Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nypd-testing-airflow-subways-precaution-against-possible-terror-201800964.html
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SAVAR, Bangladesh (AP) ? Deep cracks visible in the walls of a Bangladesh garment building had compelled police to order it evacuated a day before it collapsed, officials said Thursday. More than 200 people were killed when the eight-story building splintered into a pile of concrete because factories based there ignored the order and kept more than 2,000 people working.
Wednesday's disaster in the Dhaka suburb of Savar is the worst ever for Bangladesh's booming and powerful garment industry, surpassing a fire less than five months earlier that killed 112 people. Workers at both sites made clothes for major brands around the world; some of the companies in the building that fell say their customers include retail giants such as Wal-Mart.
Hundreds of rescuers, some crawling through the maze of rubble in search of survivors and corpses, worked through the night and into Thursday amid the cries of the trapped and the wails of workers' relatives gathered outside the building, called Rana Plaza. It housed numerous garment factories and a handful of other companies.
An Associated Press cameraman who went into the rubble with rescue workers spoke briefly to a garment worker pinned face down in the darkness between concrete slabs and next to two corpses. Mohammad Altab pleaded for help, but they were unable to free him.
"Save us, brother. I beg you, brother. I want to live," Altab moaned. "It's so painful here ... I have two little children."
Another survivor, whose voice could be heard from deep in the rubble, wept as he called for help.
"We want to live, brother. It's hard to remain alive here. It would have been better to die than enduring such pain to live on. We want to live. Please save us," the man cried.
After the cracks were reported in the walls of Rana Plaza on Tuesday, managers of a local bank that also had an office in the building evacuated their workers. The garment factories, though, kept working, ignoring the instructions of the local industrial police, said Mostafizur Rahman, a director of that paramilitary police force.
The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association had also asked the factories to suspend work starting Wednesday morning, hours before the collapse.
"After we got the crack reports, we asked them to suspend work until further examination, but they did not pay heed," said Atiqul Islam, the group's president.
On Thursday morning, the odor of rotting bodies wafted through holes cut into the building. Bangladesh's junior minister for home affairs, Shamsul Haque, said that by late Thursday morning 2,000 people had been rescued from the wreckage.
Brig. Gen. Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder, who is overseeing army rescue teams, said the death toll had climbed to 203 by Thursday afternoon.
Dozens of bodies, their faces covered, were laid outside a local school building so relatives could identify them. Thousands of workers' relatives gathered outside the building, waiting for news, and thousands of garment workers from nearby factories took to the streets across the industrial zone in protest.
Shikder said rescue operations were progressing slowly and carefully to save as many people as possible.
He said rescue teams were standing by with heavy equipment and would "start bulldozing the debris once we get closer to the end of the operation. But now we are careful."
He also said the huge crowd that remained at the collapse site Thursday was interfering with getting more rescuers to the scene.
"We are ready with about 1,000 soldiers and rescue workers from other departments. But a huge crowd is obstructing our effort," he said.
Thousands of workers from the hundreds of other garment factories in the Savar industrial zone took to the streets to protest the factory collapse and poor safety standards for the country's garment workers.
Television reports said that hundreds of protesting workers also clashed with police in Dhaka and the nearby industrial zone of Ashulia. It was not immediately clear whether there were any injuries in those clashes.
The garment manufacturers' group said the factories in Rana Plaza employed 3,122 workers, but it was not clear how many were in the building when it collapsed.
Searchers worked through the night to probe the jumbled mass of concrete with drills or their bare hands, passing water and flashlights to people pinned inside.
"I gave them whistles, water, torchlights. I heard them cry," said fire official Abul Khayer late Wednesday, as he prepared to work late into the night.
Abdur Rahim, an employee who worked on the fifth floor, said he and his co-workers had gone inside Wednesday morning despite the cracks in the building, after a factory manager gave assurances that it was safe. About an hour later, the building collapsed. The next thing Rahim remembered was regaining consciousness outside.
Abdul Halim, an official with the engineering department in Savar, said the owner was originally allowed to construct a five-story building but added another three stories illegally.
On a visit to the site, Home Minister Muhiuddin Khan Alamgir told reporters the building had violated construction codes and that "the culprits would be punished."
Local police chief Mohammed Asaduzzaman said police and the government's Capital Development Authority have filed separate cases of negligence against the building owner.
Habibur Rahman, police superintendent of the Dhaka district, identified the building owner as Mohammed Sohel Rana, a local leader of ruling Awami League's youth front. Rahman said police were also looking for the owners of the garment factories.
Among the garment makers in the building were Phantom Apparels, Phantom Tac, Ether Tex, New Wave Style and New Wave Bottoms. Altogether, they produced several million shirts, pants and other garments a year.
The New Wave companies, according to their website, make clothing for major brands including North American retailers The Children's Place and Dress Barn, Britain's Primark, Spain's Mango and Italy's Benetton. Ether Tex said Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, was one of its customers.
Primark acknowledged it was using a factory in Rana Plaza, but many other retailers distanced themselves from the disaster, saying they were not involved with the factories at the time of the collapse or had not recently ordered garments from them.
Benetton said in an email to The Associated Press that people involved in the collapse were not Benetton suppliers. Wal-Mart said it was investigating and Mango said it had only discussed production of a test sample of clothing with one of the factories.
The November factory fire that killed 112 people drew international attention to working conditions in Bangladesh's $20 billion-a-year textile industry, but Wednesday's collapse highlighted that workers still face danger. The country has about 4,000 garment factories and exports clothes to leading Western retailers, and industry leaders hold great influence in the South Asian nation.
Bangladesh's garment industry was the third-largest in the world in 2011, after China and Italy. It has grown rapidly over the past decade, a boom fueled by some of the lowest labor costs in the world. The national minimum wage, which was doubled in 2010, stands at $38 per month.
The Tazreen factory that caught fire in November lacked emergency exits, and its owner said only three floors of the eight-story building were legally built. Surviving employees said gates had been locked and managers had told them to go back to work after the fire alarm went off.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/collapsed-bangladesh-factories-ignored-evacuation-101035209--finance.html
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Apr. 25, 2013 ? Researchers at Wake Forest University's Organic Electronics group have come up with a novel solution to one of the biggest technological barriers facing the organic semiconductor industry today. Oana Jurchescu, an assistant professor of physics, and a team of researchers developed a high performance organic semiconductor 'spray paint' that can be applied to large surface areas without losing electric conductivity. This is a potentially game changing technology for a number of reasons.
Organic thin film transistors are currently deposited by one of three methods. Drop casting and spin coating conduct electricity well but are limited to small area applications. They could not be used to make a wall-sized, flexible video screen for instance. On the other hand, organic spray-on techniques can be applied to large areas but have poor performance when compared to their small-area counterparts.
Jurchescu's work provides the best of both worlds. The spray-deposition technology developed in her lab produced the highest performance organic thin film transistors for this method to date -- (April 2, 2013) -- comparable to those of drop casting and spin coating. Unlike drop casting and spin coating, her spray-deposition technology can be applied over large surfaces to any medium-from plastic and metal to human skin.
Her team's research, High Mobility Field-Effect Transistors with Versatile Processing from a Small-Molecule Organic Semiconductor was published April 2, 2013 in the journal Advanced Materials.
Because of its superb performance and the fact it can be applied over large areas quickly (it is also inexpensive to process compared to inorganic semiconducting materials like silicon), it has the potential to be produced in commercial quantities. The technology is a big step towards realizing futuristic devices such as transparent solar cells on building windows, car roof and bus stations, electronic displays in previously inaccessible spaces and wearable electronics due to the organic plastics' thin, lightweight and conformal nature.
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Apr. 24, 2013 ? Scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt together with dental technicians have digitally analysed modern human teeth using an engineering approach, finite element method, to evaluate the biomechanical behaviour of teeth under realistic loading. They report results, showing that very widespread loss of dental material (enamel and dentine) at the base of the crown might be linked to the reduction of tooth wear in our industrialised societies.
The study is published today in the online journal PLoS ONE.
Our teeth are important and expensive for us. In this respect aesthetic aspects are of major interest. A healthy dentition should show shiny white tooth crowns and possibly no occlusal wear. The evolutionary history of our dentition teaches us something different: natural tooth wear as an inevitable consequence of chewing food and habitat accompanying human evolution since ancient times.
?In our industrialised societies we find an increase in dental cervical defects?, explains Ottmar Kullmer of the Senckenberg Research Institute: ?Based on the results of our simulations of chewing loads, we assume that much of the enamel failure we find today frequently in tooth crowns is probably caused by cyclic tensile stresses during chewing.?
The researchers used methods from engineering science (Finite Element Analysis, FEA), after applying a new Software tool (Occlusal Fingerprint Analyser) developed in the Senckenberg Research Institute to precisely determine tooth to tooth contacts. ?The computer simulation of chewing forces creates high tensile stresses exactly in the cervical areas where we frequently find tooth lesions in our teeth?, reconsiders Stefano Benazzi of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, who carried out the Finite Element Analysis. To investigate changes in the stress pattern in the same tooth crowns with varying tooth wear ages, two premolars were artificially abraded in the laboratory, based on their individual data of occlusal movement. So, it was possible to calculate the changes in the stress pattern, depending on the wear stage.
The stress in the teeth with advanced wear shows a far better distribution of the loads over the whole tooth crown, so that the tensile stresses will be remarkably reduced. ?Evolutionary factors have apparently led to a quite successful compromise between material loss and longest possible preservation of function?, says Benazzi. The extension of the lifespan and the quick changes in our lifestyle with a remarkable reduction in tooth wear present a major challenge for modern dentistry, say the scientists.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/wDOiwCV3Idk/130424185059.htm
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Apr. 25, 2013 ? Exaggeration over the extent of the malaria parasite's resistance to the 'wonder drugs' artemisinins could jeopardise the fight against the disease, according to a leading expert.
In an opinion article published on World Malaria Day today (25 April 2013) -- online in the journal Trends in Parasitology, Professor Sanjeev Krishna of St George's, University of London argues that much of the evidence of the malaria parasite's resistance to artemisinin has been misinterpreted. He says this has led to the extent of artemisinin resistance being overstated, and that fears of its demise as an effective treatment are premature.
The artemisinin class of drugs are the best anti-malarial treatments available, and are used most effectively with other drugs as artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). Recent research has suggested that the malaria parasite is developing resistance to ACTs, particularly in Southeast Asia. Experts fear that if artemisinins became obsolete -- as previous anti-malarials have -- the effect could be devastating, as there are currently no other effective alternatives.
However, Professor Krishna argues that -- despite being accepted as dogma by the malaria research community -- most of the descriptions of artemisinin resistance do not meet the criteria by which resistance to other anti-malarials and drugs for other diseases have been measured.
For true resistance to exist, according to criteria used for other drugs, there needs to be: a significant failure in treatment (by not meeting the World Health Organization's target of a 95 per cent cure rate 28 days after treatment); a reduced sensitivity to the drug when the parasite is examined in the lab; and a visible delay in ridding the patient of parasites.
Currently, Professor Krishna says, it seems to be accepted that artemisinin treatment failure has occurred when a three-day course of ACT does not meet the target cure rate. This has been observed in a number of studies and has been used to try and understand 'artemisinin resistance.'
But other studies of seven-day courses of artemisinin monotherapies -- in which artemisinins are used alone, without partner drugs -- have shown up to 100 per cent cure rates after 28 days.
This, Professor Krishna, says, indicates proof of resistance to ACTs, but that there is no compelling evidence that artemisinins themselves are becoming less effective. He says this resistance will usually "be to a combination of an artemisinin with another drug against which there is usually a high background of resistance already."
"Contending that there is artemisinin resistance when cure of patients relies on the partner drug of an artemisinin is difficult to substantiate without additional studies," writes Professor Krishna. "It is more appropriate to describe the lack of observed efficacy as resistance to an artemisinin combination therapy rather than as being artemisinin resistance."
He adds that "crying wolf" and raising fears of artemisinin resistance when it is not yet proven "will itself have significant costs, so that when the wolf finally turns up, exhausted villagers no longer respond."
To ensure better understanding of when true artemisinin resistance occurs, and to learn how to fight it, Professor Krishna says there needs to be further research into the how the drugs work against the parasite. He also urges the development of molecular markers to predict the failure of the partner drugs used in ACTs, as well as further studies on artemisinin monotherapies.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/h0Kk4iRgEvc/130424222422.htm
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