tem a ideia de que não paga essa factura. O facto de o cidadão ser chamado agora a pagar a factura vai ter consequências?
Não sei quando é que os portugueses dirão "basta!". Mas sei que o maior problema resultante da imoralidade das classes dirigentes é a pedagogia de sinal negativo que isso comporta. Infelizmente, muitos portugueses têm a tentação de pensar que, se alguns enriquecem de forma fácil e rápida por via da sua actividade política, isso também lhes pode acontecer a eles no futuro. Fenómenos como o BPN e o BPP têm muito a ver com esta amoralidade geral reinante. Por outro lado, como pode o cidadão comum combater a corrupção, se o próprio Governo não fizer o que deve e pode para encabeçar esse combate, como ainda aconteceu recentemente?

Tendo liderado uma média empresa da área dos moldes, como avalia o endividamento de Portugal?

A dívida que os últimos governos, PS e PSD, deixaram acumular em Portugal deveria ser considerada um crime público. Nomeadamente porque nos tornou dependentes dos credores internacionais e coloca em causa o bem maior de qualquer país que é independência nacional. Que, no caso do nosso país, tem mais de oito séculos e custou muito sofrimento.

Daqui a cinco anos, aonde é que Portugal vai estar?
Gostaria de ser mais optimista, mas, em consciência, não é previsível que esteja melhor. Para vencer a crise e melhorar a vida dos portugueses, a nossa democracia precisa urgentemente de saber escolher os melhores e os mais devotados à causa pública e não aqueles que nos são servidos numa bandeja prontos para eleições. Será através da pedagogia do exemplo de bons dirigentes que poderemos aspirar a iniciar um processo, forçosamente lento, da construção de um Portugal novo onde dê gosto viver.

Mas há uma solução para a situação económica de Portugal?
Apesar de tudo, dada a pequena dimensão do país, considero que as empresas portuguesas e as estrangeiras a operar em Portugal têm condições de salvar a economia portuguesa.

Para chegarmos a esse ponto, as empresas precisam de uma estratégia nacional clara e coerente, precisam de um Estado decente e sério e de uma profunda reforma ao nível da exigência educativa. O objectivo principal dos portugueses terá de ser a subida na cadeia de valor através da inovação e de recursos humanos qualificados.

C.F.

A Índia está a caminho de ultrapassar a China como o país mais populoso do mundo

2010-08-22T11:07:00.001-07:00

A Índia está a caminho de ultrapassar a China como o país
mais populoso do mundo

A Índia vai ser, indubitavelmente, dentro de 40 anos, o país mais populoso do
mundo, com 1.748 milhões de habitantes, quase um quinto da humanidade, revela o
anuário 2010 do Population Reference Bureau, dos Estados Unidos.
A China, actualmente em primeiro lugar, com 1.338 milhões de cidadãos, desce para o
segundo, com 1.437 milhões. E os Estados Unidos conservam a terceira posição, passando de
310 para 423 milhões de habitantes.
Quanto ao grande rival da Índia, o Paquistão, sobe do sexto para o quarto lugar,
tornando-se o país muçulmano mais populoso, com 335 milhões, e trocando de posição com a
Indonésia, que se deverá ficar pelos 309 milhões.
Já o Brasil, com uns previstos 215 milhões, cede o quinto lugar no pódio à Nigéria, que
deverá chegar aos 326 milhões, e é relegado para a oitava posição, atrás do Bangladesh,
para o qual se admitem 222 milhões.
A Rússia deixa de constar do top ten, pois a sua população deverá decrescer dos actuais 142
milhões para 140,8 em meados de 2025 e 126,7 em 2050. E o mesmo acontece com o Japão, que
de 127 milhões desce para uns meros 95 milhões.
Os lugares de russos e japoneses, respectivamente o nono e o décimo, passam para africanos,
respectivamente os naturais da Etiópia e da República Democrática do Congo.
Portugal entre os mais velhos
Os países desenvolvidos estão a envelhecer e aumentam pouco de população, enquanto os que
ainda estão por desenvolver permanecem jovens e a crescer.
Portugal é hoje em dia um dos seis países com mais população acima dos 65 anos, só
ultrapassado neste campo pelo Japão, Alemanha, Itália, Suécia e Grécia.
Aliás, os alemães vão deixar de estar no país mais populoso da Europa Ocidental, cedendo a
primazia aos britânicos, que dos 62,2 milhões actuais sobem para 68,6 em 2025 e 77 milhões
em 2050.
Portugal, depois de aumentar um pouco de população nos próximos 15 anos, deverá voltar em
2050 aos actuais 10,7 milhões, segundo os dados que os Estados Unidos acabam de divulgar.
No seu todo, a população mundial vai passar para 8.108 milhões em 2025 e para 9.485 milhões
em 2050, sendo estes distribuídos por 8.159 milhões nos países menos desenvolvidos e por
apenas 1.326 milhões nos mais desenvolvidos.
Por continentes, a Ásia e a África vão ficar nas próximas quatro décadas com a parte de
leão da humanidade, respectivamente 5.424 milhões e 2.084 milhões. Juntos, asiáticos e
africanos representarão mais de três quartos de toda a espécie humana.
Em muitas partes do mundo, nomeadamente na África subsariana e na Ásia meridional e
central, as populações rurais ainda não têm um saneamento adequado, destaca-se neste
trabalho do Population Reference Bureau, que funciona em Washington.
Duas grandes tendências destacadas na população actual são a natalidade cronicamente baixa
nos países desenvolvidos e o facto de nos países menos desenvolvidos estarem a nascer em
cada ano mais de 80 milhões de crianças.

Apple coloca HTC em tribunal

2010-03-03T20:36:00.001-08:00

Apple coloca HTC em tribunal

A empresa da Maçã apresentou uma queixa contra o fabricante Taiwanês HTC, por alegada violação de patentes.

De acordo com o ArsTechnica, a acção levada a cabo pela Apple contra a HTC afirma que esta fabricante de smartphones violou 20 das suas patentes relativas à arquitectura de hardware e software do iPhone. Ao mesmo tempo, a Apple apresentou queixa na International Trade Commission, com o objectivo de bloquear as importações de dispositivos da HTC que violem as suas patentes.

A propósito deste caso, Steve Jobs, CEO da Apple, afirmou que "pensamos que a competição é saudável, mas a concorrência deve criar a sua própria tecnologia e não roubar a nossa".

São muitas as patentes que a Apple afirma serem suas, incluindo interfaces baseadas no tacto, métodos para desbloquear um dispositivo desempenhando gestos no ecrã, entre outros.

Uma das que talvez seja a mais polémica é a patente número 7383453 , que descreve um "método para conversar energia, reduzindo a voltagem aplicada a uma parte do processador", visto que esta patente parece referir-se à capacidade que todos os CPUs modernos têm de diminuir o seu consumo energético quando não está a ser requisitada toda a potência de processamento.

Transístores até 100 GHz

2010-02-07T17:58:00.001-08:00

Transístores até 100 GHz

A pesquisa científica da IBM está a demonstrar como usando grafeno como material podemos vir a ter transístores que funcionam a 100 GHz.

De acordo com o Ars Technica, o grafeno é um material que consiste de folhas únicas de carbono grafítico, e é interessante por ter apenas um átomo de espessura e electrões com alta mobilidade (100 vezes superior à do silício).

Por outro lado, as propriedades eléctricas do grafeno podem ser controladas para dar origem a materiais condutores, semicondutores ou isolantes.

Investigadores da IBM demonstraram transístores baseados em grafeno que funcionam a 30 GHz. Extrapolando os resultados, chegaram à conclusão de que este material poderá resultar em velocidades de até 100 GHz.

Todavia, estas conclusões são ainda apenas baseadas em extrapolações, e ainda há muita investigação pela frente antes de os cientistas chegarem a uma conclusão mais clara sobre as potencialidades do grafeno. Ainda assim, este material é, neste momento, o melhor candidato a substituir o silício actualmente usado nos transístores.

Chinese planes challenge Boeing and Airbus

2010-02-02T20:55:00.001-08:00

Chinese planes challenge Boeing and Airbus

By Juliana Liu
Asia Business Report, BBC World, Singapore air show

The biggest potential threat to the dominance of Western aircraft makers has been unveiled at the Singapore Air Show.

China's answer to Boeing and Airbus is showing a slender, blue-and-white model of the Comac C919 aircraft for the first time outside the mainland. Its introduction was low-key, a move consistent with how Chinese firms prefer to operate overseas.

The aircraft, designed and built entirely in China, will compete directly against industry stalwarts A320 and Boeing 737 after completing flight trials in four years. It should be available commercially by 2016.

"That's our plan," an official from the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, or Comac, tells BBC News.

"But it will be tough to stick to it. These days, delivery dates are often pushed back."

Next year delivery

The C919 is part of China's stated goal of developing a homegrown aerospace industry, which may someday challenge Airbus and Boeing's hold on the global market for commercial aviation.

" [Chinese aircraft makers] will add a whole new level of economic activity to our industry "
Mark Howes, president of Honeywell Aerospace Asia Pacific

Comac is likely to build more than 2,000 C919s in the next two decades, with a view to grab a 10% share of the global market for narrow body aircraft.

It has been a meteoric rise for Comac, established just a year and a half ago.

Headquartered in Shanghai, the company is fully backed by the central government, as well as by the local government and a number of state-owned firms such as Chinalco and Baosteel.

Comac has already sold more than 240 of its ARJ-21 twin-engine regional jets to Chinese airlines, as well as to a Laotian carrier and to a unit of General Electric. The plane is scheduled for delivery to customers next year.

Biggest market

Experts believe it will take China 10 to 20 years to establish itself in commercial aviation.

That prospect has attracted scores of Western suppliers such as Rockwell Collins, General Electric and Honeywell.

"There is a great deal of excitement in the region," Mark Howes, president of Honeywell Aerospace Asia Pacific, tells the BBC in an interview at the air show. "We're all negotiating and pursuing these deals."

Honeywell is hoping to sell its mechanical and electronic systems for inclusion in the C919.

The US manufacturer has already clinched contracts for its flight controls and inertial navigation systems for use in the ARJ-21.

"They will add a whole new level of economic activity to our industry," Mr Howes adds.

Chinese customers

One day, China will be Honeywell's biggest market in Asia, Mr Howes says.

" The China market has been amazing in the last year "
Boeing Commercial Airplanes marketing chief Randy Tinseth

So he is now based in Shanghai, having moved there two years ago to be closer to his Chinese customers.

Looking ahead, the company hopes to supply parts to the aircraft unit of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, or Avic.

The group is in the process of developing the MA700, a four engine turboprop regional airliner.

But China's goal of becoming an aerospace giant may be hurt by a US embargo on military technology transfers.

This could affect dual-use parts, also found in commercial engines.

Sanction threat

Like other US manufacturers doing business in China, Honeywell is keeping a close eye on a growing row between Beijing and Washington, over the latter's arms sales to Taiwan.

China has threatened to sanction US firms selling arms to Taiwan, which it considered a renegade province.

"For everyone here, it's an issue of how it goes between governments," Mr Howes says.

"Certainly, we'll be watching it very closely."

The stakes are much higher for Boeing, which makes the Harpoon missiles that Taiwan will be purchasing as part of the US deal.

When asked by BBC News, the aerospace giant declined to comment on possible sanctions.

Boeing and other Western manufacturers have made fortunes doing business with China.

"The China market has been amazing in the last year," says Boeing Commercial Airplanes marketing chief Randy Tinseth.

As the country develops its own industry, China will want to make billions of its own.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/8494202.stm

Published: 2010/02/02 17:47:40 GMT

© BBC MMX

China’s Silicon Ceiling

2010-01-17T17:40:00.001-08:00

China's Silicon Ceiling

Free markets require free minds.

By Daniel Gross | NEWSWEEK

Published Jan 15, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Jan 25, 2010

Google vs. China represents a clash of what may be the two most powerful forces of the first decade of the 21st century. Like China, Google has changed the terms of competition in several crucial markets, thanks to its advantages in hardware, productive capacity, and engineering brainpower. The juggernaut rolls into new industries—e-mail, GPS, smart phones, operating systems for netbooks—heedless of the competition, racking up profits and disheartening competitors.

But now one of the world's most rapidly growing companies has threatened to pull up stakes from one of the world's most rapidly growing markets. It's a move that raises many questions about Google and its future—and a larger question about China. Can China get rich without becoming free?

History suggests it can't. Until recently China, which was technologically more advanced than Europe in the middle of the last millennium, had been left behind. Historians, led by the magisterial David Landes of Harvard, have made a convincing case that the slow erosion of arbitrary authority—the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of rights, constitutions, democracy—helped stoke the capitalist revolution. For the past few centuries, the developed world has been led economically by democratizing commercial empires—Britain in the 18th and 19th, and the U.S. in the 20th. Without free minds, it's difficult to have free markets, and vice versa. Trying to develop economically while controlling the flow of information has generally been a losing bet. Either such regimes fail to grow and collapse (the Soviet bloc), or the forces of economic liberalism ultimately lead to political liberalism, as in Chile.

For the past 30 years China has been testing a new, inverted model: breakneck economic development while retaining strict limits on personal liberty. The Communist Party has wrenched the nation into the 21st century. The hardware is certainly impressive—the maglev trains, shiny new airports, and modern skyscrapers. China has displaced the U.S. as the world's largest car market, and is about to surpass longtime rival Japan as the second-largest economy. Such growth has attracted American companies, which inevitably make a series of trade-offs when they decide to head east. They accept local joint-venture partners and the risk of intellectual property theft, and learn to negotiate a commercial culture in which the government may arrest and jail a key executive, as happened with Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. As a group, the Fortune 500 has overlooked or come to terms with the lack of political freedom. After all, General Motors or KFC are in the business of selling stuff, not principles. And they have to be in China because that's where the action is. "If you don't come to the Chinese markets, other countries will," said Zheng Zeguang, director general of North American Affairs in China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

That's why Google came. Last summer, Google advertisements were ubiquitous in Shanghai. But Google is unlike other U.S. companies that have succeeded in China. It sells access to information. Its business model requires freedom of linking, surfing, and expression. And that's why it, along with other media and New Economy companies, hasn't done well in China. Google has 14.1 percent of the Chinese search market, compared to homegrown Baidu's 62.2 percent. Worse for Google (motto: don't be evil), doing business in Guangzhou means being complicit in activities that are antithetical to its mission. "How far do you go down the path to becoming a de facto adjunct to government control of information?" asks Zachary Karabell, author of Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy.

Like Google, China is led by engineers—but the leaders were trained as civil engineers. Google's software engineers became billionaires by devising a democratic algorithm. China's civil engineers are turning the process on its head. They believe the nation is getting richer precisely because they are keeping democratic tendencies in check. In the two weeks I spent in China last November, I heard Westernized elites make all sorts of rationalizations for why the time isn't right for democratization. The main argument: in a nation of 1.3 billion people, 56 ethnic groups, and unbalanced development, encouraging free elections, civil society, and political organizing would be a recipe for chaos—and an obstacle to growth. One senior bureaucrat pointed out that the growth rates of South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia declined once they became more democratic. "When you emphasize development and efficiency, then you have a problem with the system of democracy," said Zhe Sun, director of the Tsinghua University Center for U.S.–China Relations in Beijing. For a regime whose legitimacy rests on economic progress, no such delays can be tolerated.

Yes, Shanghai feels a lot like New York. But don't presume that just because Americans and Chinese share a consuming culture that they also share a political one. As I stood in Tiananmen Square on a chilly November day, I turned to my guide. "That was really something, what happened here 20 years ago," I said. "Yes," he responded in his near-fluent English. "Those terrorists really killed a lot of soldiers."

Market forces prevail, but the government clearly has its hands on the steering wheel and its feet on the gas pedal and brakes—especially in information-intensive industries like Internet search. And so even as it welcomes investments by the Fortune 500, China engages in large-scale cyberattacks on the most technologically advanced company in the world. The crisis that plunged the world into recession has only given the Chinese more confidence in their model. In November, I met with Qian Xiao-qian, vice minister of the State Council for Information of China. "To say the Chinese government controls the Internet is exaggerated," he said. (After the meeting, I fired up my laptop and was blocked from getting to Twitter, Facebook, and Andrew Sullivan's blog.) Qian enumerated all the things people can't do on the Internet: no online pornography, no attempts to incite racial discrimination, and no attempts "to violate the Chinese Constitution and subvert the state." The rules, however, are arbitrary, opaque, and subject to change.

Qian ticked off the impressive numbers—China has 338 million Netizens as of June 2009, 700 million mobile subscribers, and 180 million blogs. That's certainly enough users to build businesses around, with or without Google.

Can China continue to grow without allowing Google—and the next Googles of the world—free rein in China? It's worked out well so far. But there are a few caveats to the story.

First, China still has a long way to go before it's considered rich. And some sympathetic analysts argue that it's not fair to hold China's civic development to American standards. The U.S. had China's present-day economic profile—per capita GDP of about $5,000, 40 percent of the workforce in agriculture, 30 years into the process of industrialization and urbanization—in 1900, a time when there were no direct elections for Senate, women couldn't vote, and segregation reigned in the South.

Second, much of China's extraordinary development has been based on moving peasants into manufacturing. The key to future job growth, says Stephen Green, chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai, will lie in the service sector. And the largest components of the services sector—financial services, entertainment, media—remain firmly in the grip of the state. Going forward, it will become more difficult for a services-based economy to prosper with restraints on communication and expression. China faces a fundamental paradox, says Damien Ma, an analyst at the Eurasia Group. "It needs to have fairly closed information flow for political stability purposes, but doing so stifles innovation."

And that's the rub. Any type of political system can produce excellent hardware; the Soviet Union, which ruled Russia when Google cofounder Sergey Brin was born there in 1973, managed to produce nuclear weapons and satellites. Likewise, China has built truly impressive hardware: some 67 bridges now span the Yangtze River, a superfast supercomputer made entirely from parts made in China, high-speed trains. But in the 21st century, a country needs great software in order to thrive. It has to have a culture that facilitates the flow of information, not just goods.

With Nick Summers in New York

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/231111

Early treatment hope for tinnitus

2009-12-17T18:25:00.001-08:00

Early treatment hope for tinnitus

Research has raised the possibility of successfully treating the ear-ringing disorder tinnitus soon after its onset.

Some forms of the condition are associated with spontaneous nerve activity in the brain.

A team from the University of Western Australia showed this activity is, for a time, dependent on nerve signals generated in the inner ear.

They believe it might be possible to treat tinnitus - for a limited period - by reducing these signals from the ear.

Tinnitus causes an unpleasant ringing, buzzing or whistling sound in one or both ears, or the head.

More than a third of the UK population will suffer from the condition at some point in their lives and about one in 100 will experience serious problems with long-term, established tinnitus.

" This finding indicates there may be an early phase of tinnitus development which could be arrested "
Professor Don Robertson University of Western Australia

Tinnitus is often associated with some degree of hearing loss.

The increased nerve activity in the brain associated with the condition is often caused by exposure to loud noise - such as music or machinery.

The researchers, working on animals, found that this increased activity could be reduced back down to normal levels by reducing nerve signals coming from the inner ear.

Cooling the ear

They achieved this in three ways: by removing a part of the inner ear called the cochlea, by cooling it down, and - crucially - by using drugs to block generation of the nervous impulses.

However, their work also suggested that after about six weeks, the increased nerve activity generated in the brain becomes independent of input from the ears.

This suggests that if tinnitus can be treated by dampening down nerve signals from the ear, it must be done swiftly before the condition becomes irreversibly established.

The researchers said further work was needed to find ways to exploit this potential window of opportunity.

'Extremely excited'

Lead researcher Professor Don Robertson said: "This finding indicates there may be an early phase of tinnitus development which could be arrested by temporarily dampening down the firing from the cochlea.

"And although a lot more research needs to be done at this stage, it is a very exciting prospect."

Dr Ralph Holme, director of biomedical research at the charity RNID, which funded the research, said: "Tinnitus affects seven million people in the UK, yet there are no safe or effective ways of alleviating this stressful condition.

"We are extremely excited about the significant progress this research has made into identifying a possible window of opportunity for future treatments."

The research will appear in the journal Neuroscience.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/8414597.stm

Published: 2009/12/18 00:43:39 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Tackling climate change with technology

2009-11-17T18:12:00.001-08:00

Tackling climate change with technology

New technologies will be required if the world economy is to grow without accelerating climate change.

Since the industrial revolution, economic growth has gone hand in hand with the consumption of fossil fuels and the release of ever greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - leading many scientists and politicians to call now for a new, technological revolution. Here we survey options for power-generation and transport, and also engineering solutions to reflect sunlight or remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Fuel	About	Pros	Cons	Viability
Clean coal	Range of technologies to pre-treat coal to reduce emissions, burn it more efficiently, or capture and store carbon emissions.	Most abundant and widely distributed fossil fuel. Preserves existing industry and makes use of existing infrastructure.	Uses more coal per kWh than normal coal power. Produces some pollutants, such as heavy metals. Coal is a finite resource.	Small-scale trials under way. Huge investment(c $3trn) needed by 2050. Estimated cost: 5-13 cents/kWh (double normal coal).
Geothermal	Uses naturally hot rocks, or temperature differences, beneath Earth's surface to heat water directly or drive turbines.	Constant renewable energy source in some locations. Highly efficient for heating living spaces. Long hardware lifetime.	Underground heat only available in some locations. Energy can "dry up" for years. Can in some locations release toxic gases.	Currently less than 1% of global capacity. US and Australia investing in new technologies. Estimated cost: 5-11 cents/kWh.
Nuclear	Harnesses energy from the controlled splitting of atoms, releasing heat that is harvested to drive turbines.	Significant historical experience and technology developed. Can provide heat and electricity. Plentiful fuel supplies.	Perceived as risky. Strong opposition from green campaigners. Creates radioactive waste. Fuel can be weapons security risk.	Set for a comeback after years in shadow. New reactors behind schedule. Disputed cost. One estimate: 4-8 cents/kWh.
Marine	Exploits energy of shifting tides, underwater currents, or shoreline and offshore waves.	Large and infinitely renewable resource. Tidal energy very regular. Can be exploited on small or large scale.	No consensus on best means to capture energy. Large projects may disrupt natural water flow, tides and ecosystems.	Little expected before 2030. Technology uncertain, so wide cost range: 15-30 cents/KWh (double or triple coal).
Wind	Using the wind, on land or at sea, to drive turbines.	Significant experience and mature industry and infrastructure. Infinitely renewable resource. Can be deployed in range of project sizes.	Intermittent resource. Not efficient for all locations. Windfarms interrupt radar signals, can be noisy and regarded by some as unsightly.	Currently about 1% of global supply. Onshore cheaper than offshore. High energy storage costs are handicap. Quite low cost: 7-14 cents/kWh.
Solar	Gathers energy from sunlight, using light to generate electricity directly (photovoltaic) or to heat liquids to drive a turbine.	Infinitely renewable and most abundant zero-carbon resource. Silent and no effects on local environment.	Like wind and marine, intermittent. Current photovoltaic designs complex; if widely used, chemicals could become scarce.	US investing heavily, EU planning plant in Africa. Cost still high (13-35 cents/kWh) but expected to fall. Price of solar panels falling.
Hydroelectric	Generates electricity by damming water and constraining flow through turbines. Most widely deployed renewable strategy.	Well-established as a large-scale energy source. Can also be used for energy storage if run in reverse.	Dams disrupt ecosystems and are a public health risk if they burst. Can trap decaying matter that creates pollution.	One of the cheapest forms of electricity. Development focusing on small hydro-electric power. Estimated cost: 2-6 cents/kWh.

Source: Costings from IEA

Transport	About	Pros	Cons	Viability
Hydrogen Road, Rail	Hydrogen can be burned in combustion engines or used to drive fuel cells that combine it with oxygen to produce electricity.	It's clean - the only waste product is pure water - and it's the most abundant element in the universe.	Hydrogen production is energy-intensive, often using fossil fuels or biomass. Flammable nature raises storage and transport risks.	It's too early to give an accurate estimate of cost. The US National Research Council says $55bn needs to be spent on R&D.
Electric Road	Transport can run on electricity stored in batteries, or in next-generation storage devices called supercapacitors.	Mechanically simple, and newer electric motors very efficient. Existing power grid can be used as basis for charging infrastructure.	Much depends on how electricity is produced. From a carbon-intensive source, overall emissions may be higher than petrol.	Far cheaper than petrol per mile but cost of battery makes cars more expensive. Also requires entirely new infrastructure.
Biofuel Road, Rail, Ships, Air	Fuels made from plant matter or organic waste. Bioethanol, from sugar-rich crops such as maize, used in place of petrol.	Biofuel blends can be used in existing cars. Second generation fuels will make use of waste biomass such as seeds or husks.	Growing and cropping biofuels burns carbon - maybe more than they save. Grown on arable land that could be used to grow food.	Cost comparable to petrol - sometimes cheaper, depending on oil price. Effect on food prices needs to be factored in.
Alternative Rail, Ships	Alternatives include the burning or pyrolysis (heating) of municipal waste. Pyrolysis results in a combustible gas or oil, and more heat.	Many alternative fuels' greatest advantage is that they utilise something that would otherwise go to landfill.	A dense waste product may result. Amount of CO2 saved varies, depending on method of combustion and type of fuel used.	Waste fuel technology is at an early stage of development, but experts say it could be competitive with other fuels in 10 years.

Scientists have been looking for ways of modifying the Earth's environment to control global warming - it's known as geo-engineering.

One way to do this is simply to reflect more of the sun's light, changing the Earth's reflectivity, or albedo.

This could be attempted using vast, flexible space reflectors (1) placed in orbit around the Earth. Alternatively, various types of "stratospheric aerosols" could be released in the upper atmosphere (2) to scatter some light back out into space. Earth-bound reflectors (3) could do the same.

Another approach is to directly reduce the atmospheric carbon that, among other things, leads to temperature rises.

This could be done by "fertilising" the ocean , stimulating the uptake of carbon by surface algae that would eventually sink to the ocean floor. Exposing the surfaces of carbonate and silicate rocks in "enhanced weathering" could provide a place for carbon to be absorbed.

Another frequently mentioned proposal is the capture of carbon dioxide from the air using "artificial trees", followed by liquefaction and storage, probably in underground reservoirs.

There is no single geo-engineering "silver bullet" that should be pursued as an all-encompassing solution to climate change, says the UK's Royal Society in its analysis of the cost of a range of proposals compared with their efficacy.

Stratospheric aerosols seem to offer the most effect for the least investment, and could be deployed soon, but present an unknown risk to the environment.

Changes to desert surface albedo are projected to be more effective than ocean fertilisation, but both could change delicate ecosystems in unexpected ways.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8338853.stm

Thank You, G2

2009-11-17T17:43:00.001-08:00

Thank You, G2

Why the U.S.-China relationship is not only the fulcrum of the world economy, but a good thing after all.

Nov 17, 2009

Since the end of the Cold War, big strategic thinkers have been longing for an enemy worthy of their big strategic brains. Many have tried hard to turn China into one. In the late '90s, Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's near-legendary chief of "net assessment" and the last of the Truman-era Cold Warriors, directed a study that called for a wholesale reallocation of military assets away from Europe and toward Asia. In the view of Pentagon planners, the new Fulda Gap—the region where Soviet troops were poised to invade Western Europe during the Cold War—would be the South China Sea, a key "chokepoint" that the Chinese might some day seek to control. The prominent realist scholar John Mearsheimer argued that if China continued "modernizing at a rapid pace," it "would surely pursue regional hegemony, just as the United States did in the western hemisphere during the nineteenth century." His potted prescription: America should not only withdraw from engagement but slow down China's growth. (Click here to follow Michael Hirsh).

The debate, fortunately, has moved somewhat beyond those simplistic, stuck-in-the-last-war views of the U.S.-China relationship. But it hasn't moved far enough. Today's grand strategic critiques tend to focus on economics—the staggering imbalances between China's capital surpluses and America's deficits—while still using Cold War terminology. That's why, in 2004, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, described the relationship between America and China and Japan, the largest holders of U.S. debt, as "a kind of balance of financial terror." New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in the latest iteration of this approach, urged President Obama to talk tough to Beijing about currency during his first visit to China this week in order to avoid "a potentially ugly confrontation." Krugman said the Chinese were deliberately keeping their currency weak as part of a strategy of "beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation" that would allow China to maintain its export might. Beijing's aim is to appease its own population with continued high economic growth while doing nothing to help ease America's double-digit unemployment, and that's a "dangerous game," Krugman warned.

Is it? China's game of cheating at the margins of the system by playing with its currency misses a much bigger point. Step back a moment. The larger story that has unfolded in the year since the biggest economic disaster since the Depression—an era that led to near-total breakdown and world war—is just how intact the international system remains. "We've never had a situation where we've been at such risk but at the same time the major powers have acted so responsibly as adults," says Richard Medley, who was formerly chief political adviser at Soros Fund Management and chief economist for the House Banking Committee and now manages successful hedge funds. "I'm very impressed by the Chinese, by the Americans, by the British, and even a few of the Europeans." Trade has dropped precipitously but not broken down. There is no great surge of protectionism, or virulent nationalism. On the contrary, a cautious and polite debate is taking place about reforming the global financial system (too cautious, in fact, many critics say).

Most of all, Medley says, the main motor of the world economy and global system—the "G2," America and China—is a continuing source of stability. "The G2 is evolving and both sides are doing an adult job of letting it evolve," he says. So much so that the third great source of world growth, the European Union, is getting a bit jealous. In the latest of a never-ending series of calls for an always-fractious Europe to unite itself, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband warned late last month that the EU risked becoming "spectators in a G2 world shaped by the U.S. and China." A few weeks later, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini also admonished his fellow continentals: "If we do not find a common foreign policy, there is the risk that Europe will become irrelevant ... We will be bypassed by the G2 of America and China, which is to say the Pacific axis, and the Atlantic axis will be forgotten."

All this is not only entertaining but marvelously healthy: a war of words that has no chance of becoming a real war. The G2 itself is not necessarily in a happy place, of course: at their fairly sober summit meeting on Tuesday, Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao seemed to disagree on climate change and attempts to sanction Iran over its nuclear program, which Hu did not endorse. Hu even gave Obama a free-market poke by suggesting America was encouraging protectionism with its imposition of tariffs on tires and steel pipes. But the differences were muted and for good reason: it's in the consummate interest of both leaders to keep them that way. When Obama, in his Shanghai town-hall meeting Monday, declared that "power in the 21st century is no longer a zero-sum game," he was speaking a prosaic yet profound truth about the relationship between the current superpower and the emerging one. Yes, the U.S. and Chinese economies are so integrated that to disentangle them would mean a kind of "mutual assured destruction," or MAD (to resurrect another Cold War term). But that's a good MAD, not a bad MAD. The global system resembles, in fact, more of a "mutual aid society," as Princeton scholar John Ikenberry puts it. No country, not even would-be rogues like Iran and (possibly) Russia, has found a way around the iron law of this benign global order: in order to be influential or powerful, a nation must be prosperous; in order to be prosperous, its economy must take part in the international system; in order to take part effectively in the international system, even countries with dramatically different political and social systems, like America and China, must act according to a set of strict norms. There is no other choice. "To be successful today, a major nation has to join the World Trade Organization," says Ikenberry.

Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese supreme leader, may not have understood the full implications of what he was doing when he began to open up the Chinese economy in 1978. Deng was just trying to avoid the fate of the failing "command economy" of the Soviet Union. It didn't matter what color a cat was, Deng said, as long as it caught mice. What that meant, in the koanlike rhetoric of Chinese politics, was that if private enterprise works, we'll try it. Was this all part of a 100-year plan, as some hardline U.S. analysts of China still suspect, to overcome and dominate the United States using its own economic methods? Who knows? But if so, it's unlikely the Chinese mandarins will ever succeed in carrying out that plan, for the simple reason that, to a degree they never could have anticipated, they have been permanently co-opted into the system.

This is somewhat analogous to what happened to Japan in the last century. Japan waged war twice in the 20th century, first with ships, planes, and armies, then with trade. But as Japan's economy matured, after years of relentless pressure to open up Japan's markets and change its practices, Tokyo's bureaucratic and business elite began touting the concept of kyosei, or "symbiosis" with Western economies. Japanese multinationals began setting up production abroad, in the United States, to avoid trade sanctions on exports, and in Asia, to escape the high-priced labor of their own maturing economy. The result was that Japan began losing its "Inc."—the interests of the nation and its giant corporations started to diverge. The Mitsubishis, Toyotas, and Matsushitas, the pride of Japan's postwar rebirth, began joining the great multinational diaspora. Thanks to globalized production, Japanese companies, to a startling degree, have become "us" rather than "them."

And that's where the Chinese are headed as well, if we have the patience to coax them there. Eventually—and maybe it will take another hundred years—as the population grows wealthier, the Chinese will begin consuming more normally, introducing more balance to capital flows. (Perhaps even more than the Japanese have: China's is a more naturally capitalist culture than Japan's.) The global system may not be pretty; no grand strategic thinker ever would have designed it this way. But it is working. So let's hope Barack Obama has the wisdom to leave well enough alone.

Michael Hirsh is also the author of At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World

Mutant genes 'key to long life'

2009-11-15T18:05:00.001-08:00

Mutant genes 'key to long life'

There is a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that prevents cells from ageing, researchers say.

Scientists from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the US say centenarian Ashkenazi Jews have this mutant gene.

They found that 86 very old people and their children had higher levels of telomerase which protects the DNA.

They say it may be possible to produce drugs that stimulate the enzyme.

" There may be a downside to the plan of boosting the repair processes of DNA because giving the cells more chances to divide may increase the chances of damaging mutations developing and causing cancer. "
Professor Tim Spector, King's College

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team say they studied the Ashkenazi Jewish community because they are closely related so it is easier to identify disease causing genetic differences.

They took blood samples from 86 very old, but generally healthy, people with an average age of 97; 175 of their offspring; and 93 other people who were the offspring of parents who had lived a normal lifespan and could therefore make up a control group, with which the results could be compared.

Role of telomeres

Telomeres are relatively short sections of specialized DNA that sit at the ends of all our chromosomes.

They have been compared to the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces that prevent the laces from unravelling.

Each time a cell divides, its telomeres shorten and the cell becomes more susceptible to dying.

The importance of telomeres was recognised last month when three scientists received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for determining the structure of telomeres and discovering how they protect chromosomes from degrading.

Telomerase can repair the telomeres, preventing them from shrinking.

'Strongly heritable'

The team at Einstein found that the centenarians and their offspring had higher levels of telomerase and significantly longer telomeres than the unrelated people in the control group and that the trait was strongly heritable.

The scientists had previously shown that individuals in Ashkenazi families with exceptional longevity have generally been spared major age-related diseases, like heart disease and diabetes.

The centenarians in this study had a lower average body mass index than the controls and higher levels of good (HDL) cholesterol.

Yousin Suh, associate professor of medicine and genetics at Einstein and a lead author on the paper, said: "Our findings suggest that telomere length and variants of telomerase genes combine to help people live very long lives, perhaps by protecting them from the diseases of old age.

"We're now trying to understand the mechanism by which these genetic variants of telomerase maintain telomere length in centenarians.

"It may be possible to develop drugs that mimic the telomerase that our centenarians have been blessed with."

'Downside'

Professor Tim Spector, from King's College London, who has been researching telomeres and ageing, said it was an interesting finding but it may not apply to other populations and further research was needed.

He said: "There may be a downside to the plan of boosting the repair processes of DNA because giving the cells more chances to divide may increase the chances of damaging mutations developing and causing cancer.

"Most scientists agree that there is evidence that people with long telomeres have less age-related diseases and this study does suggest that could be one reason why they are living longer."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/8359735.stm

Published: 2009/11/15 00:15:29 GMT

All change as gas reserves soar

2009-11-10T19:15:00.001-08:00

All change as gas reserves soar

By Jorn Madslien
Business reporter, BBC News, Stavanger

With coal being too dirty and wind farms and nuclear power plants arriving late, it seems the world is left with a stark choice: keep on polluting or turn out the lights.

Unless, that is, someone comes up with an alternative.

Energy executive Rune Bjornson thinks he has the answer.

"Natural gas, more than any other fuel, is an option we have here and now," he tells the BBC in an interview.

And, he adds, there is plenty of it around - unlike scarcer resources such as oil and coal.

Given that Mr Bjornson heads up the gas division at the Norwegian energy giant Statoil, it comes as no surprise that he should hail the virtues of gas.

" We look at shale gas as a potential game changer "
Rune Bjornson, head of gas division, Statoil

But he is not alone in his predictions.

In June this year, the Potential Gas Committee, which is connected with the Colorado School of Mines, raised its estimate of gas reserves in the US by 35% to 2,074 trillion cubic feet (58.74 trillion cubic metres), the highest reserves since the group started tracking the information 44 years ago.

The upgrade came after new technology made it easier and cheaper to extract gas from shale rock, a prehistoric clay, which has hitherto been deemed too expensive and tricky to recover.

The implications for global power balances could be enormous, in both the energy and the geopolitical sense.

What next?

Upgraded shale gas reserves are particularly relevant ahead of the Copenhagen summit, as it could help the world meet the Kyoto targets for carbon emission cuts, Mr Bjornson insists.

"Gas has very low carbon emissions when compared with many other energy sources," he says.

Indeed, he insists, gas - whether offshore gas reserves or from shale rock - is "not competing with" tomorrow's technologies.

The need to reduce emissions from energy production means nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, as well as wind and other renewable energy sources, will become leading power suppliers in the future as current energy production becomes unsustainable, Mr Bjornson predicts.

"It is no longer a question of whether climate change is real or not," he says. "That was yesterday's discussion. Now, it is a question of what we do next."

But while the world waits for wind farms, nuclear power plants and carbon storage facilities to be built, gas could deliver vast reductions in emissions, Mr Bjornson says.

"If Europe was to convert all coal-fired power stations to gas they would reduce emissions by 40%," he claims, pointing to how gas power stations emit about about a third less than modern coal-fired power stations and about two-thirds less than old ones.

Plenty of gas

Peter Dea, chief executive of Cirque Resources in Denver, Colorado, goes further.

" If you're not in on these plays, Wall Street says 'well, what's the matter with you guys?' "
Arthur Berman, Geological consultant

He believes gas could not only replace coal as the main source of electricity in the US, it could deliver fuel for America's cars as well.

His optimism is based on a the Potential Gas Committee's estimate, which suggests the US has a 100-year supply of gas.

New techniques have been developed, where liquid, chemicals and sand is injected horizontally into shale rock to break open pathways for the gas to leak to the surface.

The shale gas reserves are expected to boost economic growth, help reduce carbon emissions and reduce US dependence on energy imports, Mr Dea predicts.

"It is truly a win-win-win situation," he says.

'Game changer'

Eager to take part in this development, Statoil last autumn joined forces with Chesapeake Energy to extract shale gas from the North East, Marcellus foundation that stretches across Pennsylvania and New York State.

" As shale gas fields come on line in the next five years, it is likely that European prices will drop in half "
Paul Sterne, managing partner of mergers and acquisitions advisers Sterne & Co

"It has come as a surprise to the industry that the reserves were so good and that it was competitive in terms of cost," Mr Bjornson says.

"We look at shale gas as a potential game changer."

And not only in the US. "We believe there are huge resources in others areas, including Europe," Mr Bjornson says.

Shale reserves are believed to be vast in Poland, Germany, France and Sweden, and there could also be similarly enormous shale gas areas in India and China.

"But it hasn't gotten much attention," says Mr Bjornson. "It is an industry that is still young."

Exaggerated hopes?

Sceptics say there are good reasons why.

Arthur Berman, who was speaking at a recent energy conference in Denver, is one of them.

The Texas-based geological consultant believes the latest estimates are vastly exaggerated and suggests the shale gas reserves are neither as large as nor as profitable as many in the industry predict.

But "in the midst of a boom or a bubble, it's hard to sit on the sidelines", he says.

"If you're not in on these plays, Wall Street says 'well, what's the matter with you guys?'"

Others point to how shale gas extraction can damage the environment as the chemicals used in the pressure-washer style drilling methods can leak into the ground water.

Energy security

Such sceptical voices do not ring loud in energy circles, however.

Advocates argue that the ability of shale gas to help curb carbon emissions makes it a worthy, and in macroeconomic terms worthwhile, risk to take.

But what is really exciting executives and policy makers alike is shale's potential to unseat leading natural gas suppliers such as Russia, Iran, Qatar and Algeria from their dominant positions, elevating the US, Europe, India and China into pole positions.

This could help improve energy security across the world, leaving few countries reliant on gas imports from countries often governed by unstable regimes.

It could also hit current energy exporters where it hurts, namely in their wallets, as new gas sources send energy supplies soaring thus depressing prices across the world.

Falling prices

Already, there are signs of such developments in the US, where natural gas is priced at up to $4 per million British thermal units - equivalent to crude priced at about $23 a barrel. (A barrel of crude contains on average $5.80 MBTU).

That is a seasonal rise from an average spot price of $2.50 during summer 2009, sharply down from 2008 when rising shale gas supplies pushed the average gas spot price down from almost $14 to about £10 per MBTU.

"Longer-term, the cost of producing shale gas is estimated at about $6 per MBTU, equivalent to crude priced at $34.80 per barrel," observes Paul Sterne, managing partner of mergers and acquisitions advisers Sterne & Co, in an article published by Ground Report.

"Unconventional gas will exert downward pressure on energy prices for years to come," predicts Mr Sterne - in the US, as well as elsewhere.

"As shale gas fields come on line in the next five years, it is likely that European prices will drop in half."

Winners and losers

Consumers might find that an appealing prospect, particularly in some of the world's poorest countries. Such sharp price falls should go a long way to relieve fuel poverty and indeed hunger.

But elsewhere, notably in Russia, many ordinary people could also see their lives transformed in less-than-desirable ways as it could lead to a painful reversal of the country's recent economic prosperity, which was based largely on highly-priced gas and oil exports.

The geopolitical implications are both obvious and enormous, so it is far from certain that a sharp and sudden rise in global gas supplies will be a blessing rather than a curse.

But if the gas is there, do not expect such concerns to prevent it from being extracted.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/8303581.stm

Published: 2009/11/08 17:43:14 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Islão na Europa Os suíços têm medo dos minaretes e não são os únicos na Europa

2009-11-10T18:16:00.001-08:00

Islão na Europa
Os suíços têm medo dos minaretes e não são os únicos na Europa

Uma torre não é só uma torre, quer se erga no cimo de um castelo, de uma mesquita ou de uma igreja. Um minarete não é nem nunca foi só uma torre. Na Europa, tem-se tornado num dos símbolos de tensão entre grupos de não muçulmanos, que vêem os crentes do islão como estranhos à sua cultura e identidade, e comunidades muçulmanas que, cada vez mais integradas e orgulhosas, querem dar visibilidade aos seus templos.

Os 400 mil muçulmanos da Suíça têm 180 locais de culto, a maioria em edifícios industriais ou salas, "soluções improvisadas sem representatividade exterior, longe dos bairros simpáticos", diz Andreas Tunger-Zanetti, do Centro de Investigação em Religião da Universidade de Lucerne. Só há quatro mesquitas com minaretes no país e em nenhum local de culto se ouve o muezzin, a chamada para a oração.

Mas, nos últimos anos, os muçulmanos de pequenas cidades da Suíça alemã decidiram pedir autorização para construir novas mesquitas com minaretes. Primeiro, alguns habitantes começaram a recolher assinaturas contra as torres. Depois, o Partido do Povo Suíço (SVP) resolveu coordenar uma campanha nacional. Como na Suíça 100 mil assinaturas chegam para convocar um referendo, no dia 29 os eleitores serão chamados a votar. Se disserem "sim", a frase "a construção de minaretes é proibida" será acrescentada à Constituição, a mesma que prevê a liberdade religiosa.

As sondagens dão vantagem ao "não" - 51 por cento contra 35 por cento -, mas o debate e as suas potenciais cicatrizes estão para ficar.

Os promotores da campanha descrevem as torres como símbolo da "intolerância islâmica". "Se queremos impedir a sharia [lei islâmica], temos de proibir os minaretes", explicou Walter Wobmann, um deputado do SVP, citado na imprensa local.

Em causa, portanto, não estão os muçulmanos, mas a sua aparente determinação em islamizar a Suíça, sustentam. Tunger-Zanetti também não acredita que a questão tenha a ver com a presença de muçulmanos, mas com a tomada de consciência de que o islão não está de passagem: "A construção de um minarete indica que a comunidade vai ficar. É isso que a sociedade suíça só agora está a perceber", disse ao PÚBLICO.

Num estudo intitulado "Conflitos sobre Mesquitas na Europa", promovido pela Network of European Foundations e dirigido pelo sociólogo Stefano Allievi, conclui-se que nos últimos 20 anos as mesquitas (ou os minaretes) geraram "cada vez mais e mais frequentes disputas, mesmo em países onde estes conflitos não existiam e as mesquitas já estavam presentes".

Isso acontece independentemente da relação de cada país com o islão - nas nações onde o islão chegou nos seus primeiros séculos, nos países que colonizaram nações muçulmanas ou naqueles onde o islão quase só chegou através da imigração, no século XX.

Os conflitos crescem, "mesmo em países onde o processo de inclusão já fez mais caminho", escreve Allievi. Muitas vezes, os aspectos questionados não são visíveis ou sequer existentes nos países em que estas tensões irrompem. Diferentes acontecimentos, fruto de fundamentalismos mais ou menos locais, tornaram-se tema global. A fawta (édito religioso) contra Salman Rushdie veio do Irão, os cartoons de Maomé provocaram protestos em países muçulmanos, alguns suicidas do 11 de Setembro viviam na Europa, Theo van Gogh foi assassinado na Holanda, houve ataques em Londres e Madrid, o hijab (lenço islâmico) foi debatido até onde é pouco comum.

Na Suíça, sustenta Tunger-Zanetti, os promotores da campanha antiminaretes alimentam-se "de um desconforto generalizado com alguns fenómenos associados, correcta ou incorrectamente, ao islão, como as burqas, a repressão das mulheres, a intenção de expandir a influência muçulmana". Para o conseguir, explica, "insinuam episódios ou estatísticas de países europeus ou muçulmanos, mas a cadeia de "provas" é tão fraca que não pode ser encarada como um argumento". É, "na verdade, uma expressão desse desconforto e da incapacidade que muitas pessoas têm em encontrar o seu espaço numa sociedade multicultural e multirreligiosa".

Nós e eles

As mesquitas, mais do que as mulheres de hijab que passam na rua, ficam. Os minaretes erguem-se acima de outros pontos. "O controlo do território e sobre o território não é só um facto cultural e simbólico, é também um sinal muito concreto e material de domínio e poder", escreve Stefano Allievi. O italiano conclui que neste momento da história as mesquitas produzem quase sempre conflitos induzidos por um reflexo de identidade - uma dinâmica de "nós/eles" - e que essa reacção não se verifica quando em causa estão igrejas de uma confissão diferente da dominante, sinagogas ou templos de outras religiões.

Inevitavelmente, quase todos os conflitos a propósito das mesquitas na Europa incluem "a questão do minarete, a sua altura ou a sua própria existência". O minarete, "como os arranha-céus ou a Torre de Babel, é um símbolo que se eleva no céu, um símbolo de poder, dimensão e força".

O arqueólogo Cláudio Torres lembra que "desde os zigurates na Babilónia" se valorizava "esse elevar-se, esse subir aos céus, às casas dos deuses, e por outro lado, esse marcar de poder".

Se o cristianismo inicial, uma "religião da salvação contra os poderosos", não tinha torres e era "virado para dentro", já "o mundo muçulmano surge numa época de expansão do proselitismo que passava por se mostrar". Com o feudalismo, o cristianismo torna-se religião de poder na Europa. E enquanto no mundo cristão "surgia uma torre cada vez mais afilada", a torre, "essa coisa alta e visível, onde os cristãos puseram o sino e os muçulmanos o muezzin", tornava-se no símbolo desta espécie de frente a frente. "À medida que as religiões se confrontavam, começou a confrontação das torres", diz Cláudio Torres.

Na Europa de hoje, "o minarete tornou-se no símbolo por excelência do conflito que rodeia o islão, ou a sua visibilidade - mais do que o hijab", sustenta Allievi. Para uns, é um símbolo de integração; para outros, uma demonstração inaceitável de poder.

Porcos e leis

Em Colónia, na Alemanha, onde uma iniciativa da extrema-direita contra uma mesquita desencadeou protestos e contra-manifestações em 2007, vai nascer um minarete de 55 metros, menos cinco do que os 60 da torre do sino da catedral. Em Los Bermejales, Espanha, o minarete foi reduzido a metade. Em Driebergen, Holanda, dois foram retirados após negociações com a câmara.

Em 2008, a Caríntia foi a primeira região da Áustria a aprovar uma lei que baniu os minaretes. Seguiu-se Voralberg. Outras regiões austríacas, mas também alemãs e suíças, pediram cópias da legislação.

Em Itália, dos 660 locais de culto, só três são verdadeiramente mesquitas, reconhecíveis como tal. No Norte do país, a oposição ao islão tem sido assumida pela Liga Norte: o ano passado, membros do partido levaram um porco a passear no local onde estava planeada a construção de uma mesquita, em Pádua, e o ministro Roberto Calderoli chegou a propor um "dia do porco" para protestar contra a mesquita. Manifestações semelhantes tiveram lugar na Áustria e na Suécia.

No caso dos minaretes, muitas vezes as comunidades muçulmanas acabam por aceitar diminuir a sua altura ou abdicam tranquilamente da sua construção. Como acontece com o chamamento para a oração, que quase nem chega a ser reivindicado. Em todo o caso, apesar de as leis de excepção só existirem até agora em duas regiões austríacas, o estudo de Allievi confirma que os muçulmanos tendem a ser vistos como tão "diferentes" que para uma parte da população europeia não faz sentido que as leis e as regras que se aplicam para todos lhes sirvam.

Na Suíça, mais do que os próprios muçulmanos, têm sido membros de outras religiões a falar em nome deles na defesa dos minaretes. "Os líderes da comunidade concordaram muito cedo em não dar início a uma contra-campanha. Sentem que os promotores da iniciativa tentaram provocá-los", diz Andreas Tunger-Zanetti. "Consideram, e penso que têm razão, que este debate pertence à maioria da sociedade e é sobre princípios de tolerância e liberdade de crença."

The methane makers

2009-10-28T21:24:00.001-07:00

The methane makers

By Dan Bell
BBC News

The man behind one of the most influential reports on climate change, Lord Stern, has highlighted the impact meat production has on greenhouse gas emissions. Part of it comes through methane made by the animals as they digest food. So which farm animals expel the most methane?

A diet that relies heavily on meat production results in higher emissions than a typical vegetarian diet, says Lord Stern.

The author of the 2006 Stern Review into the cost of climate change attacked the "enormous pressure" meat production puts on the world's resources and said people were becoming increasingly aware about "low carbon consumption".

He told the BBC that cutting greenhouse gas emissions was important across the board, in areas such as electricity, transport and food.

In a 2006 report, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions. By comparison, it said, all the world's cars, trains, planes and boats accounted for a combined 13% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Belching

The greenhouse gas emissions associated with meat consumption has many components, the largest of which is land use change - the clearing of forests for pasture or for the production of soya for animal feed. Other elements that have an impact on emissions include the rearing and slaughter of livestock, and the transport, refrigeration and cooking of meat.

There is also the nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, in the manure of animals reared for meat and the methane, another greenhouse gas, in their flatulence. Molecule for molecule, methane has a much larger warming effect than carbon dioxide.

As the diagram above shows, methane emission is dramatically higher in cows (primarily from belching) than other animals. But cutting back on eating meat is not the simple answer, say scientists.

For a start, many of the cows responsible for producing methane are not reared to be eaten, according to Elaine Matthews, a methane expert at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The breeds favoured in non-western countries are often bred for other uses, such as work, and these non-western cows are far more numerous than the larger dairy varieties reared in North America and Europe.

The larger western cows actually produce more methane per cow than their smaller non-western breeds, but because there are fewer of them, they only account for about 15% of all the methane produced by cows in general.

Meat output 'doubling'

Ms Matthews also says the quantity of methane they produce depends on the quality of food they are given. Cows that eat grain, she says, produce less methane than cows grazing on wild grass.

HAVE YOUR SAY
" The simple fact of the matter is we don't need to eat meat, so why do we? Without it we can save releasing dangerous gases and save the cruelty of the meat trade "
The Running Man, London

And methane is not the most important consideration in relation to livestock, says Friends of the Earth - it's the intensity with which they are reared.

According to the environmental pressure group, methane from livestock accounts for about 6% of greenhouse gas emissions, with 6% from CO2 released when forests are cleared for pasture and to produce soy for feeds.

What is clear is that people are eating more meat and dairy products every year.

Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8329612.stm

Published: 2009/10/28 13:26:35 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Everything You Know About China Is Wrong

2009-10-19T19:41:00.001-07:00

Everything You Know About China Is Wrong

By Rana Foroohar | NEWSWEEK

Published Oct 17, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Oct 26, 2009

The conventional wisdom is that China is steaming through the global financial crisis by building on the momentum generated by its 30-year boom. Indeed, ever since it sailed through the last big global crisis—the Asian contagion 10 years ago—Beijing has been feted for uniquely steady helmsmanship in financial storms. So perhaps it's natural for forecasters to assume that the Chinese supertanker of state is not turning sharply now, particularly since it continues to grow rapidly even as other economies sink in the recession. Yet this crisis is different—bigger and more damaging than any seen in generations—and it is exposing limits and forcing change in just about every key piece of the China model: the supremacy of the one-party state, the smart economic management, the export-driven growth, the emerging consumer class, the burgeoning private sector, the headlong focus on growth at any environmental cost, and the drive to build world-class companies. What follows is a look at why these common assumptions about China are increasingly inaccurate or just plain wrong.

Myth No. 1: THE COMMUNIST PARTY IS A MONOLITH.
No, the financial crisis is splitting the party, pitting the rural populists against the urban growth-firsters. The populists include the current top two, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, who favor slower growth, distributed more evenly to poorer rural Western regions, governed with a more careful eye to protecting the environment and less devotion to the free market. Opposed to them are the elite factions based in urban coastal cities, led by Shanghai, who want high-speed growth, more freedom for the free market, and greater support for entrepreneurs and the private sector. While it's too early to tell which faction will win out, it's clear that the new leadership will take China in new and possibly unexpected directions. "Perhaps the biggest myth about China is that it is only developing economically," says Cheng Li, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "In fact, it's also evolving politically."

Myth No. 2: THE COMMUNISTS ARE BRILLIANT ECONOMIC MANAGERS.
On the day in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers fell, China began planning the swift rollout of a $600 billion stimulus that would prove to be the largest (as a share of GDP), swiftest, and, many say, most effective in the world. The results—China continues to grow at a world-beating pace, now 8 percent—have confirmed the reputation of the party elders as macro maestros. While most economists agree that Beijing has done a strong job of solving the short-term problem, which was how to keep growth high enough to offset massive unemployment and subsequent political unrest, there is growing unease about how the massive stimulus could distort the economy in the long term. China has become an economy driven almost entirely by state investment, which in the first half of 2009 accounted for 88 percent of GDP growth—a share for which it is hard to find any parallel, in any country, at any time.

The dangers of this lopsided boom are real. The pro-market faction worries that the liberalization of financial markets and the privatization of strategic sectors (which include most of the richest industries such as banking, telecoms, and construction) are being forgotten in favor of "bridge to nowhere"–style projects. Even government officials now admit that 60 percent or more of the stimulus money has ended up in stock and real-estate markets, fueling worries about dangerous new asset bubbles. In some coastal cities, property sales are three times what they were last year; the Shanghai stock market is up over 60 percent this year. "It's just a stopgap measure—all the stimulus has been concentrated in building new infrastructure and reheating the property sector," says Chinese independent economist Andy Xie.

This could spell trouble for Hu and Wen. The Chinese government debt, once negligible, is now officially about 30 percent of GDP, but some Western economists put the real figure as high as 70 percent. While these figures are still low compared with Western nations (the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio will reach about 100 percent next year), they have Chinese politicians fretting. Last month Wen told a group of VIPs at the World Economic Forum in Dalian that China's rebound was "unstable, unbalanced, and unconsolidated." A week earlier Chi Fulun, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference was blunter: "Chinese leaders," he said in an interview, "should rethink the country's reform package."

China bulls would argue that China, where 40 percent of villages still have no paved roads to the nearest market, has a huge demand for more paving projects. Yet bears would ask how much China gains from connecting poor villagers (China's per capita GDP is still only $2,000, and much less in rural areas) to the market. "Take a drive on one of those new rural highways; you won't see many cars," says Ming Huang, a finance professor at Beijing's Cheung Kong business school and Cornell University. "It's going to take a long time for this sort of investment to result in any kind of consumption boost." Meanwhile, the stimulus is like steroids for the dominant state sector, which, according to Hudson Institute fellow John Lee, has received some 95 percent of the stimulus capital so far. If it falters, Hu and Wen will be held to account, not held up as brilliant managers.

Myth No. 3: CAPITALISM IS FLOURISHING.
That was partly true until this year. The number of private enterprises in China doubled from 20 million in 1990 to 40 million in 2008. Yet, according to Lee, that number will likely be down to about 38 million by the end of this year, as many private manufacturers go out of business. State enterprises enjoyed huge advantages, even before Beijing's stimulus started shifting more funds their way. State companies have easy access to 3 percent loans from state-owned banks, while private companies pay double-digit rates and are often forced to tap underground markets for funding. Since 1992, growth in private-sector fixed asset investment has been rising at about 10 percent per year, compared with state-sector growth of between 20 and 50 percent. Since the 1990s, the average size of a successful private business in China has flatlined at about 30 employees, due mainly to their difficulties raising capital. It's no surprise that recent market surveys show state companies are bullish on the future, while private-sector businesspeople are decidedly less so.

The last several years of boom growth have given the state little reason to ease its grip on the most lucrative industries, and the crisis may not be enough to force its hand. "Unfortunately, the low hanging fruit has been plucked," says Huang. "We've now hit a point where if you want to do more reform, you are going to have to really hurt some vested interests in the key parts of the economy—finance, telecoms, energy, government bodies, etc." The Chinese state owns more than two thirds of all fixed assets like telecommunications lines, power plants, and real estate in the country. State-controlled companies represent some 70 percent of the major stock markets. And while the private sector still controls a little more than half the total economy, most China watchers believe the stimulus package will turn the tables. "I have no doubt that after this crisis, the state will control a larger share of the overall economy," says Wang Shuo, managing editor of China's Caijing economic journal. "That's bad news for domestic demand, because it means that individuals will control a smaller share of the economy. Households are already supporting state-owned enterprises with their savings, which are given to these mostly inefficient businesses via state-owned banks at very low interest rates."

The crisis is exposing the hidden hand of the state. Back in 2007, the government listed three of its largest four banks on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in what was described at the time as an effort to make them more commercial, less political. Yet as soon as the crisis hit, Beijing issued instructions to bank heads on how and when to start lending. That prevented the kind of credit-market heart attack that hit the West, but many analysts fear it will lead to a spike in nonperforming loans next year. Now Beijing is meddling in the market in all manner of ways—arresting executives of an Australian mining company after it jilted a Chinese merger partner, supporting state-owned firms that want to walk away from Western derivatives contracts, allowing state takeovers of more efficient private firms. China threw open its doors to capitalism under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, but now "the open door has lost its momentum," says Wang.

Myth No. 4: CHINA IS AN EXPORT-DRIVEN ECONOMY.
If that really were true, why is it that exports are down 20 percent this year, but the economy is still up by 8 percent? "While exports are important to China, in the same way that they are important to Japan or Germany, it's not the only thing going on here," says Fang Xinghai, director of the Shanghai Financial Services Office.

Take a close look at Chinese exports as a growth engine, and they begin to fall apart. While gross exports make up a bit less than 40 percent of the economy, that figure is misleading, says CLSA strategist Andy Rothman, because it overestimates the Chinese take on goods stamped made in china. Most of those goods are merely assembled in China from parts made in South Korea, Taiwan, and other richer countries. Consider a $299 iPod that sells wholesale from the Chinese assembly plant for $150. Only about 5 percent, or $7.50, of that wholesale price comes from Chinese parts and labor. That $7.50 is the net export value, and the real contribution to China's economy. Net exports account for just over 7 percent of China's GDP. That explains why China can still grow when its key Western export markets are in a deep recession.

China depends, as we've seen above, on state spending. The contribution of a growing consumer is real but widely overstated, as Morgan Stanley Asia chair Stephen Roach and many others like to point out. Chinese consumption makes up only 37 percent of the economy, the smallest share of any major nation. And to the extent that Chinese consumers are still more optimistic, and less heavily in debt than Western counterparts, that too has much to do with heavy state subsidies. Lately the middle class has been snapping up flats in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as furnishings and white goods, thanks to the massive, government-mandated increases in bank lending over the past year. Credit was up 32 percent in September, after similar rises over the past several months. Rothman's conclusion, which is increasingly supported by a number of other Chinese and Western economists, is that China can continue to grow at a 6 to 9 percent annual pace based on state and consumer spending "without any contribution from net exports." So much for China's export dependence.

Myth No. 5: CHINESE COMPANIES WILL RULE THE WORLD.
True, many big Chinese state companies are scouring the world, hunting for distressed properties, creating the illusion that the crisis is advancing China Inc.'s global ambition. But the buyers are mainly government-run oil and mining behemoths, seeking out cheap resources in other developing nations, and they have little potential to become global brands. "Quite simply, there is little real innovation or branding ability in China," says Beijing University professor Michael Pettis. The obstacles include weak legal protection for intellectual property and contracts, and an educational system focused on rote learning and metrics rather than creativity and innovation. In typical Chinese fashion, the financial crisis prompted edicts from Beijing that firms should go forth and innovate—subsidies are now being doled out for new patents filed. Yet as any economist or investor will tell you, patents rarely translate directly into real companies with new and unique technologies, and top-down efforts at creating startup companies can't compete with the sort of spontaneous germination of ideas that happens in places like Silicon Valley or Cambridge.

Meanwhile, China's Wild West atmosphere doesn't encourage the long-term thinking necessary for building global businesses and world-class research and development. "Blurry rules and corruption fosters short-term thinking here," says Huang. "Entrepreneurs don't feel safe—there are many examples of the government taking over private businesses or changing the legal landscape—so they take their profits as quickly as they can." Meanwhile, richer state companies (think Sinopec or Chinalco) use their giant war chests to make acquisitions to feed domestic demand, rather than investing in research or branding. Why spend money to become more globally competitive when you have a monopoly in the world's most populous country? Result: even China's 800-pound gorillas won't replace Western blue chips any time soon.

Myth No. 6: CHINA PUTS MONEY BEFORE THE ENVIRONMENT.
China's growing tendency to ignore market forces is working in one surprising field: clean technology. For years China has resisted pressure to help control carbon emissions, insisting that it needs to develop first, and that its per capita emissions are far below those of the West. Now, as China has come to realize that its people could be among the hardest-hit victims of global warming, Beijing has mobilized its resources, as perhaps only China can. With the help of generous state subsidies, Chinese companies have, for example, taken the lead in solar cell production, and are powering ahead in many other areas. This fall Chinese leaders announced new targets for reducing carbon emissions, which, if met, would put the nation in the lead on combating climate change by 2020.

China has made green technology a national priority, launching major research initiatives on solar-powered batteries and wind technology. Its green stimulus package amounts to $218 billion, the largest in the world, resulting in the founding of dozens of alternative energy companies within the last year. China already produces more power from renewable energy than any other nation in the world. Meanwhile, the recession and uncertainty about the direction of oil prices has slowed the momentum of green investing in the West. This doesn't mean that China can clean up its own act soon: to meet energy demand, it continues to build old-fashioned coal-fired plants at the rate of one a week. But it may become the leading manufacturer of clean energy technology for the rest of the world.

None of these changes should come as a real surprise, on closer look. In past crises, China has always shown a bold willingness to adapt. Its original opening to global markets emerged from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Its last big opening emerged from the Asian crisis, when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Now the changes seem to be moving in the opposite direction, back toward a more insular economy, run by the state, less welcome to private and foreign business, and with one big surprise. If the ruling faction fails, there is an alternative waiting in the wings.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/218290

Power Up

2009-09-21T20:27:00.001-07:00

China's resource nationalism is on the rise as it hoards minerals essential for batteries, cell phones, computers, and the green revolution.

By Melinda Liu | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Sep 17, 2009

For some countries, trade policy is the stuff of arcane rules and wonky bureaucracy. But for centuries in China, trade has been the biggest bugaboo of foreign affairs. Every Chinese knows about the moment their country was forcibly "opened" to the West: British merchants compelled Beijing to allow imports of opium—a baleful product that many Chinese nonetheless desired—in the 19th century. More recently, though, the tables have turned. China has come to possess a raft of things coveted by those same foreign powers: cheap labor, abundant capital, and, as it turns out, the world's greatest supply of so-called rare earths—metals essential for everything from hybrid cars to iPods to precision-guided weaponry.

Which is why this past weekend's Sino-U.S. row isn't just about lowly rubber and poultry. (On Friday, President Barack Obama decided to impose a tariff of up to 35 percent on Chinese tires for the next three years; in response, Beijing threatened to return the favor with possible tariffs on American auto parts and chicken meat.) A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman called the U.S. move a "grave" form of protectionism, but episodes like these also give nationalistic Chinese an excuse to demand that Beijing hoard those rare-earth metals. It is already doing so, and its own protectionism may end up reshaping the global economy.

You're not alone if you can't name any of these rare-earth minerals. Words like yttrium, holmium, lanthanum, and thulium don't exactly roll off the tongue. All you have to know is that China has a near stranglehold on such ores, currently producing 95 percent of the world's supply and claiming about 60 percent of known reserves within its borders, mostly in the region of Inner Mongolia. The region's vice governor, Zhao Shuanglian, declared in early September that China planned to streamline the domestic rare-earth industry, impose export controls, and establish a national reserve mechanism. "We're not taking a short-term view of just trying to prop up rare-earth prices," he maintained.

Over the past decade, China has honed its competitive edge in producing rare earths, thanks to cheap labor, improved quality, and economies of scale. Extraction is a dirty job—in some cases crushed ore is doused with hot sulfuric acid—and therefore requires costly environmental-protection measures in developed countries. The combination of these factors, and a flood of cheap Chinese ores in the '90s, persuaded many mining enterprises in other countries with rare-earth reserves—from the United States to Russia—to reduce or even cease production. The biggest U.S. rare-earth mine at Mountain Pass, Calif., was closed, for instance, though it's now being revived by Molycorp Minerals.

Problem is, it takes up to a decade to develop a rare-earth mine on a commercial scale. Yet these 15 metallic elements happen to be essential in many emerging green technologies. They go into electric vehicles, into all the methods yet conceived for reducing carbon monoxide and microparticles in engine exhaust, and into high-performance metallurgy behind wind gearboxes. To name just one use that is bound to grow: rare earths are a key component (reportedly at least 12 kilos' worth per battery) in Toyota's famous green car, the Prius. Jack Lifton, a freelance analyst who works on rare-earths, estimates that global trade in these metals is roughly $2 billion annually, but the total market for the products that depend on them is up to $100 billion per year.

But just as these elements are becoming more essential, China is undertaking a new bout of resource nationalism. For some time, intellectuals representing what they call "patriotic" Chinese (that is, those who are hawkish about defending their country's national interests and skeptical of Western intentions) have demanded that their government play hardball in international trade–including rare-earth exports—and the decibel level has risen significantly since Western excesses triggered the global financial crisis almost exactly a year ago.

The government has fallen in line. China has already moved dramatically to curb export quotas for rare earths: last month a draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology called for a total ban on shipments of terbium (a key ingredient in low-energy lightbulbs), dysprosium (used in the nuclear industry and lasers), yttrium (present in LEDs and TVs), thulium (which enhances medical imaging), and lutetium (used in alloys and polymerization). Other minerals, such as neodymium (crucial for hard-disk drives and wind turbines), europium (used in lasers), cerium (which reduces carbon monoxide in engine exhaust), and lanthanum (key for many hybrid and electric-car batteries), would face a combined export quota of 35,000 tons annually—woefully insufficient to fill global needs. World demand this year is an estimated 124,000 tons, and is expected to double by 2015.

Beijing officials say their goal is not to squirrel away the ores for themselves but rather to persuade manufacturers to build plants in China if they want to use Chinese-produced rare earths in manufacturing. But jitters have already swept through the Japanese government, which has drafted a "Strategy for Ensuring Stable Supplies of Rare Metals" that calls for stockpiling and securing supplies abroad. Japanese authorities are especially worried because their industries' hunger for rare earths is skyrocketing—it was 40,000 tons in 2008, meaning Tokyo's demand alone exceeded China's new export quota. Already, some Japanese users are compelled to rely on smuggled or illegally mined rare earths.

Other countries—namely Australia, the United States, Canada, and South Africa—are redoubling efforts to exploit their own reserves of rare earths. Molycorp (the owner of the Mountain Pass mine in California) and two Australian mining firms are slated to ramp up rare-earth production to some 50,000 tons by middecade. But these alternative producers cannot reach optimum capacity right away, so a crunch is inevitable. Among China's trading partners, there's some talk of invoking WTO commitments to try to prod the regime into more generous exports. But it'll be hard to force Beijing into magnanimity when it claims domestic supplies are needed just to meet internal demand. Worried about their own shortfalls, Chinese firms have scrambled to hook up with Australian rare-earth producers. One Chinese company doubled its stake (to 25 percent) in Arafura Resources Ltd., and another is awaiting Canberra's approval of its bid for majority share of Lynas Corp. Ltd.

In other words, rare earths are the sword of Damocles hanging over Beijing's trading partners. If and when they anger China, the People's Republic can cut them off on these essential elements. And nationalistic citizens will surely call on their government to play that card if China finds itself in a trade war like the one it is now spiraling toward with the United States. The effect would be felt across the developed world desperate for the technologies these metals enable. Tension would beset China's ties with the U.S. and Japan. And the long-term economic repercussions would affect the renewable-energy initiatives and defense industries of tomorrow—not merely the tires, car parts, and chickens at the heart of today's dispute.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/215544

Robots 'to revolutionise surgery'

2009-09-10T20:16:00.001-07:00

Robots 'to revolutionise surgery'

By Jane Elliott
BBC News health reporter

Within ten years some doctors and scientists are predicting that all surgery could be scarless.

They say by using the natural orifices of the body and the body's own natural scar the belly-button (or umbilicus), it will be possible to insert robots into the body which can help perform every surgical procedure.

It sounds fantastical, but prototypes are already in existence that can crawl and swim inside the body taking pictures of difficult to access areas.

There are particularly big hopes for Ares (Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal Surgical System), developed by Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy, with the support of the European Commission.

This is a robot that will self assemble inside the body, after the patient has swallowed up to 15 separate parts, and then aid the surgeon to carry out procedures.

" It is almost inconceivable as surgeons that in 10 years time we will be putting our hands in patients "
Mr Justin Vale Urological surgeon

By operating from inside the body, surgeons could avoid external incisions, minimising pain and shortening recovery time for the patient.

In many areas surgeons are already using robots for their daily surgical work.

Head movements

Robots such as 'FreeHand', a robotic camera controller for minimally invasive surgery.

Traditionally the laparoscopic (keyhole) camera was been moved by an assistant, but the 'FreeHand' allows the surgeon to control the camera themselves using head movements and a foot pedal.

Another example is the 'Da Vinci Robot' which is mainly used to carry out prostatectomies (removal of all or part of the prostate), tumour removals, gastro and neurological operations.

Its robotic arms rotate 360 degrees allowing surgeons more precision than they would have using their own hands.

Mr Justin Vale, a urological surgeon from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust said robots already feature heavily in his daily work.

He uses the Da Vinci robot for all his prostatectomies and half his kidney tumour removals.

"I say to all my trainees and NHS managers that it is almost inconceivable as surgeons that in 10 years time we will be putting our hands in patients," he said.

"As long as they can bring the price down and make them smaller it is almost inevitable they will take off."

But he said there were training issues and that learning to use the computers required a new approach.

Sense of touch

"It does have limitations. One that surgeons will talk about is that there is no sense of touch.

"When you use your hands or standard keyhole instruments you do get a feeling of tension and pressure and whether something is soft or hard, but you can't do that to the same degree with a robot.

" Many mini and micro-robots have biologically inspired designs which emulate the crawling and wriggling motion of worms and insects "
Dr Arianna Menciassi Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna

"It is difficult when you are learning as you have lost one of your senses, but when you are a skilled robotic surgeon you develop to overcome that minor loss."

The growth of interest in this area has led the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) to hold a special exhibition to mark the work of robots.

'Sci-Fi Surgery: Medical Robots' at the Hunterian Museum, London, will run from 8 September to 23 December.

Dr Arianna Menciassi, is one of the experts in biomedical robotics leading work at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna.

She said nature had been their inspiration for much of their work.

"Many mini and micro-robots have biologically inspired designs which emulate the crawling and wriggling motion of worms and insects, or the swimming motion of bacteria," she said.

"We turned to biological inspiration because worms have locomotion systems suited to unstructured, slippery environments and are ideally suited for use in the human body.

"The dream for us is that in the future no more incisions will be necessary for operations because we can exploit the natural orifices of the human body.

"We are also working on the real possibility of building a robot inside the person (Ares), inside their abdomen or stomach and there would be several module which are very small like pills and that can combine together inside and the idea is to introduce these robots from the mouth or anus or the umbilical

"This is the dream, but at the moment it is not so advanced to satisfy the dream but this is the direction."

" The idea of the exhibition is to put before the public the idea that surgeons can be assisted by robots - they are not competition to the profession "
Mike Larvin Royal College of Surgeons

The London exhibition will also feature some famous medical robots from the world of science fiction, including the Pyschophonic Nurse, dreamed up in the 1920s.

As a 10-year-old Mike Larvin, Director of Education at the RCS said he had been inspired by the film 'Fantastic Voyage' in which a miniaturised medical team is injected into the bloodstream of an ailing diplomat to try to make him better.

That might remain a far-fetched fantasy, but Mike said medical robotics was a branch of science that was advancing at phenomenal speed.

"The idea of the exhibition is to put before the public the idea that surgeons can be assisted by robots - they are not competition to the profession," he said.

"They are something that helps make operations safer and better."

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Chimerica’ is Headed for Divorce

2009-08-18T19:00:00.001-07:00

Chimerica' is Headed for Divorce

By Niall Ferguson | NEWSWEEK

Published Aug 15, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Aug 31, 2009

When does a rising power become a threat? There is seldom a single moment. A century ago, AngloGerman antagonism was still a relatively new phenomenon; an alliance between the two empires seemed plausible as late as 1899. Likewise, the United States took time to identify Japan as a serious rival in the Pacific region; it was not until the 1930s that relations really soured. In both cases, the perception of a strategic threat was slow to grow. But grow it did—and ultimately it led to war. Could the same be happening to the United States and China today? Are we imperceptibly but inexorably slipping from cooperation to competition?

Back in early 2007, it seemed as if China and America were so intertwined they'd become one economy: I called it "Chimerica." The Chinese did the saving, the Americans the spending. The Chinese did the exporting, the Americans the importing. The Chinese did the lending, the Americans the borrowing.

As the Chinese strategy was based on export-led growth, they had no desire to see their currency appreciate against the dollar. So they intervened consistently in currency markets, and as a result, they now have international reserves totaling $2.1 trillion. About 70 percent of these are in dollar-denominated securities, and a large proportion of these are in U.S. government bonds. The unintended effect of this was to help finance the U.S. current-account deficit at very low interest rates. Without those low long-term rates, it's hard to believe that the U.S. -real-estate market would have bubbled the way it did between 2002 and 2007.

For a time Chimerica seemed like a marriage made in heaven: both economies grew so fast that they accounted for about 40 percent of global growth between 1998 and 2007. The big question now is whether or not this marriage is on the rocks. America's highly indebted consumers just can't borrow anymore. The U.S. savings rate is soaring upward, and U.S. imports from China have slumped, down 18 percent between May 2008 and May 2009. Of course, that doesn't mean the Chinese are going to stop buying dollars. They dare not allow their currency to appreciate when so many jobs in the export sector are under threat. But it does mean that they are questioning the Chimerica strategy.

It ' s a bit like one of those marriages between a compulsive saver and a chronic spender. Such partnerships can work for a certain period of time, but eventually the penny-pincher gets disillusioned with the spendthrift. Every time Chinese officials express concern about U.S. fiscal or monetary policy, it reminds me of one of those domestic tiffs in which the saver says to the spender: "You maxed out on the credit cards once too often, honey."

Let's look at the numbers. China's holdings of U.S. Treasuries rose to $801.5 billion in May, an increase of 5 percent from $763.5 billion in April. Call it $40 billion a month. And let's imagine the Chinese do that every month through this fiscal year. That would be a credit line to the U.S. government of $480 billion. Given that the total deficit is forecast to be about $2 trillion, that means the Chinese may finance less than a quarter of -total federal-government borrowing—whereas a few years ago they were financing virtually the whole deficit.

The trouble is that the Chinese clearly feel they have enough U.S. government bonds. Their great anxiety is that the Obama administration's very lax fiscal policy, plus the Federal Reserve's policy of quantitative easing (in layman's terms, printing money), are going to cause one or both of two things to happen: the price of U.S. bonds could fall and/or the purchasing power of the dollar could fall. Either way the Chinese lose. Their current strategy is to shift their purchases to the short end of the yield curve, buying Treasury bills instead of 10-year bonds. But that doesn't address the currency risk. In a best-selling book titled Currency Wars, Chinese economist Song Hongbing warned that the United States has a bad habit of stiffing its creditors by letting the dollar slide. This, he points out, is what happened to the Japanese in the 1980s. First their currency strengthened against the dollar. Then their economy tanked.

What is China's alternative if it seeks a divorce from America? Call it the empire option. Instead of continuing in this unhappy marriage, the Chinese can go it alone, counting on their growing economic might (according to Goldman Sachs, China's gross domestic product could equal that of the United States by 2027) to buy them global power in their own right. In some ways they've already begun doing this. Their naval strategy clearly implies a challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. Their investments in African minerals and infrastructure look distinctly imperial too. And now the official line from Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is to "hasten the implementation of our 'going out' strategy and combine the utilization of foreign exchange reserves with the 'going out' of our enterprises." That sounds like a Chinese campaign to buy up foreign assets—exchanging dodgy dollars for copper mines.

At the same time, crucially, the Chinese need to have their own domestic consumers step up to take the place of over leveraged Americans. China's economy is, above all, a manufacturing concern; if no one is going to the shopping malls, China's companies are just building their inventories. So a post-Chimerican China needs to be not only an empire, but also a consumer society. This will boost China's internal market as well as trade with its Asian neighbors, and will spur the development of an Asian economic bloc.

The global implications of this divorce are huge. Imagine a new Cold War, but one in which the two superpowers are economically the same size. Or, if you prefer an older analogy, imagine a rerun of the Anglo-German antagonism of the early 1900s, with America in the role of Britain, and China in the role of imperial Germany. This is a better analogy because it captures the fact that a high level of economic integration does not necessarily prevent the growth of strategic rivalry and, ultimately, conflict.

We are a very long way from outright warfare, of course. The tectonic plates of geopolitics don't move that fast. But the danger signs are there. In a succession of official and semi-official statements, Chinese spokesmen have signaled their interest in a substitute for the dollar in the form of International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights, or even gold. At the very least, a gradual increase in the share of euros and yen in Chinese reserves must surely be in the cards. But they could go further than that. It's not impossible that, at some point within the next five to 10 years, the Chinese will feel ready to remove their capital controls and allow their own currency, the renminbi, to develop as a freely convertible international currency. At that point, the Chimerican marriage will be over. Not too surprising, really. As the name implied, such an unbalanced relationship was always something of chimera.

Ferguson, a NEWSWEEK contributor, is author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/212143

A drug discovered in the soil of a South Pacific island may help to fight the ageing process, research suggests.

2009-07-08T18:56:00.001-07:00

Tests raise life extension hopes

A drug discovered in the soil of a South Pacific island may help to fight the ageing process, research suggests.

When US scientists treated old mice with rapamycin it extended their expected lifespan by up to 38%.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, raise the prospect of being able to slow down the ageing process in older people.

However, a UK expert warned against using the drug to try to extend lifespan, as it can suppress immunity.

" We believe this is the first convincing evidence that the ageing process can be slowed and lifespan can be extended by a drug therapy starting at an advanced age. "
Professor Randy Strong University of Texas

Rapamycin was first discovered on Easter Island in the 1970s.

It is already used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients, and in stents implanted into patients to keep their coronary arteries open. It is also being tested as a possible treatment for cancer.

Researchers at three centres in Texas, Michigan and Maine gave the drug to mice at an age equivalent to 60 in humans.

The mice were bred to mimic the genetic diversity and susceptibility to disease of humans as closely as possible.

Rapamycin extended the animals' expected lifespan by between 28% and 38%.

The researchers estimated that in humans terms this would be greater than the predicted increase in extra years of life, if both cancer and heart disease were prevented and cured.

Researcher Dr Arlan Richardson, of the Barshop Institute, said: "I've been in aging research for 35 years and there have been many so-called 'anti-ageing' interventions over those years that were never successful.

"I never thought we would find an anti-ageing pill for people in my lifetime; however, rapamycin shows a great deal of promise to do just that."

Professor Randy Strong, of the University of Texas Health Science Center, said: "We believe this is the first convincing evidence that the ageing process can be slowed and lifespan can be extended by a drug therapy starting at an advanced age."

Calorie restriction

Rapamycin appears to have a similar effect to restricting food intake, which has also been shown to boost longevity.

" In no way should anyone consider using this particular drug to try to extend their own lifespan, as rapamycin suppresses immunity "
Dr Lynne Cox University of Oxford

It targets a protein in cells called mTOR, which controls many processes involved in metabolism and response to stress.

The researchers had to find a way to re-formulate the drug so that it was stable enough to make it to the mice's intestines before beginning to break down.

The original aim was to begin feeding the mice at four months of age, but the delay caused by developing the new formulation meant that feeding did not start until the animals were 20 months old.

The researchers thought the animals would be too old for the drug to have any effect - and were surprised when it did.

Professor Strong said: "This study has clearly identified a potential therapeutic target for the development of drugs aimed at preventing age-related diseases and extending healthy lifespan.

"If rapamycin, or drugs like rapamycin, works as envisioned, the potential reduction in health cost will be enormous."

'Don't try it now'

Dr Lynne Cox, an expert in ageing at the University of Oxford, described the study as "exciting".

She said: "It is especially interesting that the drug was effective even when given to older mice, as it would be much better to treat ageing in older people rather than using drugs long-term through life."

However, she added: "In no way should anyone consider using this particular drug to try to extend their own lifespan, as rapamycin suppresses immunity.

"While the lab mice were protected from infection, that's simply impossible in the human population.

"What the study does is to highlight an important molecular pathway that new, more specific drugs might be designed to work on.

"Whether it's a sensible thing to try to increase lifespan this way is another matter; perhaps increasing health span rather than overall lifespan might be a better goal."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/8139816.stm

Published: 2009/07/08 23:00:33 GMT

© BBC MMIX

New cancer drug 'shows promise'

2009-06-25T18:47:00.001-07:00

New cancer drug 'shows promise'

Researchers say a new type of cancer treatment has produced highly promising results in preliminary drug trials.

Olaparib was given to 19 patients with inherited forms of advanced breast, ovarian and prostate cancers caused by mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.

In 12 of the patients - none of whom had responded to other therapies - tumours shrank or stabilised.

The study, led by the Institute of Cancer Research, features in the New England Journal of Medicine.

CASE STUDY
Julian Lewis, 62, was treated with olaparib after being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Within a month or two levels of a key chemical marker of cancer went down to a low level, and have now stayed low for more than two years. In addition, secondary tumours in his bones have almost disappeared. He has experienced minor side-effects, such as stomach discomfort and mild nausea, but he said: "I hope to carry on with this for as long as possible. Partly the aim is the obvious one of keeping my cancer cells in check, but there's a broader goal too: to help find out how long this drug can be used safely in other people."

One of the first patients to be given the treatment is still in remission after two years.

Olaparib - a member of a new class of drug called PARP inhibitors - targets cancer cells, but leaves healthy cells relatively unscathed.

The researchers, working with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, found that patients experienced very few side-effects, and some reported the treatment was "much easier than chemotherapy".

Researcher Dr Johann de Bono said the drug should now be tested in larger trials.

He said: "This drug showed very impressive results in shrinking patients' tumours.

"It's giving patients who have already tried many conventional treatments long periods of remission, free from the symptoms of cancer or major side-effects."

Olaparib is the first successful example of a new type of personalised medicine using a technique called "synthetic lethality" - a subtle way of exploiting the body's own molecular weaknesses for positive effect.

In this case the drug takes advantage of the fact that while normal cells have several different ways of repairing damage to their DNA, one of these pathways is disabled by the BRCA mutations in tumour cells.

Olaparib blocks one of the repair pathways by shutting down a key enzyme called PARP.

BRCA MUTATIONS

BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations weaken the cells' ability to repair DNA damage

They are thought to be responsible for about 5% of breast and ovarian cancers, and about 1-2% of early onset prostate cancers

Women with a BRCA mutation have a risk of up to 85% on breast cancer, and up to 60% on ovarian cancer

Men with a BRCA mutation have a risk of up to 15% on prostate cancer

This does not affect normal cells because they can call on an alternative repair mechanism, controlled by their healthy BRCA genes.

But in tumours cells, where the BRCA pathway is disabled by genetic mutation, there is no alternative repair mechanism, and the cells die.

Cancer cells with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations are the first to be shown to be sensitive to PARP inhibitors.

But there is evidence that olaparib will also be effective in other cancers with different defects in the repair of DNA.

Professor Stan Kaye, who also worked on the study, said: "The next step is to test this drug on other more common types of ovarian and breast cancers where we hope it will be just as effective."

The researchers say the process of drug evaluation and registration may have to be revamped to take consideration of the fact that new generation cancer drugs target specific molecular defects, rather than types of cancer.

Dr Peter Sneddon, of the charity Cancer Research UK, said: "It is very encouraging to see the development of 'personalised treatment', tailored to the requirements of the individual patient, becoming a reality as it offers the opportunity to design new drugs that are truly selective.

"Although development of this drug is in its early stages, it is very exciting to see that it has the potential to work when other treatment options have failed."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/8116790.stm

Published: 2009/06/24 23:09:10 GMT

© BBC MMIX

The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good

2009-06-14T21:26:00.001-07:00

The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good

(To a point)

Fareed Zakaria

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Jun 22, 2009

A specter is haunting the world—the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. "Another ideological god has failed," the dean of financial commentators, Martin Wolf, wrote in the Financial Times. Companies will "fundamentally reset" the way they work, said the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt. "Capitalism will be different," said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

No economic system ever remains unchanged, of course, and certainly not after a deep financial collapse and a broad global recession. But over the past few months, even though we've had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalized no banks and undergone no grand reinvention of capitalism, the sense of panic seems to be easing. Perhaps this is a mirage—or perhaps the measures taken by states around the world, chiefly the U.S. government, have restored normalcy. Every expert has a critique of specific policies, but over time we might see that faced with the decision to underreact or overreact, most governments chose the latter. That choice might produce new problems in due course—a topic for another essay—but it appears to have averted a systemic breakdown.

There is still a long road ahead. There will be many more bankruptcies. Banks will have to slowly earn their way out of their problems or die. Consumers will save more before they start spending again. Mountains of debt will have to be reduced. American capitalism is being rebalanced, reregulated and thus restored. In doing so it will have to face up to long-neglected problems, if this is to lead to a true recovery, not just a brief reprieve.

Many experts are convinced that the situation cannot improve yet because their own sweeping solutions to the problem have not been implemented. Most of us want to see more punishment inflicted, particularly on America's bankers. Deep down we all have a Puritan belief that unless they suffer a good dose of pain, they will not truly repent. In fact, there has been much pain, especially in the financial industry, where tens of thousands of jobs, at all levels, have been lost. But fundamentally, markets are not about morality. They are large, complex systems, and if things get stable enough, they move on.

Consider our track record over the past 20 years, starting with the stock-market crash of 1987, when on Oct. 19 the Dow Jones lost 23 percent, the largest one-day loss in its history. The legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that he just hoped that the coming recession wouldn't prove as painful as the Great Depression. It turned out to be a blip on the way to an even bigger, longer boom. Then there was the 1997 East Asian crisis, during the depths of which Paul Krugman wrote in a Fortune cover essay, "Never in the course of economic events—not even in the early years of the Depression—has so large a part of the world economy experienced so devastating a fall from grace." He went on to argue that if Asian countries did not adopt his radical strategy—currency controls—"we could be looking at?.?.?.?the kind of slump that 60 years ago devastated societies, destabilized governments, and eventually led to war." Only one Asian country instituted currency controls, and partial ones at that. All rebounded within two years.

Each crisis convinced observers that it signaled the end of some new, dangerous feature of the economic landscape. But often that novelty accelerated in the years that followed. The 1987 crash was said to be the product of computer trading, which has, of course, expanded dramatically since then. The East Asian crisis was meant to end the happy talk about "emerging markets," which are now at the center of world growth. The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998—which then–Treasury secretary Robert Rubin described as "the worst financial crisis in 50 years"—was meant to be the end of hedge funds, which then massively expanded. The technology bubble's bursting in 2000 was supposed to put an end to the dreams of oddball Internet startups. Goodbye, Pets.com; hello, Twitter. Now we hear that this crisis is the end of derivatives. Let's see. Robert Shiller, one of the few who predicted this crash almost exactly—and the dotcom bust as well—argues that in fact we need more derivatives to make markets more stable.

A few years from now, strange as it may sound, we might all find that we are hungry for more capitalism, not less. An economic crisis slows growth, and when countries need growth, they turn to markets. After the Mexican and East Asian currency crises—which were far more painful in those countries than the current downturn has been in America—we saw the pace of market-oriented reform speed up. If, in the years ahead, the American consumer remains reluctant to spend, if federal and state governments groan under their debt loads, if government-owned companies remain expensive burdens, then private-sector activity will become the only path to create jobs. The simple truth is that with all its flaws, capitalism remains the most productive economic engine we have yet invented. Like Churchill's line about democracy, it is the worst of all economic systems, except for the others. Its chief vindication today has come halfway across the world, in countries like China and India, which have been able to grow and pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by supporting markets and free trade. Last month India held elections during the worst of this crisis. Its powerful left-wing parties campaigned against liberalization and got their worst drubbing at the polls in 40 years.

Capitalism means growth, but also instability. The system is dynamic and inherently prone to crashes that cause great damage along the way. For about 90 years, we have been trying to regulate the system to stabilize it while still preserving its energy. We are at the start of another set of these efforts. In undertaking them, it is important to keep in mind what exactly went wrong. What we are experiencing is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of finance, of democracy, of globalization and ultimately of ethics.

"Capitalism messed up," the British tycoon Martin Sorrell wrote recently, "or, to be more precise, capitalists did." Actually, that's not true. Finance screwed up, or to be more precise, financiers did. In June 2007, when the financial crisis began, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, IBM, Nike, Wal-Mart and Microsoft were all running their companies with strong balance sheets and sensible business models. Major American corporations were highly profitable, and they were spending prudently, holding on to cash to build a cushion for a downturn. For that reason, many of them have been able to weather the storm remarkably well. Finance and anything finance-related—like real estate—is another story.

Finance has a history of messing up, from the Dutch tulip bubble in 1637 to now. The proximate causes of these busts have been varied, but follow a strikingly similar path. In calm times, political stability, economic growth and technological innovation all encourage an atmosphere of easy money and new forms of credit. Cheap credit causes greed, miscalculation and eventually ruin. President Martin Van Buren described the economic crisis of 1837 in Britain and America thusly: "Two nations, the most commercial in the world, enjoying but recently the highest degree of apparent prosperity and maintaining with each other the closest relations, are suddenly?.?.?.?plunged into a state of embarrassment and distress. In both countries we have witnessed the same [expansion] of paper money and other facilities of credit; the same spirit of speculation?.?.?.?the same overwhelming catastrophe." Obama could put that on his teleprompter today.

Many of the regulatory reforms that people in government are talking about now seem sensible and smart. Banks that are too large to fail should also be too large be leveraged at 30 to 1. The incentives for executives within banks are skewed toward reckless risk-taking with other people's money. ("Heads they win, tails they break even," is how Barney Frank describes the current setup.) Derivatives need to be better controlled. To call banks casinos, as is often done, is actually unfair to casinos, which are required to hold certain levels of capital because they must be able to cash in a customer's chips. Banks have not been required to do that for their key derivatives contract, credit default swaps.

Yet at the same time, we should proceed cautiously on massive new regulations. Many rules put in place in the 1930s still look smart; the problem is that over the past 15 years they were dismantled, or conscious decisions were made not to update them. Keep in mind that the one advanced industrial country where the banking system has weathered the storm superbly is Canada, which just kept the old rules in place, requiring banks to hold higher amounts of capital to offset their liabilities and to maintain lower levels of leverage. A few simple safeguards, and the whole system survived a massive storm.

The simplest safeguard American regulators have had, of course, is the interest rate on credit. In responding to almost every crisis in the past 15 years, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan always had the same solution: cut rates and ease up on money. In 1998, when Long-Term Capital Management collapsed, he suddenly and dramatically slashed rates, even though the economy was roaring along at 6 percent growth. In late 1999, buying into fears about Y2K, he swamped the markets with liquidity. (One effect: between November 1998 and February 2000, when rates finally rose, the NASDAQ jumped almost 250 percent, increasing in value by more than $3 trillion.) And finally, when the technology bubble burst and 9/11 hit, Greenspan again lowered rates and kept them low, this time inflating a massive housing bubble.

Greenspan behaved like most American political leaders over the past two decades—he chose the easy way out of a hard situation. William McChesney Martin, the great Fed chairman of the 1950s and 1960s, once said that his job was to take the punch bowl away just as the party had begun. No one wants to do that in America anymore—not the Fed chairman, not the regulators, not Congress and not the president.

Government actions should be "countercyclical"—that is, they should work to slow down growth. So, in boom times, the Fed would raise rates and require banks to have higher capital and lower leverage. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would start worrying about too much easy credit, raise standards for loans and disqualify buyers unlikely to be able to afford houses. Banks would be urged to slow down the supply of credit cards and other credit instruments. In fact, this is exactly how the governments of China and India behaved in 2007, when their economies were booming. At the peak, consumption in India actually declined as a percentage of GDP.

In the United States, the opposite happened: consumption surged from 67 percent to 73 percent of GDP. Presidents and congressmen extolled the virtues of homeownership for everyone. Congress pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to extend more loans. Regulators eased up on banks, and the Fed kept rates low. And the public cheered this pandering at every step.

Since Ronald Reagan's presidency, Americans have consumed more than we produced and have made up the difference by borrowing. This is true of individuals but, far more dangerously, of governments at every level. Government debt in America, especially when entitlements and state pension commitments are included, is terrifying. And yet no one has tried seriously to close the gap, which can be done only by (1) raising taxes or (2) cutting expenditures. Any sensible proposal will have to feature both prominently.

This is the disease of modern democracy: the system cannot impose any short-term pain for long-term gain. For 20 years, most serious structural problems—Social Security, health care, immigration—have been kicked down the road. And while the problem is acute in America, Europe and Japan face many of the same difficulties. Right now, the U.S. government's boldness is laudable, but it is being bold in spending money. In a few years, when the bills come due, and Congress must enact major spending cuts as well as raise taxes (and not just on the rich), that's when we will see if things have changed.

In reality, the problem goes well beyond Washington. It also goes beyond bad bankers, lax regulators and pandering politicians. The global financial system has been crashing more frequently over the past 30 years than in any comparable period in history. On the face of it, this suggests that we're screwing up, when in fact what is happening is more complex. The problems that have developed over the past decades are not simply the products of failures. They could as easily be described as the products of success.

Here's why we got to where we are. Since the late 1980s, the world has been moving toward a extraordinary degree of political stability. The end of the Cold War has ushered in a period with no major military competition among the world's great powers—something virtually unprecedented in modern history. It has meant the winding down of most of the proxy and civil wars, insurgencies and guerrilla actions that dotted the Cold War landscape. Even given the bloodshed in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, the number of people dying as a result of political violence of any kind has dropped steeply over the past three decades.

Then there is the end of inflation. In the 1970s, dozens of countries suffered hyperinflation, which destroyed the middle class, destabilized societies and led to political upheaval. Since then, central banks have become very good at taming the monster, and by 2007 the number of countries with high inflation had dwindled to a handful. Only one, Zimbabwe, had hyperinflation.

Add to this the information and Internet revolutions, and you have a series of historical changes that have produced a single global system, far more integrated and faster-moving than ever before. The results speak for themselves. Over the past quarter century, the global economy has doubled every 10 years, going from $31 trillion in 1999 to $62 trillion in 2008. Recessions have become tamer than ever before, averaging eight months rather than two years. More than 400 million people across Asia have been lifted out of poverty. Between 2003 and 2007, average income worldwide grew at a faster rate (3.1 percent) than in any previous period in recorded human history. In 2006 and 2007—the peak years of the boom—124 countries around the world grew at 4 percent a year or more, about four times as many as 25 years earlier.

Many of these countries had more cash than they knew what to do with. China sits on a war chest of more than $2 trillion, while eight other emerging-market nations have reserves of more than $100 billion. They've all looked to the safest investment they could imagine—U.S. government debt. In buying so much debt, they drove down the interest rate Washington had to offer, which in turn made credit in America cheap. So the effect of all this money sloshing around the world was to subsidize Americans in their favorite activity: shopping. But it affected other Western countries as well, from Spain to Ireland, where consumers and governments loaded themselves up with debt.

Good times always make people complacent. As the cost of capital sank over the past few years, people became increasingly foolish. The world economy had become the equivalent of a race car—faster and more complex than any vehicle anyone had ever seen. But it turned out that no one had driven a car like this before, and no one really knew how. So it crashed.

The real problem is that we're still driving this car. The global economy remains highly complex, interconnected and im-balanced. The Chinese still pile up surpluses and need to put them somewhere. Washington and Beijing will have to work hard to slowly stabilize their mutual dependence so that the system is not being set up for another crash.

More broadly, the fundamental crisis we face is of globalization itself. We have globalized the economies of nations. Trade, travel and tourism are bringing people together. Technology has created worldwide supply chains, companies and customers. But our politics remains resolutely national. This tension is at the heart of the many crashes of this era—a mismatch between interconnected economies that are producing global problems but no matching political process that can effect global solutions. Without better international coordination, there will be more crashes, and eventually there may be a retreat from globalization toward the safety—and slow growth—of protected national economies.

Throughout this essay, I have avoided treating this economic crisis as a grand morality play—a war between good and evil in which demon bankers destroyed all that is good and true about our socie-ties. Complex historical events can rarely be reduced to something so simple. But we are suffering from a moral crisis, too, one that may lie at the heart of our problems.

Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system—capitalism, socialism, whatever—can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass.

One of the great shifts taking place in American society has been away from the old guild system of self-regulation. Once upon a time, law, medicine and accounting viewed themselves as private-sector participants with public responsibilities. Lawyers are still called "officers of the court." And historically they acted with that sense of stewardship in mind, thinking of what was appropriate for the whole system and not simply for their firm. That meant advising their clients against time-consuming litigation or mindless mergers. Elihu Root, a leader of the New York bar in the late 19th century, once said, "About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop."

It's not just the law that has changed; so have all the professions. Ever since the 1930s, accountants have been given a unique trust. "Who audits you?" asked Sen. Alben Barkley during a 1933 committee hearing. "Our conscience," replied Arthur Carter, the head of a large accounting firm. But by 2002 The Wall Street Journal was describing a different world, in which accountants had gone from "watchdogs to lapdogs," telling clients whatever they wanted to hear. Bankers similarly once saw themselves as being stewards of capital, responsible to their many constituents and embodying trust. But over the past few decades, they too became obsessed with profits and the short term, uncertain about their own future and that of their company. The most recent example of this phenomenon has been at the rating agencies, which were generating fees that were too lucrative to be exacting in their judgments about their clients' products.

None of this has happened because businesspeople have suddenly become more immoral. It is part of the opening up and growing competitiveness of the business world. Many of the old banks and law firms operated as monopolies or cartels. They could afford to take the long view. They were also run by a WASP elite secure in its privilege. The members of today's meritocratic elite are more anxious and insecure. They know that they are being judged quarter by quarter.

The failure of self-regulation over the past 20 years—in investment banking, accounting, rating agencies—has led inevitably to the rise of greater government regulation. This marks an important change in the Anglo-American world, away from informal rules often enforced by private actors toward the more formal bureaucratic system common in continental Europe. Perhaps the state should not set the pay of the private sector. But surely CEOs should exercise some judgment about their own compensation, and tie it far more closely to the long-term health of the company. It will still be possible to get very rich—Warren Buffett, after all, draws a salary of only $100,000.

There's a need for greater self-regulation not simply on Wall Street but also on Pennsylvania Avenue. We get exercised about the immorality of politicians when they're caught in sex scandals. Meanwhile they triple the national debt, enrich their lobbyist friends and write tax loopholes for specific corporations—all perfectly legal—and we regard this as normal. The revolving door between Washington government offices and lobbying firms is so lucrative and so established that anyone pointing out that it is—at base—institutionalized corruption is seen as baying at the moon. Not everything is written down, and not everything that is legally permissible is ethical. Who was the last ex-president to refuse to take a vast donation for his library from a foreign government that he had helped when in office?

We are in the midst of a vast crisis, and there is enough blame to go around and many fixes to make, from the international system to national governments to private firms. But at heart, there needs to be a deeper fix within all of us, a simple gut check. If it doesn't feel right, we shouldn't be doing it. That's not going to restore growth or mend globalization or save capitalism, but it might be a small start to sanity.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/201935

Alcohol: Is it really good for you?

2009-06-08T18:35:00.001-07:00

Alcohol: Is it really good for you?

By Sue Nelson
Writer and Broadcaster

Alcohol is bad for you. Red wine is good for the heart. It's all about moderation… Confused? You're not alone.

Government guidelines state that men and women should not consume more than 21 or 14 alcoholic drinks each week.

Yet the Million Women study reported that just one drink a week increases your risk of breast, pharynx and liver cancer.

No wonder a recent UK survey for the World Cancer Research Fund found that people are deeply sceptical about claims for what causes or prevents cancer.

In exploring the alcohol-cancer connection, Radio 4's Frontiers reveals a frightening lack of knowledge about how alcohol interacts with the body.

Toxic compounds

Scientists do not know definitively why we get hangovers or how alcohol may be causing cancer.

" In high doses it does seem to enhance the lifespan of mice - but you need huge doses "
Professor Roger Corder

Alcohol is metabolised in the body into toxic compounds - but how these compounds cause damage is unknown.

Since genetics, gender and age play an important role in how we interact with alcohol, a safe amount for one is not safe for another.

The negative effects of alcohol on health and the economy are reported regularly in the media and highlighted by the government.

But despite the link between alcohol and cancer being known for over 100 years, it is an area of research that is little understood and, according to many scientists, underfunded.

This means that drinkers, no matter how moderate their consumption, are not fully aware of the risks or damage, as the science is not there.

In fact, many drinkers believe they are improving their health.

Myth

"It's an absolute myth that red wine is good for you," says Professor Valerie Beral from the University of Oxford and lead author of the Million Women study.

"The evidence is not there."

Professor Roger Corder, author of The Red Wine Diet, would disagree.

"Our research identified a group of chemicals called procyanadins which are polyphenols, and the key component in terms of protecting from heart disease."

Polyphenols, such as the antioxidant resveratrol, are found in the skins of red wine grapes.

"In high doses it does seem to enhance the lifespan of mice. But," he adds crucially, "you need huge doses."

In humans, it equates to thousands of litres of wine.

Professor Corder dismisses wines that effectively promote themselves as a health drink, with 'rich in polyphenols' or 'rich in antioxidants' on the label.

But, he says, two small glasses of a very tannic, procyanadin rich wine would confer a benefit.

"The problem is that most supermarket wines are low procyanadin and high alcohol," he said.

"We're promoting bad wine for bad habits."

Frontiers is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 8 June at 2100 BST.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/8079816.stm

Published: 2009/06/08 09:14:28 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Comissão Europeia estima que Portugal terá o maior corte da UE nas pensões

2009-03-16T19:50:00.001-07:00

Comissão Europeia estima que Portugal terá o maior corte da UE nas pensões

16.03.2009 - 08h50

Por João Ramos de Almeida (Público)

Portugal apresentará em 2046 o maior corte médio de pensões de reforma da União Europeia, segundo um relatório da Comissão Europeia sobre a inclusão social.

Já a previsão do Governo é menos pessimista. De qualquer forma, trata-se de estimativas para quem entre agora no mercado de trabalho. E o que acontece aos que já trabalham?

Os números parecem assustadores. Na realidade, nenhuma instituição nem o Governo têm números para o que vai acontecer às pensões dos trabalhadores actuais, porque apurá-los nunca foi preocupação. Uma coisa é certa: as pensões desses portugueses vão diminuir em cada ano face à lei vigente até 2006, fruto da reforma da Segurança Social desse ano. E os relatórios internacionais vão já dando conta dessas alterações.

O tema da quebra das pensões não é novo. Após a reforma de 2006, suscitou um curto debate na comunicação social, com o Governo a negar esse facto. Voltou recentemente após a divulgação pela Organização para a Cooperação e o Desenvolvimento Económico (OCDE) do estudo Private Pensões Outlook 2008 que actualizou as previsões do estudo de 2007. E mais recentemente com a difusão do mais actual relatório da Comissão Europeia sobre a inclusão social.

Esse relatório revela que para quem tenha recebido um salário médio e descontado durante 40 anos, a pensão antes de impostos a receber em 2046 descerá de 70 para 50 por cento do último salário bruto. Ou seja, menos 29 por cento. Um número acima da estimativa oficial do Governo. No anexo da reforma (ver infografia) ficou um gráfico onde se pode ver que a pensão média em 2050 baixará dos actuais 71 por cento do salário recebido para 55 por cento, ou seja, uma quebra de 23 por cento.

Se o tema não é novo, a estimativa da quebra média das pensões continua a ser de difícil estimativa. Para cada trabalhador, depende do ano em que se reformar, da sua carreira de descontos sociais, do seu nível salarial ao longo dessa carreira e, ainda, de dados que apenas existem actualmente como previsões e que podem mudar todos os anos. É o caso da esperança de vida no ano anterior ao do momento da reforma e do sistema fiscal sobre os rendimentos salariais e dos reformados.

Mas nem a OCDE ou a Comissão Europeia duvidam de que as pensões vão baixar. Dado que o Governo decidiu, em 2006, introduzir a esperança de vida (factor de sustentabilidade), a pensão só pode ser inferior à que vigorava em 2006 (ver cronologia). Em quanto é que é a dúvida.

Estimativas da OCDE

Para quem está no mercado de trabalho, não vai ser fácil estimar a quebra da sua pensão. As estimativas da OCDE - as mais completas - são para 2050. As da Comissão Europeia para 2046 ou 2050. Em grande medida, dependerá do ano de reforma. Em 2030, por exemplo, uma pensão bruta ficará entre o valor actual e o corte previsto para 2050 (ver infografia).

E quais são essas estimativas? A infografia mostra que para quem se reformar em 2050 e o seu último salário for metade do salário médio (antes de impostos), então a primeira pensão recebida representará 70,4 por cento do salário. Quebra estimada: como antes da reforma de 2006, a pensão representava 92 por cento do salário bruto, será de 23 por cento.

Mas atente-se que depois de impostos ficará com 81,6 por cento do salário líquido. Isso será correcto se até 2050 não for alterado o nível de tributação, o que é muito improvável e torna qualquer previsão falível.

E quanto aos salários mais elevados? Esses sofrerão quebras mais pronunciadas em termos brutos. A tabela dá uma ideia da quebra para diferentes níveis salariais relativos ao salário médio. Basta estimar qual será em 2050 o seu último salário, o que também não é fácil.

A tabela mostra também a diferença entre as taxas brutas e líquidas, o que ilustra o impacte do actual sistema fiscal na pensão. À medida que o salário aumenta, os impostos penalizam menos os pensionistas. As taxas líquidas crescem, ou seja, as pensões são maiores.

Mas essas taxas já estão desactualizadas. O Governo parece ter querido "endireitar" esse desvio para "os mais ricos". Os orçamentos de Estado de 2007 e 2008 introduziram cortes nas deduções específicas dos rendimentos dos reformados. Efeito: a pensão será ainda mais baixa.

Um tema deixado na sombra

Mas se as previsões da OCDE foram validadas pelo Governo português, porque nunca foram divulgadas? A baixa das pensões nunca foi um tema analisado. A discussão da reforma centrou-se no equilíbrio da Segurança Social (ver texto). Passados três anos, ainda não há números.

Carlos Pereira da Silva, docente do ISEG, diz que alertou o Governo de que ia dar menos pensão pelo mesmo esforço contributivo e aumentar indirectamente a idade de reforma ao obrigar a trabalho mais para a mesma pensão. "O Governo não quis atrasar mais a sua 'melhor reforma'", afirma Pereira da Silva. Mas havia alternativas. Na Finlândia, introduziu-se o mesmo factor de sustentabilidade, mas o Estado pagou metade. Na Sué-cia, fechou-se um grupo geracional de futuros pensionistas, emitiu-se dívida pública para pagar o défice, introduziu-se a longevidade, mas ponderada com uma taxa de juro, e recomeçou-se do zero para quem entrou no mercado de trabalho com contas públicas virtuais financiadas por descontos sociais.

Os valores da OCDE não surpreendem Fernando Ribeiro Mendes, ex-

-secretário de Estado da Segurança Social do Governo Guterres. Lembra a advertência de Boaventura Sousa Santos, no Livro Branco, sobre estar a criar-se um sistema de protecção social de pobres. E concorda que o factor de sustentabilidade talvez pudesse não ser sentido por todos de igual forma. Afinal, "a esperança de vida não é igual para todos", sintetiza.

29 por cento

É a perda estimada pela Comissão Europeia para a pensão a receber em 2046. Antes um trabalhador recebia 70 por cento do último salário, após a reforma de 2006 estima-se em 50 por cento.

Até 2001

A pensão de reforma era calculada com base na média dos melhores dez salários dos últimos quinze anos. Equivalia a dois por cento dessa média por cada ano de descontos, podendo ir até os 80 por cento da remuneração de referência (40 anos x 2 = 80).

Reforma de 2001

Aprovada na concertação social (com a CGTP). Passou a contar toda a carreira de descontos, mas apenas para quem se reformasse em 2017. Até lá, a pensão era o maior valor entre a regra antiga e uma média ponderada das duas regras (antes e depois de 2001). A taxa de formação da pensão podia ultrapassar os 80 por cento da remuneração de referência.

Maio de 2006

O Governo prevê uma ruptura da Segurança Social em 2015.

Reforma de 2006

Acordo na concertação social (sem a CGTP). A ruptura foi evitada com três medidas: antecipar a reforma de 2001, introduzir um "factor de sustentabilidade" e novas fontes de financiamento. O fim da transição da reforma de 2001 significou que a pensão integrou as primeiras fases da vida profissional em que se recebe menos. Efeito: redução de pensão. O "factor de sustentabilidade", baseado na esperança de vida, teve o efeito de reduzir a pensão. Porque se considera o montante total que o pensionista reformado em 2006 receberia desde os 65 anos até à sua morte. Seria mais 15,7 anos para os homens e 19,1 anos para as mulheres. Se a esperança de vida aumentar, esse "bolo" é repartido pelo acréscimo de esperança de vida. Efeito: pensão tendencialmente mais baixa. A diversificação de fontes permitiria diluir o esforço dos pensionistas, mas essa discussão - apesar de prometida - não se fez. E o custo recaiu sobre eles.

Governo evitou falar na baixa das reformas

Os documentos oficiais da reforma de 2006 mostram que o Governo evitou a conclusão de que as pensões iriam baixar. O executivo não comentou até à hora de fecho desta edição.

Apesar de um dos quadros anexos ao acordo apresentar uma quebra da taxa de substituição bruta do salário pela pensão de 71 para 55 por cento em 2050 (ver infografia) e de outro mostrar uma quebra da pensão média de 18 por cento em 2050, os textos nada concluem.

No documento das linhas estratégicas da reforma anunciava-se o factor de sustentabilidade. Um método que faria com que os "futuros beneficiá-

rios de pensões se encontrem em igualdade relativa com os actuais pensionistas recebendo os recursos a que têm direito de modo ajustado ao maior número de anos ao que previsivelmente deles beneficiarão". Ou seja, todos receberiam o "mesmo", tivessem mais ou menos esperança de vida. E como no futuro se espera viver mais, a pensão teria de baixar. Mas essa ilação não foi retirada.

Em seu lugar, afirmou-se que a reforma "deixa a cada cidadão uma maior margem de opção, por oposição a um eventual aumento de idade legal de reforma". Ou seja, cada pensionista decidia se queria trabalhar mais para receber o que recebia antes ou se ficava com menos reforma. "Deste modo, cada cidadão poderá antecipar os efeitos previsíveis do factor de sustentabilidade", referia-se. Mas que efeitos eram esses?

No acordo de 2006, admitiu-se que a "penalização resultante da aplicação desse factor não deve ser confundida com redução das pensões". Porquê? Porque, no futuro, as carreiras contributivas tenderiam a ser completas e os salários mais elevados. Ou seja, não se comparava um mesmo caso antes e depois da reforma.

Quanto à antecipação da reforma de 2001, frisava-se: "O que se propõe é que se possa entretanto reforçar o potencial de curto e médio prazo de tal reforma (...) por forma a que mais rapidamente se possam sentir os benefícios da maior justiça contributiva que tal fórmula induz". Isto é, contar-se com a carreira contributiva completa e baixar a remuneração de referência da pensão.

Mas o texto do acordo de 2006 admitia que uma "transição mais rápida para a nova fórmula de cálculo de pensões tem efeitos de curto, médio e longo prazo no saldo do sistema". Ora, isso só aconteceria se os "custos" fossem menores face aos vigentes então. Ou seja, as pensões iam baixar, porque só isso gerava menos despesa no sistema.

OCDE avisa: pensões vão cair para metade

2009-03-05T23:31:00.001-08:00

Economia

Percentagem fica pelos 54,1%

OCDE avisa: pensões vão cair para metade

Trabalhadores vão receber uma reforma igual a metade do último salário, por causa das mudanças da Segurança Social Os actuais trabalhadores portugueses vão ter, em média, uma das pensões mais baixas do conjunto dos 30 países mais desenvolvidos do mundo, que corresponderá a pouco mais de metade do último salário recebido, diz o «Diário Económico».

As contas são da OCDE e confirmam o forte impacto da reforma do sistema de pensões: antes, os trabalhadores podiam contar com uma pensão média correspondente a 90% do último salário recebido, agora, esta taxa será muito baixa e para quem se aposentar em 2030 ficará pelos 54,1%.

Portugal destaca-se como um dos poucos países - apenas sete em 30 - onde o sistema de pensões público é o único com relevância. É por isso que, comparando as taxas de substituição dos regimes exclusivamente públicos e de repartição, Portugal fica acima da média (44%).

Looking back into history

2009-03-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

The Tech Lab: Alastair Reynolds

Science fiction author Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space and Century Rain, wonders if we could do a better job of looking back into history.

If there's a silver lining to the dark cloud of CGI-dominated blockbusters that seem to infest the cinema lately, it's this: the same digital technology that can make Spiderman or Hulk leap around the screen in a singularly unconvincing fashion, can also be used to create something infinitely more interesting: the past.

Imagine if you could actually walk around in a simulated version of a scene from history? Wouldn't that be worth an hour of anyone's time?

I'm not talking about the Star Trek holodeck here. I'm talking about something we could have sometime next week, if the appropriate technologies were combined.

For a start, we'd need a computer system capable of running the simulation - but in these days of super-powerful games consoles, that surely isn't too much of an ask.

“ Imagine fast-forwarding through entire centuries, watching buildings rise and fall, the Great Fire of London coming and going in a convulsive flash, transforming half the city ”

We'd also need a display device, feeding a constantly moving three-dimensional viewpoint to the participant, something like a virtual reality headset. We'll call them goggles, but they don't have to look any weirder than Bono's last pair of wraparound shades. You don't want to look like a complete berk, do you? Actually, let's not go with Bono's shades.

The problem is, virtual reality is so Lawnmower Man, so 1990s. Can't we go one better than that? Can't we integrate the simulation with the real world instead?

Easily enough, as it happens. We certainly don't need any kind of motion capture suit or scanning rig, because that's not how it's going to work. The system isn't going to track how you move; it's only going to track the movement of the wraparound goggles.

With differential GPS receivers embedded in the goggles, that's all the data it needs.

You're not going to be trapped in some windowless room somewhere, prancing around like a demented mime artist. You're going to be walking through your favourite city, perhaps the place where you actually live. Simultaneously, the goggles are feeding you a one-to-one overlay derived from the computer simulation, integrated seamlessly with your view of the real world.

The key is that the goggles don't have to feed you the view of the present day. They can feed you the past.

Imagine you're walking through London. There's a slider on the left side of the frame; you can reach up and adjust it as you walk. By moving the slider, you can dial all the way back to the Blitz, or the time of Samuel Pepys, or the Londinium of 45AD.

It would be a fascinating - not to mention disorientating - experience. Imagine fast-forwarding through entire centuries, watching buildings rise and fall, the Great Fire of London coming and going in a convulsive flash, transforming half the city. You'd feel like HG Well's time traveller, hurtling through time. You'd get an entirely new perspective on a familiar neighbourhood.

Of course, there'd need to be a certain amount of fudging. Streets and rivers re-align themselves; what was once passable becomes impassable. Ground levels change dramatically. But all of that could be accommodated; the aim would be to educate and illuminate, but that wouldn't mean that the simulation had to be rigorously correct at all times.

Speaking of education, it seems to me that one of the earliest applications of such a technology - if it doesn't already exist in embryonic form - would be in museums, especially those dealing with the buried past.

Imagine visiting an historical site a few years down the line, something like the Roman spa in the city of Bath. Instead of being given the option to hire a handset with a pre-recorded commentary, you get given a pair of goggles, with an associated earpiece.

They're a bit scuffed from repeated use, but they've been thoroughly cleaned since the last person used them. You put them on and move into the museum proper. The goggles are preset for 45AD, but you can move the left-hand slider up and down to surf through the ages. If you wish you can even skip to post Roman times and stroll around the greening ruins.

Importantly, there's a second slider on the right side of the goggles. This one is preset to low immersion: when you first don the goggles, it displays the simulated overlay as a ghostly tracery, a bit like the vector graphics of old arcade games. You can see where walls and floors used to be, but you're still firmly anchored to the real world.

Turn the slider up a bit, though, and the overlays become progressively more solid, more photo-real.

Turn it up a bit more and the glasses begin selectively deleting what they don't want you to see - the modern walls that are in the wrong place, the modern ceiling that should show the blue sky and clouds of Roman Britain instead. What's more, the slider goes even further up the scale.

There's no reason why the software can't drop in a few authentic-looking Roman citizens, going about their business. As you walk past them, your earpiece picks up snatches of murmured conversation in Latin. A subtitle tells you what they're really saying.

While you're at it, why not have the option of deleting some of your fellow visitors? You came to see Roman ruins, not a gaggle of exchange students ticking off another item on the itinerary.

Depending on the software, the goggles could overlay a "Roman" over each visitor, or render them entirely invisible until they came within a certain collision volume. At which point, they could be progressively de-erased, or perhaps flagged with a graphical outline. It would be up to you how far you adjusted the slider.

I don't know. I think this would be pretty fantastic, but who knows? Perhaps it would be yet another reason not to exercise the imagination; yet another reason not to have to think too hard.

After all, you have to think to make sense of schematic diagrams and dioramas, the usual stuff of museums. You have to work at it a bit. And maybe that's a good thing.

But I definitely wouldn't mind finding out

Imagining the future of technology

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/7926422.stm

Published: 2009/03/05 14:44:14 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Experts uncover cause of greyness

2009-03-03T23:13:00.001-08:00

Experts uncover cause of greyness

Scientists at Bradford University believe they have uncovered the root cause of why hair turns grey.

It is an accepted part of the ageing process, but experts say understanding how grey hair happens could help find a way to prevent it.

Experiments found it is caused by a massive build-up of hydrogen peroxide due to wear and tear of hair follicles, which blocks hair's natural pigment.

The research has been hailed as a "major breakthrough".

The scientists worked in collaboration with experts in Mainz and Luebeck in Germany and the discoveries have been published in the FASEB scientific journal, published by the Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Lead researcher Karin Schallreuter said experts examined hair as well as cells from human hair follicles to uncover the findings.

He said: "This discovery is a major breakthrough in the understanding of hair greying and opens up some novel ideas to combat this scenario.

"These are being followed up at the current time in our laboratory."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/england/bradford/7920363.stm

Published: 2009/03/03 08:21:15 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Drink a day increases cancer risk

2009-02-24T18:53:00.001-08:00

Drink a day increases cancer risk

A glass of wine each evening is enough to increase your risk of developing cancer, women are being warned.

Consuming just one drink a day causes an extra 7,000 cancer cases - mostly breast cancer - in UK women each year, Cancer Research UK scientists say.

The risk goes up the more you drink, whether spirits, wine or beer, the data on over a million women suggests.

Overall, alcohol is to blame for about 13% of breast, liver, rectum, mouth and throat cancers, the researchers say.

They estimate that about 5,000 cases of breast cancer in the UK - 11% of the 45,000 cases diagnosed each year - can be attributed to women's consumption of alcohol.

The study looked specifically at women who consumed low to moderate levels of alcohol - defined as three drinks a day or fewer.

Over the seven years of the study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a quarter of the 1.3 million women reported drinking no alcohol.

" About 5% of all cancers in the UK are due to drinking something in the order of one alcoholic drink a day "
Lead author Dr Naomi Allen

Of those who did drink, virtually all consumed fewer than 21 drinks per week, and an average of 10g of alcohol per day, which is equivalent to just over one unit of alcohol found in half a pint of lager, a 125ml glass of wine or a single measure of spirits.

Nearly 70,000 of the middle-aged women developed cancer and a pattern emerged with alcohol consumption.

One too many?

Consuming one drink a day increased the risk of all types of cancer by 6% in women up to the age of 75.

The rates for individual cancers varied, with one drink a day causing a 12% rise in the risk of breast cancer, a 10% rise in rectal cancer, a 22% rise in gullet cancer, a 29% rise in mouth cancer and a 44% rise in throat cancer.

KNOW YOUR LIMITS

Women are advised to drink no more than 2-3 units a day

Men are advised to drink no more than 3-4 units a day

A unit = half a pint of beer, a small (125ml) glass of wine, a shot or a small (25ml) measure of spirits

On a population scale, this would mean 15 extra cases of these cancers diagnosed for every 1,000 women - comprising 11 breast, one mouth, one rectal cancer and 0.7 each for cancers of the gullet, throat and liver.

The government says no amount of alcohol is fully safe, but recommends women should drink no more than two to three units per day on a regular basis to have a lower risk of any harm to health.

For men the recommended limit is no more than three to four units per day.

Mixed messages

Lead author Dr Naomi Allen from the University of Oxford said her work would help the government assess whether the limits should be changed, although the study did not look at men.

"The findings of this report show quite strongly that even low levels of drinking that were regarded to be safe do increase cancer risk.

"About 5% of all cancers in the UK are due to drinking something in the order of one alcoholic drink a day."

She said there was confusion about how much people should drink. Research has shown a daily tipple can be good for the heart. And factors other than alcohol pose a bigger risk for certain cancers.

"It is up to individual people to make their own decision. All of us to some extent have to weigh up the risks and take some responsibility for our health," said Dr Allen.

" Around 80% of breast cancer cases are diagnosed in women aged over 50, so limiting how much you drink is one step you can take to try to reduce your risk of developing the disease "
Dr Sarah Cant, Breakthrough Breast Cancer

A Department of Health spokesman said: "We keep our guidance on sensible drinking under review. We currently advise on a lower risk drinking limit and that drinking above this level could be harmful.

"There is no completely safe level of drinking but this lower level reflects the known risks including breast cancer, which is partly why there is a lower drinking limit for women.

"We look forward to examining this research in more detail."

Dr Sarah Cant of Breakthrough Breast Cancer said: "We already know that drinking alcohol can increase your risk of breast cancer.

"This study suggests that for women over 50 even drinking moderate amounts of any type of alcohol can have many health consequences, including a greater chance of developing breast cancer.

"Around 80% of breast cancer cases are diagnosed in women aged over 50, so limiting how much you drink is one step you can take to try to reduce your risk of developing the disease."

Breast cancer is now the most common cancer in the UK. Each year almost 45,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer. A woman's lifetime risk for breast cancer in the UK is one in nine.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7906355.stm

Published: 2009/02/24 21:00:24 GMT

© BBC MMIX

How to build a star on Earth

2009-02-16T18:53:00.001-08:00

How to build a star on Earth

Physicist Professor Brian Cox has looked at the different strategies now being pursued to make nuclear fusion a reality. His personal assessment is presented on the BBC's Horizon programme.

" If a steady stream of mini-stars can be created, then a power station could be constructed "
Prof Brian Cox

Nuclear fusion is nature's power source. From the Sun to the most distant stars, the energy that lights up the Universe is released by sticking hydrogen nuclei together to make helium.

Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, it seems sensible to ask whether we might endeavour to do the same and power ourselves out of our serious energy crisis by building stars on Earth.

The problem of course is that stars are big and hot; the Sun is the size of a million Earths, and burns six hundred million tonnes of hydrogen fuel every second.

The temperature at its core is 15 million degrees, and this is barely enough to allow fusion to take place at anything other than a snail's pace.

Despite the obvious difficulties, however, the UK has hosted a working nuclear fusion reactor in Oxfordshire for the last three decades.

Jet, the Joint European Torus, routinely heats a cocktail of different forms of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium to well over one hundred million degrees and initiates nuclear fusion at a rate far in excess of that in the centre of the Sun.

FIND OUT MORE...

Horizon: Can We Build a Star on Earth? is on BBC Two on Tuesday, 17 February, at 2100 GMT

Catch it later on the BBC

Jet is too small to produce meaningful amounts of electricity, but it is a prototype for a much bigger and potentially commercial design called Iter, now under construction in southern France.

The Jet/Iter approach to fusion is to heat and contain a gas so hot that the electrons are stripped away from the atomic nuclei to form a lively and difficult to control sub-atomic soup known as a plasma.

The plasma is held in an intense magnetic bottle so it never touches the walls of the reactor. If enough deuterium-tritium plasma can be held for long enough at a high enough temperature and pressure, Nature will do the rest. The result is helium and clean, abundant energy.

In the US, a different approach known as inertial fusion is being perused at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California and the Z-Machine in New Mexico. If Iter is like a conventional power station burning fuel for days or weeks at a time, the inertial projects share more in common with the combustion engine.

NIF blasts tiny pellets of deuterium-tritium fuel with a single 500-trillion-Watt laser beam. This is a big number; about 1,000 times the power consumption of the United States.

This gargantuan short-lived laser pulse causes the fuel pellet to collapse and detonate, producing a mini-star for a fraction of a second.

The Z-machine takes a different approach, channelling half a trillion Watts through a spider's web of hair-thin wires surrounding the fuel pellet. The result is much the same: a big crunch known as a Z-pinch and the birth of a star.

If a steady stream of mini-stars can be created, then a power station could be constructed. The Z-machine has already achieved fusion in a test run, and NIF hopes to follow in its footsteps in 2010. The challenge will then be to smooth the rough edges of the technology in order to mass-produce economically viable, reliable power stations.

This is no mean feat, but there seems to be no fundamental reason to doubt that it is possible.

When fusion is mentioned, a common reaction in some circles is to say, "It's always 30 years away, so let's not invest too heavily".

In fact, the fusion engineers of 2009 are speaking of building the final generation of experimental reactors now.

If they succeed, Iter and her sisters should be capable of putting electricity on to the grid some time in the early 2030s. This long-term and final solution to the energy crisis depends of course on sustained public investment at current or preferably significantly increased levels.

This is a challenge that I believe we must confront now, and not tomorrow. At some point in the future, we will generate our power by nuclear fusion; there is simply no other way to deliver the trillions of watts needed to make life comfortable for all the citizens of our planet.

To this statement nobody objects. The question is therefore not "if" but "when", and it is my view that the "30 years away" argument simply doesn't wash.

John F Kennedy used to tell a story about a French general who asked his gardener to plant a tree. "What's the rush?" replied the gardener. "It will take 30 years to grow."

The general looked him in the eye, and said in an urgent tone: "Thirty years? Then you had better plant it immediately."

Professor Brian Cox is affiliated to Manchester University's high energy physics group

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7891787.stm

Published: 2009/02/16 12:41:15 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Is love just a chemical cocktail?

2009-01-08T18:49:00.001-08:00

By Pallab Ghosh
BBC News science correspondent

It is said that love is a drug. But is it just a drug?

That is the contention of Larry Young, a professor of neuroscience at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Writing in the respected scientific journal Nature, Professor Young argues that love can be explained by a series of neurochemical events in specific brain areas.

If it is true, he says, people will no longer have to rely on oysters or chocolates to create a loving mood.

Instead, it will be possible for scientists to develop aphrodisiacs - chemicals that would make people fall in love with the first person they see.

And for those who have fallen in love with someone they shouldn't have, there could be an antidote to unrequited love.

There is even the prospect of a genetic "love test" to assess whether two potential love-birds are predisposed to a happy married life.

Not poetry

Poets would have us believe that love is one of those things that are beyond understanding.

But that concept is anathema to Professor Young.

"I'm not sure we'll be able to understand it fully," he said.

"But my belief is that our emotions have evolved from behaviours and emotions that are in the animal kingdom.

"I don't think that the way a mother loves her baby is that different to a mother's love in a chimpanzee or a rhesus monkey - or even a rat."

In animals, scientists have observed that a chemical called oxytocin is involved in developing a bond between a mother and her young.

Professor Young believes it is very likely that a similar process is going on in humans.

"It's just that when we experience these emotions they are so rich we can't imagine that they are just a series of chemical events," he said.

But even if that is true of maternal love, is romantic love simply down to a squirt of oxytocin and a few other love chemicals at a timely moment?

Professor Young thinks it might be.

Intense bonds

Researchers have found that oxytocin is involved in the bonding of male and the female prairie voles, which like humans, form an intense bond with each other that lasts for a very long time.

And there have been studies in humans that show that oxytocin increases trust - the ability to read the emotions of others.

So, Professor Young argues that it makes sense that the same sort of molecule might be involved in strengthening the bond between individuals.

He believes there are other chemicals involved too - it is just a matter of doing the research and finding out which ones they are.

"I'm sure that we are just beginning to tap the surface," he said.

"There are hundreds of signalling molecules in the brain - they all act in different brain areas.

"I think one day we will have a much better understanding of how all these chemicals interact and act in specific brain areas that have specific function that give rise to these complex emotions."

Other scientists argue that upbringing and psychology play a part.

Professor Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, said: "We shouldn't think that this perspective on its own provides a full understanding of what love is.

"There are also evolutionary, psychological, sociological, phenomenological (a philosophical approach and method of qualitative research) and humanistic perspectives that offer important insights."

"Nurture has an important part to play," Professor Young conceeds.

"But the way nurture works is through changing neurochemistry.

"We know from studies in humans that women that have experienced abuse or neglect early in their life have decreased levels of oxytocin in their brain.

"So I totally agree that our experiences have a huge impact on our ability to form relationships - but that impact occurs through changes in neurochemistry and gene expression."

So, if love really is just a complex chemical reaction, could that most powerful of human emotions be manipulated?

"Oxytocin increases eye gaze, increases our ability to recognise emotions in others," Professor Young said.

"It may actually enhance our ability to form relationships, and so it is a very real possibility that something like oxytocin could be used in conjunction with marital therapies to bring back that spark."

There are already perfumes on the market containing oxytocin, but Professor Young believes the levels are too low for it to be an effective aphrodisiac.

"But I think in the future we can develop drugs that readily pass into the brain and can target certain brain areas that could do this," he said.

Professor Bostrom believes it will become increasingly possible to manipulate the neurological mechanisms that play a role in romantic attachment.

"Used wisely, such pharmacology could enhance human experience and mitigate unnecessary suffering.

"However, this kind of manipulation would raise a thicket of ethical and cultural issues, which would need to be carefully explored."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7815095.stm

Published: 2009/01/07 18:04:17 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Feeling a bit thin on top? This cloning story may restore your crowning glory

2008-12-11T01:46:00.001-08:00

Feeling a bit thin on top? This cloning story may restore your crowning glory

Last hairs can be duplicated many times over

From The Times

June 2, 2008

David Rose in Rome

The new technique, known as "follicular cell implantation", has already shown positive results in continuing clinical trials on human beings. The work, being carried out by a British team, is being hailed as a major advance in hair restoration and is backed by a £1.9 million government grant.

The cell therapy has the potential to provide a limitless supply of an individual's hair to replace that lost because of burns, cancer treatment or simply the onset of age, and could be available to patients within five years.

The latest results of the Phase II trial, presented at a conference of leading hair replacement surgeons in Rome, suggest that the technique can increase hair count in at least two thirds of patients after six months, and four out of five if the scalp is stimulated beforehand through gentle abrasions that encourage hair growth.

The new technique involves extracting dermal papilla (DP) cells, the basic cells responsible for hair growth, from a sample of only about 100 hairs from the back of the scalp – the area where hair usually continues to grow despite losses in other areas. These cells are then multiplied many times over in a special patented culture before being injected back into the scalp in their millions, stimulating the formation of new hair follicles or rejuvenating those that have stopped producing hair on the top of the head.

The procedure is being developed by Intercytex, a British company based in Manchester, which is among many competing to find a cure for hair loss that affects 40 per cent of men over 50. It may require more than 1,000 tiny injections to produce that number of hairs in extensively bald patients but it will be quicker and less invasive than current hair transplant techniques favoured by celebrities including Sir Elton John and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister.

Experts believe that the continual refinements in modern-day hair transplants and proven medical therapies are creating increased demand for hair restoration surgery around the world. About 3,000 such procedures – costing between £2,500 and £7,000 – take place at private clinics in Britain every year. Current hair transplants involve large clumps of follicles being cut from the back of the head under local anaesthetic and separated into individual strands before being transplanted on top of the pate in their thousands. Surgeons are limited by the extent of hair needed to create a graft and the scar that it leaves behind.

Bessam Farjo, a hair-loss specialist and president of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, who is leading the research, said that results after six months were now available for 11 patients out of 19 currently enrolled on the trial. Of these, four out of five whose scalp had been stimulated had an increased hair count, noticeable from photographs, while three out of six without stimulation of the scalp had also noticed benefits. Full data was not available for two of the remaining patients, he added.

"We can take a small sample from the back of the head, extract the dermal papilla [DP] cells and then use a patented method of multiplying these basic cells of extracted hairs in the lab," he said. "Within eight weeks they are capable of generating literally millions of themselves, meaning that only around 100 hairs are needed in order to produce thousands of new hairs."

Researchers from the US, Italy and Japan are also exploring the possibility of cloning hair, including techniques designed to extract stem cells from the base of the hair follicles.

But Dr Farjo, who runs the Farjo Medical Centres in London and Manchester, said he was confident that the Intercytex approach was the most advanced and regulated clinical trial for hair loss anywhere in the world. The full results of the 48-week study will be available next year.

"For many men and women the consequences of hair loss can be devastating – whether brought on by pattern baldness or as a result of cancer treatment such as radiotherapy," he said. "There are some effective nonsurgical treatments that can slow down the process but these involve taking daily pills. For those with more significant hair loss one to two operations per bald area can give a natural looking head of hair of reasonable density."

Dr Farjo said that his team was also experimenting with combining the DP cells with keratinocytes – the cells that produce keratin, the basic building material of hair – so that they could grow actual hairs for transplant, rather than injectable cells. This could further improve surgeons' control over the amount, direction and appearance of the transplanted hair, he said.

"Hair surgeons and their patients have been waiting for something like this since the 1980s, but in my view it may be as little as five years before patients start seeing the benefits."

Connor Kiely, a hair restoration surgeon based in Ireland, said: "The possibilties thrown up by this research are very exciting, and we have been waiting for a long time for a solution like this that will deal with the problem at source, rather than simply relocating hair from one place to another."

Andrew Messenger, a consultant dermatologist at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, sounded a sceptical note. "If they really have done this then that is quite an achievement, but I would like to see all the data.

"It does work with other species, but these are other species who grow hair at the drop of a hat. It's quite a bit more difficult with humans."

Marilyn Sherlock, chairman of the Institute of Trichologists, and a practising specialist in hair loss in Salisbury, Wiltshire, said: "If it works as well as the preliminary findings suggest, this is going to be absolutely superb. Baldness is sometimes only noticed once a lot of hair loss has already occurred and a lot of men who do not have a lot left at the back of their heads cannot opt for current transplants, while the cost is also prohibitive.

"We don't yet know what the cost of these injections would be, but if they were made available they could also be a useful treatment for women whose hair typically becomes extremely thin all over the head. This could allow a lot more people to opt for hair restoration who currently might previously not have considered having anything done."

Why Beijing Is In A Risky Place

2008-11-25T01:36:00.001-08:00

Why Beijing Is In A Risky Place

As the factory to the world, China may be the nation most vulnerable to collapsing global demand.

George Wehrfritz

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 1, 2008

Workers are losing factory jobs at the fastest rate in decades. Automakers—having failed to anticipate today's sales slump—are lobbying politicians for bailouts. The stock market is a crash heap, home prices are down by 35 percent or more in many cities and toxic assets have begun to weigh heavily on banks. America in 2008? Try China, where the global economic downturn now looks certain to end the country's 30-year growth boom, posing the greatest leadership challenge to Beijing since pro-democracy demonstrations threatened one-party communist rule back in 1989.

That's not the conventional take on China—yet. But with most industrialized countries now in recession and countries the world over hoping against hope that the planet's most buoyant major economy might somehow dampen the global downturn, it's a forecast that increasingly rings true. The reasoning goes something like this: China, despite its deep pool of savings and $2 trillion in foreign reserves, is unprotected from the fall in global demand that began in earnest in mid-2008. Notwithstanding all the hoopla about the rise of China's billion consumers, the body blow that's now landing in the industrial heartland will debunk the notion that China has already begun transitioning toward a new growth model based less on exports and investment and more on household consumption. "We would love to believe it too, but it just ain't so," wrote Standard Chartered bank's highly respected China economist, Stephen Green, last month. He says expecting Chinese spending to save the world from recession is "a pipe dream."

With China at the vanguard, Asia as a whole stands dangerously exposed to external shock. Since the late 1990s, household consumption as a share of China's GDP has fallen from roughly half to 35 percent. On the flip side, the share of Asia ex-Japan's output devoted to exports is now more than 45 percent, or roughly 10 points higher than it was on the eve of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. When juxtaposed with America's debt-driven gluttony, Asia's puny appetite for the goods it produces reflects a global economy that's staggeringly out of whack. "We are where we are because of massive imbalances that policymakers and politicians have allowed to build up over the last decade," argues Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. "Those imbalances were never sustainable, but the longer they went on the more they seduced people. And now we're paying the ultimate price for that seduction."

The tab, in fact, has yet to be tallied, but don't be surprised if Beijing gets stuck with the biggest portion of the bill for the simple reason that China's rebalancing act is actually much tougher than America's. For U.S. households, today's crisis means saving more and consuming less (recent consumption data suggests that is happening quite rapidly). Yet in China, where total household consumption is just 5 percent of America's by value, the challenge is to sustain an economy that's largely investment- and export-driven, which means finding ways to perpetuate industrial overproduction. Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University, says America found itself in the same bind back in 1929. "The U.S. in the 1920s ran a huge trade surplus and had the largest reserves in history to that point," he says. "So was the U.S. immune to the global crisis? No. It was the country that suffered the most. In that sense it is exactly like China today."

Beijing realizes the growth trap it's in. Why else would it unveil on Nov. 10 a $590 billion stimulus plan—a package nearly as large as Washington's $700 billion financial bailout—just days after it announced that China's economy expanded by 9 percent in the July–September quarter? The consensus view is that China's economy has slowed markedly since then. Year-on-year growth estimates for 2009 are mostly in the 7s, with the latest forecasts adding the scary caveat, "or less." This month the Royal Bank of Scotland said 5 percent growth in China next year couldn't be ruled out. China's economy, which grew by 11.9 percent last year, hasn't dipped below 6 percent annually since 1990.

Beijing's stimulus plan has won plaudits internationally not least because it indicates that Chinese leaders won't stand idly by as the crisis deepens. But just as in Washington at the beginning of the Great Depression, policy miscues could cost China dearly—especially if they undermine the global trading regime that China's economy relies on more heavily than any other major economy in the world. In the early 1930s, America's self-defeating mistake was to cut off world trade, particularly in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, at a time when it was the leading exporter in a world burdened by massive industrial overproduction. Today, China is the lead exporter, the world again faces massive overproduction, and the mistake Beijing must avoid is moving too hard to sell more manufactured exports at the risk of flooding an already weak market, and triggering a protectionist backlash. That will only push the global market toward deflation—the downward spiral of falling prices leading to falling demand, as stressed consumers wait for even better bargains.

The doubts about China's stimulus plan arise in part because it's all broad strokes with no fine print. Conceptually, however, it seems intended to split the difference between promoting consumption at home, and export sales. It includes commitments to fund rural infrastructure, boost social spending on health and education, and mount an "economic housing" scheme for migrant workers in major cities—all of which, if implemented, would raise household spending over time. But it also contains perks for heavy industry, value-added tax cuts for the export sector and lending provisions that will channel bank funding to state enterprises engaged in road and rail construction and away from private companies. "The two focuses are definitely exports and infrastructure. That's what we're getting from everything we're picking up," says Green. "And that the health and education spending, although it has been listed as one of the eight priorities, is not going to be [well] supported." Economists estimate that only a quarter of the $590 billion is new money as opposed to previously announced spending, future tax cuts and unfunded mandates passed down to local governments. There's reason to expect that much of the promised social spending—and the consumer empowerment it represents—may not materialize. One warning signal is that Beijing has entrusted much of the safety net stuff to the provinces, which historically have put a low priority on building schools, unless the order to do so comes with earmarked funding from Beijing. One new concern: local tax revenues are shrinking due to the economic downturn. Roach says investment in the social safety net would "reduce the precautionary saving that is inhibiting broad-based consumption growth across the nations [of Asia]," though he adds: "China has from time to time flirted with that, but they really have dragged their feet."

To understand the linkage between social services and household consumption, visit a Chinese hospital. At check-in, patients are required to deposit money up-front, and when that funding runs dry they're tossed out onto the street, healthy or not. According to the World Health Organization, China spends less than 1 percent of its GDP on health care, which ranks it 156th out of 196 nations the U.N. agency tracks. Likewise, poor kids can't attend school without paying fees, and most migrants are uninsured against job-site accidents at any price. Families cope by saving an estimated 25 percent of their disposable income, just in case.

That isn't a social contract conducive to the "harmonious society" President Hu Jintao has advocated since 2006, or so concludes a new report co-produced by the United Nations Development Program and the China Institute for Reform and Development. It calls on China to overhaul its social-welfare system to provide universal basic health care, education, unemployment and retirement benefits for the country's 1.3 billion people. It stresses the need to vest forgotten segments of society including farmers, migrant workers and the poor. And it claims that such expenditures—which it estimates would cost $55 billion a year—actually offer a bigger bang for the buck than would the construction of new roads, railways and bridges.

The risk today (and it's one that's already materializing in a mounting exodus from shuttered factories in Guangdong province) is that these workers could, like the boxcar-hopping hobos of America's Depression era, become the flotsam and jetsam of the economic bust. Almost since China's reforms began three decades ago, Beijing insisted that sustaining economic growth rates above 8 percent was paramount to employing the millions of workers pouring in from inland villages. The further growth drops below that level, the higher the percentage of an estimated 15 million workers entering the labor force each year lands in the ranks of the unemployed. Yet even as policymakers stoked fast growth with every means at their disposal, little was done to transform these workers into foot soldiers of a different sort: new consumers with sufficient social protections to save less and spend more.

The prescription for change has been obvious since the late 1990s. It includes balanced growth between booming east and lagging west; efforts to narrow the yawning income gap between China's superrich and everyone else; and policies that channel the massive earnings logged by the state-owned conglomerates that dominate China Inc. back into government coffers to fund social spending. Yet campaigns with names like Go West meant to spur investment in the hinterland never amounted to more than propaganda exercises, and a long-mulled plan for the government to charge state companies dividend on their huge profits remains a small-scale experiment. In October, Standard Chartered noted a "gulf between aspirations and actual policies" illustrated by Beijing's long-standing bias toward investment and exports, and support for "state-protected oligopolies." Pettis argues that Beijing's persistent mercantilism has prepared it for the wrong crisis—specifically, an external debt shock akin to the one that ravaged Asia in 1997-98, against which China's huge savings and foreign reserve pools would make it "superbly protected." Yet as with America in 1929, China is the nation most exposed in the world to a collapse in global demand today.

As such, Beijing finds itself in a fix as 2008 winds to an ignominious close. Export promotion offers a viable short-term means of keeping the factories of China running—yet grabbing more market share amid a global downturn is the surest way to incite protectionism. During the recent gathering of G20 leaders in Washington, much public emphasis was placed on shoring up the global financial architecture and defending free trade. Yet former New Zealand prime minister Mike Moore, who headed the World Trade Organization from 1999 to 2002, believes the backroom talks focused on the imperative that Asia not try to export its way out of today's crisis. It was "the elephant in the room; how China, and to a lesser extent India and the Southeast Asians, must become consuming countries," he says. "It's overwhelmingly in [their] interest to become a lot less reliant on exports, and it also does right by the people they represent. Not to do it could trigger something that's very, very unpleasant." Global trade slumped 70 percent in the 1930s, and any return to the virulent economic nationalism of that era "would turn crisis into catastrophe," warns Moore.

That presents Beijing with a leadership challenge very different from the one it confronted with tanks and soldiers in 1989. Today, it must work to maintain enough harmony in the global trade arena so as not to lose access to vital overseas markets, while telling the Chinese people that fast growth isn't their birthright. In essence, Beijing must offer a new social contract in which consumption bolstered with a social safety net replaces the export-driven growth engine that has powered China's economy for 30 years. FDR did that in America in the 1930s, but it took a decade. Might China's leaders fare any better? In the late 1990s, then Premier Zhu Rongji refrained from devaluing China's currency when many of its neighbors did so; the decision lost China some export momentum but gained its leadership a reputation for responsible global action. Today's leaders have maintained that reputation, but given the enormity of the economic challenges at hand, the only safe bet is that their helmsmanship will be tested to the extreme in 2009. Especially if the pessimists are correct and China's economy grinds to a halt.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/170305

Uma pen cheia de saúde

2008-11-24T19:56:00.001-08:00

Uma pen cheia de saúde

Numa pen USB é possível guardar radiografias, análises e receitas de uma vida inteira. O conceito acaba de estrear pelas mãos da Mobilwave

Ainda tem guardados os raios X de há dois anos? E as análises e o boletim de vacinas sabe onde estão? O Processo Clínico Electrónico (EPCI) promete ajudá-lo nestas questões. Com uma condição: não pode ser um nostálgico das chapas de radiografia ou da letra de médico.Isto porque o EPCI é uma pen USB, com uma aplicação pré-instalada que guarda e organiza, em suporte digital, todos os documentos que acompanham a vida clínica de um indivíduo. A solução foi criada pela Mobilwave e acaba de ser lançada na versão de 1 GB.

«Uma das grandes vantagens da solução é não perder os exames ou as análises. Hoje há grandes custos na saúde provocados pela perda de exames ou análises. Com todos estes dados na pen, o utilizador não gasta dinheiro a fazer os exames que perdeu, mas também as seguradoras e Serviço Nacional de Saúde ficam a ganhar», garante Francisco Duarte, administrador da Mobilwave.

O EPCI está ser comercializado com uma pen incorporada numa cápsula metálica própria para o transporte diário no bolso ou no porta-chaves. A pen da Mobilwave dispensa a instalação de software nos computadores utilizados para extrair ou inserir informação.

«O software que se encontra na pen dispõe de três níveis de acesso. Um de acesso geral onde são inseridos dados ou alertas úteis numa emergência; um segundo para o acesso dos médicos; e por fim, um último com acesso apenas do utilizador. O EPCI recorre a criptografia de 128 bits», explica Francisco Duarte.

O software do EPCI não pode ser descarregado da pen para o computador pessoal. Com esta restrição, pretende-se evitar eventuais cópias-pirata e também a dispersão de dados dos pessoais por computadores menos recomendáveis.
A Mobilwave prevê vender o EPCI em farmácias, seguradoras, mas também Internet e ginásios. «Pretendemos que evolua ao longo do tempo, com a inserção de funcionalidades adicionais. Além da área da saúde, também queremos apostar num posicionamento relacionado com o estilo de vida», acrescenta o responsável da Mobilwave.

Em casa ou no hospital
O EPCI deverá começar a ser vendido por cerca de 40 euros (IVA incluído) na versão de 1G B. Posteriormente, a Mobilwave deverá lançar versões de 2 GB, 4 GB ou 8 GB. Apesar do preço, Francisco Duarte acredita que os utilizadores vão sentir-se aliciados por uma solução que facilita a gestão de processos clínicos e até pode repercutir-se em poupanças ao longo do tempo.
«Alguns hospitais já entregam raios X e outros exames em DVD. Sabem que é mais barato e que é mais fácil de guardar. Além disso, também tem vantagens do ponto de vista ecológico», recorda Francisco Duarte.

Porque a adesão das unidades hospitalares pode ser uma mais-valia em termos comerciais, a Mobilwave já começou a estudar a compatibilidade entre o software do EPCI e aplicações clínicas mais utilizadas, a fim de desenvolver actualizações imediatas dos dados, quando solicitados pelo utilizador (hoje, os dados têm de ser descarregados manualmente de um computador, como se faz com as pen tradicionais).

Em inglÊs tambÉm
Actualmente, a Mobilwave está a desenvolver uma versão do processo clínico electrónico em inglês, que pode servir de alavanca para o mercado estrangeiro. Outra das apostas da companhia é a venda de módulos digitais do boletim de saúde infantil, da grávida, do diabético ou do hipertenso no site www.myepci.pt.

Apesar de conter dados tão valiosos para o utilizador, o EPCI não perdeu as funções tradicionais de uma pen. «Podemos lá colocar o que quisermos, até dados que não são de âmbito clínico. O EPCI tem partições, que permitem dividir os dados por várias temáticas», conclui Francisco Duarte.

O EPCI ao detalhe

O software do EPCI foi desenvolvido em tecnologia .Net, da Microsoft. Pode ser utilizado em qualquer computador que tenha porta USB; dispensa a instalação de software no computador que fornece o acesso aos dados. Por enquanto,
é apenas compatível com Windows, mas a Mobilwave conta vir a lançar versões para sistemas operativos Linux ou da Apple.

A Mobilwave inaugurou o conceito da "pen clínica" com uma versão de 1 GB de capacidade de armazenamento, que custa cerca de 40 euros. Futuramente, serão postos à venda modelos de 2 GB, 4 GB e 8 GB (este último terá um preço a rondar 130 euros).

O EPCI permite armazenar fotos, vídeos, ecografias, electrocardiogramas, textos, gráficos, radiografias, digitalizações de resultados de análises, entre outros formatos de imagem e documentos que clínicas, laboratórios e hospitais costumam usar.

Para quem se habituou aos computadores, a utilização do EPCI é intuitiva. O acesso é feito em três níveis: acesso geral para os dados de emergência, que dispensa a inserção de uma password; acesso para pessoal clínico, com uma password própria; e por fim, o acesso do proprietário, que tem a sua password e permite distribuir a informação visível nos três níveis de acesso.

Por razões de confidencialidade dos dados e protecção antipirataria, o sistema não permite a cópia do software EPCI para o computador.
A segurança dos dados é assegurada por encriptação de 128 bits.
A actualização do EPCI é feita através da descarga de ficheiros para uma área própria. Posteriormente, o utilizador pode definir em que níveis de acesso os dados são disponibilizados, ou em que menus devem estar arquivados.

O menu de utilização dispõe de módulos de configuração e gestão de dados tanto de âmbito temático como de segurança. O software do EPCI dispõe também de um serviço de agenda, que permite inserir lembretes, alertas, notas ou contactos pessoais. O sistema contempla ainda um serviço de vigilância que permite emitir alertas automáticos, caso os índices do colesterol, da tensão arterial sejam anormais. No menu também se encontram áreas específicas para receitas e medicação e descrição do histórico clínico.

'Crippled virus'

2008-11-10T19:10:00.001-08:00

'Assassin' cells home in on HIV

Cells have been successfully engineered in the laboratory to overcome one of HIV's most effective defence mechanisms, say researchers.

The immune system cells, created by UK and US scientists, can lock on to HIV, even after it has mutated to throw them off the scent.

It is hoped the Nature Medicine study could lead to a more effective way of tackling HIV infection.

Tests on people with advanced HIV may start next year.

In the face of our engineered assassin cells, the virus will either die or be forced to change its disguises again, weakening itself along the way
Professor Andy Sewell
Cardiff University

Most viruses can be "cleared" by the body's own defences, partly due to cells called "killer T-cells", which learn to recognise the intruder and eliminate it.

However, HIV's power stems from its ability to mutate rapidly to evade detection and destruction.

The project underway at the Universities of Cardiff and Pennsylvania, in partnership with an Oxford-based biotech company, involves the creation "souped-up" T-cells with the ability to recognise and attack more of these mutated forms.

To do this, the scientists attach extra versions of the "T-cell receptor", the part of the cell responsible for scanning and removing infected cells, which have been preset to identify various HIV mutations.

In laboratory studies, the modified T-cells were able to destroy HIV cells in a laboratory cell culture.

'Crippled virus'

Professor Andy Sewell, from Cardiff, said that he hoped that in humans, the effect would be equally devastating to the virus.

"In the face of our engineered assassin cells, the virus will either die or be forced to change its disguises again, weakening itself along the way.

"We'd prefer the first option but I suspect we'll see the latter. Even if we do only cripple the virus, this will still be a good outcome, as it is likely to become a much slower target and be easier to pick off.

"Forcing the virus to a weaker state would likely reduce its capacity to transmit within the population and may help slow or even prevent the onset of AIDS in individuals."

Dr Ade Fakoya, from the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, said that the work essentially amounted to an "enhanced detection" system to detect HIV as it lay hidden in cells.

However, he warned that it might not be a suitable strategy for everyone with HIV.

"It is very interesting basic research and as such really does contribute to our knowledge of what might work as a immunological treatment strategy. It is early days in the search for an effective immune based treatment for HIV.

One limitation however is that the immunological assassins generated by this technology are done using a specific part of the receptor of the active cells.

"The genetic make up of these receptors do vary with different racial populations."

Garry Brough, from the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, described the research as "potentially very good news for people living with HIV".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7716449.stm

Published: 2008/11/10 10:11:59 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Purple tomato 'may boost health'

2008-10-26T18:56:00.001-07:00

Purple tomato 'may boost health'

Scientists have developed purple tomatoes which they hope may be able to keep cancer at bay.

The fruit are rich in an antioxidant pigment called anthocyanin which is thought to have anti-cancer properties.

A team from the John Innes Centre, Norwich, created the tomatoes by incorporating genes from the snapdragon flower, which is high in anthocyanin.

The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, found mice who ate the tomatoes lived longer.

This offers the potential to promote health through diet by reducing the impact of chronic disease
Professor Cathie Martin
John Innes Centre

Anthocyanins, found in particularly high levels in berries such as blackberry, cranberry and chokeberry, have been shown to help significantly slow the growth of colon cancer cells.

They are also thought to offer protection against cardiovascular disease and age-related degenerative diseases.

There is also evidence that the pigments have anti-inflammatory properties, help boost eyesight, and may help stave off obesity and diabetes.

The John Innes team is investigating ways to increase the levels of health-promoting compounds in more commonly eaten fruits and vegetables.

Tomatoes already contain high levels of beneficial antioxidant compounds, such as lycopene and flavonoids.

More benefit

Professor Cathie Martin, from the centre, said: "Most people do not eat five portions of fruits and vegetables a day, but they can get more benefit from those they do eat if common fruit and veg can be developed that are higher in bioactive compounds."

It is too early to say whether anthocyanins obtained through diet could help to reduce the risk of cancer
Dr Lara Bennett
Cancer Research UK

The John Innes team took two genes from snapdragon that induce the production of anthocyanins in snapdragon flowers, and turned them on in tomato fruit.

Anthocyanins accumulated in tomatoes at higher levels than anything previously achieved in both the peel and flesh of the fruit, giving them an intense purple colour.

Tests on mice bred to be susceptible to cancer showed that animals whose diets were supplemented with the purple tomatoes had a significantly longer lifespan compared to those who received only normal red tomatoes.

Professor Martin said: "This is one of the first examples of metabolic engineering that offers the potential to promote health through diet by reducing the impact of chronic disease.

"And certainly the first example of a GMO [genetically modified organism] with a trait that really offers a potential benefit for all consumers."

She said the the next step would be test the tomatoes on human volunteers.

Exciting

Dr Lara Bennett, of the charity Cancer Research UK, said: "It is exciting to see new techniques that could potentially make healthy foods even better for us.

"But it is too early to say whether anthocyanins obtained through diet could help to reduce the risk of cancer.

"We do know that eating a healthy, balanced diet that is rich in fibre, fruit and vegetables - and low in red and processed meat - is an important way to reduce your cancer risk."

Dr Paul Kroon, of the Food Research Institute in Norwich, said the research was an "important study".

"The technology offers great scope for altering colours of fruits and vegetables, and their content of potentially health-protective compounds."

However, he said it would be wrong to assume the effects seen in mice would necessarily occur in humans.

Anna Denny, a nutrition scientist for the British Nutrition Foundation, stressed there was no "magic bullet" against diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

"Fruit and veg with higher levels of health-promoting compounds should not been seen as a replacement for eating a healthy balanced diet."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7688310.stm

Published: 2008/10/26 15:52:22 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Too Large To Grow So Fast

2008-09-28T19:15:00.001-07:00

The Middle Kingdom is still a powerhouse, but the days of runaway growth are quickly coming to an end.

Ruchir Sharma

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Oct 6, 2008

Anyone forecasting a hard landing for China's boom is typically met with the same skepticism that doomed the boy who cried wolf. But the lesson of the fable is that the wolf did come, the third time. Now, after two false alarms in 2004 and 2006, the slowdown is at the door. China has simply grown too big to keep expanding at the 10 percent rate it has sustained for 30 years, and is likely to slow to 8 percent at best next year and for the foreseeable future. The decisive end of the era of double-digit growth is here, with major implications for the nation and the world.

Until now, China had defied the traditional theories of how fast developing nations could grow, and for how long. Its economic growth has compounded at an annual average rate of 10 percent over the past 30 years, a record that has surpassed the other miracle economies, such as Japan and South Korea. Japan's growth rate downshifted significantly after 1973, when it reached a per capita income of $3,000—a level China hit earlier this year. Now the law of large numbers is catching up to China: in 1998, to grow its $1 trillion economy by 10 percent, it had to expand its economic activities by $100 billion and consume only 10 percent of the world's industrial commodities. Currently, to grow its $3.5 trillion economy that fast, it needs to expand by $350 billion a year and suck in nearly 30 percent of global commodity production. Even more important, there are clear signs in China's response to the slowdown that the leadership understands that this moment was inevitable—that it is abandoning its old growth-at-any-cost mentality, and will not try to artificially revive double-digit growth.

Until very recently, of course, the China headlines had remained entirely bullish. The red-hot expansion had shown only marginal signs of moderation through the first half this year, and most economists blamed weak growth in Western countries, which are China's best export customers. They had also assumed that sluggish exports could be offset by stronger domestic demand, powered by Beijing's big spending on infrastructure projects and the rising purchasing power of the Chinese consumer. However, the latest signs are that the Chinese domestic economy is not immune to slowdown: it is starting to falter, too, and the property sector is the heart of its troubles, as in many countries.

For the first time since the Chinese housing market was fully privatized in the late 1990s, a coordinated real-estate downturn has set in across all major provinces. The feeding frenzy of rising prices and increasing demand has given way to a vicious cycle of falling prices and slowing demand. Housing is increasingly unaffordable, as property prices doubled between 2000 and 2007, and authorities began raising interest rates last year in an attempt to prevent overheating. Still, for much of this year, developers have continued building with abandon, counting on demand to revive and refusing to lower prices, even as sales began to collapse and inventories mounted. Property sales started to drop in October 2007, turning negative in the second quarter of 2008.

Now there is widespread anecdotal evidence that a price war is breaking out from Beijing to Shenzhen. Discounts of 10 to 20 percent are increasingly common on existing residential projects. New construction activity is grinding to a halt. Auctions of apartments in new buildings are failing to attract bidders even in formerly hot coastal cities like Shanghai.

A bear market for real estate will have widely unforeseen ripple effects across the economy: while the consensus forecast is for still-robust growth of 9 to 10 percent in 2008 and 2009, down from 11.9 percent in 2007, those predictions factor in only falling export growth, which is expected to slip from the 20 percent pace of recent years to single digits next year, stalling a sector that accounts for a third of investment spending in China. Businesses in some of the most energetic export hubs, such as the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions, have been reporting a softening in demand for months now. But real-estate construction accounts for another third of total investment spending, and its collapse should lop off at least an additional percentage point from economic growth.

The downside risks don't end there.

Falling property prices will further discourage consumption, which was weakening anyway. Many Chinese are feeling decidedly less rich because the local stock market has fallen by two thirds from its peak in October 2007. And historically, as consumer confidence wanes, so too do both the real-estate and auto sectors. In a telling sign, passenger-car sales fell in August, down 10 percent from the same month last year.

Until late 2007, China had in fact been relatively immune to the travails of the U.S. economy, which began to slow dramatically from the middle of 2006. But then inflation started to pick up speed in China, and policymakers responded last November by getting tough, with a strict directive to banks to clamp down on excess lending. The aggressive tightening of monetary policy laid the seeds of the current housing slump in China and dashed hopes of any economic decoupling.

Shakeouts are always necessary to cleanse the system of excesses in prices and spending that accumulate during any bubble. But China's housing excesses are less dangerous than those in the United States and Britain. For one, China's urbanization process is in its early stages, so housing demand is likely to rebound strongly in the long term, and help to swiftly clear unsold inventory. With Chinese household income rising at 10 percent a year, housing will become increasingly affordable if home prices remain flat, even for a year. And unlike Americans, the Chinese are not deep in personal debt; mortgage loans equal 12 percent of China's economy, compared with more than 100 percent of the United States' economy. Banks in China also have relatively small exposure to real-estate developers, who hold just 7 percent of outstanding banks loans. The comparable figure in the United States is 53 percent. The Chinese housing-market-led slowdown poses no systemic risk to its financial system.

The more important questions are how long will the downturn last and where will China emerge at the end of this phase? Some policy help is already on the way. The People's Bank of China recently reduced its benchmark rate by 27 basis points, its first softening in six years. With consumer price inflation slowing, there is further scope for an easing of monetary policy. The government also has ample room to stimulate the economy by raising spending, since its fiscal accounts are almost balanced, and its total debt-to-GDP ratio is very low at 16 percent.

But there is growing disappointment in the Chinese investment community as to why the government is not stepping in more decisively to stabilize growth, particularly in the property sector. The government's reaction reveals a lot about the shifting priorities of the leadership. Following the rapid rise in property prices over the past few years, there was a general feeling in policymaking circles that the average buyer was being priced out of the market and that developers were raking in money like bandits. The government would consequently be happy to see a fall in property prices, possibly a part of its larger objective of achieving a "harmonious society" by dampening the widening income gap.

The government is also wary of turning on the monetary spigots too quickly. It wants to anchor inflationary expectations after the painful experience of the past year, when inflation stayed well above the tolerance limit of 5 percent. The danger with such a strategy is that once a deflationary psychology sets in, it's difficult to turn things around. Consumer price inflation has fallen sharply from a high of 8.7 percent in February to 4.9 percent in August. While the merits of slowly lowering interest rates are debatable, this incrementalist policy does suggest a nuanced shift in the government's growth-at-any-cost approach to a greater emphasis on balanced economic development.

In a way, the commodity-price-led inflation surge of the past year was a message from the marketplace that there are limits to China's growth potential. It is not feasible for an economy to keep growing at a double-digit pace once it achieves a certain critical mass.

The Japanese case is telling. Back in the 1970s, Japan was forced to allow domestic prices and its exchange rate to be more market-determined—all part of an economic evolution process, as larger economies require greater currency flexibility to better tailor domestic money and credit conditions to local needs. Productivity growth in Japan naturally slowed as the exchange rate became less globally competitive, and economic growth averaged 4 percent over the next 15 years.

To be sure, China is not likely to slow to 4 percent growth for some time. China has also moved toward greater exchange-rate flexibility, beginning in 2005, but more gradually than Japan, and it still has a long way to go before it achieves anywhere near the level of modernization that Japan had reached in 1973. China started its modernization drive from a much lower base in 1978, while Japan was already a relatively advanced industrial economy, with modern textile, steel and shipbuilding sectors, at the beginning of its high-growth period in 1955.

Furthermore, China's labor-productivity boom has been driven by the vast migration of rural workers to higher-value-added urban jobs. An estimated 12 million to 15 million people continue to shift from agricultural to manufacturing- and services-based jobs every year. While it is hard to estimate when this labor supply will be exhausted, some early signs suggest that incrementally higher wages are required to move workers to urban centers. This should chip away at productivity growth.

There are also signs that Chinese policymakers are focusing more on shoring up rural infrastructure. Following the food-price shortages of recent years, the government is promoting increased farm growth that will help stabilize prices and—as an unintended consequence—give rural workers less reason to migrate to cities. If that slows factory output, so be it. A further demonstration of the change in mind-set is the recent adoption of a new labor law that, among other things, sets a minimum wage ranging from anywhere between $60 and $110 a month based on the per capita income of each province.

China remains a great economic growth story and is on the path to converging with the industrialized world. But developments of the past year—from commodity-price-led inflation to the slight shift in the government's priorities—indicate that the pace of convergence is set to slow in the years ahead. The 11.9 percent growth rate recorded last year was probably the high-water mark of China's economic miracle; growth could slow to 8 percent or lower in 2009. While that will prompt stimulus measures from the government, it is unlikely that China's growth trajectory will return to the 10 percent-plus rate that it sustained with little inflation from 2003 to 2007. After all, when fixed investment has exceeded 40 percent of GDP for years, there's a limit to how many more new power plants and roads the government can help build.

The $3.5 trillion economy's potential growth rate is probably closer to 8 percent, a rate that hardly detracts from its reputation as an economic miracle. But the shift to a slower growth plane is likely to be painful for many economic agents—from property developers in China to commodity traders worldwide—for whom the idea that anything related to Chinese demand could be bid up to any price had been taken for granted. Although it is starting off as a cyclical downturn, the bigger story is that the law of economic gravity is catching up with China, too.

Sharma is head of global emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/161234

Get Your Green Motor Running

2008-09-07T19:06:00.001-07:00

Get Your Green Motor Running

Japan's automakers are zooming ahead in the eco-car race. Their lead may turbocharge their country.

Christian Caryl and Akiko Kashiwagi

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:36 PM ET Sep 6, 2008

Honda's new FCX clarity feels like a perfectly ordinary car—which may well be the most shocking thing about it. It looks and drives like a run-of-the-mill four-seat sedan. Slip behind the wheel and press the pedal with your foot, and the car accelerates with satisfying punch. But after a few minutes of cruising, you'll notice that something is missing. The only audible engine noise is a faint whir, so faint that you can actually hear the tires swishing along the asphalt.

That's because the Clarity is a hydrogen-fuel-cell car, one of the most advanced in the world. The once bulky fuel-cell stack that supplies energy to the engine has been reduced in size by half over the past decade while increasing the power output by 50 percent. It's the first to be certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the first to be delivered to retail customers (albeit on a leasing basis). As for CO2 emissions, the only exhaust it produces is a trickle of water. And perhaps most important of all is what stands behind it: A state-of-the-art factory that's ready to produce thousands of the vehicles once the market's ready. Most of Honda's competitors, by contrast, are still bringing concept cars to the auto shows.

The Clarity is also just one of a number of next-generation green automobiles that are beginning to come off assembly lines in Japan. These vehicles, whether powered by fuel cells, long-lasting batteries or renewable biofuels, have been around for years, but almost always as one-off utopian designs or experimental models that were designed mainly to attract good green press. Now Japanese automakers are going to the next level, entering the green-car mass market, in many cases years before their competitors. Nissan plans to introduce an electric vehicle to the United States and Japan by 2010, with a global rollout in 2012. Toyota is road-testing a plug-in hybrid in Japan, the United States and Europe and plans to launch it in 2009 (there's a buzz, unconfirmed by the company, that this hybrid car could use solar power as well). Honda, a distant second to Toyota in the hybrid market, is preparing for the launch of a new car highly anticipated for its innovative green technologies, including its state-of-the-art battery. Mazda will offer the world's first hydrogen-gasoline hybrid in Japan by next March. All of these companies are benefiting from close cooperation with electronics manufacturers, component makers and suppliers that are helping to push Japan to the forefront of green-car technologies. "Globally, Japanese companies are definitely at the top right now, and I expect them to remain No. 1 in the future," says Mike Omotoso, an auto analyst for California-based J.D. Power and Associates. "It's definitely having a positive impact on the Japanese economy."

In large part, Japan's lead in green-car technology is an outgrowth of its old austerity. Japan was obsessed with energy efficiency long before global warming made it a worldwide obsession. For decades Japanese companies have struggled to cope with their oil-poor country's sky-high energy costs by placing a premium on energy-saving technologies, and it has paid off. Even old Japanese industries are cutting-edge in cutting energy costs. Japan continued to make batteries long after U.S. rivals quit, and now makes the most efficient batteries in the world. Japanese steelmakers have ceded ground to cheaper emerging-market rivals but are still unsurpassed in the fine niche art of making superlight steel for car bodies. The hidden strength of Japanese smokestack industries helped create its green cars, and now the success of those cars is pushing more and more Japanese industries—electronic-motor and control-unit producers, all sorts of material companies—to innovate faster.

It's impossible to tally the direct economic effect of the green-car race at this point, but it's huge and likely to grow. The Prius is already the most popular green car in the world, and Toyota plans to raise domestic output of the Prius by 60 percent to 450,000 a year by 2009. By 2015, Goldman Sachs expects the hybrid-vehicle market (including plug-in hybrids) to grow to 2.5 million, up from half a million in 2007, with Toyota and Honda in the lead. Analysts say plug-in hybrids, which run on a battery alone for a short range, are the vehicles that will gradually ease drivers out of the gasoline age and into the electric era. Goldman analyst Kota Yuzawa says hybrid vehicles could account for 5 to 10 percent of operating profits for Honda and Toyota in 2010. And the potential markets look likely to grow as oil prices hit new highs and environmental regulations get tighter.

The focus on green cars reveals the kind of industrial vision that Japan is often criticized for having lost decades ago. Toyota launched the G21 Project, which ultimately produced the Prius, back in the 1990s, when oil prices were low and America's love of SUVs was still growing. The idea was to create a model car for the 21st century, and counter Toyota's reputation for "boring" vehicles. Toyota simply saw the long view before others, assuming that the petroleum-based economy was becoming unviable for a variety of environmental and economic reasons, according to Noriyuki Matsushima, analyst at Nikko Citigroup in Tokyo.

Toyota has since dramatically cut the costs of producing the Prius by achieving economies of scale. Toyota has already reached the break-even point on sales of its hybrids; by contrast, its foreign competitors, like GM, still have years of bleeding red ink ahead of them. Toyota says the parts in its next line of hybrids, due for release next year, will cost about half the current bunch, allowing it to drop prices and raise profits. While the company is estimated to have lost about $10,000 on each car produced when the line was launched back in 1997, "the new Prius is going to be hugely profitable," says Nikko's Matsushima, bringing in thousands of dollars per car. And Toyota aims to cut hybrid production costs over the next decade. With so much more manufacturing experience than its rivals, Toyota will be "the price leader" for the next generation of hybrid vehicles, says Matsushima.

To be sure, virtually every car company in the world is ramping up intriguing green-car projects. Even slow-moving GM plans to debut the plug-in hybrid Volt in 2010, but it is racing from behind against Japanese rivals that work in often exclusive national supply networks, as they have for decades.

Japanese carmakers aim to protect their edge by joining forces with makers of electronics and batteries, the key to the next generation of high-tech cars. Toyota's joint venture with Panasonic (which is majority-owned by the car company) has already made it one of the world's leading battery companies. Similarly, Nissan recently increased its stake in its own battery joint venture with NEC, investing in a big new factory with the aim of marketing its lithium-ion batteries to other carmakers. Japanese battery companies have a big lead in design and mass production, which will make their prices hard to match. A.T. Kearney's Eiji Kawahara says that, even if Japan does not come up with the next big breakthrough in battery design, the technology for putting it into mass production will likely be Japanese.

Mitsubishi's new electric car, the i MiEV, offers another nice illustration of the factors underlying Japan's lead. Until now, many electric vehicles have been limited by range, meager acceleration and long charging times. The four-door i MiEV boasts a range of 160 kilometers per each full charge (compared with 40 for a GM Volt), and, as a recent test-drive around Tokyo demonstrated, its pickup in urban traffic differs in no notable way from a gas-powered car. Other new electric vehicles—like Tesla's much-hyped roadsters—may offer even better performance. But in stark contrast to Tesla—an innovative but tiny start-up—Mitsubishi is reaping the benefits of a tie-up with leading Japanese battery maker GS Yuasa that has the two companies preparing for mass production of state-of-the-art batteries by the end of 2009.

Already the i MiEV's battery weighs in at a mere 204 kilograms (compared with 454 for Tesla's model), and the effect on cost is palpable. Mitsubishi plans to start selling i MiEVs in Japan at the end of next year for a price of about $28,000 after planned subsidies of about $10,000—compared with a cool $100,000 for a Tesla. Meanwhile, thanks to its work with Japanese power companies, Mitsubishi says it's close to perfecting "quick charge" devices that would bring the battery up to 80 percent of capacity in half an hour—thus opening up the prospect that you could recharge your car in the supermarket parking lot while picking up the groceries, for example.

Japanese companies have been plugging away at the green-car challenge for years, in a slow and steady way that plays to the strengths of their manufacturing tradition. While U.S. automakers have spent as much on R&D as top Japanese makers do, the former have been pursing totally different priorities—still sticking money into bulky SUVs while the Japanese were already well down the hybrid road. That money is filtering into other areas of Japanese industry, reinforcing technological progress. "We are now seeing the result of numerous companies' ferocious effort to innovate technologies" to meet carmakers' demands, says Masahiro Ohta, analyst at Fuji Chimera Research Institute.

The secret to making better batteries lies less in blazing transformations than in incremental innovation—something the Japanese are traditionally good at. Japanese battery makers and automakers have been collaborating since the late 1990s. Both sides use the word suriawase, meaning "coordination and integration." Indeed, car-industry observers took note last year at the Detroit Motor Show when Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe adorned his company's stage with a huge PANASONIC sign (Panasonic supplies batteries for the Prius). The fact that car manufacturers and suppliers have such close relationships in Japan facilitates speedy experimentation and innovation. "It's not like assembling personal computers," says Tatsuo Yoshida, analyst at UBS Securities. "When you're making cars, you just can't put a set of components together to make a perfect product. A car is made of tailor-made parts and tailor-made components."

Slowly but surely, these relationships come together to give Japan an edge. Nissan is also working to develop a next-generation battery, partnering with NEC in an effort to begin mass production next year. A.T. Kearney's Kawahara says, "Those [Japanese] manufacturing technologies are the most confidential of the confidential." Though Ford and GM have been loudly touting hybrid vehicles of their own, those are estimated to be much more expensive, and U.S. manufacturers are already finding themselves compelled to turn to the Japanese for batteries that offer the necessary staying power.

Since the batteries that power cars could also someday be used to heat homes, a lead in the area has vast implications for the broader Japanese economy. Nobuaki Yoshioka is a senior executive at Automotive Energy Supply Corp. (AESC), a joint venture between Nissan and NEC. His company has been pushing the envelope of battery technology by developing lithium-ion batteries with manganese components—something NEC has been working on since 1990. "I think [the potential of this technology] is enormous," says Yoshioka. "We know that oil is going to be depleted, and that's going to make it indispensable to somehow store energy that is generated. Today we're focused on cars. But it's clear that the number of possible applications as storage of energy is huge."

For example, superefficient batteries might store electricity generated at times of low demand for use during peak hours. Batteries could be used to change the infrastructure of the energy industry not just in Japan but also throughout Asia. Fumikazu Kitagawa, an auto-sector consultant at Nomura Research Institute, believes that combining the new generation of batteries with solar-power generators will completely revolutionize household energy systems. "This sort of system will be available at reasonable cost, and fairly soon," says Kitagawa.

Batteries are only one part of a green automotive-components industry, including electric motors, inverters and the like, which Japan already dominates. Nomura estimates that the market for hybrid components alone could triple to $5 billion by 2012, and reach $9 billion by 2015. "Japan now has a huge potential to become a world supply center," says Yozo Hasegawa, author of the book "Clean Car Wars," which details the competition for green-car technology among Japanese carmakers and their foreign rivals.

Japan's push for the ultimate green car will also spill over into the materials sector. Consider the steel industry (steel is the main ingredient in automotive bodies). Amid intensifying global competition and consolidation, Japan's steelmakers have kept their edge, increasingly focusing on high-end innovative products coveted by the auto industries (about 80 percent of Japanese production is in this area, which yields the highest profit margins). Yasuhiro Daisho, a professor at Waseda University, says Japanese steelmakers have been leaders of ultralight and high-strength steel for years. "Nippon Steel and JFE Steel have the technologies that ArcelorMittal is very anxious to have," he says. Asian makers, in particular the Chinese, are also trying to catch up with Japan's lead in steel innovation.

Other materials makers are also scampering to develop new products for high-tech cars. Toray, a pioneer of high-tech materials like the carbon fiber it puts into aircraft wings and into the fuselage of the Boeing Dreamliner, too, is just one of them. The company recently set up a new automotive research-and-development center for advanced materials in Nagoya, just down the road from Toyota and suppliers. Toray holds 34 percent of the world carbon-fiber market, and aims to develop a carbon fiber cheap enough for use in car bodies. It hopes to more than double its sales to the auto sector to $3.5 billion by 2015. Teijin, another high-tech-materials maker, aims to "cut the weight of a car by half" by using a variety of new materials like polycarbonate resin, and a bubble-shaped prototype is on display in its Tokyo showroom. Meanwhile, a superlight sports car produced by Ken Okuyama Design is set for sale this fall in Japan. Using carbon fiber and aluminum generously, the model weighs only 750 kilograms.

Another potential growth industry: bioplastics, which have been attracting R&D money from Mazda and Toyota, among others. Because these materials are derived from plants rather than from petroleum (as most plastics are today), bioplastics are carbon-neutral and require much less energy to make. These companies are experimenting with a range of items, including installment panels and floor mats.

Of course, by betting heavily on all the green-car technologies, Japan could easily find itself getting a couple of calls badly wrong. It's certainly missed forecasts in the past—when, for example, Japanese mobile-phone companies ended up backing the wrong standard in the early 1990s, largely shutting themselves out of the global cell-phone boom that followed. The lithium-ion batteries that Japanese companies are investing in right now have plenty of limits, and it's always possible that nimble non-Japanese entrepreneurs could figure out an even better technology.

So far it's unclear which of the new green-car technologies will triumph in the race for "sustainable mobility." Hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles like Honda's Clarity still face some serious challenges if they're ever to break though into the market: not only are they costly, but the fuel stations and infrastructure to power them would have to be built from the ground up. While electric vehicles have the huge advantage of being able to tap into existing power networks, they, too, remain costly, and even the best batteries still don't offer the same range as a full tank of gasoline. Lithium-ion batteries hold some safety concerns. The batteries have a tendency to overheat, potentially causing fires; some manufacturers have had to recall lithium-ion laptop batteries for just this reason. Don Hillebrand, director at Argonne National Labs in Chicago and a leading researcher who has testified before the U.S. Congress on battery technology, warns: "This is a time of great potential and huge risk. Those leaders today may not stay leaders, because rules are going to change quickly."

Even the popular hybrids are still a niche product. But as far as Japanese carmakers are concerned, gasoline is no longer where the action is. Hillebrand believes that green technologies are changing the industry in an unprecedented way. If Ford invented modern car manufacturing when it built the first assembly line for the Model T, says Hillebrand, then the emerging green technology represents "the second invention of the auto industry. And it's the Japanese who are leading the charge."

Ecofriendly cars are leaving the auto shows and the design exhibitions and taking to the streets. Honda, for one, has already started leasing the FCX Clarity to a select group of high-profile customers in southern California. As American actress Jean Harris, one of those chosen as a Clarity user, says: "I love that it's not a huge leap from what we're already used to. It feels like a space-age regular car." If Japanese managers have their way, that simple phrase could well provide the key to a new economic boom.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/157508

Agricultura biológica

2008-08-29T01:28:00.001-07:00

Agricultura biológica

Árvores com "chip" incorporado

Inovação. No Fundão, o maior produtor de cereja biológica da Europa desenvolveu tecnologia de ponta para gerir o seu pomar.

Conceição Antunes

16:00 | Terça-feira, 12 de Ago de 2008

Link permanente:	x

Alberto Frias

Carlos Mendes, agricultor, confere no PDA os tratamentos a realizar no seu cerejal de quase 120 hectares

Parecem rubis a brilhar ao sol radioso da Cova da Beira. As últimas cerejas do ano são colhidas sob o controlo atento do agricultor Carlos Mendes. Nos seus quase 120 hectares de cerejal no Fundão, a produção é 100% biológica. "Esta é a maior área de produção de cereja biológica da Europa", faz notar Carlos Mendes, que está habituado a exportar cerejas para países como França, Inglaterra, Alemanha e até Brasil. "Para vender no Norte da Europa, é fundamental estar certificado. E em 2009, quero estar a exportar 90% da produção".

Aquele vasto cerejal do Fundão já deixou de ser gerido "a olhómetro". As árvores têm um "chip" incorporado e todas as operações de rega, colheita ou colocação de adubos são controladas ao milímetro, sendo a informação continuamente encaminhada para um sistema central. "Agora, as árvores podem falar comigo", refere o agricultor.

Dar uma voz à Natureza

O sistema no pomar biológico de Carlos Mendes está em fase de construção, prevendo-se a sua conclusão até ao final do ano. Vai incorporar um conjunto variado de tecnologias, envolvendo também investigação da Universidade de Coimbra. Para desenvolver esta nova plataforma de "software", o agricultor português juntou-se ao informático e consultor belga Paul Raoul Gailly na criação de uma empresa comum, a SSIAgri, que está a funcionar no Parque de Ciência e Tecnologia da Covilhã.

"Sempre tive o problema de conseguir gerir uma área que excede a minha capacidade humana", reconhece o produtor de cereja do Fundão. E acrescenta: "E sou obrigado a fazer o controlo dos produtos que envio para os supermercados europeus".

Segundo Paul Raoul Gailly, "o carácter inovador do sistema está em dotar a Natureza de uma voz. Numa produção biológica há mais regras que são impostas, e o grau de rastreabilidade do sistema ultrapassa de longe as regras mais exigentes".

Quando estiver finalizado, o sistema permite gerir as colheitas em função da previsão de chuvas ou outras condições de clima adverso que podem danificar as cerejas. "Como numa fábrica, posso informar o meu cliente na Bélgica ou na Alemanha que dentro de xis dias tenho xis quilos de cerejas colhidas. É o que sempre quis fazer e nunca consegui", salienta Carlos Mendes. Ao vender para cadeias como Jumbo e El Corte Inglés, o produtor também reforça o "casamento com a grande distribuição", ajudando ao controlo da fruta que entra nos armazéns.

O consumidor também terá acesso, pela Internet (e com o código de barras da embalagem), a toda a informação sobre tratamentos feitos na cerejeira que deu os frutos que vai comer. A 'cereja em cima do bolo' é poder ver imagens da própria árvore, através de câmaras móveis a instalar no pomar. "O que está em causa é a segurança alimentar e a credibilização de origem. Não ficam dúvidas para o consumidor que as cerejas são da Cova da Beira, contrariamente à questão que se fala de pôr fruta espanhola nas casas portuguesas", sublinha o agricultor.

"Este sistema foi algo que pensei para mim. Mas aplica-se a qualquer produção, tanto biológica como convencional", frisa Carlos Mendes, referindo que além da cereja, o sistema pode ser aplicado à produção de azeite, vinho, hortofrutícolas e até à floresta, com vista a obter ganhos de eficiência em várias frentes. "Vamos criar um conceito de agricultura para conseguir produtos mais baratos".

A meta da SSIAgri é "criar um produto português com uma patente" e exportá-lo para vários países. Numa primeira fase, já em 2009, o alvo é a Península Ibérica, além de Itália, França ou Grécia. "O nosso caminho vai ser evoluir para um prestador de serviços global e um parceiro na gestão florestal", adianta Carlos Mendes. "E aqui já estamos no domínio da inovação pura".

Compensa uma produção 100% biológica? "A cereja desenvolve-se em dois meses e requer muito menos intervenções fito-sanitárias que as batatas ou as cenouras, por exemplo", explica o agricultor. "A Mãe-Natureza é a minha grande sócia. É ela que faz 90% das coisas", sublinha.

Gestão inteligente do cerejal

Árvores com "chip"
O sistema-piloto neste cerejal do Fundão agrega um conjunto de tecnologias que permitem a rastreabilidade total dos frutos desde o campo ao armazém. Cada linha de árvores tem um "chip" incorporado, com informação actualizada sobre todas as operações mecânicas e manuais, ligado a um sistema central

Agricultor 'fala' com as cerejeiras
No campo, o agricultor, munido com um PDA (terminal móvel multifunções), interage com cada cerejeira que lhe 'diz', em tempo real, todas as operações já feitas ou a fazer ao nível de adubagem e outros tratamentos, rega, colheita, etc

Erros de campo reduzidos a zero
Os erros mais comuns da agricultura 'a olhómetro', como a dupla adubação, são rejeitados à partida pelo sistema - que regista os nomes dos trabalhadores que asseguraram cada operação

Rega controlada por fitomonitorização
O sistema mede a humidade da árvore, que varia ao longo do dia em função do ciclo de seiva, para controlar a rega e as necessidades nutricionais da planta

Biosensores avaliam a fruta
O grau de maturação da fruta é avaliado por biosensores, permitindo determinar a altura ideal da colheita em cada árvore

Colheita sob previsão meteorológica
Uma ferramenta previsional com informação meteorológica permite gerir as colheitas e informar os clientes sobre a calendarização das encomendas

Supermercados fiscalizam "online"
Os clientes retalhistas podem controlar online as especificações da produção

Consumidores vêem o pomar
Através de câmaras instaladas no pomar, o consumidor pode ver na Internet, pela indicação do código de barras da caixa, imagens em tempo real da árvore de onde vieram os frutos que está a comer

Produção mais barata
Ao eliminar as ineficiências do processo agrícola, economizando energia, água e tratamentos, além de afinar toda a cadeia logística, o objectivo do sistema é obter uma produção mais barata

Bases para uma nova certificação
Além de dotar as entidades certificadoras de informação mais apurada, o sistema visa ele próprio abrir o caminho para uma nova certificação, contando com o apoio de parceiros e de fornecedores

Um sistema para exportar
A meta é patentear o sistema, aplicável a toda a produção agrícola e florestal, e comercializá-lo em vários países

Comprar com segurança: Selos de certificação

A partir de agora, o consumidor pode deparar com dois tipos de certificação (que aqui reproduzimos) sempre que procurar bens alimentares resultantes do modo de produção biológico. Ambos lhe darão a garantia de que, perante eles, estará a comprar um produto genuinamente biológico. Ou produzido em qualquer outro país da União Europeia ou em Portugal.

A marca Portugal Bio é gerida pela Interbio em acordo com os organismos de certificação. Mas, como fazem questão de sublinhar os responsáveis daquele organismo, está aberta a todos os operadores, sejam ou não associados da Interbio.

Reunidos há pouco mais de um mês no seu segundo congresso, os agricultores de modo biológico deixaram claro que é necessário uniformizar os critérios e procedimentos das entidades certificadoras. Por outro lado, sempre que forem aplicadas sanções, elas deverão ser divulgadas e tornadas públicas. É que, segundo Alfredo Cunhal, vice-presidente da Interbio, o pior que poderia acontecer ao sector era uma crise de falta de credibilidade.

Gene therapy 'may repair hearing'

2008-08-27T19:39:00.001-07:00

Gene therapy has the potential to restore hearing in mice, offering hope for humans too, US scientists suggest.

An Oregon team discovered gene transfer produced functioning hair cells that are essential for the inner ear to interpret sounds, Nature reports.

In people with normal hearing, cochlear hair cells convert sound into electrical signals, which are ultimately transmitted to the brain.

Once the cells are lost or damaged, they cannot be replaced naturally.

Although still a long way from the clinic, the work shows that gene therapy is a potential treatment to combat some forms of congenital deafness
Professor Andy Forge
Deafness Research UK

According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), there are about nine million people who are deaf or hard of hearing in the UK.

Most of them have lost their hearing gradually with increasing age, partly due to the loss of hair cells in the cochlea.

Repair and replace

Prolonged exposure to loud noise is another culprit, damaging the hair cells.

John Brigande and his team from Oregon Health and Science University showed, at least in unborn mice, gene therapy can be used to encourage other cells to become hair cells.

Gene therapy uses a harmless virus to insert copies of the key gene into cells which then replicate.

The key gene used by the Oregon team was Atoh1 which is essential for hair cell development.

The cells "treated" with Atoh1 functioned exactly like original hair cells.

"This capability is a crucial first step in defining translational therapies to ameliorate the effects of inner-ear disease in humans," the researchers said.

Work in humans is still a way off, but the findings point to a way to repair the damaged cochlea without using a mechanical or electrical device.

Currently, people can have a cochlear implant which works by bypassing the damaged cochlear hair cells and stimulating the auditory nerve directly.

An implant cannot restore hearing to normal but it does give the sensation of sounds.

Andy Forge, Professor of Auditory Cell Biology and advisor to Deafness Research UK, said: "Although still a long way from the clinic, the work shows that gene therapy is a potential treatment to combat some forms of congenital deafness.

"With one in 2,000 children born deaf because of genetic defects, such a therapy would clearly be of value."

Dr Mark Downs, of the RNID, said: "This is an exciting development which completes another important piece of the jig-saw in understanding how we might use gene therapy to eventually restore hearing loss."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7582640.stm

Published: 2008/08/27 23:20:17 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Hope over 'early arthritis test'

2008-08-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

Hope over 'early arthritis test'

A new way of scanning joints which may reveal early warning signs of arthritis is being developed by US researchers.

The MRI scan looks for low levels of the chemical glycosaminogycan, which helps cartilage in joints hold the water that makes it tough and elastic.

New York University researchers told the American Chemical Society conference early diagnosis could reduce the need for surgery later in life.

The Arthritis Research Campaign said the scan could help assess treatments.

Our methods have the potential for providing early warning signs for cartilage disorders like osteoarthritis, thus potentially avoiding surgery and physical therapy later on
Dr Alexej Jerschow
New York University

The weakening and breakdown of cartilage, which cushions the moving parts of joints, is a key factor in the development of osteoarthritis, which is common in the over-40s.

There are an estimated eight million people in the UK who have the problem in some form or another, and in severe cases patients can require constant painkillers or even joint replacement surgery.

Cartilage is tough and elastic because of its high water content, and existing MRI scans look for lower levels of this as a sign that the disease is developing.

The team is trying to spot the disease even earlier by looking for a substance called glycosaminogycan (GAG), which helps the cartilage hold plenty of water.

The scientists found a way to make the hydrogen atoms attached to GAG emit a signal which can be picked up by the scanner.

Dietary supplements

Dr Alexej Jerschow, one of the researchers, said: "Our methods have the potential for providing early warning signs for cartilage disorders like osteoarthritis, thus potentially avoiding surgery and physical therapy later on."

He said that a patient given early notice of impending arthritis could take steps to protect their joints, perhaps using dietary supplements such as glucosamine and chondroitin, which may be able to slow or halt joint degeneration.

The next stage now is to test the technique in trials.

However, Professor Alan Silman, the medical director of the Arthritis Research Campaign, said that the practical implications of the research were "currently very limited".

"Unfortunately at the moment there is no treatment that could be offered that would change the situation.

"What it may prove to be is a very sensitive test of drug treatment response as new agents are developed."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7574707.stm

Published: 2008/08/22 23:00:17 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Cell change 'keeps organs young'

2008-08-10T19:34:00.001-07:00

Cell change 'keeps organs young'

Researchers may have found a way to halt the biological clock which slows down our bodies over the decades.

A US team thinks it may have found the genetic levers to help boost a system vital to cleaning up faulty proteins within our cells.

The journal Nature Medicine reported that the livers of genetically-altered older mice worked as well as those in younger animals.

They suggested it might one day help people with progressive brain diseases.

These results show it's possible to correct this protein 'logjam' that occurs in our cells as we get older, thereby perhaps helping us to enjoy healthier lives well into old age
Dr Ana Maria Cuervo
Yeshiva University

The researchers, from Yeshiva University in New York, are focusing on a process which is central to the proper working of cells.

The fundamental chemicals of cells - proteins - often have very short working lives, and need to be cleared away and recycled as soon as possible.

The body has a system for doing just that, but it becomes progressively less efficient as we get older.

This leads to progressive falls in the function of major organs - the heart, liver and brain, some of which contribute to the diseases of old age.

Dr Ana Maria Cuervo, from Yeshiva, created a mouse with two genetic alterations.

The first, when activated, boosted the number of specific cell receptors linked to this protein recycling function, while the second allowed the first to be turned on whenever Dr Cuervo wished simply by modifying the animal's diet.

Switched on

She waited until the mice were six months old - the point at which age-related decline in the protein-recycling system begins - then turned on the receptor gene.

When examined at two years old, the liver cells of these mice were far more effective at recycling protein compared with normal mice.

When the overall liver function of the very old genetically-modified mice was tested, they performed at a comparable level to much younger mice.

Dr Cuervo said: "These results show it's possible to correct this protein 'logjam' that occurs in our cells as we get older, thereby perhaps helping us to enjoy healthier lives well into old age."

She now plans to test animal models of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, believing that the abnormal protein deposits in Alzheimer's in particular might be dealt with more effectively this way.

Thomas von Zglinicki, Professor of Cellular Gerontology at Newcastle University, said that the results were "very exciting".

"It's not often you see studies where they have managed to improve function in this way.

"What they seem to have managed is to maintain the mice at this young stage, and both restore and maintain normal activity."

He said that it should, in theory, be possible to achieve the same effect across the whole body.

A spokesman for the Alzheimer's Society said: "As we age we have an increase in protein misfolding and general faults in protein processing, so the ability to maintain an effective system to clear these would be beneficial.

"However, a direct line to the clearance of defective proteins in the brain is not so clear from this research."

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