Global

submitted by Albert Gomez

Israel21c.org - July 28, 2011

A Gates Foundation grant will help an Israeli scientist further develop his cell-phone imaging system for diagnosing and staging the serious African disease.

Mosquitoes carry Malaria, a disease that is now the second-leading cause of death in Africa.

A simple mobile-phone imaging system developed in Israel for diagnosing and monitoring malaria has won its developers a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The grant is shared by biomedical engineer Dr. Alberto Bilenca of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and his research partner, Dr. Linnie Golightly of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

NewScientist.com - August 3, 2011

Sellafield nuclear plant (Pic: Getty)

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

The 11 March earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan's nuclear industry has claimed a commercial victim thousands of miles away: the Sellafield Mixed Oxide (MOX) plant in Cumbria, UK, is to close "at the earliest practical opportunity" the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority announced today.

The plant's only customer was the vastly-troubled Japanese nuclear industry, currently embroiled in a programme of plant shutdowns as the scale of the seismic menace some of its power stations face comes into sharper relief. A Sellafield spokesman said plans to close one plant in particular, at Hamaoka, was instrumental in sealing the MOX plant's fate.

Situated on the coast some 200 kilometres south of Tokyo, the Hamaoka nuclear power plant straddles two major geological faults and has been described by seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi at Kobe University as a "kamikaze terrorist waiting to explode".

sciencedailey.com - July 28, 2011

ScienceDaily (July 28, 2011) — Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare may be an important key to improving the public health system's ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, according to a New England Journal of Medicine "Perspective" article from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania to be published this week. From earthquakes to oil spills or other industrial accidents to weather-related events like heat waves and flooding, the authors suggest that harnessing crowd-sourcing technologies and electronic communications tools will set the stage to handle emergencies in a quicker, more coordinated, effective way.

Noting that more than 40 million Americans use social media Web sites multiple times a day, the researchers suggest that social media enables an unprecedented, two-way exchange between the public and public health professionals. Officials can "push" information to the public while simultaneously "pulling" in data from lay bystanders.