When COVID-19 cases nearly doubled on March 14—skyrocketing from 64 a day before to 111—President Rodrigo Duterte responded by placing Luzon on Enhanced Community Quarantine, restricting land, air, and sea travel; suspending mass transport facilities; and prohibiting mass gatherings, among other enforced guidelines. Responding to the severity of the pandemic, the Department of Health (DOH)…
Category: Vanguard
As we continue to explore the evolutionary puzzle of human origins, we often unearth previously unknown facts and develop theories about how modern humans came to be. One such study—co-authored by Dr. Alan Rogers, Dr. Nathan Harris, and Alan Achenbach of the University of Utah—has recently documented the earliest known interbreeding event between ancient human…
One in every five Filipino adults use Facebook to access and consume news, a Social Weather Stations survey conducted in 2019 revealed. While television remains the chief source of news for about 60 percent of Filipinos, Facebook places second, surpassing radio stations and newspapers. By racking up likes and shares, news on Facebook and other…
Last March 13, a webinar titled COVID-19 and Me: How Do We Cope?—Part 2 was hosted online by Ateneo de Manila University. The event was part of the IPC eTuro UHC Webinar Series 2020, which aimed to shed light on the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications on public health and safety. Dr. Regina Berba from…
Since the commercialization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones, multiple industries’ operations—such as those in photography and creatives, and specimen collection in scientific research—have been modified to incorporate the use of these technologies. With the potential utilization of UAVs in multiple disciplines, X-LIPAD, the Philippines’ first UAV technology-focused research team, along with De La…
Typically utilized in visualizing Engineering problems, process graphs (P-graphs) serve to represent the structure of process systems, and are considered bipartite graphs—where vertices of a distinct set are connected to vertices in a separate set that does not share any common element with the first set. Its application in the field of Ecology was explored…
Last March 20, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) officially declared the start of the country’s dry season—not summer, the weather bureau clarified—which marked the end of the northeast monsoon or Amihan. Along with the temperatures peaking this dry season, the sun is also at its maximum elevation, reaching its peak at…
With more than four million confirmed cases and around 300,000 deaths worldwide as of early May, countries are scrambling to control the relentless spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). With only seven recorded deaths so far, Taiwan is among the most successful countries to respond to the pandemic. To learn from Taiwan’s example in combating…
Driven by advancements in technologies, the field of Biomedical Engineering, which deals with the application of Engineering principles to areas such as Biology and Health Sciences, has taken leaps and strides since its establishment. What started as a specialization for BS in Manufacturing Engineering and Management (MEM) students has now grown more prominent through the…
From cartridges to memory cards
My very first console came in the form of the Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP—cobalt blue, compact and portable, with a screen around double the size as that of a digital camera. It felt unreal at first, switching it on for the first time and seeing the graphics come to life of whichever game was…