KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction for his second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists.
He travelled from his home in South Africa to be at the ceremony in Melrose in the Scottish Borders. He received his prize from the Duke of Buccleuch at a special event during the Borders Book Festival.
The Garden of Evening Mists is the first novel by an overseas writer to have won the four-year-old prize.
HIV drug helps risk groups
BANGKOK: A clinical trial in Thailand has concluded a medication used to treat patients infected with HIV can also act as an effective prevention for all groups at high risk of acquiring the virus that causes AIDS. The United States-supported study showed the anti-retroviral drug Tenofovir cut the risk of HIV in half among injected drug users, the last high risk group to be tested.
Researchers from the United States and Thailand said a clinical trial of a medicine to prevent the spread of HIV showed a 49 percent reduction in risk among injected drug users.
A food bar for evacuees
MANILA: Nutritionists and other scientists from the Philippine Department of Science and Technology have come up with a highly nutritious “compressed food bar” recommended to be served at evacuation centres during disasters.
Food scientists and technologists from the Food and Nutrition Research Institute said the cereal-legume food mix can be prepared without cooking. It is said to be highly nutritious because of the mixture of milk, vegetable fat and sugar that is added in its preparation.
A machine developed for the food’s mass production can make as many as 600,000 packets of compressed food with four pieces in one packet.
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