TechTalk

Publishing WarsAnyone who thinks that the e-book market is dominated by Amazon may have to revise their opinion. Barnes and Noble (B&N), the world’s largest bookseller, this week launched a new e-bookstore that it claims is the world’s largest. B&N also said its e-books will be available on the eReader of Plastic Logic, to be launched next year. This is in direct competition with Amazon and its wireless reading kit Kindle, which is supposed to have 80 per cent share of the US market for digital books.B&N’s new store will have 700,000 titles, and bestsellers can be downloaded for $9.99 (about Rs 500) — the same price that Amazon offers to Kindle subscribers. But unlike Amazon, whose e-books are available only on Kindle, B&N’s offerings will be available on many platforms: iPod, touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, laptops and desktops, not to speak of the coming eReader. The store also has half a million public books from Google that are downloadable for free. This is obviously the beginning of a new war in e-books publishing, and publishing itself.
BloombergTest Of Swine Flu Vaccine BeginsCSL, an Australian company that makes vaccines, has begun testing the first swine flu vaccine in the world. Healthcare organisations, immunologists and pharma companies around the world will watch the outcome with interest because the ultimate dose of the vaccine will be determined from it. Many firms are developing vaccines for swine flu, which is now expected to return in a few months to the northern hemisphere.Virologists have recently said that Swine flu is more dangerous than they thought so far, and that it could kill far more people when it returns during the flu season. Vaccines and antiviral drugs are our defence against the disease. For the vaccine to work well, we need to determine how much antigen — the weakened or killed virus, or its part — a person needs to trigger a satisfactory immune response. The first trials are supposed to determine this, and the result is necessary to calculate how many doses of vaccine companies will be able to make this year. In the US, President Barack Obama has already set aside $1.85 billion in emergency funds to tackle an epidemic this year.
BloombergPesticide Link To DiabetesConventional wisdom — and recent medical knowledge — suggests that diabetes is caused by genes, a lazy lifestyle and eating a high- calorie diet. You may not be in control of your genes yet, but eating right and exercising are supposed to ward off this dreaded disease. But now a new study says that pesticides can cause diabetes. And scientists based their findings on specific pesticides that are break-down products of DDT. Although US had banned the use of DDT decades ago, their break-down products are seen still in the bodies of people. So, what about India, which still uses the chemical for controlling malaria?
Scientists at the University of Illinois in Chicago studied people who eat fish from the great lakes. They are still full of chemicals that are break-down products of DDT, and get concentrated in larger and carnivorous fish. The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, showed an unambiguous link between diabetes and DDE, a DDT metabolite. The higher the concentration of DDE in the blood, the stronger the association with diabetes. The study is the latest in a series that suggests a link between environmental chemicals and diabetes. It is well-known that India has one of the largest concentrations of such pollutants. Is that also why there is a diabetes epidemic here?
(Businessworld Issue Dated 28 Jul-03 Aug 2009)