本周要聞圖片

本周要聞



西班牙野牛狂奔



瀑布下的一對情侶




被洪冰淹沒的中國武漢一小島



對殉職警察的追思-美國達拉斯




菲律賓颱風天



在印度雨中單車行



等待購買音樂劇門票的覌眾




為殉職員警哀思? 為自己懦弱施政怨嘆?



為嬴球高興?



ISIS回教恐怖分子之暴行

Justin Lai编

07/13/ 2016

台南大地震

At least 5 dead in 6.4-magnitude Taiwan earthquake-外電報導

33 Photos

Rescue personnel help a victim at a damaged building after an earthquake in Tainan, southern Taiwan, February 6, 

2016.

  

 

 REUTERS

Last Updated Feb 6, 2016 12:06 AM EST

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- A powerful, shallow earthquake struck southern Taiwan before dawn Saturday, collapsing two high-rise residential towers and killing at least five people and injuring hundreds. More than 220 people were pulled out from rubble, as rescuers raced against time to find dozens of others unaccounted for.

Firefighters and soldiers in worst-hit Tainan city scrambled with ladders, cranes and other equipment to the two towers that folded like an accordion in a pile of rubble and twisted metal and extracted dazed survivors.

Local media said the building complex included a care center for newborns and mothers.

The emergency response center told The Associated Press that five people were killed, including a 10-day-old infant and a 40-year-old man. They were pulled out of a 17-story Wei Guan residential building and later declared dead.

Rescue personnel work at a damaged building after an earthquake in Tainan, southern Taiwan, February 6, 2016.

 

 REUTERS

Local media said a woman was killed in a water tower collapse in another city district, and no information was immediately available for the two other deaths. The Health Ministry reported 318 people have been hospitalized.

One of the two towers was home to 256 people living in 92 units, according to the official Central News Agency. A second 16-story high-rise nearby also collapsed, and more than 30 survivors have been pulled out from there. It wasn't clear how many others were still trapped.

The news website ET Today reported that a mother and a daughter were among the survivors from the Wei Guan building, and that the girl drank her urine while waiting for rescue, which came sooner than expected.

Dozens more people have been rescued or safely evacuated from a market and a seven-floor building that was badly damaged, the news agency reported. A bank building also careened, but no injuries were reported, it said.

Most people were caught asleep when temblor struck about 4 a.m. local time. It was located some 22 miles southeast of Yujing, and struck about six miles underground, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

As dawn broke, live Taiwanese TV showed survivors being brought gingerly from the high-rise, including an elderly woman in a neck brace and others wrapped in blankets. The trappings of daily life -- a partially crushed air conditioner, pieces of a metal balcony, windows -- lay twisted in rubble.

People with their arms around firefighters were being helped from the building, and cranes were being used to search darkened parts of the structure for survivors. Newscasters said other areas of the city were still being canvassed for possible damage.

Men in camouflage, apparently military personnel, marched into one area of collapse carrying large shovels.

The quake was felt as a lengthy, rolling shake in the capital, Taipei, on the other side of the island. But Taipei was quiet, with no sense of emergency or obvious damage just before dawn.

Residents in mainland China also reported that the tremor was felt there.

Questions started to rise if the construction crew had cut corners when building the Wei Guan residential complex that was finished in 1989. The Home Department minister said an investigation would examine if the developer skirted requirements.

Earthquakes frequently rattle Taiwan, but most are minor and cause little or no damage.

However, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake in central Taiwan in 1999 killed more than 2,300 people.

02/06/2016

台灣選舉快報

Taiwan Nationalist concedes defeat, congratulates Tsai Ing-wen as President

 

 

By Katie Hunt and Kristie Lu Stout, CNN

Updated 8:49 AM ET, Sat January 16, 2016 | Video Source: CNN-國民黨承認敗選，恭喜蔡英文當選

Taipei (CNN)Taiwan appears to have its first female President, in a landmark election that could unsettle relations with Beijing.

Eric Chu, the Nationalist Party candidate in Taiwan's presidential election conceded defeat late Saturday and congratulated rival Tsai Ing-wen to her victory as the country's new President, state-run Central News Agency reported.

Her supporters filled streets, waving party banners and cheering to victory announcements made from a stage.

Official election results have not yet been announced.

Voters lined up Saturday at polling stations, and when they closed, surveys suggested that Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), would win the presidential vote by a significant margin after eight years under the government of the pro-China Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Party.

The ruling party was also in danger of losing control of the legislature for the first time in parliamentary elections, with a record 556 candidates in the race for 113 seats.

01/16/2016

Photos of the day

Photos of the day- 12/07/2017



吉隆坡水族館美人魚遨遊魚群中



追悼加州喪生的無辜受害人



西班牙網球名將被菲律賓球迷包圍



二次大戰老兵為1941年珍珠港事件罹難官兵致衷






在緬因州史上最大驅逐艦下水




義大利西西里島南方火山爆發



中國藝術家Kong Ning穿著橘黃色塑膠片衣服抗議北京沙塵



北京女士戴口罩在沙霧中漫舞



2015年世界氣候改變會議在巴黎舉行


Justin Lai 整理

12/07/2015

當日要聞圖片

Photos of the day-當日要聞圖片



尼泊爾的貓頭鷹



中國馬雲與歐巴馬出席馬尼拉的Apec會議



台灣板橋的3D聖誕樹




澳洲巴蕾舞表演




西藏拉薩的數位畫作


教宗在梵蒂岡經過法國國旗



印度回教徒舉牌抗議ISIS



海拔4仟多公尺的西藏喇嘛教聖地-鹽湖




APEC會場


11/18/2015

2015年諾貝爾獎-生理醫學獎得主

The 2015 Nobel prizes: Physiology or medicine- 2015年諾貝爾獎-生理醫學獎得主-

Researchers share honour for finding ways that nature can provide solutions to its own problems-本年度由美、中、日三國科學家分享殊榮- 用大自然的力量征服大自然的危害(以毒攻毒法)。

DESPITE what the romantic poets would have you believe, the natural world is not a friendly place. It is full of dangerous creatures, and some of the most dangerous are the smallest: the bacteria, viruses and parasites that between them debilitate (weaken) and kill millions of people every year. But it is possible, with a bit of cunning, a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, to turn a bit of nature against itself—to humanity's benefit. And it is for exactly this sort of work that Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2015 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.

The three winners are William Campbell, Satoshi Omura (大村) and Tu Youyou. (杜友友) Drs Campbell and Omura were honoured for their discovery of avermectin, a drug that kills the parasitic worms (寄生菌) responsible for river blindness and lymphatic filariasis (淋巴絲蟲病), and which between them infect about 125m people worldwide. Dr Tu—who originally trained in traditional Chinese medicine—discovered artemisinin,(苦艾草類屬) a drug that helps kill the parasite that causes malaria (瘧疾). Around 200m people are thought to be infected with malaria, and about half a million die each year.

Dr Omura is a microbiologist(微生物學家) by training. His research at Kitasato University, in Japan, focused on a genus of bacteria (細菌屬類) called Streptomyces,(鏈球菌) which were known to produce complex chemicals that seemed to be able to weaken and kill rival micro-organisms. (微生物) Streptomycin,(鏈球菌抗生素) an early antibiotic and one of the first effective treatments for tuberculosis (肺結核), is, as its name suggests, derived from Streptomyces. Selman Waksman, its discoverer, won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1952. Dr Omura developed ways of growing Streptomyces bacteria in the lab, allowing him to systematically culture (培養) thousands of strains(菌屬) and screen(過篩分級) them to see whether any of those compounds(化合物) might hold medical promise.(醫療用這的遠景)

   

鏈球菌                                 avermectin(獸醫用-除寄生菌注射劑

Dr Campbell, then of Drew University in New Jersey, heard of Dr Omura's work and managed to obtain samples of his most promising bugs. An expert in parasite physiology, he was able to demonstrate that a certain chemical extracted from Dr Omura's bacteria was indeed effective at killing parasites in animals. It was isolated and dubbed(轉錄)avermectin; after further lab work, a slightly chemically modified version called ivermectin was produced for human consumption. These days ivermectin is listed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on its List of Essential Medicines, which catalogues the drugs that even the most basic medical system needs.

Whereas avermectin is derived from bacteria, artemisinin comes from plants. Its discovery was the consequence of Project 523, a secretive military operation run by the Chinese government at the request of Ho Chi Minh(胡志明)during the Vietnam War. The hope was to find new treatments for malaria, which is thought to have killed more soldiers than the bullets and bombs of the war itself. Artemisia annua,(苦艾草)or sweet wormwood, was one of the plants screened by the programme's scientists, using a list of thousands of compounds used in traditional medicine.

                                    

                                                           苦艾草

Folk doctors had long suspected the plant had anti-malarial properties(抗瘧疾特性): the first record of its use dates back to "The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies", (急救手冊) written in 340 BC by an alchemist(煉丹士) and writer called Ge Hong.(葛洪)

    

Dr Tu helped to confirm that the plant did indeed have anti-malarial properties, was able to isolate the compound responsible, and developed a way to extract it in bulk. Anti-malarial drugs derived from artemisinin became available just as the malaria parasite was beginning to evolve resistance to chloroquine (奎因-抗瘧疾藥) and quinine, (奎寧) two older treatments. These days it and its derivatives are the treatment of choice for the disease.

    

左：奎寧植物  右：瘧疾症狀(乾咳、全身發冷發熱、噁心、嘔吐、脾臟擴大等)

Even today, and even with drugs readily available, millions of people, mostly in poor countries, are dogged (受侵襲) by parasitic infections. Malaria in particular remains a public health disaster, killing half a million people a year and burdening hundreds of millions more with a debilitating, painful disease. Yet the outlook is better than is often supposed: the WHO says that by 2013, malaria deaths had fallen by 47% compared with 2000. Some countries, notably India, talk of eliminating the disease entirely from within their borders. Similarly, river blindness used to be one of the leading causes of preventable blindness; these days doctors talk cautiously, but optimistically, of the possibility of extirpating (澈底消滅) the disease entirely from the Earth. Doing that will take money, determination and political will—but it would not be possible at all without the drugs that Drs Campbell, Omura and Tu helped to discover.

取材自經濟學人 (the Economist)- Oct 5th 2015  Science and technology

Justin Lai 加注中文及圖示

10/06/2015/全