HI-TECH HEALTH PLAN WITHOUT A FRAMEWORK?

       To make Thailand into a country where people can expect equality in receiving high-quality health and medical services no matter where they seek them, the country needs a distinguished national e-health policy as a frame-woke for its investment in healthcare technology.
       So says Boonchai Kijsanayoti, health-informatics officer at the Public Heath Ministry.
       Moreover, he says the country's health and medical systems need a national e-health governance body as well as additional investment in healthcare-related information and communications technology(ICT).
       At present, Thailand's annual information-technology(IT) expenses for the healthcare industry amount to 3-6 per cent of gross domestic product(GDP), whereas the United States spends 15 per cent of its GDP per year on healthcare-related IT investments.
       The World Health Organisation(WHO) says e-health means the use of information and communications technology(ICT) to improve the quality of healthcare, the overall health of the population and the efficiency of the healthcare system.
       Boonchai said the establishment of an e-health system required a development model, and there were three main elements involved: foundation policy and strategy - such as governance, fixing of policy, funding and infrastructure; enabling policy and strategy - such as citizen protection, equality and interoperability; and e-Health applications - such as public health services, knowledge services and providers of service.
       Meanwhile, the Public Health Ministry has rolled out the second phase of the National Health Information System, covering the three years between 2010 and 2012. The plan aims to improve healthcare services by providing a health information system at 11,160 healthcare points of service throughout the country.
       Under the plan, there are four stages of implementation. First is the establishment of the infrastructure and net works for the new system, connecting healthcare service facilities with the Internet and establishing health data centres at provincial health offices. It will also connect central health-information offices with provincial health data centres and develop health-information security systems.
       Second, the ministry will develop both the infrastructure for a Health Information Exchange and national standards for minimal health-data sets, health-information messaging standards, health-information privacy and security standards and health-terminology standards.
       The third stage will involved the implementation of telemedicine services using an Internet connection(Web technology) to provide teleconsultations between primary care providers and secondary care providers in provincial of district hospital. It will enable 252 provincial or district hospitals around the country to serve 1,500 sub-district health-promotion hospitals.
       The fourth stage will be the implementation of a health television system with the aim of providing health-education broadcasting and health-threat alerts from the minstry's central office facilities across country.
       The government has allocated Bt2.97 billion to roll out the plan over the next three years.
       Additionally, the ministry is working on the second phase of the National Health Standard Data Set, concerning standards for clinical data. It has been working with the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre and the National Health Security Office, Boonchai said.
       He said the ministry was also continuing work on the first phase of National Health Standard Data Set, which was due to end this year. The work involes harmonising reimbursement data sets of three health-insurance schemes: social security insurance, national health security insurance and civil service medical benefits, as well as decreasing the reporting workloads of health-service providers.
       "We will continue to work on the development of national standare codes, including medical disease classifications, drug codes, the Thailand drug code, the health facilities code and the laboratory code," Boonchai said.

"Strange lights" seen after Nasa launch

       Nasa says it successfully launched a rocket in Virginia as part of an experiment, and the blast may have caused dozens of people to report seeing strange lights in the sky.
       The US space agency said it launched the Black Brant XII on Saturday evening to gather data on the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. Around the time of the launch, people in the northeast US reported seeing strange lights.
       Along the east coast, reports of the bright, cone-shaped light poured into weather stations and news organisations.
       The calls came from as far away as Boston, which is about 610km northeast of the launch site.
       The rocket is designed to create an artificial cloud. Nasa hopes the experiment will provide information on the formation and properties of noctilucent clouds, which form at high altitudes.

A DAINTY DINO IS DUSTED OFF

       A relatively tiny new ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex has been unearthed in China, researchers said Thursday.
       The three-metre-long dinosaur dubbed the Raptorex only weighed about 60 kilograms and was nearly 100 times smaller than the king of the dinosaurs.
       But it was nearly identtical in structure-even down to the scrawny arms-and had all of the traits which made T Rex such a successful preda-tor, says lead author Paul Sereno, a paleontologist with the University of Chicago.
       "It was jaws on legs," he says.
       This unexpected new link in the evolution of the mighty predator which once dominated the northern half of the globe has provided researchers with an entirely new pic-ture of how T Rex evolved.
       "Raptorex, the new species, really throws a wrench into the observed pattern," says co-author Stephen Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History.
       "Hers we have an animal that's 1/100th of the size of T Rex-about my size-but with all of the signature features-big head, strong muscles, tiny little arms-that werd thought to be necessary adaptations for a large-body predator"
       The Raptorex fossil shows that the skinny arms evolved not in order to help it offset a heavier overall bodyweight, but instead as a trade-off for agility and speed.
       The powerful muscles of the back legs would have helped the T Rex chase down its prey while the smaller front legs allowed it to remain upright and attack with its deadly jaws.
       The Raptorex fossil-which was estimated to be a juvenile of five to six years old when it died-is about 125 million years old.
       The tyrannosaurus genus did not reach its full size until about 85 million years ago and was wiped out about 65 million years ago in the great extinction, which ended the Cretaceous Period.
       "What that means is that for most of their evolutionary history, about 80 per cent of the time that they were on earth, tyrannosauruses were small animals that lived in the shadow of other types of very large dinosaur predators," says Brusatte.
       It's likely that T Rex was able to grow to its colossal size because other competing predators became extinct.
       "We connot say that this incredibly successful, scalable blueprint for a predator was responsible for their total domination... because we never saw them cohabiting in environ-ments with these other, earlier types of predators," says Brusatte.
       But once tyrannosauruses were able to expand in body size, "there was no turning back until the aster-oid hit because they really had it down pat".
       The incredibly well-preserved and nearly complete fossil was almost lost to science after it was unearthed illegally and spirited out of China for sale on the private market.
       An american eye surgeon and dinosaur enthusiast purchased the still-embedded fossil and recognised its potential value to science.
       Henry Kriegstein contacted Sereno, who agreed to analyse the fossil so long as Kriegstein was willing to return it to China once the work is complete.
       "We repidly achieved that agreement and Raptorex sees the light of day," Sereno explains
       "I hope this is a pathway that can be used again so that other importhant specimens that do find their way out of the ground in the dark of night do not get lost to science."
       The full name of the new species is Raptorex kriegsteini, in honour of Kriegstein and the dinosaur's link to raptors and the T Rex.
       The study was published in the journal Science.

A mammoth find in Serbia

       Wading through the swamps that hundreds of thousands of years later would become eastern Serbia, "Vika" became stuck, never managing to pull herself ree, and eventually died.
       Now Vika, a mammoth whose skeleton was found perfectly preserved in a crouched postion, has been hailed as a "sensational" find despitr disputes over her age, species and even sex.
       In the millennia since the animal's death, 27 metres of earth were deposited on her until in May when a digger in the Kosolac mine pit, 60 kilometres east of Belgrade, exposed her skeleton.
       Fortunately, no damage was done during the surprise discovery and now vika's remains, preserved at the site by a climatised tent, have been made accessible to scientific visitors.
       "Our geologists dated Vika's age at 4.8 million years, based on the age of the surrounding stratum," says the director of the Belgrade Natural Museum, Zoran Markovic.
       If Serbian experts are correct, Markovic says, Vika's remains are the oldest ever found in Europe.
       Serbian scientists say that Vika was a sounthern mammoth Mammuthus Meridionalis, standing four metres tall and weighing seven tonnes, with 2.5-metre-long tusks.
       For now, Serbian scientists have decided to leave Vika exactly where she (or he) was and in the crouched position in which she was found. This was due to one last posthumous event. Shortly after she died in the mud of Kostolac, Serbian experts say, her stomach literally exploded, breaking her spine and scattering a few ribs.
       Leaving the ancient skeleton as it was found allows scientists to continue arguing over her age, species and gender, while also allowing tourists to created their own picture of Vika's final days long ago.

       Vika, a mammoth whose skeleton was found perfectly preserved in a crouched position, has been hailed as a "sensational" find despite disputes over her age, species and even ses.

ROBOT CAN SWITCH BED TO WHEELCHAIR

       Japan's Panasonic Corp has developed a "Robotic Bed" that can transform into a wheelchair to make life easier for elderly and disabled people, it announced yesterday.
       The invention in designed to help people with limited mobility maintain an independent lifestyle, the firm said in a statement.
       "Now, the user can join the family meal by converting the bed into a wheelchair and moving to the dining table without the need of assistance from other people," it said.
       Panasoinc will exhibit the Robotic Bed at a home care and rehabilitation exhibition in Tokyo from September 29 to October 1, it said.
       "It is still a concept model and we will not be selling it soon," said Panasonic spokeswoman Yuka Arii. "We plan to bring it to markets in or after 2015. But we don't know the price yet."
       Japan has one of the owrld's oldest populations and faces a constant shortage of care workers.

Thunderstorm on Saturn is a record-buster

       A tempest that erupted on Saturn in January has become the Solar System's longest continuously observed lightning storm, astronomers reported yesterday.
       The storm broke out in "Storm Alley",a region 35 degrees south of the ringed giant's equator, researchers told the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, near Berlin.
       Thunderstorms there can be as big as 3,000km across.
       The powerful event was spotted by the US space probe Cassini, using an instrument that can detect radiowaves emitted by lightning discharge.
       "The reason why we see lightning in this peculiar location is not completely clear," said Georg Fischer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in a press release.
       "It could be that this latitude is one of the few places in Saturn's atmosphere that allow large-scale vertical convection of water clouds, which is necessary for thunderstorms to develop."

High-yield crop genius Borlaug dies

       Norman Borlaug,the US agricultural scientist who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing high-yielding crops to prevent famine in the developing world,has died aged 95.Norman Borlaug Borlaug, hailed as a central figure in the "green revolution" that made more food available for the world's hungry, died on Saturday night from cancer complications in Dallas. The "green revolution"- the development of crops such as wheat that delivered better yields than traditional strains - is credited with helping avert massive famines that had been predicted in the developing world in the last half of the 20th century.
       Borlaug served as a distinguished professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M University, located in College Station, Texas. Experts have said his crusade to develop high-yielding, diseaseresistant crops saved the lives of millions of people worldwide who otherwise may have been doomed to starvation.
       His efforts to develop new crop varieties helped alleviate food shortages in places such as India and Pakistan, helping make developing countries self-sufficient in food production.
       He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2007, Borlaug also received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honour of the United States.
       "We all eat at least three times a day in privileged nations, and yet we take food for granted," Borlaug said in a recent interview."There has been great progress,and food is more equitably distributed.But hunger is commonplace, and famine appears all too often."
       In 1944, he was appointed as geneticist and plant pathologist assigned the job of organising and directing the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Programme in Mexico. Within two decades, he succeeded in finding a highyielding disease-resistant wheat. He then worked to put newly developed cereal strains into production.