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Gurren Lagann

JANGAN CEPAT MENGALAH!! JANGAN MUDAH PUTUS ASA!!! Itu lah diantara kesan positif yang terkesan kepada diriku selepas menghabiskan 27 episod Gurren Lagann. Pergh!! Inilah diantara anime yang paling padat dengan aksi-maksi tempur yang penuh dengan semangat membara yang meluap-luap!!

Gurren Lagann bukanlah sebuah anime mecha yang standard. Ia lain daripada yang lain! Tolonglah jangan samakan Gurren Lagann dengan anime Gundam , Macross, Linebarrel atau Code Geas. Anime bergenre mecha ini mempunyai aksi tempur mecha gergasi yang lebih mirip kepada anime mecha era 70an dan 80an seperti Voltron atau Saber Rider And The Star Sheriff (Kedua-duanya anime kesukaan aku waktu kecik-kecik dulu selain Robotech). Walaupun begitu, aksinya lebih lancar dan segar, dan yang paling utama, LEBIH SEMANGAT PERJUANGAN! Dalam ertikata yang lain, Gurren Lagann mengambil semua unsur-unsur pop anime mecha era Voltron itu dan di olah semula dengan teknik animasi yang terkini dan diberi jalan cerita yang lebih emosi. Hasilnya, lahirlah satu anime aksi mecha yang yang sangat menyengat dan bombastik!

Ringkasnya, Gurren Lagan mengisahkan tentang seorang remaja lelaki yang naif serta lemah yang bernama Simon. Simon adalah sebahagian dari masyarakat yang tinggal dibawah tanah. Dirinya serta masyarakat bawah tanahnya tidak pernah menaiki ke permukaan bumi dan melihat langit. Mereka telah dibelenggu dengan pelbagai peraturan dan mitos yang melarang mereka naik ke permukaan sejak dari zaman nenek moyang lagi. Simon mempunyai seorang abang angkat yang bernama Kamina. Kamina merupakan seorang lelaki yang mempunyai perasaan ingin tahu yang tinggi, berjiwa kental, tidak mudah mengalah, dan seorang lelaki yang tidak menelan bulat-bulat satu kisah yang tidak dipastikan kebenarannya. Semangat ingin tahu yang tinggi Kamina ini telah menjadi daya penolak kepada sifat lesu Simon untuk meneroka ke atas bumi.

Akhirnya, dengan berbekalkan sebuah mecha yang hanya berbentuk kepala, Simon dan Kamina berjaya menembusi ke permukaan bumi! Mecha ini ditemui oleh Simon ketika menjadi penggali ketika dibawah tanah. Mecha inilah dinamakan Gurren Lagann oleh Kamina.

Tetapi, kehadiran pertama mereka ke permukaan bumi setelah dihalau oleh masyarakat bawah tanahnya yang masih mahu mengekalkan cara hidup kuno itu disambut dengan satu mecha yang dikendalikan sejenis mahkluk yang bukan manusia. Mecha yang dipandu mereka ini dinamakan Gunmen. Makhluk-makhluk ini telah diarahkan oleh satu kuasa supaya menekan atau menghapuskan mana-mana manusia yang mahu naik ke permukaan bumi.

Tetapi, Simon dan Kamina tidak mahu menyerah kepada nasib begitu sahaja. Mereka yakin bahawa mereka ada hak untuk hidup di permukaan bumi ini. Lalu, dengan semangat yang kental dan membara, mereka menghadapi satu demi satu pertempuran yang penuh dengan aksi –aksi yang menggegarkan skrin anda sehingga nak pecah!!

Walaubagaimanapun!

Anime ini memang TIDAK SESUAI untuk kanak-kanak atau mereka yang belum dapat berfikir dengan waras. Walaupun sekali imbas, anime ini nampak santai, dan mempunyai rekabentuk watak,anime, mesin serta mecha yang tidaklah terlalu teliti dan kurang cantik bagi peminat Gundam, Macross, atau Code Geass. Tetapi percayalah, idea yang dibawa oleh anime Gurren Lagann ini lebih berat dari Gundam 00 mahupun Macross Frontier. Ia lebih dekat kepada anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, sebuah anime yang memang terbaik dari segi aksi-maksinya, tetapi sangatlah terpesong akidahnya. Cuma Gurren Lagann tidaklah mencapai tahap terpesong akidah yang melampau seperti Evangelion itu. Aksi-maksi bombastik serta gejolak emosi yang membadai hubungan antara watak-wataknya sedikit menggelamkan idea Darwinism yang dibawanya. Tidak terlalu major seperti Evangelion. Perkara ini juga tidak menghairankan kerana Gurren Lagann dihasilkan studio yang sama menghasilkan anime Evangelion, studio Gainax.

Jika ditolak unsur-unsur masonik yang ada dalam Gurren Lagann ini (anime-anime Gainax memang selalunya ada unsur masonik), memang banyak nilai-nilai positif yang boleh kita dapat. Kesimpulannya, sila tonton atas risiko sendiri.

Diantara dialog yang aku tidak boleh lupa dari Gurren Lagann ialah kata-kata sewaktu Kamina cuba meniup keyakinan kedalam diri Simon yang sentiasa dalam keadaan cepat lemah semangat ketika menghadapi serangan-serangan musuh.

“Jangan yakini dirimu. Yakinlah kepada Kamina yang yakin akan Simon!”

Dan satu lagi ketika Kamina sudah luka parah dan sudah hampir mati ketika mereka bertempur hebat dengan salah seorang jeneral Lord Genome iaitu Lord Thylmilph serta anak buah General Adiane iaitu Viral.

“Dengar baik-baik Simon,yakinlah akan dirimu. Bukan kepada Simon yang aku yakini, bukan juga kepada Kamina yang engkau yakini.Tetapi percayalah kepada Simon yang meyakini dirimu!”

Kata-kata kedua ini diucapkan oleh Kamina kepada Simon kerana dia tahu Simon sangat bergantung kepada dirinya. Jadi dia cuba menyedarkan Simon bahawa Simon perlu tabah untuk menjalani hidup selepas kematiannya nanti.

Akhir kata. Gurenn Lagann menjanjikan aksi tempur mecha yang terbaik serta unik bagi para penonton. Ia cemerlang dalam kelasnya yang tersendiri!

US Government Paid Dutch Researchers To Mutate Deadly H5N1 Virus And Make It Go AIRBORNE!!!

The young scientist, normally calm and measured, seemed edgy when he stopped by his boss’s office.

“You are not going to believe this one,” he told Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. “I think we have an airborne H5N1 virus.”

The news, delivered one afternoon last July, was chilling. It meant that Dr. Fouchier’s research group had taken one of the most dangerous flu viruses ever known and made it even more dangerous – by tweaking it genetically to make it more contagious.

What shocked the researchers was how easy it had been, Dr. Fouchier said. Just a few mutations was all it took to make the virus go airborne.

The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile governments or rogue scientists.

Journal editors are taking the recommendation seriously, even though they normally resist any form of censorship. Scientists, too, usually insist on their freedom to share information, but fears of terrorism have led some to say this information is too dangerous to share.

Some biosecurity experts have even said that no scientist should have been allowed to create such a deadly germ in the first place, and they warn that not just the blueprints but the virus itself could somehow leak or be stolen from the laboratory.

Dr. Fouchier is cooperating with the request to withhold some data, but reluctantly. He thinks other scientists need the information.

The naturally occurring A(H5N1) virus is quite lethal without genetic tinkering. It already causes an exceptionally high death rate in humans, more than 50 percent. But the virus, a type of bird flu, does not often infect people, and when it does, they almost never transmit it to one another.

If, however, that were to change and bird flu were to develop the ability to spread from person to person, scientists fear that it could cause the deadliest flu pandemic in history.

The experiment in Rotterdam transformed the virus into the supergerm of virologists’ nightmares, enabling it to spread from one animal to another through the air. The work was done in ferrets, which catch flu the same way people do and are considered the best model for studying it.

“This research should not have been done,” said Richard H. Ebright, a chemistry professor and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University who has long opposed such research. He warned that germs that could be used as bioweapons had already been unintentionally released hundreds of times from labs in the United States and predicted that the same thing would happen with the new virus.

“It will inevitably escape, and within a decade,” he said.

But Dr. Fouchier and many public health experts argue that the experiment had to be done.

If scientists can make the virus more transmissible in the lab, then it can also happen in nature, Dr. Fouchier said.

Knowing that the risk is real should drive countries where the virus is circulating in birds to take urgent steps to eradicate it, he said. And knowing which mutations lead to transmissibility should help scientists all over the world who monitor bird flu to recognize if and when a circulating strain starts to develop pandemic potential.

“There are highly respected virologists who thought until a few years ago that H5N1 could never become airborne between mammals,” Dr. Fouchier said. “I wasn’t convinced. To prove these guys wrong, we needed to make a virus that is transmissible.”

Other virologists differ. Dr. W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University questioned the need for the research and rejected Dr. Fouchier’s contention that making a virus transmissible in the laboratory proves that it can or will happen in nature. But Richard J. Webby, a virologist at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, said Dr. Fouchier’s research was useful, with the potential to answer major questions about flu viruses, like what makes them transmissible and how some that appear to infect only animals can suddenly invade humans as well.

“I would certainly love to be able to see that information,” Dr. Webby said, explaining that he has a freezer full of bird flu viruses from all over the world. “If I detect a virus in our activities that has some of these changes, it could change the direction of what we do.”

Some scientists dismiss fears of bioterrorism via influenza, because flu viruses would not make practical weapons: they cannot be targeted, and they would also infect whoever deployed them.

Dr. Fouchier said it would be easier to weaponize other germs. Which ones? He would not answer.

“That should tell you something,” he said. “I won’t tell you what I as a virologist would use, but I would publish this work.”

However, some experts argue that appeals to logic are useless.

“You can’t know who might try to re-create H5N1,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

The A(H5N1) bird flu was first recognized in Hong Kong in 1997, when chickens in poultry markets began dying and 18 people fell ill, 6 of them fatally. Hoping to stamp out the virus, the government in Hong Kong destroyed the country’s entire poultry industry – killing more than a million birds – in just a few days. Buddhist monks and nuns in Hong Kong prayed for the souls of the slaughtered chickens, and world health officials praised Hong Kong for averting a potential pandemic.

But the virus persisted in other parts of Asia, and reached Europe and Africa; that worries scientists, because most bird flus emerge briefly and then vanish. Millions of infected birds have died, and many millions more have been slaughtered. Since 1997, about 600 humans have been infected, and more than half died.

Dr. Donald A. Henderson, a leader in the eradication of smallpox and now a biosecurity expert at the University of Pittsburgh, noted that even the notorious flu pandemic of 1918 killed only 2 percent of patients.

“This is running at 50 percent or more,” Dr. Henderson said. “This would be the ultimate organism as far as destruction of population is concerned.”

Dr. Fouchier was working on AIDS when the first bird flu outbreak occurred. He immediately became fascinated by the new disease and gave up AIDS to study it. He has worked on bird flu for more than a decade.

The medical center in Rotterdam built a special 1,000-square-foot virus lab for this work, a locked-down place where people work in spacesuits in sealed chambers with filtered air and multiple precautions to keep germs in and intruders out and to protect the scientists from infection. Dr. Fouchier said that even more security measures had been added recently because of the publicity about his work.

The Dutch government and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the laboratory, and the National Institutes of Health gave the Erasmus center a seven-year contract for flu research.

Because a government advisory panel has recommended that the full recipe for mutating the bird flu virus not be published, Dr. Fouchier declined to explain much about how it was done.

But he previously described the work at a public meeting, and various publications have reported that the experiment involved creating mutations in the virus and then squirting it into the respiratory tracts of ferrets. When the ferrets got sick, the researchers would collect their nasal secretions and expose other ferrets to the virus. After repetitions of this process, a strain of virus emerged from sick ferrets last summer that could infect animals in nearby cages without being squirted into them – just by traveling through the air.

The published reports say five mutations were all it took to transform the virus. Dr. Fouchier declined to confirm or deny that, and would say only that it took “a handful” of mutations.

Looking back on that day in July with Sander Herfst, the member of his team who told him the virus had gone airborne, Dr. Fouchier said, “We both needed a beer to recover from the shock.”

Then they planned their next step, repeating the experiment to make sure the results were reliable. There was one major obstacle: they had run out of ferrets. They ordered a new shipment from Scandinavia. So they had to wait several weeks to find out whether their discovery was real. Dr. Herfst took a vacation, timed to end the day the ferrets arrived.

They ran the tests again. Once more, A(H5N1) went airborne.

Sumber: Sini

First Blood

Chee..wah..! First blood la kononnya. Rasanya lebih baik dipanggil first lebam. Tapi lebam yang hampir pecah untuk berdarah. Yargh! Sebenarnya terdapat lagi beberapa lebam di bahagian badan aku ini. Juga terdapat beberapa luka di jari-jari ini. Dari mana lebam-lebam ini datang? Yargh! Dari peluru cat yang ditembak oleh musuh-musuh palsu aku ketika bertempur sakan dalam permainan paintball yang pertama kali aku main baru-baru ini.

Aku main tiga game dan juga terbang RM35 selepas itu. Perlawanan pertama, team aku menang. Kami main mod serang dan bertahan (attack and defend). Pasukan aku akan cuba menawan sebuah pondok yang dijadikan tempat bertahan pasukan musuh. Corak permainannya agak lambat dan kurang agresif. Tetapi memerlukan strategi yang lebih teliti dan kemahiran menembak jarak jauh.

Game kedua, kami main CQB (Close Quarter Battle) atau tempur jarak dekat. Padangnya sedikit kecil dari padang pada perenggan di atas. Yang ini memang aku suka! Kerana apa? Ia lebih agresif! Memerlukan lebih stamina dan kepantasan untuk menang! Juga lebih daya tahan sakit kerana aksi tembak-menembaknya lebih dekat! ADOI!! Dan aku terkena eye-shot dua kali di sini! Pergh!! Nasib baik pakai topeng. Kalau tidak, jadi Kasim Selamatlah aku. Kat sini juga salah seorang rakan aku terkena ass-shot! Hahaha!! Aku yang tembak. Hahaha!!!

Pengalaman pertama bermain paintball ini memang mengujakan! Memang best! Cuma yang sakitnya, pelurunya mahal! Adus! Baik main cakplong.