Jakarta:The Kiat Esemka Sport utility vehicle (SUV) is not the first car to be produced by Indonesia. According to Wikipedia, national automotive businessmen have developed 16 other brands since the 1990s. Unfortunately, most of the innovative projects collapsed due to problems including the monetary crisis and political turbulence in 1998.
Bakrie and Brothers developed the first national car in 1994. The Beta 97 MPV minibus was designed by UK-based automotive designer, Shado. The prototype of Beta was released in 1997 but the development was terminated due to the monetary crisis.
A year later, President Soeharto issued a policy on the development of a national car, Timor, which was short f orTeknologi Industri Mobil Rakyat. His youngest son, Hutomo Mandala Putra, developed the Timor S515 sedan, which was a derivation of Korea’s Kia Sephia 1995. Further developments were halted due to the monetary crisis.
At the same time, Timor, B.J. Habibie, the then research and technology minister, designed a car called Maleo. The 1,200 cc car was made with 80 percent local components and was supposed to be sold at Rp30 million. The development also ended as the research fund was used for Timor.
However, not all national car projects failed. Besides Esemka, there are currently several brands that are ready to be marketed, such as the GEA mini car produced by PT Industri Kereta Api, Nuri and Tawon produced by PT Super Gasindo Jaya, Marlip electric car produced by the Indonesia Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and off road car, Komodo, which was released by PT Fin Komodo Teknologi.
The Industry Ministry’s land transportation industry director, Supriyanto, said that Indonesia could produce its own cars within the next five years. To support the design development, the government will provide incentives, including research and human development support. “So far, Indonesia only assembled cars, while the designs are made overseas,” he said. FERY FIRMANSYAH | EKA UTAMI APRILIA
The New Blue Planet
KOMPAS.com - Astronomers have discovered the first habitable blue planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to the Sun.
NASA’s Kepler Mission has been finding new worlds at an incredible rate over the past year but this is the first discovery of what could be a habitable super-earth as it appears to be large, rocky planet with a surface temperature of about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to spring day on Earth.
A team of researchers, including Carnegie Institute's Alan Boss, made the discovery which will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The discovery team, led by William Borucki of the NASA Ames Research Center, used photometric data from the NASA Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars.
Earth-size planets whose orbital planes are aligned such that they periodically pass in front of their stars result in tiny dimmings of their host star’s light, dimmings that can only be measured by a highly specialized space telescope like Kepler.
This discovery is the first detection of a possibly habitable world in orbit around a Sun-like star.
The host star lies about 600 light-years away from us toward the constellations of Lyra and Cygnus.
The star, a G5 star, has a mass and a radius only slightly smaller than that of our Sun. As a result, the host star is about 25 per cent less luminous than the Sun.
The planet orbits the G5 star with an orbital period of 290 days, compared to 365 days for the Earth, at a distance about 15 per cent closer to its star than the Earth from the Sun. This results in the planet’s balmy temperature.
It orbits in the middle of the star’s habitable zone, where liquid water is expected to be able to exist on the surface of the planet. Liquid water is necessary for life as we know it, and this new planet might well be not only habitable, perhaps even inhabited.
Numerous large, massive gas giant planets have been detected previously in habitable-zone orbits around solar-type stars, but gas giants are not thought to be capable of supporting life.
This new exoplanet is the smallest-radius planet discovered in the habitable zone of any star to date. It is about 2.4 times larger than that of the Earth, putting it in the class of exoplanets known as super-Earths.
While the mass of this new planet is not known, it must be less than about 36 times that of the Earth, based on the absence of a measurable Doppler (radial velocity) wobble in the host star.
The masses of several other super-Earths have been measured with the Doppler technique and determined to lie in the range of about 5 to 10 times that of the Earth.
Some appear to be rocky, while others probably contain major fractions of ice and water. Either way, the new planet appears to be habitable.
'This discovery supports the growing belief that we live in a universe crowded with life,' Boss said. 'Kepler is on the verge of determining the actual abundance of habitable, Earth-like planets in our galaxy'.
Meanwhile scientists have started a systematic 'index' to categorise which planets might be 'habitable' - and so far, we've found 47 planets and moons that might fit the bill.
The Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (UPR Arecibo) judges candidates by where they sit in their solar system, and what type they are. Most of the 700 planets so far detected are no-go zones - but 47 look promising.
Over 700 exoplanets have been detected and confirmed with thousands more still waiting further confirmation by missions such as NASA Kepler.
Most of these are gas giants, similar to Jupiter and Neptune, but orbiting very dangerously close to their stars. Only a few have the right size and orbit to be considered suitable for any life.
'One important outcome of these rankings is the ability to compare exoplanets from best to worst candidates for life,' says Abel Méndez, Director of the PHL and principal investigator of the project.
The catalogue uses new habitability assessments like the Earth Similarity Index (ESI), the Habitable Zones Distance (HZD), the Global Primary Habitability (GPH), classification systems, and comparisons with Earth past and present.
According to Méndez, 'New observations with ground and orbital observatories will discover thousands of exoplanets in the coming years. We expect that the analyses contained in our catalogue will help to identify, organize, and compare the life potential of these discoveries.'
The catalogue lists and categorizes exoplanets discoveries using various classification systems, including tables of planetary and stellar properties.
ne of the classifications divides them into eighteen mass and thermal categories, creating a table similar to a periodic table for exoplanets. Additional resources of the catalogue will include scientific visualizations and stellar maps of exoplanets.
Only two confirmed exoplanets so far match the criteria for habitability in the catalogue, Gliese 581d and HD 85512b - both of which are Earthlike. However, the catalogue identifies over 15 exoplanets and 30 exomoons as potential habitable candidates.
Future observations with new instruments, such as the proposed NASA Terrestrial Planet Finder, will be necessary to confirm the suitability for life of any of these candidates.
'I hope this database will help increase interest in building a big space-based telescope to observe exoplanets directly and look for possible signatures of life,' says Jim Kasting, an expert on planetary habitability science from Penn State.
NASA’s Kepler Mission has been finding new worlds at an incredible rate over the past year but this is the first discovery of what could be a habitable super-earth as it appears to be large, rocky planet with a surface temperature of about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to spring day on Earth.
A team of researchers, including Carnegie Institute's Alan Boss, made the discovery which will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The discovery team, led by William Borucki of the NASA Ames Research Center, used photometric data from the NASA Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars.
Earth-size planets whose orbital planes are aligned such that they periodically pass in front of their stars result in tiny dimmings of their host star’s light, dimmings that can only be measured by a highly specialized space telescope like Kepler.
This discovery is the first detection of a possibly habitable world in orbit around a Sun-like star.
The host star lies about 600 light-years away from us toward the constellations of Lyra and Cygnus.
The star, a G5 star, has a mass and a radius only slightly smaller than that of our Sun. As a result, the host star is about 25 per cent less luminous than the Sun.
The planet orbits the G5 star with an orbital period of 290 days, compared to 365 days for the Earth, at a distance about 15 per cent closer to its star than the Earth from the Sun. This results in the planet’s balmy temperature.
It orbits in the middle of the star’s habitable zone, where liquid water is expected to be able to exist on the surface of the planet. Liquid water is necessary for life as we know it, and this new planet might well be not only habitable, perhaps even inhabited.
Numerous large, massive gas giant planets have been detected previously in habitable-zone orbits around solar-type stars, but gas giants are not thought to be capable of supporting life.
This new exoplanet is the smallest-radius planet discovered in the habitable zone of any star to date. It is about 2.4 times larger than that of the Earth, putting it in the class of exoplanets known as super-Earths.
While the mass of this new planet is not known, it must be less than about 36 times that of the Earth, based on the absence of a measurable Doppler (radial velocity) wobble in the host star.
The masses of several other super-Earths have been measured with the Doppler technique and determined to lie in the range of about 5 to 10 times that of the Earth.
Some appear to be rocky, while others probably contain major fractions of ice and water. Either way, the new planet appears to be habitable.
'This discovery supports the growing belief that we live in a universe crowded with life,' Boss said. 'Kepler is on the verge of determining the actual abundance of habitable, Earth-like planets in our galaxy'.
Meanwhile scientists have started a systematic 'index' to categorise which planets might be 'habitable' - and so far, we've found 47 planets and moons that might fit the bill.
The Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (UPR Arecibo) judges candidates by where they sit in their solar system, and what type they are. Most of the 700 planets so far detected are no-go zones - but 47 look promising.
Over 700 exoplanets have been detected and confirmed with thousands more still waiting further confirmation by missions such as NASA Kepler.
Most of these are gas giants, similar to Jupiter and Neptune, but orbiting very dangerously close to their stars. Only a few have the right size and orbit to be considered suitable for any life.
'One important outcome of these rankings is the ability to compare exoplanets from best to worst candidates for life,' says Abel Méndez, Director of the PHL and principal investigator of the project.
The catalogue uses new habitability assessments like the Earth Similarity Index (ESI), the Habitable Zones Distance (HZD), the Global Primary Habitability (GPH), classification systems, and comparisons with Earth past and present.
According to Méndez, 'New observations with ground and orbital observatories will discover thousands of exoplanets in the coming years. We expect that the analyses contained in our catalogue will help to identify, organize, and compare the life potential of these discoveries.'
The catalogue lists and categorizes exoplanets discoveries using various classification systems, including tables of planetary and stellar properties.
ne of the classifications divides them into eighteen mass and thermal categories, creating a table similar to a periodic table for exoplanets. Additional resources of the catalogue will include scientific visualizations and stellar maps of exoplanets.
Only two confirmed exoplanets so far match the criteria for habitability in the catalogue, Gliese 581d and HD 85512b - both of which are Earthlike. However, the catalogue identifies over 15 exoplanets and 30 exomoons as potential habitable candidates.
Future observations with new instruments, such as the proposed NASA Terrestrial Planet Finder, will be necessary to confirm the suitability for life of any of these candidates.
'I hope this database will help increase interest in building a big space-based telescope to observe exoplanets directly and look for possible signatures of life,' says Jim Kasting, an expert on planetary habitability science from Penn State.
26th Sea Games
JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com -
Indonesian vice president Boediono expressed his optimism that the country would come out as the overall champion at the upcoming 26th Southeast Asian Games.
"I am convinced with the good preparations that I have seen so far our athletes would be able to make their best achievements this time. I think as the host country we must, God willing, be able to become the overall champion," he said before athletes here on Monday.
He met with the athletes after checking their readiness and inspecting the venues that would be used for the 26th SEA Games.Vice President Boediono called on the athletes to maintain their health conditions and fitness so that they could perform well at the competitions and show their best performance.
He also called on them to prepare their mental conditions. Boediono said the event is a prestigious competition among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). During his inspection of venues and readiness of martial art athletes Boediono was presented with demonstrations of karate, taekwondo, wu shu and Povinam.
Several athletes from other sport brachens like athletic and weight lifting were also seen at the meeting. When inspecting the venue for archery Boediono took an opportunity to try shooting a target twice but failed.
Other venues being inspected are the basket ball field in Kelapa Gading and Vellodrom in Rawamangun. The 26th SEA Games which is scheduled to be opened on November 11 and end on November 22 will be carried out in Palembang, South Sumatra, and Jakarta.
The event will compete 44 sport branches and offer 542 gold medals for grab. This year’s bi-annual event will be the fourth hosted by Indonesia. Indonesia hosted the 10th event in 1979, the 15th event in 1987 and the 19th one in 1997 and in all of the events it came out as the overall champion.
HIV Vaksin
VIVAnews - Alan Aderem, Director of BioMed, Seattle and Rino Rappuoli, Global Head of Vaccines Research for Novartis Vaccines and Diagonstics, reviewed the latest progress in vaccine development in a scientific journal, Nature.
They write, it is estimated, by 2020, a vaccine for malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and HIV / AIDS is found. In the journal that they also discussed the new devices include systems biology and structure-based design of antigens that can provide a better understanding of the mechanism of protection.
This device will give clues leading to the rational development of vaccines to alleviate the patient's most terrible diseases in the world.
According Aderem, a pioneer in the field of systems biology, new concepts and technological advances indicate that the vaccine for three diseases terdahsyat it will be developed within the next 10 years.
"The success will greatly depend on our ability to approach biological systems to analyze data generated during testing of evidence," said Aderem, like diktutip from MedIndia, May 28, 2011.
Aderem says, success will also provide new insights such as identifying the relationship between protection or signs of immunogenicity and the acceleration of large-scale clinical trials. Also, added Aderem, new regulatory approaches and innovative clinic will also accelerate the discovery of vaccines that are needed.
In his report, Aderem and Rappuoli also reviews the advantages and disadvantages of systems biology approach, with the major advantages of this approach is the ability to capture and integrate biological data in a very large number that appears to visualize the nature of which is not shown by the parts individually and unpredictable if you only use every single part.
"The advantage of biological systems is its ability to predict the behavior of entire biological systems," said Aderem. "From there, we can optimize vaccine candidates and predict whether the drug or vaccine candidates able to work before the drug was taken to a large-scale clinical trials are very expensive," he said.
Biological systems can also be used to accelerate clinical trials usually last long.
Aderem and Rappuoli predicts that in a trial vaccine for malaria, TB and HIV / AIDS, only one hypothesis successfully tested every eight years in the past three decades. "We can not continue to use this approach if we want to get results in the period immediately," said Aderem.
With this new method, said Aderem, we can accelerate development by conducting clinical trials of more efficacious and to improve the design using a systems biology approach to test several hypotheses in parallel and have an adaptive design to extend the results will prove most promising.• VIVAnews
They write, it is estimated, by 2020, a vaccine for malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and HIV / AIDS is found. In the journal that they also discussed the new devices include systems biology and structure-based design of antigens that can provide a better understanding of the mechanism of protection.
This device will give clues leading to the rational development of vaccines to alleviate the patient's most terrible diseases in the world.
According Aderem, a pioneer in the field of systems biology, new concepts and technological advances indicate that the vaccine for three diseases terdahsyat it will be developed within the next 10 years.
"The success will greatly depend on our ability to approach biological systems to analyze data generated during testing of evidence," said Aderem, like diktutip from MedIndia, May 28, 2011.
Aderem says, success will also provide new insights such as identifying the relationship between protection or signs of immunogenicity and the acceleration of large-scale clinical trials. Also, added Aderem, new regulatory approaches and innovative clinic will also accelerate the discovery of vaccines that are needed.
In his report, Aderem and Rappuoli also reviews the advantages and disadvantages of systems biology approach, with the major advantages of this approach is the ability to capture and integrate biological data in a very large number that appears to visualize the nature of which is not shown by the parts individually and unpredictable if you only use every single part.
"The advantage of biological systems is its ability to predict the behavior of entire biological systems," said Aderem. "From there, we can optimize vaccine candidates and predict whether the drug or vaccine candidates able to work before the drug was taken to a large-scale clinical trials are very expensive," he said.
Biological systems can also be used to accelerate clinical trials usually last long.
Aderem and Rappuoli predicts that in a trial vaccine for malaria, TB and HIV / AIDS, only one hypothesis successfully tested every eight years in the past three decades. "We can not continue to use this approach if we want to get results in the period immediately," said Aderem.
With this new method, said Aderem, we can accelerate development by conducting clinical trials of more efficacious and to improve the design using a systems biology approach to test several hypotheses in parallel and have an adaptive design to extend the results will prove most promising.• VIVAnews
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