Author: Ben Debski

In a partnership with the Economic Development Board (EDB), Accenture are launching their Analytics Innovation Centre (AAIC) in Singapore with the aim of developing a better understanding of human behaviour in many aspects of working.

The information will help Accenture’s private and public clients gain a greater insight into education, procurement, health transportation and workforce effectiveness, and therefore helping them to provide better services to citizens.

Teo Lay Lim, Accenture Singapore’s managing director, told reporters: “Singapore is the ideal location for this new center because of the alignment with the country’s focus on pioneering advances in innovation, driving competitive advantage for growth, and maintaining a high level of citizen engagement.

“We believe that the intellectual property output from the center will enable a number of breakthrough solutions for our clients that will positively impact the lives of Singapore citizens. Based on our strong relationships with the Singapore government, global multinational corporations as well as leading local companies, we look forward to serving the needs of our broad client base through the unique analytical skills housed at the center – one that we see as being a genuine hub for research and innovation.”

Although primarily focused on Singapore, the information gleaned from the research at the AAIC will compliment work done by Accenture’s other research centres in Bangalore, Barcelona, Chicago, Dublin, Mumbai, New Delhi, and California.

Solving the twin problems of harmful fuel emissions and increased demand for overseas travel is troubling many airlines and plane manufacturers.

Although there have been emissions targets set by many governments, some airlines seem to be taking a relaxed approach to cutting their contribution to global warming. However, in a recently tested flight, Boeing and American Airlines trialled what they have called the ecoDemonstrator, a plane they say will help advance technologies designed to cut emissions and noise.

The plane, a redesigned Boeing 737-800, has been loaned by the American Airlines for the project, which is being partially funded by the US Federal Aviation Administration’s Continuous Lower Energy, Emissions, and Noise (CLEEN) programme.

John Tracy, Boeing’s chief technology officer told reporters recently: “The ecoDemonstrator illustrates how we’re pursuing technologies and advanced materials that make airplanes operate more efficiently and produce fewer emissions and less noise.”

“I am proud of the leadership role that Boeing is playing in advancing the science of aerospace and demonstrating the value of these technologies to our airline customers, the flying public, and to society at large.”

The environmental impact of air travel has been debated for a number of years, with agreements over firm targets proving difficult to reach between emerging and developed countries. Some controversial proposals, such as emissions trading for CO2 have been adopted in places like the EU, but the environmental lobby say this merely allows others to get away with overconsumption and doesn’t address the fundamental problems.

While many campaigners say air travel should be reduced, the industry believes that they can mitigate the damage down by fuel emissions with advances in technology. Attempts by to address this, such as with the trials by Boeing and American Airlines, are certainly a step in the right direction.

Every so often, a new medical breakthrough or health-assisting device hits the market. The latest innovation to grab the headlines and change the health industry for the better is a cuff-shaped apparatus conceived to measure blood pressure in the largest artery in the body. As the brainchild of researchers at the University of Leicester and institutions in Singapore the cuff, which is fitted around the patient’s wrist, serves to give a much more accurate reading than the traditional arm cuff.

Cut science funding, and innovations such as the new blood pressure device wouldn’t come to fruition, nor would life-saving medicines, let alone space ships. Still, the question of whether more money should be pumped into scientific research at the time of financial hardship is a delicate one. Before raising the budget-busting axe, it should be taken into account that unlike most areas of public spending, the science research budget tends to pay for itself. To offer a tangible figure, the Medical Research Council in the UK estimates that every pound it parts with brings back a 40p return each year. To further prove the strength of the segment, university offshoot companies have been acquired or floated on the stock market for a total value of £3.5bn in the past few years, creating jobs for over 14,000 people in the UK.

Indeed, scientific research is, or rather has been, one of the UK’s most sound areas of economic competitive advantage, and as ardently stressed by institutions such as The Royal Society, the country faces a doomed future and stifled economic growth unless it invests heavily in research. “History shows us that new technologies drive economic development – look at the industrial and digital revolutions. The UK has been in the top two of the scientific premier league for the last 350 years. It would seem obvious that politicians would recognise the need to invest in this competitive advantage rather than cutting funds,” says Sir Martin Taylor, who chaired the Royal Society report entitled The Scientific Century in March last year.

The significant and much buzzed about report was put together in a bid to create awareness leading up to the new budget announcement of 2011 that didn’t seem to favour R&D. While some muttered that the paper was nothing but a piece of propaganda drafted by a gaggle of scientists fretting that they’d be forced to hand in their lab coats for good, the actions of international rivals supported the pro-science argument by making scientific research and exploration their number one priority. To give a snapshot of what the competition is up to in an attempt to boost their economies via science research, President Obama’s stimulus package included more than $100bn for science, seeing an increase of 5.9 percent per year, while the country’s overall budget stayed intact; President Sarkozy of France, meanwhile, announced an extra €35bn for research, whereas Germany is set to spend an additional 12bn on education and science by 2013.

Also upping its game significantly, China has ramped up research funds by 20 percent a year for a decade and is thus considered the new monster force in the sphere of global science. To strengthen its position further, the top scientific bodies of China and Taiwan have formed a partnership to promote exchanges and cooperation between researchers, who will also share research resources and data. The country has also made progress in the field of space science and is widely regarded as taking a leading role in some areas of space research in the future.

Since we’re on the subject, France and the US are equally keen to invest in the space industry. In his 2012 budget request for Nasa, Mr Obama is asking Congress for $850m to help seed the development of a series of private space vehicles – a $238m increase on the 2011 budget (that is yet to be implemented, but has been authorised). The request for Nasa as a whole is $18.7bn – the same as the current figure. Under the proposed budget, Nasa would continue to work with the same budget through to the fiscal year of 2016.  Hot on the heels of the US, France is on a roll too, launching new space innovations on a regular basis.

Academics’ campaign pays off
Returning to bleaker territories, the UK and less fortunate parts of the EU need to be on their guard if they’re not to fall by the wayside, ramping up their spending and general science investment to match that of their rival nations, the US and China. Giving the UK as an example, while the R&D pot of gold was full to the brim during Blair and Brown governments, when it doubled in value, the situation looks much different today, with a £178bn deficit to be dealt with. Leading up to the latest budget announcement, academics fought their corner with gusto, without much assurance from government to encourage their cause. The Shadow Science Minister even went as far as to state that cuts were inevitable. Hence, the research community expected nothing but a catastrophic outcome with at least a 20 percent cut in grants for science research. To everyone’s surprise and delight, the campaign paid off; in October 2010 George Osbourne announced that the £4.6bn science budget was ring-fenced for the next four years. In his speech, Osborne rightly said: “Britain is a world leader in scientific research, and that is vital to our economic success.” The funds are divided between the seven research councils, which in turn hand out grants to relevant scientists and institutions, leaning towards a distribution favouring areas with the most potential to deliver wealth creation and promote a low carbon economy.

The fact that merciless cuts were avoided is undeniably positive, but the stagnant budget still sees a reduction of about 10 percent once inflation has been taken into account. Stepping in to rescue dwindling revenues, charities are under greater pressure than ever to fund the area, particularly the field of medical research. But organisations such as the Wellcome Trust are careful to point out that they’re not stepping in to substitute for government, as that would send out the wrong signal. “The government knows very well that the Wellcome Trust believes this is about synergy not substitution,” said Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, in a statement responding to the government’s feeble attempts to rescue the UK science industry from cuts.

Apart from the obvious drawbacks of a shrinking scientific community, such as challenged prosperity and an increasing number of vacant labs, countries with a less forward-thinking scientific culture risk seeing their best scientists becoming easy prey for international rivals ready to lure them away with more lucrative offers and high-profile ventures. In developing countries, ‘brain drain’ is a problem, where many skilled scientists undertake studies in science abroad, but rarely return to home turf to utilise their expertise.

But it’s not only practicing scientists that are in decline. Looking at A-levels in science in the UK, for example, a mere 17 percent of 16 to 18-year-olds took one or more science A-levels in 2009, according to a fresh report by The Royal Society. Equally worrying, British universities produce less than 10,000 science graduates per year, and there’s a significant fall in the number of selective schools putting forward candidates for physics. To compare, in 2005, every private school in the UK had physics candidates, but in 2009 that number had dropped to 89 percent. “At a time of economic uncertainty, when science and scientists can play a key role in revitalising the UK’s financial outlook, it is deeply worrying to find that numbers of A-level science students are at such low levels,” says Professor Athene Donald, chair of the Royal Society’s education committee.

Empty labs
The pharmaceutical industry has been hotly debated for some time now, and spending in some areas is in decline worldwide. Making headlines when the news broke in January 2010, UK pharmaceutical name AstraZeneca has made substantial cuts that form part of a global restructuring plan to make up for losses linked to lost patents and pressure to reduce drug prices. On the job loss front, the number will reach 8,000 across the company’s various international sites by 2014. Of the total cuts, around 1,800 account for worldwide redundancies within the R&D segment, with another 1,700 shifting to other locations or therapeutic areas.

In a bid to up its profit, AstraZeneca will be exiting  research areas where the risks outweigh the rewards. These include thrombosis, acid reflux, ovarian and bladder cancers, systemic scleroderma, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety and hepatitis C. The company will continue to invest in all its traditional areas, namely cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, oncology, respiratory, inflammation, neuroscience and infection.

Adding to the worrying trend, the US drug company Merck has also closed facilities worldwide in countries including the Netherlands, Canada and Denmark, whereas GlaxoSmithKline has decided to withdraw its antidepressant research facility in Britain in an attempt to save £500m a year by 2012.

Another major blow to the R&D community is the announcement that US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is to close its main European research site in Sandwich, UK. By no means a minor player, the company boasts Europe’s largest research and development facility, bringing together prime chemists, biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists and clinicians – some of the fields that the UK specialises in. At the Sandwich site, key areas of research and development include that of drugs fighting Alzheimer’s and cancer. The closure of the facility, planned for 2013, will result in 2, 400 employees being made redundant within the next two years.

According to company executives, the decision to close the site is not a reflection on the UK environment, but part of a global plan to create a more “focused and sustainable R&D engine for innovation”. This new route involves exiting certain therapeutic areas, such as allergy and respiratory, which significantly is based at the soon to be abandoned site. By no means struggling, Pfizer recorded a 36 percent increase in revenue for the financial year to $67.8bn. The upswing is primarily a result of the Pfizer’s merging with Wyeth in 2009. Not planning to clear out of the UK entirely, Pfizer is said to be opening a new Pain and Sensory Disorders Unit based in Cambridge. Still, the company’s ruthless plan of action has created furore in the UK, and the House of Commons won’t let the company or the government get off lightly. In due course, the Science and Technology Select Committee is to summon Pfizer representatives and science minister David Willetts to give evidence about the closure and job losses. 

In order to soften the blow, Mr Willetts recently suggested that the government should attempt to transform the Sandwich site into a new life sciences park. Furthermore, the ABPI (Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries) has backed the UK as a destination for scientific research, owing much to the fact that the government recently introduced the so called Patent Box – a promising new tax-reduction initiative aimed at luring the pharmaceutical industry.

Called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), the metallic crystals are porous, stable structures that can absorb and compress gases into very small spaces.

Scientists are hoping such materials can lead to cleaner energy and help capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions before they reach the atmosphere and contribute to global warming, rising sea levels and ocean acidity.

Led by Omar Yaghi at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, the team improved upon an earlier crystal named MOF-177 to produce two new versions – MOF-200 and MOF-210 – that can store twice the volume of gases.

“Porosity is a way to do a lot with little,” said Yaghi, a chemistry and biochemistry professor, in a statement. “Instead of having only the outside surface of a particle, we drill small holes to dramatically increase the surface area.”

The improved crystals were described in a paper published in the online edition of the journal Science.

Jaheon Kim, a chemistry professor at Seoul’s Soongsil University, helped design the MOF-210. He described one gram of MOFs as being about the size of four sugar tablets.

When flattened, each gram of these improved crystals could spread over 5,000 square metres, Yaghi said.

“If I take a gram of MOF-200 and unravel it, it will cover many football fields, and that is the space you have for gases to assemble,” Yaghi said. “It’s like magic. Forty tons of MOFs is equal to the entire surface area of California.”

Kim said he saw many uses for these crystals.

“They can be used for the short-term storage of CO2 or fuel gas storage. I think it is practically possible,” said Kim, adding that hydrogen could also be stored.

MOFs can be made from low-cost ingredients, such as zinc oxide, a common ingredient in sunscreen, and terephthalate, which is found in plastic soda bottles.

“We had a technical stop over Christmas and that has finished. The beams are circulating again,” Barbara Warmbein, press officer at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), told reporters.

Collisions at the highest possible energy level, emulating conditions in the moments after the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago, should occur within two to four weeks, the spokeswoman said.

Scientists around the world will scour the resulting data to search for the elusive Higgs Boson particle, which Scots scientist Peter Higgs said three decades ago would explain how matter came together and created the universe.

“The plan is to run at those energies for 18 to 24 months to give the experimenters the data that they need to work,” Warmbein said.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is the largest machine ever built and doomsday theorists have worried its experiments would create black holes that would destroy humanity.

It was first started up in September 2008 but then shut down 10 days later after over-heating in its 27km (17-mile) circular underground tunnel which required lengthy and expensive delays. The project has drawn together thousands of physicists worldwide and cost some $10bn.

The UN health body said the rapidly rising rates of new HIV infections in countries such as Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia and Latvia meant the region as a whole now had world’s the fastest growing epidemic.

“While HIV epidemics in Western Europe are, with some exceptions, generally stabilising, in many countries in Eastern Europe, they rage out of control,” Andrew Ball of the WHO’s HIV/AIDS department told an international AIDS conference in Vienna.
   
“The rate of increase of new HIV infections in Europe is now the highest in the world.”

Most of the increase is due to the spread of the virus among injecting drug users in places such as Russia and Ukraine, where addicts are often stigmatised and have limited access to HIV treatment or information.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS is spread in blood, breast milk and through sex and drug users can spread it by sharing used needles.

In the WHO’s European region, which covers around 50 countries in Eastern and Western Europe, as well Central Asia, there were more than 1.2 million HIV cases by the end of 2008, with more than 100,000 new infections in that year.

“The AIDS crisis in Europe is not over,” said Martin Donoghoe, the WHO’s programme manager for HIV/AIDS in the region.

He said that while the annual number of new HIV cases was relatively stable at about 20,000 in Western Europe, rates were volatile and increasing in the east, where there were 80,000 new cases in 2008.

The UN children’s fund UNICEF said recently that an “underground HIV epidemic” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia was being fuelled by drug use, risky sex and severe social stigma that stopped people asking for help.

Donoghoe said a specific focus was needed on injecting drug users, a group which in some areas accounts for 50 percent of all those living with HIV. In a large number of countries in the region, drug users are stigmatised and excluded from health and social services, including HIV treatment, the WHO said.

The number of people in Europe who get AIDS drugs has doubled from 2003 to 500,000 in 2008. But Donoghoe said the vast majority of those new patients were in the west. In Eastern Europe, only around 23 percent of people who need HIV/AIDS medicines can actually get them.

Donoghoe said breaking and ultimately halting the fast growth of HIV in Europe would require “concerted action” by all governments and health organisations. “HIV in Europe depends on access to services in the east,” he said.

At stake is public belief that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, and political momentum to act as governments struggle to agree a climate treaty which could direct trillions of dollars into renewable energy, away from fossil fuels.

Public conviction of global warming’s risks may have been undermined by an error in a UN panel report exaggerating the pace of melt of Himalayan glaciers and by the disclosure of hacked emails revealing scientists sniping at sceptics, who leapt on these as evidence of data fixing.

Scientists said they must explain better how a freezing winter this year in parts of the northern hemisphere and a break in a rising trend in global temperatures since 1998 can happen when heat-trapping gases are pouring into the atmosphere.

“There is a lack of consensus,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, on why global temperatures have not matched a peak set in 1998, or in 2005 according to one US analysis.

Part of the explanation could be a failure to account for rapid warming in parts of the Arctic, where sea ice had melted, and where there were fewer monitoring stations, he said.

“I think we need better analysis of what’s going on on a routine basis so that everyone, politicians and the general public, are informed about our current understanding of what is happening, more statements in a much quicker fashion instead of waiting for another six years for the next IPCC report.”

The latest, fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was published in 2007 and the next is due in 2014.

The proportion of British adults who had no doubt climate change was happening had dropped in January to 31 percent from 44 percent in January 2009, an Ipsos MORI poll showed recently.

Hottest decade to record
The decade 2000-2009 was the hottest since 1850 as a result of warming through the 1980s and 1990s which has since peaked, says the World Meteorological Organisation.

British Hadley Centre scientists said last year that there was no warming from 1999-2008, after allowing for extreme, natural weather patterns. Temperatures should have risen by a widely estimated 0.2 degrees Centigrade, given a build up of manmade greenhouse gases.

“Solar might be one part of it,” said the Hadley’s Jeff Knight, adding that changes in the way data was gathered could be a factor, as well as shifts in the heat stored by oceans.

The sun goes through phases in activity, and since 2001 has been in a downturn meaning it may have heated the earth a little less, scientists say.

“We’ve not put our finger precisely on what has changed,” Knight said. “If you add all these things together … there’s nothing really there to challenge the idea that there’s going to be large warming in the 21st century.”

Melting Arctic ice was evidence for continuing change, regardless of observed temperatures, said Stein Sandven, head of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway.

“The long-term change for the Arctic sea ice has been very consistent. It shows a decline over these [past] three decades especially in the summer. In the past three or four years Arctic sea ice has been below the average for the last 30 years.”

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, told reporters that the IPCC stood by its 2007 findings that it is more than 90 percent certain that human activities are the main cause of global warming in the past 50 years.

“I think the findings are overall very robust. We’ve made one stupid error on the Himalayan glaciers. I think that there is otherwise so much solid science.” The IPCC wrongly predicted that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035.

Natural causes?
One long-running doubter of the threat of climate change, Richard Lindzen, meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said a lull in warming was unsurprising, given an earlier “obsessing about tenths of a degree” in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The world warmed 0.7-0.8 degrees Celsius over the last century. Lindzen expected analysis to show in a few years’ time that recent warming had natural causes. “It just fluctuates. I think the best explanation is the ocean. The timescale for ocean circulations can be decades.”

He dismissed recent ice melt over a short, 30-year record.

Pachauri said that scientists had to unpick manmade global warming from natural influences – such as the sun and cyclical weather patterns – also dubbed “natural variability”.

“Natural variability is not magic, there is movement of energy around the climate system and we should be able to track it,” said Trenberth.

Trenberth attributed the cold winter to an extraordinary weather pattern not seen since 1977 which had curbed prevailing westerly winds across the northern hemisphere, and said that the underlying cause was “one we don’t have answers to.”