Marchers tear-gassed, invaders ‘embraced’

Joseph Tawie | February 21, 2013

BN leaders have 'lost the plot', says Sarawak PKR, alluding to the incursion in Sabah and the deportation of Aussie Senator Nick Xenophon.

KUCHING: Is it not ironical that thousands of Malaysians rallying for clean and fair elections were tear-gassed and hunted down like criminals, while 100 armed men in army fatigue who “invaded” Sabah recently are being dealt with “kid gloves”?

The double standard practised by the Barisan Nasional administration never ceases to shock, said Sarawak PKR chief Baru Bian.

Blaming Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s “weak” administration, Bian also cited another irony –the detention and subsequent deportation of Australian Senator Nick Xenophon.

He said it was now obvious to all that the current leadership had “lost the plot”.

“A government that treats armed invaders in Sabah with kid gloves but deports a senator from a friendly neighbouring country has clearly lost the plot.

“Also, those of us who were tear-gassed, doused with chemical laced water and treated like criminals at the Bersih rallies want to know why our government is giving these invaders better treatment than what we received,” asked Bian, who is also Ba’Kelalan assemblyman.

He said Sarawakians were closely watching the developments in Sabah and were puzzled at the Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein’s dismissal of the “invaders” as being “neither militants nor terrorists”.

“The Home Minister said they [invaders] are neither militants nor terrorists but did not tell us what he thinks they are.

“The people know which party is the real threat to our peace and security and are puzzled about the government’s actions [in Sabah and against Xenophon].

“The people of Sarawak are wondering whether we will be next. If we are invaded, will the BN government defend us as it is duty-bound to do?” he said.

H was alluding to the situation in Sabah where the police have engaged the armed Royal Sulu army in gentle “negotiations” much to the anger of Sabahans who see the incursions as a serious security breach and an “act of war”.

Tengah ‘oversells’ Najib
On another matter, Bian took to task Second Resources Planning and Environment Minister Awang Tengah Ali Hassan for urging Lawas constituents to continue rooting for BN.

Lawas, Tengah had said, was still in need of infrastructure and public amenities and only BN could ensure this.

Pointing out the irony of Tengah’s statement, Bian said: “Firstly, he [Awang Tengah] called for Lawas to continue to be BN’s bedrock and in the next breath, he said that Lawas still needs much infrastructure and public amenities.

“If Lawas is still so lacking [in infrastructure] after almost 50 years of BN rule, why should the people give the BN another term?

“Where is the much-needed hospital, which the incumbent MP professes to be completely ignorant?

“Awang Tengah is correct about the opposition singing a tune of change, and he can rest assured that the public will be wise to the fact that the change offered will benefit them.”

Bian also urged Awang Tengah not to “oversell” Najib’s track record of delivering the goods in Sarawak.

“If I were Awang Tengah, I would not be so confident about the prime minister’s track record and the effectiveness of his ‘constant engagement with the younger generation and across the board’.

“After all, his latest attempt at engaging the younger generation in Penang was met by a resounding ‘no’, much as Dr Mahathir [Mohamad] and the BN leaders may deny it,” Bian said.

Print a car.

Jim Kor is printing a car.

Kor, an engineer and entrepreneur from Winnipeg, Manitoba, has designed a two-passenger hybrid car of the future dubbed the Urbee. The ultra-sleek three-wheel vehicle will have a metal internal combustion engine, electric motor and frame.

But Kor is printing out the body in plastic, piece by piece, in Eden Prairie at RedEye, a business that uses three-dimensional printers to produce parts and prototypes on demand, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.

Kor used RedEye a few years ago to create the prototype for Urbee, but he's worked out the bugs since then and now says he's ready to go into actual production.

But instead of assembling his Urbees on a Henry Ford-style assembly line the way cars have been made for more than 100 years, Kor wants to print his cars.

It's not a gimmick. He says the only way he can create the Urbee body is with 3D printers, which create objects that are impossible with conventional manufacturing.

For instance, instead of using sheet metal with a uniform thickness, he can create large, intricate pieces that vary in thickness as needed to strengthen and lighten the car.

He compared it to the way nature has designed the bones of birds -- they are extremely lightweight yet strong, without a smidge of extra material.

"The process has the potential to put the material exactly where you want it and not put it where you don't want it," he said. "Conventional cars carry around a lot of extra weight."

The capabilities of 3D printing also freed Kor to radically rethink the car's design: His Urbee will be made using only about 50 large pieces, some of which are deceptively intricate.

Take the bumper. RedEye had one incubating last week inside one of its top-of-the-line Fortus printers made by Stratasys, a maker of 3D printers and RedEye's parent.

From the outside, it looks any bumper, but inside, Kor included ductwork for both the dashboard and the rest of the car.

The ability to print out a bumper with ductwork allowed Kor to attach the windshield and dash directly to the bumper, which helped make it more aerodynamic than a Toyota Prius, with half the weight and rolling resistance, he said.

It also eliminated parts. Lots of parts.

"Take a car apart and put all the parts on the floor," Kor suggested. "For just the dashboard, there must be thousands!"

Using the unique capabilities of 3D printing, you can make a lot of those tiny individual parts into one unified piece, he said. The Urbee's car body will be assembled from about 50 separate parts, total.

"The surprise to us is that there are very few car parts in this. We didn't start out that way," Kor said.

Designing a printed-out car may initially be more expensive, but it could become an advantage if large-scale production gets under way, Kor said.

The technology of 3D printing continues to get better and less expensive, he said. The cost of printing out a relative handful of parts eventually could drop below the cost of manufacturing requiring thousands of individual parts be made and then assembled, he said.

Three-dimensional printing opens up the vision of the designer, said Jeff Hanson, business development manager for RedEye.

What you can make -- and how you make it -- is limited only by your imagination, he said.

At Kor Ecologic, when we design a product, we try to make the design fit our idea of the way things should be.

The Urbee design team had a vision. That vision was written out and posted on the walls of our shop. It is the fundamental design ideals we followed in working on the Urbee Car Project.

1. Use the least amount of energy possible for every kilometre traveled.
2. Cause as little pollution as possible during manufacturing, operation and recycling of the car.
3. Use materials available as close as possible to where the car is built.
4. Use materials that can be recycled again and again.
5. Use parts and materials that last as long as possible.
6. Be simple to understand, build, and repair.
7. Be as safe as possible to drive.
8. Meet the standards and regulations applicable to traditional cars.
9. Be buildable in small quantities so we don't have to wait for it to become more widely accepted before we can begin manufacturing it for the public.
10. Be mass-producable so it can be built more economically once it becomes more widely accepted.
11. Be affordable.
12. Be visually appealing.

3D printed meat

3D printed meat could soon be cheap and tasty enough to win you over

Feb. 12, 2013 (9:30 am) By: Ryan Whitwam

The next time you’re about to bite into a hamburger, take a moment to consider the resources that went into making it. In a recent Solve for X talk, Andras Forgacs laid out all the statistics, and explained how tantalizingly close we are to a more sustainable method of meat production. Basically, humanity may soon be 3D printing meat instead of growing it in an animal.

Forgacs starts by explaining just how costly a single quarter-pound beef patty is to produce. For that one serving, 6.7lbs of grains, 600 gallons of water, and 75 square feet of grazing land were used. Now multiply that by 1000 to find your (approximate) impact — the average American eats over 220lbs of meat each year. Additionally, at least 18% of greenhouse gas emissions are due to meat production. All this for one burger?

As economic opportunities continue to lift populations around the world into the middle class, demand for meat is rising. With 7 billion people on the planet, we are sustained by 60 billion land animals. When the population hits 9 billion somewhere around 2050 we would need 100 billion land animals. That would be ecologically devastating, so something has to change.

Advances in bioengineering have been able to produce meat analogs, but the process has always beenstupendously expensive, and the results were only passable. It turns out that it’s actually very difficult to match the taste and texture of animal muscle tissue by growing cells in the lab. The marbling of fats and connective tissue is integral to the experience of eating a burger.

Applying 3D printing to artificial meats could be the answer, according to Forgacs. If you take tissue engineering and add in some 3D printing, you get the burgeoning field of bioprinting. Researchers are working with cell aggregates as the medium in bioprinting (as opposed to plastics in regular 3D printing). Layer after layer of cells can be laid down to more closely resemble the genuine article. Researchers can basically build a block of muscle that never lived.

So maybe it’s going to be possible to make artificial meat that feels and tastes like the real deal, but what about cost? Well, Forgacs concedes that it does still cost a few thousand dollars to make a pound of meat in the lab. Unless you’re seeking the most expensive burger in the world, that’s no good. Still, the cost of real meat is inevitably going up and the printed stuff will become cheaper as economies of scale kick in. The process right now is taking place in a research lab, not a large production facility.

Printed meats will eventually become cost-competitive with the dead animal kind. Until then, we may all have to take a closer look at what we’re eating.

Dr M. abut to cause a disaster

Dr M brewing recipe for disaster

Jeswan Kaur | February 11, 2013

If there is anyone who is gearing up for an 'Arab Spring', it is none other than Mahathir himself, going by his anti-Malaysian rants and racist nature.

COMMENT

He may have ruled the country for 22 years before reluctantly calling it quits but Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who holds the record as the country’s longest serving prime minister, has no intention whatsoever of doing his bit to promote peace and harmony on Malaysian soil.

Instead, Mahathir is doing the reverse; he is accusing arch enemy Anwar Ibrahim of plotting an ‘Arab Spring’ to overthrow the Barisan Nasional government.

And the former premier regrets that regressive laws like the Internal Security Act and the Emergency Ordinance are no longer in use.

Mahathir is also supportive of the move by Malay-rights group Perkasa to burn bibles with the word Allah saying it was natural to torch banned books and that Perkasa president Ibrahim Ali  was merely expressing his opinion.

No wonder why Ibrahim has the audacity to continuously humiliate and threaten the non-Malays, for he has the ‘blessings’ of his patron Mahathir in all that he does.

When electoral reform activist Bersih took to the streets on July 9, 2011, Mahathir condemned the move saying it was politically motivated and aimed at repeating the 2008 election tsunami and tarnishing the BN government’s name and police.

If there is anyone who is gearing up for an ‘Arab Spring’, it is none other than Mahathir himself, going by his anti-Malaysian rants and racist nature.

Save Malaysia before its’s too late
Should people like Ibrahim and Mahathir continue with their scandalous views, it will not be long before the rakyat decides to take matters into their hands.

The fact that police brutality sees no end in sight, racism is at an all-time high and corruption continues to reign does not worry the leaders of this country; on the contrary they worry if the votes are split and if the opposition continues to win support from the people.

Just who do these politicians want? Or what really is their agenda that  veteran leaders like Mahathir and the current batch of politician-leaders seem to be forgetting the real purpose of their serving the rakyat?

Truth be told, it is these politicians who have  jeopardised the good name of Malaysia and threatened the tranquility of this nation boasting of multi-faiths.

Claims that the opposition coalition of Pakatan Rakyat is out to paint a bad image of the federal government has no basis; if anything, Pakatan is doing damage-control to all the wrongdoings undertaken by the BN government prior to 2008.

Before matters get out of hand and tragedies become a daily occurence, something has to be done to save Malaysia from being prostituted further by unscrupulous politicians.

Bigotry, hypocrisy must be dealt with
Mahathir very conveniently justified Perkasa’s move to ban bibles using the word ‘Allah’ but he and his band of racist politicians cringe when an award-winning actor dares to tackle the subject of terrorism, as happened to actor-director Kamal Haasan’s movie “Vishwaroopam”.

A day after it was screened at the local theatres, the film was banned after a protest by the Indian Muslim League in Penang and a memorandum submitted by the Indian Muslim Youth Movement  to the Home Ministry – their claim was that “Vishwaroopam” portrayed Muslims in a negative light.

But when racist utterances are made and acted against the non-Malays of this country, no one comes to their rescue, forcing them to act accordingly to defend their respective faiths.

Looks like the independence achieved in 1957 has not taught the politicians of this country the importance of perserving harmony among the people. Nor have these leaders made any effort to improve for the benefit of the country and the rakyat.

In this respect, one such example would be Mahathir who after two decades of lording over the country has failed to shine as a leader worthy of respect.

Allowing dissenting voices from the Mahathir camp to continue is a confirmed recipe for disaster, one worse than the Arab Spring.

Jeswan Kaur is a freelance writer and a FMT columnist.

Scientists 3D-print embryonic stem cells

Scientists 3D-print embryonic stem cells, pave 

the way for lab-made organ transplants 

By Sarah Silbert posted Feb 5th, 2013 at 10:04 PM60 

---

3D printers already have a firm footing the commercial market, with
more than 20 models available for well-heeled DIYers, and the
technology's appeal isn't lost on the scientific community. A team
at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland has developed a
method for 3D-printing clusters of human embryonic stem cells in
a variety of sizes. Researchers have successfully printed 3D cells
before, but this is the first time that embryonic cell cultures, which
are especially delicate, have been built in three dimensions. Human
embryonic stem cells can replicate almost any type of tissue in the
human body -- and the scientists at Heriot-Watt believe that lab-made
 versions could one day be used to make organ transplants, thereby
rendering donors unnecessary. In the nearer future, 3D-printed stem
cells could be used to make human tissue models for drug testing;
effectively eliminating the need for animal testing. Makes that 
Burritob0t look a little less ambitious, doesn't it?

Mahathir, a political animal

Dr M will do a Brutus on anyone

Mohd Ariff Sabri Aziz | February 5, 2013

Hate must be eating into Dr Mahathir Mohamad's 88-year-old physique now that the extent of his lust for power is unravelling in the RCI.

COMMENT

Will any self-respecting non-Malay Malaysian vote for Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s Umno, now that their forefathers may be dishonoured with his suggestion that a Royal Commission of Inquiry be established on pre-independence non-Malays?

His suggestion questions your grandparents and great-grandparents’ presence in Malaysia before Merdeka.

He is trivialising your ancestors’ hardwork, sweat and contributions to the growth of this country. Will you sit back and allow it?

This is the man Mahathir is. He would have done a Brutus on anyone.

As an ex-committee member of Pekan Umno and Najib Tun Razak’s former information officer, I know a little more about the prime minister. Believe me, he is small fry for Mahathir.

The way it stands Najib is begging Mahathir to save his life. That is how vile and powerful Mahathir is.

It is now obvious that Mahathir is not a statesman. He is in fact a political animal. If he can do that to Tunku Abdul Rahman, no one else is safe.

That is why we say Mahathir’s 22 years as premier was a nightmare.

Malaysians are better off without his legacy – the Umno of 1988 – which is now inherited by Najib.

Tunku Abdul Rahman is not here to defend himself.

Mahathir’s lust for power

The granting of citizenship to more than one million non-Malays before 1957 was for the purpose of nation-building.

It was a small price to pay to avoid bloodshed if independence from the British were to be obtained by armed struggle.

Tunku’s action was for a higher calling.

But the granting of citizenship to the Filipinos and an assortment of other nationalities as revealed in the Sabah RCI last week – engineered by Mahathir – was directed at consolidating his power.

These are two different things.

Tunku’s call served a higher calling and for the advancement of the greater good – the nation. Mahathir’s call serve a narrower interest – his lust for power.

The difference should be obvious to any right-thinking person.

We don’t even need to go into the granting of citizenship as a pre-condition of the British giving independence to Malaya.

Were we not yet independent when Mahathir started his project IC in Sabah?

Garlic may be a cure for cancer

Sandra John | February 4, 2013

An amino acid called Allicin is the magic potion in garlic that helps guard us against cancer.

FEATURE

In a major study involving men and women from 10 different countries EPIC, the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition discovered garlic had the preventive properties to guard against various forms of cancers.

Several other independent population studies through the years have supported this finding showing that an increased intake of garlic results in a reduced risk of stomach, colon, esophagus, pancreas, prostate and breast cancers.

In fact as early as 1952, Russian scientists were already using garlic extracts to successfully kill tumours in humans. Over in Japan, scientists found that these same garlic extracts acted as powerful antioxidants against ‘lipid peroxidation’, a condition that occurs when an inappropriate number of oxygen molecules enter cells, causing their destruction.

So just what is that magic potion in garlic that helps guard us against cancer? An amino acid called Allicin. Keep in mind however that garlic is at its most effective when eaten raw – crushed or chopped – after it’s been allowed to sit for at 15 minutes at room temperature. Don’t keep it any longer though as Allicin can quickly diminish after it’s produced.

This little bulb is so potent even a little helps combat a host of other health-related conditions. Here are just a few…

• Lowers cholesterol – studies have shown that garlic can lower total serum cholesterol levels and raise HDL or ‘good’ cholesterol levels. It can also lower triglyceride (another type of fat in the blood) levels.

• Reduces plaque by preventing platelets in the blood from sticking together.

• Fights infections by exerting antimicrobial activity against viruses, bacteria, parasites and fungi. In fact raw garlic is so potent, numerous tests have proven it is more powerful than penicillin and tetracycline.

• Boosts immunity – Dr Abdullah of the Akbar Clinic and Research Centre in Panama City, Florida believes garlic can rev up the immune defences of AIDS patients and may also directly combat the many kinds of fungal-type infections that most AIDS patients suffer from.

• Lowers blood pressure – garlic has been used in China for centuries to lower blood pressure. The Japanese government officially recognises garlic as a blood pressure depressor.

• Good for the lungs – garlic acts as a decongestant and expectorant for common colds and as a ‘mucus regulator’ for chronic bronchitis.

Just so you know, experts warn that garlic oils, capsules and pills offer very little in the form of the active compound that is so effective in keeping us healthy. Opt for fresh garlic or better yet grow your own!

So you’re eager in making consumption of raw garlic one of your New Year’s resolutions but you’re worried about being called “garlic breath”. Well, there’s a solution for that – just pop a few fennel seeds (jintan manis) into your mouth to counter garlic odours. It’s a small price to pay for a healthier you in 2013.

LINKS:

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=60