Your ticket to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the rest of South Asia
From TED Talks: Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.
In a village in Kerala, something extraordinary is happening. The phenomenally high rate of twins born there far exceeds the national average, presenting medical researchers with a mystery that is as yet unsolved. Vinita Bharadwaj in The National:
The latest survey, from December 2009, counted 265 pairs of twins in the village, which is home to about 3,000 families and 13,000 inhabitants. This equates to a twinning rate of about 30 to 35 per 1,000 live births within a radius of about 500 metres. The average in the rest of the country is 8.1 per 1,000 live births.
The anomaly has caused a sensation in research circles and generated enormous national and international media interest in Kodinji in the past two years.
The number of reporters and researchers arriving unannounced is growing, not always to the delight of the villagers. Tucked away in the lush green northern parts of Kerala, Kodinji is a small village in the Malappuram district. It is a quiet, unassuming village with the noticeable signs of Gulf money pouring in to sustain its people. Small billboards advertising abaya fashion dot the road leading to the village and large multi-storeyed houses with wild gardens of banana and coconut trees function as symbols of prosperity.
At the day-long camp, 175 pairs of twins from the village, dressed in their Sunday best, are examined by a team of doctors led by Dr Sribiju, a dermatologist and geriatrician, who goes by one name. The doctors measure the twins’ height and weight and note down the vitals of each participant. A dietician then interviews the twins and their parents for a nutritional assessment. One of the examiners, who prefers not to give their name, later says the preliminary observations did not indicate any outward abnormalities in the twins’ health and well-being. More:
A life-sized reconstruction of the moment just before the dinosaur hatching and snake were preserved. The scales and patterning of the snake's skin is based on its modern relatives. The coloration of the hatchling is the artist's interpretation. / Sculpture by Tyler Keillor/Photo by Ximena Erickson/Image modified by Bonnie Miljour
Christpher Joyce at National Public Radio:
Scientists have discovered a macabre death scene that took place 67 million years ago. The setting was a nest, in which a baby dinosaur had just hatched from an egg, only to face an 11-foot-long snake waiting to devour it.
The moment was frozen forever when, apparently, the nest was buried in a sudden avalanche of mud or sand and everything was fossilized.
The discovery was made by Jeffrey Wilson, a professor at the University of Michigan. He had heard about the amazing fields of dinosaur eggs discovered in India.
Wilson visited a scientist in India who showed him a broken, fossilized egg encased in a briefcase-sized block of stone. He leaned in to take a closer look and saw something else.
“I was stunned when I saw it,” Wilson says, “because, sort of leaping out at me, were the peculiar articulations between the vertebrae of a snake, and so I had no idea that there would be a snake there but there it was sitting in front of me.” More:
A.K. Pradeep, founder of NeuroFocus
How does it feel to know that the seller knows your mind better than you know yourself? And this isn’t science fiction either. Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:
The founder of NeuroFocus, the world’s biggest neuromarketing firm, is AK Pradeep, a PhD in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Five years ago, having moved from designing satellites to management consultancy, he found himself sitting next to a neuroscientist on a flight back from Atlanta: “I had just had a meeting with someone senior at Coke. He had been telling me that despite spending $3 billion on marketing and another $3 billion on indirect marketing, he was not sure what precisely he got out of it. This was still on my mind when I asked the neuroscientist what he did. He told me he helps children with attention deficit disorders, adults with emotional problems, and he works with the aged suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It struck me that this was exactly what the man at Coke was looking for. How do you get people to pay attention? How do you engage them emotionally, and how do you ensure they remember what is being said to them? Can’t I apply what he was doing in the clinic to what was happening?”
The team of neuroscientists, market researchers and business experts that Pradeep got together has devised what is now the most widely used neuromarketing model. Among their clients are companies such as Google, PayPal, Microsoft and CBS. Google, for example, used NeuroFocus to test its InVideo Ads that were launched on YouTube(with good reason, given the results). More:
Saritha Rai from Bangalore at GlobalPost:
In a building smack in the middle of chaotic Hyderabad, an hour’s flight from Bangalore, 29-year-old American Brad Fister recently got acquainted with the delirious joy of first-time parenthood.
Fister and his partner Michael Griebe, who own a computer business in Kentucky, contracted a womb from an Indian surrogate mother thousands of miles away in Hyderabad. Their daughter Ashton, conceived in a laboratory out of Fister’s sperm and an anonymous donor’s egg, was born in mid-February.
India has long been the go-to destination for a diversity of outsourced tasks such as answering customer service calls, online tech support and high-end technology services.
Now Americans — and increasingly gay American couples — are follwing American corporations into the world of oursourcing. More:
From TED:
At Pawan Sinha’s MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.
In this talk, Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
India-born scientist-CEO K.R. Sridhar has unveiled his “Bloom Box,” a power plant in a box that could eliminate the traditional grid. He provided a sneak peek over the weekend.
Sridhar is the principal co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy. Prior to founding the company, Dr. Sridhar was a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering as well as Director of the Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Sridhar received his Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering with Honors from the University of Madras, India, as well as his M.S. in Nuclear Engineering and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Below, from The Times of India:
At its heart, Sridhar’s Bloom Box claims to be a game-changing fuel cell device that consists of a stack of ceramic disks coated with secret green and black “inks.” The disks are separated by cheap metal plates. Stacking the ceramic disks into a bread loaf-sized unit, says Sridhar, can produce one kilowatt of electricity, enough to power an American home – or four Indian homes.
The unit can be scaled up, installed anywhere, and be connected to an electrical grid just like you would connect your PC to the Internet. Hydrocarbons such as natural gas or biofuel (stored separately) are pumped into the Bloom Box to produce clean, scaled-up, and reliable electricity. The company says the unit does not vibrate, emits no sound, and has no smell, although Sridhar admits to some initial, but minor, glitches at some installations.
A hoax it is not, although some are suggesting there is a lot of hype around the launch — somewhat like with that of the Segway transporter that was much bally-hooed but did not live up to its billing. As with Segway, the big catch right now is cost. Large-sized Bloom Boxes of the kind installed at some Silicon Valley campuses costs around $ 700,000 to $ 800,000. Sridhar estimates that a Bloom Box for the residential market could be out within a decade for as little as $3,000 to produce electricity 24/7/365. “In five to ten years, we would like to be in every home,” Sridhar told CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday night. More:
The sneak peak has generated a lot of buzz on the net: See here, here, here
Top points to Samar Halarnkar who has the case for and against BT Brinjal clearly cut out in the Hindustan Times. Cogent, balanced and everything you need to know and understand about why Bt Brinjal has everyone — Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, environmentalists, NGOs, farmers and scientists — so worked up.
In 1997, in a field outside Delhi, government regulators forced scientists at the State-run Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) to destroy India’s first field of locally designed killer brinjals (aubergines or eggplants to the rest of the world).
India is littered with State institutions that fail their purpose or flatly refuse to crack down on erring colleagues, so the 1997 move against the government-grown brinjals was extraordinary. These were no ordinary brinjals. In the invisible reaches of their DNA, scientists had spliced in a gene that let the brinjals kill a caterpillar, which bores holes into it and forces farmers to use costly and poisonous pesticides. But the IARI scientists lost their field of dreams because they had not followed some of the safety procedures required. more
And from the Indian Express:
Bt brinjal is on indefinite hold because the Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, has said there are many questions still to be answered. But the fact is there are many questions the minister needs to answer. We look at the Bt brinjal story from the day Ramesh took charge as Environment Minister, we assess the procedural changes he put in place, and we examine his argument that research in food science is best left to the public sector. As much as the decision he took, it’s also how he came to that decision that has raised troubling issues. More:
Researchers at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi have developed tomatoes genetically modified to stay fresh for 30 days longer. From The Telegraph, Calcutta:
Plant biologists in India have discovered two previously unknown genes that are involved in fruit ripening and shut them down to create what might be the world’s longest-lasting tomatoes.
The tomatoes developed at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, can retain their firmness and texture for up to 45 days without refrigeration, compared with ordinary tomatoes that shrink and lose texture in about 15 days.
The researchers at the NIPGR have applied their gene-silencing technology on tomatoes, but they say it may also, in theory, be used to increase the shelf life of mangoes, papayas and bananas.
“We’re not adding new genes into tomatoes — the shelf life is increased by shutting down two genes that make the fruits go soft,” said Asis Datta, the senior scientist at the NIPGR who led this research. More:
[Graphic: The Telegraph]
Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics and of the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey, in The Guardian:
There is no such thing as Islamic science – for science is the most universal of human activities. But the means to facilitating scientific advances have always been dictated by culture, political will and economic wealth. What is only now becoming clear (to many in the west) is that during the dark ages of medieval Europe, incredible scientific advances were made in the Muslim world. Geniuses in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Cordoba took on the scholarly works of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, India and China, developing what we would call “modern” science. New disciplines emerged – algebra, trigonometry and chemistry as well as major advances in medicine, astronomy, engineering and agriculture. Arabic texts replaced Greek as the fonts of wisdom, helping to shape the scientific revolution of the Renaissance. More:
From MIT World:
It’s rare to find research that simultaneously advances basic science and brings good into people’s lives, but Pawan Sinha’s Project Prakash does precisely that. An investigator of human visual processing, Sinha is interested in how these brain mechanisms develop. For his work, Sinha realized the ideal subjects would be individuals who developed sight after blindness. Since he could not ethically create such an experimental population, he had to “rely on natural experiments” — children born blind, but who recovered their vision.
Sinha found these subjects in his native India, which has the world’s highest number of blind children — more than one million. They are victims of Vitamin A deficiency, congenital cataracts, and absent or atrocious medical care. But salient to Sinha’s research, many of these blind children could be treated. He glimpsed a humanitarian and scientific opportunity, and Project Prakash (Sanskrit for light) was born. More:
Also read A vision for the future at MIT News.
Click here to watch part 2 and here for part 3
The ethnic group at the heart of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan may descended from their Jewish enemy, according to researchers in India. Dean Nelson in the London Telegraph:
Experts at Mumbai’s National Institute of Immunohaematology believe Pashtuns could be one of the ten “Lost Tribes of Israel”.
The Israeli government is funding a genetic study to establish if there is any proof of the link.
An Indian geneticist has taken blood samples from the Pashtun Afridi tribe in Lucknow, Northern India, to Israel where she will spend the next 12 months comparing DNA with samples with those of Israeli Jews.
The samples were taken in Lucknow’s Malihabad area because it was regarded as the only place safe enough to conduct such a controversial project for Muslims.
Shanaz Ali a senior research fellow, will lead the study at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Tel Aviv. More:
In India – where 4,000 year-old stories still inspire death threats – historians, mathematicians and nationalists are going to battle over an ancient civilisation’s script. S Subramanian reports. in The National:
In 1856, searching for stone to anchor the railway tracks they were building between Karachi and Lahore, William and John Brunton, engineers working for the East India Railway Company, followed the directions of local residents to the site of an old, ruined town. There, they found 93 miles of perfect, kiln-fired bricks – and discovered the remains of Harappa, one of the two chief cities of the Bronze Age civilisation in the Indus valley.
The Harappan ruins had been known previously, discovered by various explorers rambling around present-day Pakistan. But in the course of meticulously picking apart the bricks, the Bruntons unearthed enough artefacts to attract the attention of archeologists; their continued excavations revealed a record of an ancient civilisation whose urban ruins were scattered all across the vast Indus river basin.
The discovery of Harappa revised, in one stroke, existing theories of ancient Indian history. Until then, the earliest known Indians were believed to be the literate Hindus who lived by the Rig Veda in the Second millennium BC. Modern Hindus trace their origins to this “Vedic civilisation”, whose language and religion were considered wholly indigenous to the subcontinent. The existence of a separate pattern of settlement, an advanced civilisation predating the Vedic era by a few hundred years, raised confusing – and politically charged – questions. If the Indus Valley peoples were not Hindus, who were they? And where, then, did the Hindus come from? More:
From TED:
Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.
In an interview with Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk. From The Indian Express:
Tell us about your journey in science — you started off as a physicist.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: I originally thought I might go to medical school. And I got admitted to the Baroda Medical College , but I also appeared for the National Science Talent exam. That was at the encouragement of my mother. I made a deal with my father — that if I got the scholarship, then you shouldn’t force me to do anything. He wanted me to be a doctor. I got the scholarship, and while he was away, I transferred my admission from medical college to study physics. The clerk thought I’d made a mistake, and I actually meant the other way round.
For our generation, the first choice was medicine. Next was engineering. If you failed in both, you went for the IAS.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: One thing that motivated me was that a group of professors, some of whom had come back from the US, had completely modernised the curriculum. 30 years later, my son studied basically the same curriculum at Harvard. So that was a motivation for me to go into physics. Somewhere along the line I realised that I was not going to be a good physicist. I would just be doing some boring calculations and not have any real insight. I believe physics is on a difficult plane, because to make truly fundamental breakthroughs in physics is very hard now. At the same time, molecular biology was blossoming. It seemed every week there was an important discovery being made. More:
In the Sunday Express a report from Anand in Gujarat, India’s surrogacy hub and the story of a woman who rented her womb:
Ramilaben Solanki: "This time I am asking for Rs 5 lakh ($10,000) because I am too weak to keep doing it many more times."
Before she pressed her inked thumb on the contract agreement, they had made Ramilaben Solanki understand that she is a womb. No more, no less. They had told her that the baby would be no part of her flesh and blood. That she was its shell, only a shell.
But sitting in the dark of her single-room, tin-roofed hovel—home to nine more people in her extended family—this 27-year-old domestic help in Gujarat’s Anand is still fighting to come to terms with herself. She thinks that the “pink infant with the golden hair and light brown eyes” of his American father, the one she bore and delivered, had come of her. Not through her.
For seven days and nights after, until the American couple from Wisconsin, US—whose sperm, ovum and money helped make her baby—flew in, Ramila had fed him her milk, sung him to sleep. She had also whispered in his ears that he is Deep, younger brother to her own five-year-old daughter, Deepali. More:
[Photo: The Indian Express]
Dr Mark Turin in the Independent. Dr Turin is a linguistic anthropologist specialised in the Himalayas:
In the beginning, there was only water. The gods held a meeting to decide how to develop this vast expanse. First they created a type of small insect, but these insects couldn’t find a place to live since there was only water and no solid land. Consequently, the gods created fish which could live in the water. The insects took to living on the fins of the fish, which stuck far enough out of the water to allow the insects to breathe. The insects collected river grass and mixed it with mud in order to build dwellings on the fins of the fish in each of the four directions: south, west, north, and east.
Then a lotus flower arose spontaneously out of the water, with the god Vishnu seated in the middle. Out of the four directions of the lotus flower came an army of ants. The ants killed all of the fish-dwelling insects and destroyed their houses. The ants took the mud that the insects had used for their dwellings and left, gathering another species of grass as they went. They mixed this with the mud to construct new houses. Then the snake deities arose. It was still dark, so the sun was created. More:
Also in the Independent:
In a small office room in the back of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology – a place in which you almost expect Harrison Ford to walk around the corner at any moment, fedora on head, whip in hand – Turin looks over the contents of a box that arrived earlier in the morning from India. “[The receptionists] are quite used to getting these boxes now,” says the 36-year-old anthropologist, who is based at the university. Inside the box, which is covered in dozens of rupee postage stamps, are DVDs representing hours of chants, songs, poems and literature from a tiny Indian community that is desperate for its language to have a voice and be included in Turin’s venture.
For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of their culture. The stories they tell are creative works as well as communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few indigenous communities – from the Kallawaya tribe in Bolivia and the Maka in Paraguay to the Siberian language of Chulym, to India’s Arunachal Pradesh state Aka group and the Australian Aboriginal Amurdag community – have recorded their own languages or ever had them recorded. Until now. Turin launched the World Oral Literature Project earlier this year with an aim to document and make accessible endangered languages before they disappear without trace. More:
Click here for the Digital Himalaya Project and here for Himalayan Languages Project.
To see and hear recordings of the Thangmi in Nepal, click here.
Fed up with foreign companies patenting traditional medicine from India, the country’s top scientific body is compiling a giant database of everything from yoga positions to medicinal fruit juice. An AFP report at Physorg.com:
The initiative has had early success since going public in February, repelling two foreign patent applications in July — one for a skin cream based on melon extract and another for a cancer medicine based on pistachios.
Another 30 cases are being examined worldwide, drawing on the database which aims to prove medical precedents and therefore undercut attempts by companies to patent knowledge that has been passed down over generations in India.
V.K. Gupta, the head of this library, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), told AFP he hoped the database would provide a cheap and easy system to prevent “wrong patents” based on Indian naturopathy.
“Nobody in the world has a right to take our knowledge, repackage it and claim it as theirs,” said Gupta, who works for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
The TKDL already contains 30 million pages and more than 200,000 medicinal formulas derived from herbal and mineral-based treatments originating in India and abroad, such as ayurveda, unani, siddha, as well as yoga techniques. More:
From Newsweek:
Sudhir Paul
Last summer, while watching a news program about a possible AIDS vaccine, Zach Barnett had a “Eureka!” moment. The show was describing a Texas scientist’s unorthodox approach to vaccine-making, a strategy that involved superantigens and covalent bonds and a lot of other words that weren’t in Barnett’s vocabulary. That didn’t matter; the science turned him on anyway. “It was just so cool,” he says. “I was like, ‘lightbulb!’ “
For years, Barnett, a fashion publicist, had been trying to get involved in AIDS activism, but mainstream organizations had told him there wasn’t much for him to do, save passing out brochures. “That was a waste of my talent,” he says. Here he saw a use for his skills. He wrote to the scientist, Dr. Sudhir Paul of the University of Texas, to tell him that “if what he was saying was true, he was doing a bad job of publicizing it.” To show he was serious, he offered Paul $50 out of his own pocket to support the research. More:
Previously on AW: A vaccine for HIV?
Also read ScienceDaily: Pathologists Believe They Have Pinpointed Achilles Heel Of HIV
From the Telegraph, London:
The Gatecrashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi with Vice-President Joe Biden in a screen image from Facebook page.
Like many suburban couples, Michaele and Tareq Salahi clearly aspire to greater things in life. The former cheerleader and her husband enjoy a spot of polo, run a winery near their home in Virginia, and like to rub shoulders with local movers and shakers. Indeed, when the most powerful couple they know of recently hosted a glittering party for a visiting friend, they decided to try and gatecrash. It would be their chance to mingle with the great and good, the stinking-rich and the well-connected. Who could possibly resist such temptation?
Well, most of us, actually. For the hosts of said party were Barack and Michelle Obama and the venue, naturally, was the White House. Yet somehow, on Tuesday, the Salahis managed to brazen their way past the Secret Service, the many layers of security screenings that one might expect at a do thrown by the most powerful man on the planet, and into the South Lawn tent where the state dinner in honour of the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was taking place. More:
And more about the party at The Daily Beast:
The most anticipated moment of the evening came when a member of the White House communications team emerged around 8 p.m. to brief the press on Michelle Obama’s outfit. “It’s a gold strapless dress,” the woman said, gesturing to her décolletage. “By Naeem Khan. N-A-E-E…” Khan, an Indian-born designer who started his own label in 2003, having thus been blessed with the Mobama fashion seal of approval, must have had a pretty good night.
“Michelle Obama is not following type,” said Wall Street Journal columnist Teri Agins, who predicted the strapless gown hours in advance. “We’ve seen her wear cardigans to meet Queen Elizabeth. We’ve seen her wear walking shorts on Air Force One. We’ve seen her wear Target and the Gap and White House Black Market; she’s just all over the place. And I just kind of think: I wonder if this has now set a new tone in Washington.”
Who sat where:
PRESIDENT’S TABLE
Mrs. Gursharan Kaur, India’s First Lady
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass)
Ambassador to India Tim Roemer
Mary Johnston, Roemer’s guest (likely a relative of his wife, Sally Johnston Roemer)
Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Paul Pelosi, her husband
David Geffen, the Hollywood titan
Jeremy Lingvall, Geffen’s boyfriend
FIRST LADY’S TABLE
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
Amrit Singh, the Prime Minister’s daughter, an ACLU lawyer in New York
Upinder Singh, another daughter, a Professor at University of Delhi
Dr. Amartya Sen, Nobel-prize winning economist, now at Harvard
Emma Rothschild, Dr. Sen’s wife, economic historian, now at Harvard
Gen. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State
Alma Powell, his wife
Rep. Howard Berman, (D-Calif.)
From the New York Times:
Many Indians bought their first mobile phones before they had their first experiences with personal computers. Pranav Mistry thinks that most of them might also skip keyboards and mice and go straight to more intuitive and interactive interfaces.
Pranav Mistry, speaking at the TEDIndia conference. Photo: TED
Mr. Mistry, a 28-year-old research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, demonstrated what one such interface might look like at the TEDIndia conference taking place this week in Mysore, India, about three hours west of Bangalore.
He calls it SixthSense, and it uses a camera and projector brought together in a pendant that is worn around the neck.
His prototype, and the software that powers it, works with smartphones and turns walls, sheets of paper and other surfaces into screens for, say, browsing the Web. The camera translates gestures into commands — for example, you can hold up both your hands to frame a scene and flick your thumb to take a picture. Aim the device at an airplane boarding pass and the projector flashes the status of your upcoming flight. Mr. Mistry even demonstrated a clever way to copy and paste text from a printed page. More:
From the Times, London:
Dr Geeta Shroff
Mumbai: An Indian doctor claims to be able to beat a variety of incurable or terminal illnesses using embryonic stem cells — and is charging as much as £30,000 for a single course of treatment.
Medical researchers are deeply sceptical of Geeta Shroff’s claims, and brand many rogue stem-cell physicians dangerous quacks offering expensive, unproven and potentially dangerous treatments that are banned in Britain.
Some of her patients, however, insist that they are getting better.
Dr Shroff says she has treated 700 people, including several Britons, since 2002, by injecting them with embryonic stem cells capable of replicating themselves and of giving rise to almost any specialised cell type. She says all the cells she uses are derived from a single unwanted embryo left over from an IVF treatment.
The results, she claims, have been remarkable. More:
A growing number of Muslims seem to accept the idea of a very old planet but reject human evolution, international academics said at a recent conference. From the New York Times:
For many Muslims, even evolution and the notion that life flourished without the intervening hand of Allah is largely compatible with their religion. What many find unacceptable is human evolution, the idea that humans evolved from primitive primates. The Koran states that Allah created Adam, the first man, separately out of clay.
Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominent atomic physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan, said that when he gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, the audience listened without objection to most of it. “Everything is O.K. until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoy said.
Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out. “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge,” he said. “Your lineage is what determines your worth.”
Biology education, even in places like Pakistan that otherwise teach evolution, largely omits the question of where humans came from. More:
The deepest part of the Shiva basin, in red in this elevation diagram, is three miles below the surface of the Indian Ocean
From Discovery News:
Dr Sankar Chatterjee
Off the west coast of India, there is a suspicious basin called Shiva. It forms a rough ring over 500 kilometers (311 miles) in diameter and has a central underwater peak the size of Mt. McKinley. Where it sweeps on shore, the land appears shattered and riddled with faults and geothermal hot springs.
If Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University is right, Shiva is the largest impact crater on the planet, the scar leftover from a cataclysm that had a hand in killing the dinosaurs.
The basin is a bonanza of oil and gas resources, and energy companies have been drilling in it for decades. Information on its rocks has trickled out slowly from company vaults, but Chatterjee has kept close tabs, suspecting for years that the region has a dramatic story to tell about a long-lost cosmic catastrophe.
So far the evidence he has assembled is mostly circumstantial. The bedrock that lines Shiva is rife with mantle rocks, as though Earth’s crust was simply obliterated across a huge area. And the areas dating to the moment of the suspected impact 65 million years ago are rich in iridium — a typical fingerprint of impacts. More
Also read The Hindu, The Telegraph of London, National Geographic
Scientists have long dreamed about turning thorium – which is less radioactive and produces less nuclear waste than uranium – into an alternative fuel for nuclear energy. From the New York Times:
India has been making advances in the field of thorium-based fuels, working to design and develop a prototype for an atomic reactor using thorium and low-enriched uranium.
The country has a long-term objective goal of becoming energy-independent based on its vast thorium resources, Anil Kakodkar, chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, said in a speech in Vienna in September.
Dr. Raja said that India’s new thorium reactor does not use an accelerator. Instead, it is a fast-breeder reactor and neutrons are produced by a plutonium core rather than an accelerator.
“The advantage of using an accelerator is that if something goes wrong, we can switch it off,” Dr. Raja said. Accelerator-based systems operate at subcriticality, which means they can produce fission without achieving a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. More:
Below, from World Nuclear News:
India has announced intentions to export power reactors to other nations and is developing an advanced design for that purpose. The head of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar, announced yesterday in Vienna a special version of the forthcoming Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) adapted to use low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel. More:
When India-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize for chemistry with two others, he was flooded with adulatory emails from India. He expressed disenchantment with people from India “bothering” him, “clogging” up his e-mail box and dubbed as “strange” their sudden urge to reach out to him. “There are also people who have never bothered to be in touch with me for decades who suddenly feel the urge to connect. I find this strange,” he said.
In a subsequent article in the Times of India, he clarified what he meant:
I am distressed by the reaction to my comment about being deluged by emails from India, and realize I have inadvertently hurt people, for which I apologize. I hope people realize that I have no personal secretary and use my email mainly for work, so finding important communications became very difficult.
I want to make it clear that I was delighted to hear from scientific colleagues and students whom I had met personally over the years in India and elsewhere, as well as close friends with whom I had lost touch. Unlike real celebrities like movie stars or people in sports, we scientists generally lead a quiet life, and are not psychologically equipped to handle publicity. So I found the barrage of emails from people whom I didn’t know or whom I only knew slightly almost 40 years ago (nearly all from Indians) difficult to deal with.
People have also taken offence at my comment about nationality being an accident of birth. However, they don’t seem to notice the first part of the sentence: We are all human beings. Accident or not, I remain grateful to all the dedicated teachers I had throughout my years. Others have said I have disowned my roots. More:
via Shunya’s Notes:
Dr. Sudhir Paul is a scientist at the very forefront of HIV research. A graduate of AIIMS, Delhi, he is currently Professor and Director of the Chemical Immunology Research Center at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Click here to link to an article that describes his research:
Scientists working to develop a vaccine for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) report they have created the first antigen that induces protective antibodies capable of blocking infection of human cells by genetically-diverse strains of HIV. The new antigen differs from previously-tested vaccines by virtue of its chemically-activated property that enables close sharing of electrons and produces strong covalent bonding.
Watch the video:
Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan, an India-born structural biologist whose quest for scientific excellence took him from undergraduate schools in India to graduate and post-doc studies in US and research in UK, has been named a joint winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry for helping to discover how cells transform genetic code into living matter. He is currently affiliated with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK
Ramakrishnan, 57, shares the award – and 10m Swedish kronor (£900,000) – with Thomas Steitz at Yale University, Connecticut, and Ada Yonath, the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel prize, at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot.
Ramakrishnan was born in the temple town of Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu in 1952. When he was two, his parents moved to Gujarat.
Both his parents, father C.V. Ramakrishnan and mother Rajalakshmi, were scientists and taught biochemistry at the Maharaj Sayajirao University until they retired in the eighties. The elder Ramakrishnan, now 85, lives in Seattle, where daughter Lalita – also a scientist – teaches. Rajalakshmi, who did pioneering work on developing child nutrition in India, passed away two years ago.
More here and here. His Wiki page here.
My son has always followed his heart: Times of India spoke to his father.
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The News, Pakistan:
It was mid-October 1973 when, after a gruelling 26-hour train ride from Karachi, I reached the physics department of Islamabad University (or Quaid-e-Azam University, as it is now known). As I dumped my luggage and “hold-all” in front of the chairman’s office, a tall, handsome man with twinkling eyes looked at me curiously. He was wearing a bright orange Che Guevara t-shirt and shocking green pants. His long beard, though shorter than mine, was just as unruly and unkempt. We struck up a conversation. At 23, I had just graduated from MIT and was to be a lecturer in the department; he had already been teaching as associate professor for five years. The conversation turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Together with Abdul Hameed Nayyar – also bearded at the time – we became known as the Sufis of Physics. Thirty six years later, when Faheem Hussain lost his battle against prostate cancer, our sadness was beyond measure.
Revolutionary, humanist, and scientist, Faheem Hussain embodied the political and social ferment of the late 1960s. With a Ph.D that he received in 1966 from Imperial College London, he had been well-placed for a solid career anywhere in the world. In a profession where names matter, he had worked under the famous P T Mathews in the group headed by the even better known Abdus Salam. After his degree, Faheem spent two years at the University of Chicago. This gave him a chance to work with some of the world’s best physicists, but also brought him into contact with the American anti-Vietnam war movement and a powerful wave of revolutionary Marxist thinking. Even decades later, Faheem would describe himself as an “unreconstructed Marxist”. Participating in the mass anti-war demonstrations at UC had stirred his moral soul; he felt the urge to do more than just physics. Now married to Jane Steinfels, a like-minded soul who he met in Chicago, Faheem decided to return to Pakistan. More:
From the Times:
Sujoy Guha, a biomedical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, believes that the most critical problems are a result of artificial hearts attempting to mimic the real thing.
The human heart has four chambers, but only the left ventricle is responsible for building the pressure that moves blood around the body. Depending on one chamber to do the hard work places this part of an artificial heart under enormous strain.
Dr Guha likens the process to trying to scale a four-foot rise in just one bound. “Do it too often and your knees will give way,” he said. “Much better to use a series of small steps.”
The sudden build-up of pressure inside conventional artificial hearts can also damage blood cells, Dr Guha said. This can lead to clotting and strokes, and means that patients must be given anti-coagulants, which place them at risk of severe bleeding. More:
