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INDIA – Rice diplomacy in South Asia.

INDIA – Indian court's Novartis ruling keeps door to cheap drugs open.

INDONESIA – A blueprint for changing diabetes in Indonesia.

SINGAPORE – Understanding abnormal proteins in degenerative diseases.

SINGAPORE – Singapore scientist wins coveted Chen New Investigator Award 2013.

SINGAPORE – Singapore single-cell research center opens door for Asian biological discoveries.

THE PHILIPPINES – Wild parent spawns super salt-tolerant rice.

AUSTRALIA – Women: Hormone therapy won't harm your head.

AUSTRALIA – QLD government's removal of "green tape" will achieve results for all.

AUSTRALIA – Chinese herbs help cut diabetes symptoms.

AUSTRALIA – iSonea launches new Asthmasense™ cloud technology.

EUROPE – Bone Therapeutics and Erasme University Hospital start Phase IIa trial in osteoporosis.

NORTH AMERICA – Medicago and IDRI reports positive results for its Phase I clinical trial for an H5N1 vaccine.

NORTH AMERICA – Civitas Therapeutics announces positive Phase II clinical results an inhaled L-dopa for Parkinson's disease.

NORTH AMERICA – Impel NeuroPharma completes industry's first nose-to-brain human imaging study.

NORTH AMERICA – A new treatment option for alcohol dependence: Reduced consumption rather than abstinence.

NORTH AMERICA – Targacept completes recruitment in Phase IIb schizophrenia trial.

UNITED KINGDOM – ID deadly pathogens without growing bacteria.

Structural hierarchies are universal design paradigms of biological materials, e.g., several materials in nature used for carrying mechanical load or impact protection such as bone, nacre, dentin show structural design at multiple length scales from the nanoscale to the macroscale. Another example is the case of diatoms, microscopic mineralized algae with intricately patterned silica-based exoskeletons, with substructure from the nanometer to micrometer length scale. Previous studies on silica nano-honeycomb structures inspired from these diatom substructures at the nanoscale have shown a great improvement in plasticity, ductility and toughness through these designs over macroscopic silica, though along with a substantial reduction in stiffness. Here, we extend the study of these structural designs to the micron length scale by introducing additional hierarchy levels to implement a multilevel composite design. To facilitate our computational experiments we first develop a mesoscale particle-spring model description of the mechanics of bulk silica/nano-honeycomb silica composites. Our mesoscale description is directly derived from constitutive material behavior found through atomistic simulations at the nanoscale with the first principles-based ReaxFF force field, but is capable of describing deformation and failure of silica materials at tens of micrometer length scales. We create several models of randomly-dispersed fiber-composite materials with a small volume fraction of the nano-honeycomb phase, and analyze the fracture mechanics using J-integral and R-curve studies. Our simulations show a dominance of quasi-brittle fracture behavior in all cases considered. For particular materials with a small volume fraction of the nano-honeycomb phase dispersed as fibers within a bulk silica matrix, we find a large improvement (≈4.4 times) in toughness over bulk silica, while retaining the high stiffness (to 70%) of the material. The increase in toughness is observed to arise primarily from crack path deflection and crack bridging by the nano-honeycomb fibers. The first structural hierarchy at the nanometer scale (nano-honeycomb silica) provides large improvements in ductility and toughness at the cost of a large reduction in stiffness. The second structural hierarchy at the micron length scale (bulk silica/nano-honeycomb composite) recovers the stiffness of bulk silica while substantially improving its toughness. The results reported here provide direct evidence that structural hierarchies present a powerful design paradigm to obtain heightened levels of stiffness and toughness from multiscale engineering a single brittle — and by itself a functionally inferior material — without the need to introduce organic (e.g., protein) phases. Our model sets the stage for the direct simulation of multiple hierarchical levels to describe deformation and failure of complex biological composites.

Water may become a medium for attacks through chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, explosives, cyber impacts (CBRNE/cyber terrorism), and psychological operations from terrorists. The objective of this paper is to discuss strategies, policy, practice and technologies that prevent, disrupt, respond, mitigate and assist recovery from waterborne threats.

It is proposed that mitigation of potential waterborne components of CBRNE/cyber terrorism is critical for the sustainability of cities and that the problem can be addressed within a wider definition of waterborne threats to cover conflict, natural hazards and accidents as well as CBRNE/cyber terrorism. Included within the scope of this discussion are radiological ‘dirty bombs’, improvised nuclear devices and conventional conflicts between nations. Psychological operations of terror groups may have significant impacts in attacks on water facilities. Recommendations are made for new forms of fast, near-real time, trusted and unambiguous scientific communications techniques to mitigate unnecessary fear in the population and to limit other harmful effects.

Two case studies are presented to illustrate the importance of the sustainability of cities from waterborne threats. The first case study, of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) accident, shows the capacity of Tokyo to function despite city-wide contamination from Caesium-137 and Iodine-131—although rural Japan continues to have unresolved challenges to agricultural land sustainability a year after the disaster. The second case study discusses Iran as a country under threat of conflicts which may breach underground and aboveground nuclear facilities, including a nuclear reactor. The potential for a perceived threat to fragile water resources within this region illustrates the importance of scientific communications for real-time public advice (for example on whether any incident requires shelter in-situ or evacuation) and the formulation of twelve hour plans to recover cities’ water access to prevent panic and refugee movements.