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Researchers are aiming to bridge the gap between Chinese and Western systems of medicine with what they say is the first database of chemical compounds found in herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine.

The database, known as Chem-TCM, will be used to help with drug development, according to researchers from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science at King’s College London, United Kingdom, and partners at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, China, who launched it this month (18 October).

The database features more than 12,000 chemical compounds identified in more than 300 Chinese herbs, and can be searched using text searches, but also using chemical terms.

“You can even draw a picture of a chemical structure on a computer screen and the database will search for matching molecular structures and activities,” said David Barlow, an expert in computer-aided drug design and delivery systems at King’s College London….

Barlow said the database was developed using publicly available information on Chinese medicines, with funding from the Global Partnership fund at the UK Department for Business, Innovations and Skills as well as Innovation China-UK — a subsidiary of Queen Mary University of London. But the database will not be freely available — it will instead be commercially marketed to major pharmaceutical, biotech, agricultural and educational organisations.

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The first global database documenting the effectiveness of traditional medicines, which are widely used as the first source of healthcare around the world, has been announced by the WHO.The International Classification of Traditional Medicine will be set up in the first half of 2011 to document traditional medicines and, for the first time, provide effectiveness data based on common standards…The classification will initially focus on traditional medicine practices coming from China, Japan and South Korea which have now spread around the world.

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Food outputs by sustainable intensification have been multiplicative – by which yields per hectare have increased by combining the use of new and improved varieties and new agronomic-agroecological management (crop yields rose on average by 2.13-fold), and additive – by which diversification has resulted in the emergence of a range of new crops, livestock or fish that added to the existing staples or vegetables already being cultivated. The challenge is now to spread effective processes and lessons to many more millions of generally small farmers and pastoralists across the whole continent. These projects had seven common lessons for scaling up and spreading: (i) science and farmer inputs into technologies and practices that combine crops-animals with agroecological and agronomic management; (ii) creation of novel social infrastructure that builds trust among individuals and agencies; (iii) improvement of farmer knowledge and capacity through the use of farmer field schools and modern information and communication technologies; (iv) engagement with the private sector for supply of goods and services; (v) a focus on women’s educational, microfinance and agricultural technology needs; (vi) ensuring the availability of microfinance and rural banking; and (vii) ensuring public sector support for agriculture. This research forms part of the UK Government’s Foresight Global Food and Farming project.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3763/ijas.2010.0583

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Helmholtz may not have known it, but his A = U – TS is good equation for energy sustainability analysis in ecologics. This equation (in my view, as important as E=MC^2) suggests that the amount of free energy in a system (A) is equal to the amount of internal energy (U) less the product of the absolute temperature (T) and the (S) entropy. In our Earth System, environmentally sustainability may be viewed as the preservation of free energy (A) and so it if we want to allow future generations to access the same or nearly the same amount of free energy as is available to us, we must try to minimize the TS part of the equation. This means keeping absolute temperature and/or entropy as low as possible. This is exactly the message conveyed by the concept of negentropy in the book Ecocide. It also explains why global warming works against future generations. Our technology and engineering designs should be informed by the goal of minimizing TS at all process stages and scales (a zero TS is impossible; eventually A goes to zero, a process we can only delay but not avoid entirely). Only then will future generations benefit from nearly the same amount of free energy as we ourselves enjoy today.

Helmholtz free energy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Int. J. Environ. Sci. Edu. 6, 173 (2011) PDF

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“This morning, we released a Request for Proposals to universities near and far. Our offer is straightforward: We will provide prime New York City real estate – at virtually no cost, plus up to $100 million in infrastructure upgrades, in exchange for a university’s commitment to build or expand a world-class science and engineering campus here in our city. We are offering sites at three possible locations, all of them under-utilized, and all of them overflowing with potential: Governors Island; the Navy Yard; and Roosevelt Island.

New York Offers Land for University Tech/Science – ScienceInsider

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