87ffre

While mapping out the development blueprint of Hong Kong Baptist University over the next decade, Professor Albert Chan, new head of the institute, has his eyes fixed beyond a century.

“Our ultimate goal is to see how the university will be doing after 100 years,” he said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Quality teaching and learning, innovation research, and community service are highlights of the development plan and each will have cooperations with organizations in Chinese mainland, said Chan, who took his place as the university’s 4th President and Vice-Chancellor on July 1, 2010.

Setting up a research center in Changshu, Jiangsu province, will be one of those many cooperations. The Changshu government has agreed to provide a subsidy of two million yuan RMB (about 300, 000 U.S. dollars) a year and a site of about 7,000 square meters for the university for research development under a five year contract signed earlier.

“Changshu is a strategic place to us, and a rare opportunity as well,” Chan said, the university will make use of the offer to carry out knowledge transfers in areas such as Chinese medicine, new material and chemistry, which can hardly be done in the limited space at their Kowloon Tong campus in Hong Kong.

Chan, who is also a scientist and member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said they are planning to make the Changshu research center their beachhead in the Yangtze River Delta.

The United International College, jointly established years ago by Baptist University and Beijing Normal University, situated in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, will be viewed as their Pearl River Delta base, said Chan.

Besides, the university’s plans of providing joint programs for doctoral as well as undergraduate students with elite Mainland institutes are likely to be put into practice in the coming one to two years.

Chan also shared his own view towards university ranking. According to the latest Times Higher Education Rankings, Baptist University has sprung to the position of 111th from last year’s 307th. The president was glad about the vast improvement but at the same time he was showing more concern over his students’ moral character.

“Which one is more important? University ranking or educating students as a well-rounded person? I’ll stick to the latter one,” Chan said, adding they will pay attention to the ranking but not viewing it as a target.

He believed that being capable of maintaining a good research quality and nurturing students with fine personality, who are willing to shoulder family and social responsibilities, a university should then see its ranking goes up.

Partager ce billet

The hometown of China’s great philosopher, Confucius, in east China’s Shandong Province, is scheduled to build its first large Christian church.

Holy Trinity Church, covering 2667 square meters, will be located in Yuzhuang Village of Qufu City, 3 km from Confucius’ Temple. The Gothic style church will be 41.7 meters high, as shown on its blueprint.

“It will be the first ‘real’ church in Qufu, since the one we have now is a makeshift building. It can only hold seven or eight hundred people and is not big enough,” said Feng Zongjie, head of the Qufu Municipal Committee of Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China.

Qufu has nearly 10,000 Christians, said Feng.

Although building a church in China is nothing new, it means a lot since the Christian church is to be built in Confucius’ hometown, a symbol of Chinese civilization, said pastor Kong Xiangling, a 75th generation of Confucius.

An exchange center for Christianity and Confucianism will also be built here as a venue to hold forums for the exchange and dialogue between the two civilizations, said pastor Gao Ming, head of the Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches and the Christian Council of Jijing City, which administers Qufu.

“The building of the church shows the spread of Christianity, while the exchange center will facilitate Christianity to blend in China and have an impact on China,” said Gao.

Yang Guoqing, a Christian, said: “To build a church here means it will be a place where two different civilizations meet and mix.”

The church is expected to cost 20 million yuan (3 million U.S. dollars) and one third of the investment has been raised. The land use has been approved by the local authorities and the blueprint is under review, said Feng.

“The new church will be able to hold 3,000 people. And the church construction is expected to be completed in two years,” said Kong Wei, head of Qufu Municipal Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau.

Christianity has spread rapidly in China with over 55,000 churches and 23 million Christians now in the country.

Confucius, of the Spring and Autumn Period (770 BC to 476 BC), advocated morality, honesty and good manners. His teachings were found in the “Analects of Confucius”, compiled by his students many years after his death.

At the Nishan Forum on World Civilizations, which were held in Qufu on September 26 and 27, 2010, domestic and overseas scholars drew upon the wisdom of the ancient sages, Confucius and Jesus, to broaden the possibilities for peaceful solutions of life’ s daily issues.

Partager ce billet

CANBERRA, Nov. 25 (Xinhua) — A renowned Australian Arnhem Land artist on Thursday said alcoholism is ruining the careers of many young Aboriginal painters.

Banduk Marika is one of Arnhem Land’s best-known artists and has won several national art awards.

Marika expressed concerns over young artists stop painting when they begin to drink or take drugs.

“When you [are] losing people because of drug and alcohol issues I think people really need to look and reassess what is important,” Marika told ABC News on Thursday, adding that she is also worried that not enough young people are learning skills from elders, and culture could be lost when the elders die.

Marika urged community leaders and politicians to put tighter controls on the sale of alcohol in the Nothern Territory if the Indigenous arts industry is to remain strong.

She said remnants of culture being lost due to drug and alcohol issues, added that alcohol has a way of destroying people, family and culture.

Art has been the main form of non-government income in several Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Partager ce billet

Autism in children may be caught at earlier age than currently possible by MRI imaging, University of Utah said in a news release on Thursday.

Focusing patients already diagnosed with autism, researchers at the university used MRIs to locate areas of the brain where the left and right hemispheres do not communicate properly, according to the release.

These so-called “hot spots” are central to motor function, attention, facial recognition and social behavior — types of behaviors that are abnormal in people with autism.

“We know the two hemispheres must work together for many brain functions,” study author Dr. Jeffrey S. Anderson, an assistant professor of radiology, said in the news release. “We used MRI to look at the strength of these connections from one side to the other in autism patients.”

In the study, the researchers used MRI imaging to search for differences in brain activity patterns in the microstructure of white matter tissue in 80 autism patients between the ages of 10 and 35. This tissue, the authors noted, is known to play a role in communication between various brain regions.

Communication deficits between the two hemispheres of the brain were, in fact, uncovered by MRI scans — differences that the team said were not found in the brains of people without autism.

The authors also noted that apart from an increased brain size among children diagnosed with autism, there are no apparent structural differences between the brains of autistic patients and patients who are not autistic.

The study was limited to high-functioning males and so did not allow researchers to generalize the findings to females, younger children, or “lower functioning” individuals with autism, the researchers said.

1 answer|jade3link02|filipinomaids|jadelung02|cocowenchang|hehua618|jade3link|jade

Partager ce billet

A consortium of cancer researchers has identified four chromosome locations with genetic changes that are likely to alter a woman’s risk of developing ovarian cancer. The findings appear Sunday in an article in Nature Genetics.

Researchers say that while more needs to be learned about the function of the specific chromosomal regions involved in susceptibility, the discoveries move them a major step closer to individualized risk assessments for ovarian cancer. In the future, women at greatest risk due to these and other inherited changes may be offered increased surveillance or preventive measures.

“In searching the genome, we came up with some surprises on chromosomes 2, 3, and 17,” says Ellen Goode, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic genetic epidemiologist and lead author. “While examining the usual suspects in a region on chromosome 8, we found that SNPs associated with ovarian cancer risk were located quite a distance away from those associated with risk of other cancers, which suggest that they may act through a different mechanism.”

SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms, are common genetic variants associated, in this case, with cancer risk.

The findings come from a large genome-wide association study that spanned three continents. Following an initial study in over 1,700 cases, the researchers followed up with a study of over 24, 000 women. They narrowed the focus to nine regions and confirmed that three loci (locations on the chromosome) were much stronger than the others and a fourth “approached genome-wide significance. ” These particular loci are associated with serous ovarian cancer, the most aggressive and common of the four main types of the disease.
eat
apple apple
apple

Partager ce billet

Young men who are obese may have a lower sperm count than their normal-weight counterparts, a new study suggests.

The findings, reported in the journal Fertility and Sterility, add to evidence tying obesity to relatively poorer quality sperm.

A number of recent studies have found that compared with leaner men, obese men tend to have lower sperm counts, fewer rapidly mobile sperm and fewer progressively motile sperm, which refers to sperm that swim forward in a straight line rather than moving about aimlessly.

But age is a “confounding” factor in examining the relationship between obesity and sperm quality. Older men tend to have lower sperm quality than younger men, and they also tend to have more body fat.

However, among the more than 2,000 men in the current study, obese men between the ages of 20 and 30 generally had a lower sperm count than normal-weight men in the same age group.

What all of this might mean for an obese younger man’s chances of becoming a father is unclear. Studies have so far come to conflicting conclusions as to whether obesity actually impairs a man’s fertility.

And these latest findings do not reveal whether the difference in sperm count between obese and normal-weight men would be enough to also make a difference in their fertility, according to lead researcher Dr. Uwe Paasch, of the University of Leipzig in Germany.

For their study, Paasch and his colleagues used information from a database on men who had come to their fertility clinic for a semen analysis between 1999 and 2005. The 2,157 men included in the study were 30 years old, on average, and had no known infertility problems.

Overall, obese men had a relatively lower average sperm count than normal-weight men, but were still within what’s considered the normal range. That range is between 20 and 150 million per milliliter of semen, according to the National Institutes of Health.

In an email, Paasch told Reuters Health that “we do not know in detail” whether the difference in sperm count between obese and lean men would affect their fertility. But, he added that the relationship between weight and sperm count offers young men another reason to try to maintain a normal weight.

It is not entirely clear why obesity is related to sperm quality. Some studies have found that obese men tend to have altered levels of testosterone and other reproductive hormones compared with thinner men. In this study, though, hormone levels correlated with age, but not with body weight.

In other research, Paasch noted, he and his colleagues have found that high levels of body fat are associated with changes in the collection of proteins that allow sperm to survive and function.

The current study had a number of limitations, including the fact that the men were patients at a fertility clinic rather than a sample from the general population.

The researchers also point out that weight categories were based on body mass index, or BMI, a measure of weight in relation to height. The problem is that BMI does not precisely reflect a person’s level of body fat.

Other studies have suggested that body fat, and abdominal fat in particular, is more closely related to sex-hormone levels than is BMI.

Partager ce billet

Bienvenue sur ton blogue!

Il s’agit de votre premier message. Utilisez le lien « Gérer votre blogue » pour travailler sur votre blogue!

Une fois rendu, vous pourrez faire la configuration de votre blogue..

• Cliquer sur le menu présentation, et choisir le style de votre site ainsi que les paramètre de couleurs.
• Cliquer sur le menu gérer, pour ajouter des catégories, liens et modifier vos articles.
• Appuyer sur le bouton écrire et publier ce que vous aimez… ou détestez!

C’est pas plus compliqué que ça!

Si vous avez des questions additionnels, visite le forum

Partager ce billet