By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines – The Department of Science and Technology last week activated an online portal designed to promote commercially viable technologies from Filipino scientists and researches.

The One-Stop-Information Shop of Technologies in the Philippines is an online database of over 280 technologies, inventions, and process improvements that can be used by small-to-medium scale businesses, manufacturing operators and other industries.

The OSIST project cost P20 million and was funded through the e-Government fund of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology.

It is currently operated through the Philippine Council for Industry and Energy Research and Deveopment (PCIERD).

In an interview, PCIERD Head of Technology Assessment Utilization and Transfer Albert Marino said the OSIST hopes to bring entrepreneurs to develop certain inventions and technologies to improve their own business, as well as generate business for the technology developers and inventors.

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By Federico M. Macaranas

AFTER posting its highest growth rate in more than three decades in 2007, the Philippine economy is poised to slow down in 2008 on account of external factors whose domestic impact its managers cannot fully tame. This should be less of a problem for those who are more long-term oriented and less swayed by medium-term political goals. After all, given the past economic reforms in banking and finance (capital adequacy ratios of commercial banks and the expanded value-added tax) among others, it is these long-term factors that really matter for sustained growth.

Yet short-term gains from the much-vaunted outsourcing bonanza that could result from the US slowdown, as corporations cut down costs, should be taken with much caution. Even the call for greater financial integration in the region espoused by the ADB should be tempered with a focus on the production of real goods and services — lest the economy be trapped forever in its low-level growth.

More fundamental than these financial factors is the need for the Philippines to align its economic growth with the path taken by dynamic Asia-Pacific countries and the developed world — a path that is based on innovation and technology. But more productive raw materials or chemicals, machinery or equipment, processing or marketing ideas do not grow out of trees. They come from people, educated men and women — be they peasants tutored in appropriate technologies rooted in indigenous practices or PhD’s able to translate scholarly learning into commercial ventures.

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By Anna Valmero
Inquirer.net

History saw the waning and waxing of the campaign for environmentalism. Today more than ever, green consciousness has grabbed the attention of different industries worldwide.

Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” is one of the agents that called the attention of every citizen about the human impact on the environment. The film presented the doom that might happen to the Earth and those that live in it if global warming continues at an unabated rate.

According to the film’s website, at least 279 species of plants and animals are already affected by global warming that has started moving closer to the poles. Moreover, the flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland has more than doubled over the past decade. Both scenarios can impact the environment in terms of displacing other populations of plants and animals in their natural home or habitats, which might cause extinction and break nature’s balance. This can be related to the so-called butterfly effect: “A butterfly flapping its wings in one place can, in principle, alter the subsequent weather pattern in a distant place.”

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By Izah Morales
INQUIRER.net

HAVING Hepatitis B restrict health workers in job application abroad, said Dr. Eric Tayag, officer-in-charge of the National Epidemiology Center (NEC) at the Department of Health.

“Maaaring magkaroon ng discrimination kung saan ‘yung merong mga Hepatitis B infection na naging carrier ay baka hindi mabigyan ng trabaho (People who had been infected by and have been carriers of Hepatitis B may be discriminated and may not land a job ” said Tayag who stressed the need for a set of guidelines on Hepa B by health institutions to protect health workers and prevent restrictive job policies.

Currently, the Philippine College of Occupational Medicine (PCOM) proposed the guidelines, which include communicating hazards of the disease through information dissemination programs, provision of personal protective equipment, such as aprons, gowns and gloves, and free screening for Hepatitis B and vaccination.

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MAURICE Malanes of the Philippine Daily Inquirer Northern Luzon Bureau talks to Victor Ayco, a Filipino chemical engineer and inventor, who is not worried about the current oil crisis.

In fact, he sees this as an opportunity to explore alternative sources of fuel with the help of science. Malanes finds out that Ayco has found vital clues to creating a gas-saving product, thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Excerpt:

A scientist and inventor, Ayco sees the crisis as an opportunity for the country to tap the inexhaustible potentials that science can offer in finding alternatives to fossil fuel.

“Many seem to anticipate a bleak future because of the prospect that one day the world’s fossil fuel deposits will finally run dry,” says Ayco, 70. “But fossil fuel is not the only source of energy that can run engines of cars and other machines. There are other inexhaustible alternatives [to fossil fuel].”

He based his radical optimism on what he regards as a vital clue from one of the geniuses of the 20th century — Albert Einstein. That clue is the theory of relativity, or E=mc², where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the velocity of light.

The Mandaluyong-based chemical engineer says Einstein’s theory helped him perfect his gas-saving product, which he demonstrated recently before Baguio City motorists.

Essentially, Einstein’s relativity theory, says Ayco, states that “from matter we can produce energy.”

His invention called “aero-nitro power injector” took 15 years of research and experiment. Patented on Dec. 11, 1985, the device has been marketed only recently through Energy Philippines Inc., a private firm, which Ayco co-owns with other partners.

The inventor says his device “converts ordinary nitrogen (a noncombustible substance) in the atmosphere into combustible nitro-gas, and serves as gasoline and diesel additive in gaseous form for efficient engine combustion.”

With efficient engine combustion, a vehicle can run more kilometers with less fuel and emits almost zero toxic pollutants.