Study Shows Filipino Biotech and Organic Farmers Open to Co-Existence
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA RECENT STUDY was conducted to understand farmers’ perspectives regarding co-existing biotech and organic methods in the Philippines. The results can help policymakers develop a national agriculture agenda that takes farmers’ choice of crop and farming methods into account. Thirty-five biotech farmers and 35 organic farmers from the Philippines were interviewed to explore how farmers view the concept […]
US Scientists Embark on Developing Edible Plant-based Vaccines
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA NEW project is being pursued by scientists from the University of California Riverside to develop edible plants into mRNA vaccine factories. If successful, plants such as lettuce and spinach can produce the vaccines and be grown in backyards and even entire fields. The mRNA technology is currently being used to produce COVID-19 vaccines in plants. It works […]
Capacity Building for COPMOPs Continues for Asian Countries
Reading Time: 2 minutesMORE participants were welcomed by ISAAA in its last webinar about the upcoming Conference of the Parties-Meeting of Parties (COPMOP) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). ISAAA and its co-organizers held the webinar to accommodate more participants who are interested in making their views and opinions heard as a means of taking part in the COPMOP […]
Smart Talk Series: Connecting Youths to Leading Malaysians and British Council Leaders
Reading Time: 2 minutesYouths thinking to kickstart their tertiary education need look no further than British Council’s Smart Talk Webinar Series 2021-2022. Happening every Saturday from 9 October, this webinar series aims to inspire students on the possibilities of education in the UK. It is an window of opportunity for audience to interact with a new generation of […]
Choosing the Right Cooking Oil
Reading Time: 3 minutesBY JOYCE WONG JIN YI Are you using the right cooking oil for cooking your healthy meal for yourself and your loved one? There are several choices we have in the market. With the bombardment of the advertisements, are you falling into the trap of the unhealthy cooking oil that you still using? Let’s discover […]
Answering a century-old question on the origins of life
Reading Time: 2 minutesTHE missing link isn’t a not-yet-discovered fossil, after all. It’s a tiny, self-replicating globule called a coacervate droplet, developed by two researchers in Japan to represent the evolution of chemistry into biology. They published their results on September 24 in Nature Communications. “Chemical evolution was first proposed in the 1920s as the idea that life first […]
Drugs that mimic effects of cigarette smoke reduce SARS-CoV-2’s ability to enter cells
Reading Time: 3 minutesRESEARCHERS have identified a potential reason why lower numbers of COVID cases have appeared amongst smokers compared to non-smokers, even as other reports suggest smoking increases the severity of the disease. Researchers have identified two drugs that mimic the effect of chemicals in cigarette smoke to bind to a receptor in mammalian cells that inhibits […]
Antibody cocktail therapy centre for mild Covid-19 patients opens in Sendai
Reading Time: < 1 minuteMIYAGI PREFECTURE and Tohoku University Hospital have set up an Antibody Cocktail Therapy Centre in Sendai. The treatment, which involves artificial monoclonal antibodies administered through an intravenous drip, is aimed at preventing patients with mild COVID-19 from becoming seriously ill. Doctors, nurses and pharmacists from Tohoku University Hospital and six other hospitals across the prefecture, […]
Breakthrough in vaccine against deadly antimicrobial-resistant pathogen
Reading Time: 3 minutesWHILE the Covid-19 pandemic is ongoing, another public health threat, antibiotic resistance, continues unabated. Microbiologists and chemists from two universities in Hong Kong recently made a breakthrough in synthesizing the first vaccine against one of the most deadly antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii). The vaccine shows good protection against the superbug in mice, indicating […]
First S’pore International Agri-Food Week kicks in, spearheads sustainable food production in Asia
Reading Time: 3 minutesAS the world looks beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be a renewed focus on innovative solutions to bolster food security and strengthen supply chains, so that economies can rebuild and emerge stronger. The pandemic saw the broken supply chain in the food sector right from the farmers to the consumers. Temasek, a Singapore-based global investment […]