2008: May 16th Good News (Solar Powered Plane Designed, General Mills Donates $500,000 to Aid Earthquake Victims in China, more...)

Good Evening all,

Today' I'm visiting Osan, in Korea. I came to visit an old friend who was on business here for a week, and who I had not seen in over 6 years. I have been to Osan before, but that was about 5 and a half years ago. Therefore, since we are here, we are going to take advantage of the Osan Shopping district (which is supposed to be cheep and quality) after I finish today's post. :)

I have several good articles for you. First, I'd like to mention the article about the Solar Plane. This article is my first honorable mention, as it came out in the news yesterday. I think it is awesome that this guy (Bertrand Picard--the same man who circumnavigated the globe in a hot air balloon) is so intensely working on a fossil fuel free flight operation. :)

The second article I'd like to mention is the one about new scientific discoveries on a specific molecule that may lead to a cure for Alzheimers. Although a cure for Alzheimers has not been found yet, the new discovery about how the molecule (called DAPH) and a specific set of brain fibers (called amyloids) intereact appears to be a promising step in the right direction.

The final article I'd like to highlight, is about the Monk Seals in Hawaii. Previously I have posted a couple articles about the plight of the Monk Seals, which are endangered, in Hawaii. This article shows how Monk Seals are making a small comeback. It also gives a small update on the orphaned Monk Seal that was mentioned a couple weeks ago.

I hope you enjoy today's posts! I enjoyed finding them for you! See you tomorrow!


Today’s Top 5:
1. General Mills Donates $500,000 to Aid Victims of the Earthquake in Central China
2. How Small Molecule can Take Apart Alzheimer's Disease Protein Fibers (Physorg.com)
3. Baby Boom: The Number of Monk Seals Born on Oahu in a Year Hits a Record (Honolulu Star Bulletin)
4. New Russian Wealth Sets off Mall Development Boom (International Herald Tribune)
5. Women Rise in Rwanda's Economic Revival (MSNBC)

Honorable Mention:
1. Solar Powered Plane Designed (Sky News)
2. Vegetables in Abundance in Fiji (The Fiji Times Online)




Today's Top 5:

1. General Mills Donates $500,000 to Aid Victims of the Earthquake in Central China
Posted : Fri, 16 May 2008 22:31:05 GMT
Author : MN-GENERAL-MILLS-FOUND
Category : Press Release

MINNEAPOLIS - (Business Wire) General Mills Foundation on behalf of General Mills China has committed $500,000 (approximately RMB 3.5 million) to the American Red Cross to support the earthquake response efforts led by the Red Cross Society of China. General Mills has operations in the Sichuan Province of central China.
“We were relieved to learn that our employees are safe, and our hearts go out those who have been impacted by this disaster,” said Chris Shea, president, General Mills Foundation. “We want to provide immediate help because we know that rebuilding lives takes time.”
About General Mills
General Mills, with annual net sales of $13.4 billion, is a leading global manufacturer and marketer of consumer foods products based in Minneapolis. General Mills' mission is Nourishing Lives - innovating to make lives healthier, easier, and richer - while Nourishing Communities and Nourishing the Future. Its global brand portfolio includes Cheerios, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Green Giant, Häagen-Dazs, Nature Valley, Old El Paso and more. With more than 100 consumer brands and operations in more than 100 countries, General Mills is also a leading supplier of baking and other food products to the foodservice and commercial baking industries.
General Mills





2. How Small Molecule can Take Apart Alzheimer's Disease Protein Fibers
http://www.physorg.com/news130155043.html
Published: 7 hours ago, 11:10 EST, May 16, 2008

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have shown, in unprecedented detail, how a small molecule is able to selectively take apart abnormally folded protein fibers connected to Alzheimer's disease and prion diseases.
The findings appear online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Finding a way to dismantle misfolded proteins has implications for new treatments for a host of neurodegenerative diseases.
Abnormal accumulation of amyloid fibers and other misfolded forms in the brain cause neurodegenerative diseases. Similarly, build-up of abnormally folded prion proteins between neurons causes the human version of mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
“Surprisingly, a small molecule called DAPH selectively targets the areas that hold fibers together, and converts fibers to a form that is unable to grow. Normally fibers grow from their ends, but the drug stops this activity,” says senior author James Shorter, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. “Our data suggest that it is possible to generate effective small molecules that can attack amyloid fibers, which are associated with so many devastating diseases.”
The researchers are now working on how DAPH acts as a wedge to stop the fibers from growing. “Presumably DAPH fits very neatly into the crevices between fiber subunits,” explains Shorter. “When we grow yeast cells with the prion in the presence of DAPH, they begin to lose the prion. We also saw this in the test tube using pure fibers. The small molecule directly remodels fiber architecture. We’ve really been able to get at the mechanism by which DAPH, or any small molecule, works for the first time.”
DAPH was originally found in a screen of small molecules that reduce amyloid-beta toxicity in the lab of co-author Vernon Ingram, Shorter’s collaborator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In a test tube, if a small amount of amyloid or prion fiber is added to the normal form of the protein, it converts it to the fiber form. But when DAPH is added to the mix, the yeast prion protein does not aggregate into fibers.
“It’s essentially stopping fiber formation in its tracks,” says Huan Wang, first author and research specialist in Shorter’s lab. “We were surprised to see two very different proteins, amyloid-beta and Sup35, sensitive to this same small molecule.”
The next step is to identify more potent DAPH variants with greater selectivity for deleterious amyloids. Since some amyloids may turn out to be beneficial – for example, one form may be involved in long-term memory formation – it will be necessary to find a drug that does not hit all amyloids indiscriminately.
“We’d need one that hits only problem amyloids, and DAPH gives us a hint that such selectivity is possible” says Shorter.




3. Baby Boom: The Number of Monk Seals Born on Oahu in a Year Hits a Record
http://starbulletin.com/2008/05/16/news/story05.html
Vol. 13, Issue 137 - Friday, May 16, 2008
Star-Bulletin staff

Two monk seals were born this week on Oahu, delivering a new record -- three -- for seals born within a year on the island, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The young seals also raised the total number of pups born in the main Hawaiian Islands since the beginning of the year to 10, compared to seven at this time last year, which saw a total of 13 newborn pups.
"This is going to be a busy pupping season," said Tracy Wurth, monk seal sighting coordinator for the NOAA Fisheries Pacific Islands Region, in a news release. "We are expecting several more births in the coming months as we have already identified several pregnant females out there."
Endangered monk seals, which have a population estimated at fewer than 1,200, usually give birth between February and July, with a peak between April and June.
Previously, the record for pups born in one year on Oahu was two.
On Wednesday, a seal gave birth to a pup at a North Shore beach and both appeared to be behaving normally. The pup's sex has not been determined yet, the release said.
Two days earlier, another monk seal gave birth to a male pup at an undisclosed beach on the North Shore. That pup appears to be doing well, the release said.
The same female gave birth to a seal on the North shore in 2006, prompting more than 40 volunteers to keep watch over the pair for seven weeks until the pup was weaned. A few months later, however, the pup died in a gill net off Rabbit Island.
The first pup this year was born on Rabbit Island, the news release said.
As for the newborn pup abandoned by its mother on Kauai on May 2, it continues to do well, weighing in at 37 pounds. Since scientists took him into custody nearly two weeks ago, he has gained about 5 pounds.
The pup was active, swimming in a pool at the NOAA Fisheries Kewalo Research Facility, said NOAA spokeswoman Wende Goo.




4. New Russian Wealth Sets off Mall Development Boom
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/16/business/mall.php
16 May 2008

NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia: In this region of Siberia, long synonymous with gulags and hardship, shoppers mobbed an Ikea store last winter with the vigor of a miners' riot. They loaded their outsized yellow shopping carts with clothes, housewares, appliances and furniture.
The store and the surrounding the Mega mall, opened last year on a bluff overlooking the Ob River, expect 12 million visitors in 2008 - bursting with pent-up consumerism and oil rubles, unbothered by the economic uncertainty roiling much of the rest of the world.
Siberia, where Russians waited in long lines to buy food with ration cards not long ago, is the improbable epicenter of one of the biggest mall booms in history.
As retail businesses shrink in the United States, provincial Russian towns like this one have become targets of retailers and shopping center developers from around the world. Malls here are even poaching managers from as far away as California.
Across the great expanse of Russia - on plots cleared of birch groves and old factories, beside prison colonies with their barbed wire fences and wooden watchtowers, on the territory of old airports and collective farms - big-box stores are rising at a rate of several a month.
Russia is projected to open twice as much mall space as any other European country this year, and Europe will open more shopping centers this year than ever before.
"Your eyes open wide, there is so much to buy," Tatyana Salamatina, a retired engineer who worked at one of the military factories in Novosibirsk, gushed in an interview in the Mega mall food court. "You should carry a basket," instead of pushing a cart, she advised, because "then you know by the weight when you have too much."
To be sure, malls are nothing new in Moscow, where money from the country's oil and other industries has always pooled. In Moscow and the surrounding region, 38 new malls are scheduled to open before 2010. What is new is the dispersion of wealth in the Russian provinces that have, for centuries, been poor.
The malling of Siberia is transforming the drab grey landscape into a tableau of Day-Glo green and purple outlets, and providing ray of hope to retailers whose business is lagging elsewhere. Russian retailing has become such an alluring business that Ernst Young and KPMG highlighted the sector at an investor road show in London last month.
In a sign of trickle-down petroleum money's appeal to retailers, Russian developers are expected to open 4.6 million square meters, or 49 million square feet, of retail space in shopping centers in the second half of 2007 and 2008, according to Cushman Wakefield, the real estate company.
That is more than double the new shopping center area planned in Poland, the European country with the second-largest pipeline of malls in development.
"You have this incredible purchasing power in these cities retailers want to tap into," said Charles Slater, a partner working in the Russia office of Cushman Wakefield, which advises mall developers headed to the Russian hinterlands. "There is a race for land." That is another reason sparsely built Siberia is so popular.
Developers are turning to the 12 provincial cities in Russia with populations over one million, islands of prosperity with population inflows from rural migration and rising purchasing power, ripe for malls.
This retail strategy is known here as the "millions" and embraced by leading Western retailers including Ikea and Auchan, the French food chain.
This approach has put Siberia on "the center of the radar screen" for mall developers, according to Jeff Kershaw, a former manager of California malls, now a partner in Moscow with the real estate company CB Richard Ellis.
So promising was mall development in Russia that Ikea, a privately held company run by the Kamprad family in Sweden, has taken a sideline in mall development through its Mega franchise, using Ikea as an anchor tenant.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has toyed with the prospect of expanding into Russia for years despite setbacks in its planned expansion in Germany, where it retreated in the face of local competition. The company took another step toward Russia in April by hiring a German retail veteran, Stephan Fanderi, to study business opportunities in the former Soviet Union, it said.
The appeal to Wal-Mart of expanding into frontier markets like Siberia is obvious. Its international sales from stores in 14 countries outside the United States grew 17 percent in 2007, compared with 6 percent growth domestically.
Russia, ever competitive with the United States, is now neck-and-neck in a new measure of competition: mall size. The Belaya Dacha Mega mall near Moscow, developed by Ikea like the mall in Novosibirsk and opened in 2004, has 330,000 square meters of interior space. It is about the same size as the 3.5 million square feet of interior space at the United States' largest mall, the Mall of America, near Minneapolis.
In some places in Russia, oversupply of mall space is becoming a problem. The Volga River city of Kazan, for example, has opened more shopping space per capita than the city of Paris, according to the Moscow office of CB Richard Ellis.
Though demand for cars, cellphones and furniture is far from sated, this is still Siberia. The winters are long, the distances vast.
Dirk Hammerstein, the manager of the Novosibirsk Ikea store , said Russian customers, many living with several generations crammed into tiny apartments, made a run on sofa beds in December. With the snow flurries falling ominously, it became a mighty test of his horribly attenuated supply lines, stretching back along decrepit roads all the way to Moscow.
The truck convoys he dispatched for new sofa beds covered 3,200 kilometers, or 2,000 miles, each way to Ikea's logistics center outside Moscow. He kept the store, the most remote in Ikea's worldwide chain, in stock, barely.
But sofabeds represent a new - and in some ways better - kind of scarcity for Siberia. In the fall of 1947, food was so scarce here that children were sent into the fields after the harvesters passed, to glean wheat from the discarded straw, according to the city history museum. And, as late as 1993, the city authorities rationed food. Printed in cheery red, blue and yellow colors that belied the misery they symbolized, these little slips of paper entitled residents to buy fixed quantities of staples such as sausage, sugar or flour.
One was marked simply "animal meat." Now the museum keeps a set of the cards from February 1992 under glass in an exhibition case.



5. Women Rise in Rwanda's Economic Revival
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24659361/
updated 2:35 a.m. ET May 16, 2008

MARABA, Rwanda - Sun-kissed plantations ring this village, renowned in recent years for growing the rich arabica beans brewed and served in some of the world's finest coffee houses. But the secret to success here has had far less to do with the idyllic climate and volcanic soil than with a group of people who have emerged as Maraba's -- and Rwanda's -- most potent economic force: women.
In the 14 years since the genocide, when 800,000 people died during three months of violence, this country has become perhaps the world's leading example of how empowering women can fundamentally transform post-conflict economies and fight the cycle of poverty. That is particularly clear here in Maraba, a southern village where a host of women -- largely relegated to backbreaking field work in the days before the genocide -- found unwanted opportunity in the fertile lands they would inherit from slaughtered husbands, fathers and brothers.
As both female and male survivors sought to rebuild coffee plantations with financial and
technical assistance from international organizations, Maraba's women, most trying their hands at the business of farming for the first time, were by far the faster students. They showed more willingness than men, officials here said, to embrace new techniques aimed at improving quality and profit. Now, Maraba's female farmers are outdoing their male counterparts in both, numbering about half of all farmers in the village's coffee cooperative but producing 90 percent of its finest quality beans for export.
The march of female entrepreneurialism, playing out here and across Rwanda in industries from agribusiness to tourism, has proved to be a windfall for efforts to rebuild the nation and fight poverty. Women more than men invest profits in the family, renovate homes, improve nutrition, increase savings rates and spend on children's education, officials here said.
It speaks to a seismic shift in gender economics in Rwanda's post-genocide society, one that is altering the way younger generations of males view their mothers and sisters while offering a powerful lesson for other developing nations struggling to rebuild from the ashes of conflict.
"Rwanda's economy has risen up from the genocide and prospered greatly on the backs of our women," said Agnes Matilda Kalibata, minister of state in charge of agriculture. "Bringing women out of the home and fields has been essential to our rebuilding. In that process, Rwanda has changed forever. . . . We are becoming a nation that understands that there are huge financial benefits to equality."
Where men failed
In the central highlands town of Masaka, the road to female prosperity runs through a path of male shame.
The main drag -- a red earthen way -- winds through a number of tiny mud huts, passing first by the home of Ildiphonse Muhayimana, a builder whose yet-to-be installed iron roofing was seized by village elders this year not long after he defaulted on a $110 bank loan. "He spent the money on women and liquor," said his loan officer, Abed Muhawenimana. Further down the way, teacher Enock Muvunji met a similar fate, his bike seized last month until he repays a $277 loan.
Yet venture up the road, and you reach the door of Jeanine Mukandayisenga. The 29-year-old wife of a disabled army officer and mother of two took out a $50 microloan in 2005 with a plan to support her family. Her pitch: Few people in her neighborhood owned cellphones -- so she would buy one and charge a few cents per call. She paid back the loan within a year. Last year, she took out a $400 loan to open a graining mill for cassava flour. Her businesses are earning the family a relatively princely sum of $650 a month.
Officials at Vision Finance, the microloan arm of World Vision International that launched a program in 2005 in this town of 40,000, said that while women make up the majority of borrowers, four out of five defaulters are men.
"They say that women care more about the family, but I do not know if that is true," Mukandayisenga said. "I think it has more to do with the self-control woman show in hard times. We know how to survive when men despair."
Wise investors
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that women have been key in reconstructing Rwanda. In the effort to finance the reduction of poverty in the developing world, many leading experts said that women simply make better investments.
The evidence has been building for years. In 1990, a major study on poverty in Brazil published in the Journal of Human Resources showed that the effect of money managed by women in poor households was 20 times more likely to be spent on improving conditions in the home than money managed by men.
In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank founded by 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has focused its poverty-busting microloans on women, with success rates far higher for female than for male borrowers. Microloan programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America have shown similar results.
In India's great economic transformation of the past 15 years, states that have the highest percentage of women in the labor force have grown the fastest as well as had the largest reductions in poverty, according to the World Bank.
"We have overwhelming evidence from almost all the developing regions of the world that [investment in] women make better economics," said Winnie Byanyima, director of the United Nations Development Program's gender team.

This story continues for 3 additional pages. To view full story, please visit website noted above.


Honorable Mentions:

1. Solar Powered Plane Designed
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1316077,00.html?f=rss
By Catherine Jacob
Environment Correspondent
Updated:09:10, Thursday May 15, 2008

Four years ago, Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard had a dream. He wanted to build a solar-powered plane, then fly it around the world, day and night, powered only by energy from the sun.
The solar powered plane prototype:
Now, in a secret aircraft hanger in Switzerland, that dream is fast becoming a reality, with the prototype well underway. The aircraft is called Solar Impulse.
The prototype is being built using the lightest possible materials and the end result will be 8 TIMES lighter than the best existing glider.
The aircraft's wingspan will be 60 metres wide - the same as an Airbus A340 - to provide the maximum surface area to be covered by solar panels.
There will only be room for one person on board - the rest of the space is being taken up by batteries.
Sky News was invited to Switzerland to film Bertrand and his fellow pilot, Andre Borschberg, taking part in a 25 hour virtual test flight for their mission.
A decade ago, Bertrand, along with British adventurer Brian Jones, circumnavigated the globe in a hot air balloon.
I asked him how he was feeling now his latest venture was starting to reach fruition.
From his virtual cockpit, Bertrand told me: "Sometimes I can't really believe it. Four years ago it was only a dream. Now there's a simulator and a huge team working here with us. It's fabulous.
"Our main target is to make peole down on the ground so impressed that they will try to do the same. In other words, to try to be more energy efficienct and use renewable energy, instead of fossil fuels.
"The challenge of the 21st century is to combine human creativity and pioneering spirit to develop the quality of life to which present and future generations are entitled."
The flight simulator is designed to prepare the pilot for every potential scenario, while their reactions are monitored by a doctor outside.
They're confronted with all manner of emergencies, different weather conditions are simulated and they wear a vibrating band on each arm to show them which direction the craft is tipping in.
The ultimate goal is to fly Solar Impulse around the world, following the Tropic of Cancer.
It currently carries one person:
The final route will not be decided until days beforehand, but the plane has to start somewhere hot each morning to recharge the batteries.
It's likely to begin in Asia, flying across the Pacific stopping off in Hawaii, then on to Miami, down to Spain and back again. The two pilots will each fly for up to 5 days at a time, day and night.
Andre Borschberg will take it in turns with Bertrand to fly the plane.
At their Zurich headquarters, he introduced me to the 60-strong back room team of meterologists, air traffic controllers and medical staff who are working to make Solar Impulse a reality.
Andre told me: "The existing solar planes can only fly from 10 in the morning until 3 in the evening, so they highlight the limits at the moment.
"We'd like to fly the entire day, recharging the batteries every evening. This is a first step. Today we will be able to transfer one person in a plane with renewable energy, in the future, we hope we'll be able to transport 300 people.
"It's unbelieveable. Four years ago there was nobody, just me and Bertrand and and a piece of paper, now we have people working day and night. You feel everyone believes in it."
The first stage of the £100m mission is a test flight next year, using the prototype.
Then, eventually, in 2011, Bertrand and his Solar Impulse team hope to accomplish yet another first in the history of aviation: perpetual, fuel-free flight.



2. Vegetables in Abundance in Fiji
http://www.fijitimes.com/story.aspx?id=89375
SALOME VINAKADINA
Friday, May 16th (posted here: 6:28PM EST)

A DECREASE in the price of fruits and vegetables has prompted an increase in sales.
Customers took advantage of the abundance in food supply and the decrease in market prices yesterday. In some cases, fruits and vegetables which are normally out of stock during the week, were in abundant supply.
Mustan Bi Shaheed, a vendor, said the price of bananas had decreased because the abundant supply. "When there is a good supply, we have to decrease our prices in order for people to buy," she said. "If there are many of us selling the same product then customers will go for the cheaper price."
Another vendor, Litia Tinai, said Friday and Saturday were most likely the days that customers experienced an increased supply.
Yesterday she sold cucumbers, lemon, eggplants, rourou, cabbages and bele for a dollar (One Fiji Dollar = 0.67 US Dollars) . Most vegetables and fruits sold for just $1 or $2.
The vendors said food supply also depended on the weather. They said the wet weather was good for vegetables and fruits and this added to the abundant supply.