Lebaran in Indonesia

Eid or Idul Fitri is the biggest holiday celebrated in Indonesia, which is also called "Lebaran" or "Hari Raya". For one month preceeding this holy moment, Moslems in Indonesia is mandatory to fast from dawn to dusk. Fasting does not include food only, but also means to fast from smoking cigarette and to control all desire of pleasure.

There is a big tradition in Indonesia on Lebaran, which is "mudik" or "pulang kampung". People from across the nation will go home, be back to where they originally come from. This explains why suddenly the price of airline tickets raising high two weeks before and after Lebaran. All other types of transport will also be fully booked, such as bus, trains and sea vessel.

The night before Lebaran, Moslems in Indonesia will recite "takbir" (means: worships to God) in nearby mosques. In villages and rural areas in Java, there are still a parade celebrating the "takbir" with bedug (=a kind of instrument like drums) and other simple traditional music instruments, even they’re just tapping a stick to glass bottles.

In the morning of Lebaran day, the Moslems family will have Eid prayer in the mosque or other public places, which have been decided by local authorities.Special dishes like ketupat (=rice cake served in coconut leaf) and other Indonesian delicacies are served during this day. The rest of the day is spent by visiting relatives or serving visitors. The common greeting is "Selamat Hari Raya Idul Fitri" or the informal way "Selamat Hari Lebaran". While greeting the other, it is also common to ask forgiveness for our wrongdoings both physically and emotionally by saying "Mohon Maaf Lahir dan Batin". This day is a time to gather with the whole family member, relatives and neighbours. This year, Lebaran in Indonesia will be due on 21st-22nd of September ‘2009.

source : blog.baliforyou.com

Study Exposes How Bacteria Resist Antibiotics

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists have discovered how bacteria fend off a wide range of antibiotics, and blocking that defense mechanism could give existing antibiotics more power to fight dangerous infections.

Researchers at New York University said on Thursday that bacteria produce certain nitric oxide-producing enzymes to resist antibiotics.

Drugs that inhibit these enzymes can make antibiotics much more potent, making even deadly superbugs like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA succumb, they said.

"Developing new medications to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA is a huge hurdle, associated with great cost and countless safety issues," said Evgeny Nudler of NYU Langone Medical Center, whose study appears in the journal Science.

"Here, we have a short cut, where we don't have to invent new antibiotics. Instead, we can enhance the activity of well-established ones, making them more effective at lower doses," he said in a statement.

Drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, killing about 19,000 people a year in the United States.

Nudler's team found that many antibiotics kill bacteria through the production of harmful charged particles known as reactive oxygen species, otherwise called oxidative stress.

"Antibiotics cause bacteria to produce a lot of reactive oxygen species. Those damage DNA, and bacteria cannot survive. They eventually die," Nudler said in a telephone interview.

"We found nitric oxide can protect bacteria against oxidative stress."

He said bacteria produce nitric oxide to resist antibiotics. The defense mechanism appears to apply broadly to many different types of antibiotics, he said.

Nudler said many companies are testing various nitric oxide-lowering compounds called nitric oxide synthase inhibitors for use as anti-inflammatory drugs.

He thinks a compound in this class could be made to reduce the amount of nitric oxide bacteria can produce, reducing their ability to resist antibiotics. That would mean researchers would not need to discover new antibiotics.

source : reuters.com

New Flu Drug May Resist Mutations : Researchers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new type of experimental flu drug that stops the virus from infecting cells appears to stop it from mutating into drug-resistant forms, researchers reported on Sunday.

Tests in mice and in lab dishes show that NexBio Inc.'s drug Fludase can stop the seasonal influenza virus from infecting cells and can fight strains of virus that have evolved resistance to Tamiflu, Roche AG's popular influenza drug, the company said.

"Extensive, prolonged nonclinical influenza studies have not shown the development of any meaningful resistance," the company said in a statement released at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco.

Privately held NexBio Inc. said tests showed that Fludase, also known as DAS181, worked against the new H1N1 swine flu virus too.

Influenza viruses very quickly change to put up a strong defense against antiviral drugs. Last year the seasonal H1N1 virus developed strong resistance to Tamiflu. Two older flu drugs, amantadine and rimantadine, now have very little effect against influenza viruses.

Tamiflu and a similar drug, GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza, affect a compound in the flu virus called neuraminadase -- which gives flu viruses like H1N1 the "N" in their names.

Fludase affects the human cells that influenza infects, not the virus itself and that should make it less likely to cause the virus to develop resistance, company spokesman Dr. David Wurtman said.

It affects the sialic acid receptor -- the molecular doorway that flu viruses use to attach to cells, he said.

"It makes it impossible to spread, so it can't infect neighboring cells," Wurtman said in a telephone interview.

Teams at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, University of Hong Kong and Saint Louis University in Missouri ran the experiments, the company said.

"Based on these encouraging data, we are moving forward with our ongoing clinical development of DAS181, and we will continue to work closely with FDA (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration), CDC and NIH (the National Institutes of Health) on this clinical program during the current pandemic," Dr. Ronald Moss of NexBio, who presented the study, said in a statement.

Health experts predict that new drugs to fight flu will soon be needed, as the virus is mutation prone. Many are in development -- furthest along is BioCryst's peramivir, which would be made and sold in partnership with Japan's Shionogi.

source : reuters.com

Google Plans New Mirror For Cheaper Solar Power

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

"We've been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on," the company's green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Google, known for its Internet search engine, in late 2007 said it would invest in companies and do research of its own to produce affordable renewable energy within a few years.

The company's engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun's energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun's rays on the heated substance.

Weihl said Google is looking to cut the cost of making heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, by at least a factor of two, "ideally a factor of three or four."

"Typically what we're seeing is $2.50 to $4 a watt (for) capital cost," Weihl said. "So a 250 megawatt installation would be $600 million to a $1 billion. It's a lot of money."

That works out to 12 to 18 cents a kilowatt hour.

Google hopes to have a viable technology to show internally in a couple of months, Weihl said. It will need to do accelerated testing to show the impact of decades of wear on the new mirrors in desert conditions.

"We're not there yet," he said. "I'm very hopeful we will have mirrors that are cheaper than what companies in the space are using..."

Another technology that Google is working on is gas turbines that would run on solar power rather than natural gas, an idea that has the potential of further cutting the cost of electricity, Weihl said.

"In two to three years we could be demonstrating a significant scale pilot system that would generate a lot of power and would be clearly mass manufacturable at a cost that would give us a levelized cost of electricity that would be in the 5 cents or sub 5 cents a kilowatt hour range," Weihl said.

Google is invested in two solar thermal companies, eSolar and BrightSource, but is not working with these companies in developing the cheaper mirrors or turbines.

In wide-ranging remarks, Weihl also said the United States needs to raise government-backed research significantly, particularly in the very initial stages to encourage breakthrough ideas in the sector.

The company has pushed ahead in addressing climate change issues as a philanthropic effort through its Google.org arm. Weihl said there is a lack of companies that have ideas that would be considered breakthroughs in the green technology sector. After announcing its plans to create renewable energy at a price lower than power from coal, it has invested less than $50 million in other companies.

Weihl said Google had not intended to invest much more in early years, but that there was little to buy.

"I would say it's reasonable to be a little bit discouraged there and from my point of view, it's not right to be seriously discouraged," he said. "There isn't enough investment going into the early stages of investment pipeline before the venture funds come into the play."

The U.S. government needs to provide more funds to develop ideas at the laboratory stage, he said.

"I'd like to see $20 billion or $30 billion for 10 years (for the sector)," Weihl said. "That would be fabulous. It's pretty clear what we have seen isn't enough."

source : reuters.com