MANILA, Philippines - A retired Filipina marine scientist was one of five women scientists to receive a prestigious international award.

A report from abs-cbn online said that Professor Lourdes Cruz was the only awardee from the Asia-Pacific among the five scientists honored with the prestigious 12th Annual L’Oreal-UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) awards for women in science at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

The dragons were sitting in an elegant den at the Royal Society in London, Britain’s national academy of sciences. Overlooked by portraits of great 18th-century scientists, the judges heard four powerful pitches for science-based businesses.

These included an image analysis system to assess the facial mobility of people who are suffering from paralysing diseases or have had surgery on the face; a “text mining” tool to extract chemical information from the world’s scientific literature; an educational venture, called Big Bang in a Box, to sell images of high-energy particle collisions at Cern’s new atom smasher; and a lightweight material stronger than steel, for use in body armour and the aerospace industry.