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A French nuclear expert says that the Philippines should not use the French experience to justify the reactivation of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant. Yves Marignac, a consultant on nuclear and energy issues and Executive Director of the energy-information agency, WISE-Paris. wrote his remarks in a July opinion piece for Cleantech Asia Online, an opinion site for cleantech in Asia. In his oped, Marignac said that the French experience is a pretend success story. “While there is no clear benefit from rehabilitating the Philippine Bataan plant, the risks of doing so are real,” said Marignac. Marignac said that as early as 1995, the French nuclear safety authority said that none of their existing 58 French reactors could be licensed to current standards, most especially the old ones, built at the same time as the Bataan plant and using a similar Westinghouse design, even if safety upgrades following the Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) accidents were taken into account. He added that thirty years of ageing of all the reactor’s components make the upgrading effectiveness highly uncertain. Marignac says “it will be impossible to check all possible defects in concrete walls, metallic containments, electric wires, etc.” He also cited concerns with nuclear waste disposal. Marignac said that waste fuel reprocessing results in a complex set of radioactive waste and nuclear materials like uranium and plutonium. “Should the Bataan spent fuel be reprocessed in France, the highly radioactive part, at least, of the waste would come back, needing the same kind of management scheme that is needed for spent fuel in the first place,” he said. According to Marignac, no country, including France, has yet implemented a final geological disposal for these highly active and long-lived materials. “Moreover, it is unlikely that the recovered plutonium could be reused in the old-designed Bataan reactor, leaving the operator with the only option of paying another company to take it, like the Dutch company EPZ is doing in the same situation,” he said. He also cited concerns with cost escalation from original estimates. “The new French reactor being built in Flamanville, for instance, was decided four years ago on the basis of a complete cost calculation by the Ministry of Industry of 28.4 €/MWh, giving it a narrow competitive margin. The operator, EDF, recently raised its estimate to 55 €/MWh, an increase of around 92% from the original estimate,” Marignac said. Marignac has a wealth of experience in nuclear issues. He worked at the Paris-XI University, the French Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique) and the nuclear company Société des Techniques en Milieu Ionisant (STMI). Marignac has authored many publications on energy, nuclear and global environmental issues, and has acted as an expert for France’s Prime Minister’s services and the European Parliament. He is currently a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IFPM).

By Dennis Posadas This week let us discuss the basics of funding for technology startups. The first thing one has to realize is that unlike a lot of businesses that have physical collateral (e.g. a building, manufacturing equipment, etc.), technology based businesses often have an additional type of collateral--namely intellectual property. Now the problem oftentimes is that bankers in most parts of the world, including the Philippines, do not know how to value intellectual property. You can’t blame them; specialized consulting firms have sprouted up that can do these valuations, unfortunately not many of them are based in the country. In addition, there is also the matter of how much sophistication there is in the product. If at first glance, the observer can figure out how the product or service works, then there isn’t too much of an intellectual barrier to start with. But let’s assume for argument’s sake that the invention or technology is novel, is useful, and is not immediately obvious to someone who is an expert. For example, if someone shows a design for a more efficient engine, and the mechanical engineering community thinks it is innovative, then perhaps the idea or the technology is patentable. Once that has been established, and people agree that it has value, then we can talk about funding. The first type of funding that engineers and scientists should consider is a grant. Grants are available from the Department of Science and Technology (DoST), from various government agencies, multilateral agencies, private foundations, etc. There are different types of requirements and conditions that one must meet in order to get a grant. But if you are able to get a grant, that is good because oftentimes there is no pressure to pay it back. However, you must of course make sure to deliver on what you promised, whether it is an altruistic benefit or whatever the grant stipulates. The second type of funding is of course a loan. This can be a personal loan from friends and family, or it can be a bank loan. For small amounts, often the best persons to try to get a loan from are people you already know for the simple reason that they are often the only ones who will give you a loan. For a bank loan, the situation is often difficult for technology startups because their value is not often premised on physical collateral, but more on intellectual collateral, which bankers often cannot value accurately. Try showing your Philippine or U.S. patent plaque to a banker, and let’s see how far you will go with your loan application. The third type of funding is equity. Equity is not a loan, rather it is an agreement to give partial or full ownership of the business to the person/company who gave the equity. Angel equity often comes from the three F’s: friends, families or fools. Often these people ask questions, but it is often, like the personal loan, your relationship with these people as well as a business plan that makes sense, that matters. Venture capital is a more sophisticated form of equity for those small to midsized companies who expect to grow really big. Venture capitalists make decisions based on how you present your idea in a business plan, oftentimes questioning your assumptions about market size, how you plan to penetrate it, your marketing and manufacturing strategy, your technology, and all that. VC’s, as they like to call themselves, often reject as much as 95 to 98 percent of the proposals they receive, and they often fund only when your company reaches a certain size. So if your business is still only an idea in your head, don’t talk to a VC, but talk to one of the three F’s I mentioned earlier. Finally, when all else fails, and no one wants to loan you money or give you equity, you can always do what Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and a lot of technopreneurs did. Bootstrap. To bootstrap is a verb that comes from the story of the German character Baron Munchausen, where it is said that he could pull himself and his horse out of the mud by pulling his bootstraps, which is of course physically impossible. Nevertheless, bootstrapping simply means to fund your startup by the sales you generate. So instead of borrowing or asking for money, you basically pay salaries only when your customer has made a downpayment, or given the full amount. Now making the sale, especially the first sale, of an unproven product, now that is another story altogether. Getting funding, and making a sale may seem extremely difficult for many engineers and scientists, but like many things in life, is simply a matter of determination, even in this poor economy. Dennis Posadas is the author of Jump Start: A Technopreneurship Fable (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009).

By Dennis Posadas Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared officially that six greenhouse gases namely carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride, are a threat to public health and welfare. Based on scientific evidence, particularly that summarized in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2007, these greenhouse gases produce global warming which is responsible for stronger storms, changes in weather patterns, higher sea levels that inundate formerly habitable coastal areas, and other effects. This declaration by the EPA will hopefully be a precursor to how the United States will act in the Copenhagen summit this year. Copenhagen is where the world’s leaders will gather this year to find a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol which the Bush administration refused to ratify. Obama has long made it a priority to make the United States drive the technology for clean energy forward, in order to reduce greenhouse gases and cut their dependence on OPEC oil. Let me point out what many people already know, but some do not. If you shift from fossil fuel based energy (e.g. coal) to clean energy, you will cut greenhouse gas emissions. But how exactly does this affect the Philippines? Well for starters, we have a new Renewable Energy Act that was signed into law last year by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Key features of this law include tax incentives (no tax for seven years for clean energy businesses), a reduced tax after the seven year period has elapsed, payment for missionary (off-grid) electrification, incentives for domestic development and manufacturing. It also features a Renewable Portfolio Standard and a Feed-in-Tariff mechanism that was popularized in Europe, which gave rise to many of their clean technology companies there. What this means for the Philippines is that we simply need to get our act together , drive our academe and R&D institutes to do research on clean energy (e.g. micro hydro, micro wind, biogas, solar, energy conservation, biofuels, etc.), and try to transfer these technologies to the market as soon as feasible. In this way, we are able to create new green technology jobs and industries, and put the Philippines on the world map as a leader in clean and green technologies. Surprisingly, agriculture also contributes to global warming. The manure from farm animals produces methane. But fortunately the solution is a win-win solution. If you use the methane from the manure to generate electricity, you cut global warming and you also save electricity for the farm. We simply have to pick the niches we will play in. According to Fortune magazine, there was a company in China that was given around $4m in seed money a few years ago, not by the Chinese national government, but by the local provincial government of Wuxi, China. That company, Sun Tech, is now one of the largest solar photovoltaic companies in the world, and employs thousands of workers and generates several billion dollars a year in revenue. In India, a company called Suzlon Energy came out of nowhere to compete toe to toe in the large wind turbine category, with well-known companies like General Electric. Maybe we can specialize in typhoon resistant micro wind turbines that are ideal for tropical climates. Or micro hydro turbines. Or micro methane powerplants for agriculture. Or whatever we feel we can be world-class in. The point is to get the ecosystem going so that our researchers, our entrepreneurs, our investors, our policymakers, get together and decide that we are going to do this. Because we have limited resources, we should pick what technology we will be world-class in, and pour all our resources there, instead of trying to develop everything. We should begin to develop local technology companies that will be world leaders, and begin to shift our economy from a cheap manufacturing destination to one which develops and manufactures the products here. All the ingredients are there to build a clean tech sector in the Philippines. It is simply a matter of will on our part. Dennis Posadas is the author of Jump Start: A Technopreneurship Fable (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009) and Rice & Chips: Technopreneurship and Innovation in Asia (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007)

By Marlowe Hood Agence France-Presse PARIS--Manmade climate change is set to hasten the disintegration of a massive ice sheet in Antarctica by 100,000 years, boosting sea levels some five metres (16 feet), according to a pair of studies published Thursday. The research, which matches new ice core data with a simulation of past and future changes in the West Antarctica Ice Sheet (WAIS), reveals for the first time regular cycles of "catastrophic collapse" and reformation reaching back five million years. Cycles lasted 40,000 years during the first three-fifths of this period, but have since more than doubled in length, explained David Pollard, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of one of the studies. "But with global warming we are cutting short a natural cycle," he told AFP by phone. "The two studies combined show it is really likely that the WAIS will collapse in the next few thousand years. In the absence of human influence, it would probably happen only 100,000 years from now," he said. Rising sea levels is arguably the most serious long-term threat from climate change. The global ocean water mark is likely to go up by at least a metre before the end of the century, recent research has shown. That is enough to wipe out several small island nations, and to disrupt or displace tens of millions of people living in heavily-populated and low-lying delta areas in East Asia, African and the Indian subcontinent. Part of that rise will come from thermal expansion as ocean temperatures rise, a process scientists understand well and are able to forecast. But the world's two great ice sheets sitting atop Greenland and Antarctica remain climate change wild cards, with great uncertainty as to whether -- or how quickly -- they might shed their mass. A team of more than 50 scientists led by Tim Naish of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand extracted sediment samples reaching 600 metres below the surface of the WAIS. The findings showed a geological metronome of massive change across five million years, and provided the first direct evidence of total collapse. "Before there were hints of it collapsing like that, but we really didn't know until now," said Pollard, a co-author of the study, published in Nature. The new data also confirmed that the cycles of ice destruction and formation are closely linked to shifts in the tilt of Earth's axis as it rotates around the Sun, a process called obliquity. The period covered by the sediment samples -- the early Pliocene -- is of special interest to climate scientists because it so closely resembles the conditions forecast for Earth over the next 100 years. With global temperatures set to rise about 3.0 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, "more significance is being placed on the early Pliocene as an analogue for understanding the future behaviour of the WAIS and its contribution to global sea levels," the study says. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- some 400 parts per million (ppm) -- was also in line with projected 21st century levels, which have already hit 385 ppm and are still rising. In the second study, Pollard and Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst simulate Antarctic ice sheet variations in a mathematical model over the past five million years in order to track the "grounding line", the shifting border between land and sea ice. "We found that the dominant mechanism attacking the West Antarctic ice has been variations in ocean melting under its large floating ice shelves," rather than changes in temperature or surface melt, Pollard said. "One of the next steps is to determine if human activity will make it warm enough to start the collapse," said Pollard.

By Annick Benoist AFP PARIS--Prehistoric bones and the skull of one of France's greatest thinkers, Descartes, are among thousands of curiosities going under wraps when Paris's Museum of Mankind closes for a four-year overhaul at the end of this month. Among the stars in the 70-year-old museum's 530,000-piece collection are tombs and bones of pre-historic humans, as well as their tools. Another starlet is the so-called Venus de Lespugue, a curvacious female figure carved from 15 centimetres (five inches) of prehistoric ivory, some 25,000 years old but not discovered until 1922 in southwestern France. The curator of the museum's anthropology collections, Philippe Mennecier, calls it the "most beautiful piece" in the whole museum. The statuette shares the ancient vaults with other prehistoric relics such as the skull of an early human known as Cro-Magnon, a 28,000-year-old relic dug up in the southern Dordogne region in 1868. The museum's shelves also hold 650 plaster busts, moulded from the faces of their living subjects at the end of the 19th century. Another big attraction is a human relic from relatively modern times: the skull of the 17th century French thinker Rene Descartes, who coined the philosophical saying "I think, therefore I am." Descartes died in his 50s in 1650 from pneumonia in Sweden, where he was teaching philosophy to the country's Queen Christina. He was buried in Stockholm but admirers of his intellect bribed the gravediggers to let them take his head as a souvenir. The rest of his remains were returned to France in 1667 and buried again in Paris, minus the skull, which turned up two centuries later at an auction in Stockholm, with inscriptions added by several of its former owners. The winning bidder passed it on to the Museum of Mankind, or Musee de l'Homme, Mennecier said. "That was no coincidence," he says. "That was where scientific disciplines were coming together at the time, following the ideas of Descartes which underpin science, rationalism and the separation of the mind and the body." The major renovation project is aimed at reinventing the museum's role after parts of its collection crossed the river to the flagship Quai Branly museum which opened in 2006. The venue when it reopens will show the "natural history of the human species," said its top director, Bertrand-Pierre Galey. It will "bring into the building the whole history of humanity, its past and its future." The museum opens free of charge next weekend for a last glimpse ahead of the renovation.

By Anna Valmero INQUIRER.net MANILA, Philippines—The Congressional Commission on Science & Technology and Engineering (Comste) is looking at filing a bill to mandate a national telehealth or telemedicine system in the country. Representative Joseph Emilio Aguinaldo Abaya who is also co-chair of Comste is set to file the National Telehealth Service Act of 2009 to push the use of information and communication technologies in the delivery of medical care. The proposed measure aims to benefit patients and medical professionals who can now use Internet technology to tap medical expertise. This could be done through remote medical procedures via teleconferencing. Abaya said in a statement that the bill needs the cooperation of government and public sectors “to pave way for new, better ways of delivering health services to the public,” especially to marginalized sectors. The bill is based on the experience of UP Manila Telehealth Center, which is able to provide basic electronic health record registry via the Community Health Information System (CHITS), audiovisual education to local health workers and professionals through E-learning and video conferencing, and tele-referral and tele-mentoring to Doctors-to-the-Barrios (DTTB) using SMS technology through the Buddyworks Program. In an interview, Dr. Alvin Marcelo, head of the UP Manila National Telehealth Center, said UP Manila is collaborating with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab Research Group to implement Moca, an open source-based mobile application which can capture clinical information and images from the field and send remotely to a waiting physician. Alison Perez, staff of medical informatics unit, UP College of Medicine said the UP-MIT collaboration started when Dr. Leo Celi from MIT, who is also an alumnus of UP College of Medicine, met UP Manila's group during the International Conference in Open Source in Health in Penang last November 2008. Perez said MIT is eyeing the Philippines as test site for the Moca application. Marcelo's group and MIT had an informal agreement to assess the deployment of Moca in the country. Possible sites of testing include Pasay City and Capiz, Perez said.

Agence France-Presse LONG BEACH--US university researchers have created a portable "sixth sense" device powered by commercial products that can seamlessly channel Internet information into daily routines. The device created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures. The gadget can even take photographs if a user frames a scene with his or her hands, or project a watch face with the proper time on a wrist if the user makes a circle there with a finger. The MIT wizards cobbled a Web camera, a battery-powered projector and a mobile telephone into a gizmo that can be worn like jewelry. Signals from the camera and projector are relayed to smart phones with Internet connections. "Other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in 'Minority Report' it can really let you connect as a sixth sense device with whatever is in front of you," said MIT researcher Patty Maes. Maes used a Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference stage in Southern California on Wednesday to unveil the futuristic gadget made from store-bought components costing about $300. The device can recognize items on store shelves, retrieving and projecting information about products or even providing quick signals to let users know which choices suit their tastes. The gadget can look at an airplane ticket and let the user know whether the flight is on time, or recognize books in a book store and then project reviews or author information from the Internet onto blank pages. The gizmo can recognize articles in newspapers, retrieve the latest related stories or video from the Internet and play them on pages. "You can use any surface, including your hand if nothing else is available, and interact with the data," Maes said. "It is very much a work in progress. Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant."

Agence France-Presse PARIS -- Men significantly outnumbered women in the "out-of-Africa" migration some 60,000 years ago that eventually populated the rest of the world, according to a new study. Africa is known to be the cradle of human evolution, and recent studies show that the people inhabiting other continents originate from a relatively small band of Homo sapiens who moved through the Near East, into Europe and beyond some 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. But until now no one had figured out a way to determine what the sex-ratio of this so-called founding population might have been. A quartet of researchers led by Alon Keinan at the Harvard Medical School thought that the secret might be locked inside differences in genetic code across distinct geographic regions. They knew that the percentage of X chromosomes in a given population varies depending on the proportion of men. The "X" and "Y" chromosomes determine sex -- men have one of each, while women have two X chromosomes. The other 22 chromosome pairings in the human genome are all the same. It was also known that this ratio affects the rate at which mutations randomly spread through the X chromosome over dozens or hundreds of generations as compared to the mutation rate in other, non-sex, chromosomes. Keinan and colleagues reasoned that if X-chromosomes changed more quickly than expected, then it almost certainly meant that our common ancestors who wandered out of Africa were predominantly male. To test their theory, they compared the genetic makeup of Africans first with northern Europeans, and then again with Asians. "The results point to a period of accelerated drift on chromosome X that largely occurred after the split of West Africa and non-Africans, but before the separation of North Europeans and East Asian," the conclude. Genetic drift is a term that refers to random mutations in genes, as opposed to changes that occur through natural selection. Keinan acknowledged that if a small fraction of the women in the migratory exodus from Africa had given birth to all of the children, there might still have been parity in the number of males and females. But this seemed highly unlikely, he said, adding that his findings were "in line with what anthropologists have taught us about hunter-gatherer populations in which short distance migration is primarily by women and long distance migration primarily by men." The study was published in Nature Publishing Group's journal Nature Genetics.

By Izah Morales INQUIRER.net DESPITE the migration of many Filipino medical professionals abroad, the Department of Tourism (DOT) still believes the Philippines can become a medical tourism destination. “In fact, a lot of them are coming back because of that [medical tourism],” said Cynthia Carrion, DOT undersecretary for Sports and Wellness, during the Philippine Health and Wellness Summit here in Manila. Carrion related that Filipino doctor Samuel Bernal has been bringing his patients to the Philippines for the past 15 years. Bernal believes that the Philippines can be competitive because of the quality of its labor force. “Taking care of people is not an automatic, robotic thing, where it is not the machine that can replace the human touch, and that is the competitive advantage of the Philippines,” added Bernal. Bernal also said that scientists and physicians should collaborate in order to improve medical technology and healthcare. “We just have to direct them into providing the type of scientific support that will allow medical professionals to deliver the best technology and the best care to patients,” Bernal said. Not only should scientists and physicians collaborate, but also hospitals, added Dr. James McCormick, president of Premier Medical Travel Company. “Competition should not be local but global. Hospitals within a country should work together because the reward for the country is greater than the reward for any single hospital,” added McCormick.

By Anna Valmero INQUIRER.net MANKIND has long been fascinated with time travel, fantasizing about machines that will transport us to the past. However, one need not wait for these futuristic inventions because within our reach are tools that can serve as windows to the past: fossils. Yes, the fossil is a time machine. In my video below, fossil collector Larry Gotauco further elaborates on what fossils are.
According to Gotauco, fossils are preserved matter or impressions from prehistoric animal or plant life -- parts of the organism or its excrements such as plant sap or dinosaur dung. “Unlike rocks which are non-living records of time, fossils were life preserved in stone,” he said. In general, an organism is fossilized when it is rapidly buried to prevent organic decay. Minerals gradually seep into the cell structure of the buried plant or animal matter and over millions of years, turn them into stone. Often, hard structures -- animal’s bone, teeth, shell or tree stump -- are fossilized. In rare occasions, soft body parts get preserved as in the case of insects inside amber and mammoths in ice. It was a piece of petrified wood that sparked Gotauco’s interest to learn more about fossils and eventually collect them. Upon learning the wood is over 200 million years old and has existed during the Triassic Period when early dinosaurs roamed the earth, he said it was as if holding a “piece of eternity” in his hands. He said it was then that he developed his infatuation with petrified wood and fossilized dinosaur parts. According to the 75-year-old collector, the greatest concentrations of petrified wood are in the United States, Madagascar, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burma, Australia, Brazil and China. In the Philippines, petrified wood can be found in Metro Manila and Central Luzon because of the volcanic history of Mount Pinatubo as well as in Bicol where Mount Mayon is located. Gotauco wrote in his book “Jurrasic Fossils: Wood and Dinosaur” that the universality of petrified wood supports Pangaea, a supercontinent from 250 million years ago, which broke and drift apart to form the continents we knew today. In the Philippines, Palawan and Mindoro are the oldest land masses, being once part of mainland China and existing before the Philippine archipelago rose from the sea. This makes the Philippines relatively young in terms of geologic age as compared to other land masses,” he said. Aside from age, Gotauco said color adds beauty to fossils. He said these colors show the different minerals that fill up the pores or spaces in the fossil. Teeth and claws are rare fossils but not colorful, unlike dinosaur bones and poop (coprolites) which form much of Gotauco’s collection. Scientists use the colors of the coprolites to tell if it came from a dinosaur that ate meat or plant. “For me, I let my imagination run wild and actually, see images such as pizza with cheese from the dinosaur’s personal belonging,” he said. “When I hold a piece of my collection, I know that things did not just begin with a shazam. And I am sharing this collection because I believe they can open one’s eyes and stir one’s soul, as they did mine,” Gotauco said. Over 10 years as fossil collector, Gotauco makes available his accumulated photos from fossil collections of fellow enthusiasts on his website. Some of his collection is on exhibit at the Ayala Museum until end of November. A free lecture will be held on October 18, the first was on October 11.