A first of its kind at a taluk hospital, says Chief Medical Officer
Rajapalayam :
A total hip replacement surgery was performed on a 24-year-old youth, N. Saravanan of Avarampatti, at Rajapalayam Taluk Government Hospital on Thursday.
“This is the first time that a taluk hospital in the State has performed such an advanced surgery, with a costlier implant for the patient,” Chief Medical Officer N. Babuji said.
Mr. Saravanan developed septic arthritis, an infection in the bone, on his right hip joint three years back, and found it difficult to walk.
“When he came to us last month, we decided to conduct a total hip replacement, though we had not done it before at taluk hospitals,” Dr. Babuji said. The surgery was planned under Chief Minister’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme.
“Under the scheme, the patient was eligible only for a cheaper prosthesis that is normally used on aged patients. However, considering the young age of the patient, who needed to have artificial joints of longer life, we went for a costlier prosthesis. The additional cost for the prosthesis was borne by Rajapalayam MLA Thangapandian,” Dr. Babuji said.
A team of medical officers, led by Dr. Babuji, two orthopaedic surgeons, Murali and Jagan, and two anaesthetists, Mariappan and Rajesh Khanna, performed the surgery that lasted for three hours. The patient would be back on his feet within 10 days, he added.
Such an advanced surgery was possible at the taluk-level hospital only because of the availability of two sophisticated equipment – C-arm and digital X-ray machine. “The equipment, each costing ₹10 lakh, were donated by former chairman of Ramco Group Ramasubrahmaneya Rajha two years back,” the CMO said.
Since then, the taluk hospital had been performing hemiarthroplasty surgeries on aged patients of osteoporosis as well as road accident victims. “We have been doing at least four such surgeries every month, thanks to the C-arm and digital X-ray machine,” Dr. Babuji said.
The State Government had proposed to set up a full-fledged orthopaedic ward at the taluk hospital soon. Funds to the tune of ₹1.5 crore for a CT-scan had already been sanctioned. Besides, ₹1.20 crore would be spent to establish a 10-bedded trauma ward, he added.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> States> Tamil Nadu / by S Sundar / June 15th, 2017
Ganga Medical Centre and Hospitals celebrates silver jubilee
Ethics and integrity must be the two important pillars on which good institutions are to be built, said Subroto Bagchi, Chairman of Odisha Skill Development Authority, at the silver jubilee celebrations of the Ganga Medical Centre and Hospitals Private Limited on Saturday.
Mr. Bagchi said that competence will alone not take an institution to greater heights if lacked integrity. Respect of law and the quality of fair judgment will help institutions to grow in the long run.
Speaking at the event, noted historian Ramachandra Guha said that institutions of quality and integrity are difficult to build.
“Ganga Hospital is the institution where I was restored, rehabilitated and which made my family happy,” said Mr. Guha, recalling his treatment at the hospital following an accident he met with at Kalhatti ghat road while travelling with family in April, 2012. Mr. Guha said that institutions and individuals must hold the theme of patriotism close to heart.
“Patriotism also involves loving and nurturing one’s city and State. The hospital has shown the same regional, state and national level,” he said.
Patient care
S. Rajasekaran, Clinical Director and Head of the Department of Orthopaedics of Ganga Hospital, said that the institution is committed to taking forward its excellence in patient care, research and academics.
S. Raja Sabapathy, chairman of the Department of Plastic, Hand and Reconstructive Microsurgery and Burns, Ganga Hospital and J. Dheenadayalan, senior consultant, Department of Orthopaedics, also spoke.
Founders of the hospital J.G. Shanmuganathan and his wife Kanakavalli Shanmuganathan were present at the function.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Coimbatore / by Staff Reporter / Coimbatore – June 11th, 2017
In the past few weeks — as well as at a celebration — we’ve heard much about the splendid growth of the Chemplast Sanmar Group from scratch 50 years ago and of how over those years it had nurtured and then been nurtured by N Sankar, whose first job, unpaid apprentice, was on the day Chemicals and Plastics India opened its doors. To me, the happiest part of that success has been how the Group has returned much back to society, promoting education and training, community welfare and healthcare, greening and nature, sport and art, and even saving failing journals like Madras Musings. But one thing I missed in all this was the seeding of the group.
Those seeds were first sown in the back of beyond, in the village of Kallidaikurichi in Tinnevelly District when Nanu Sastrigal entered textile retailing, then moved into financing. His eldest son SNN Sankaralingam Iyer took the business further and with landowners in Tanjore helped found the Indo-Commercial Bank in Mayavaram in 1932. SNN’s eldest son KS Narayanan (KSN) joined the bank in 1936, gaining experience while moving from branch to branch. He also became a close friend of TS Narayanaswami (TSN), who was with the bank. The two enjoyed a warm working relationship till Narayanaswami passed away in 1968. By then, they had moved beyond banking.
In fact, KSN moved earlier. In the late 1930s, he was Madras-bound to shepherd a failing ink manufacturing unit, Nanco, that had been acquired. By 1941, it was a success. With a War on, he next turned to a commodity in short supply, rubber, acquiring a re-treading unit in Coimbatore. There followed the first foray into chemicals, a sick unit there making calcium carbide, Industrial Chemicals, being taken over.
Meanwhile, SNN who had bought substantial acreage in Tinnevelly to farm, found it was limestone-rich. His thoughts turned to cement. And so was born India Cements in 1949, with Narayanaswami helping SNN set it up while KSN went to Denmark to train with cement major FL Smidth. At a time when India was yet to industrialise, this was a major venture. When TSN died, KSN headed India Cements till retiring at 60, in 1980.
Why KSN and TSN decided to get into chemical products we’ll never know, but in 1962 they thought of manufacturing PVC. TSN went to the US and negotiated a joint venture agreement with BF Goodrich, a PVC major. Agreement led to starting Chemicals and Plastics India Ltd in Mettur, near Mettur Chemicals which would supply the necessary chlorine. The plant went on stream on May 4, 1967, the date the Golden Jubilee celebrations recalled. This was one of the first Indo-American joint ventures, also among the first with a multinational in South India. The story only grows from thereon.
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The death of a trainer
Few knew him outside the two worlds he’ll sorely be missed in, those of printers and Salesians. They merged for Bro Julian Santi, who passed away recently, in the Salesian Institute of Graphic Arts he set up in Kilpauk in the late 1960s with help from friends and Salesians in Italy from where he arrived in 1957.
We first met years later and, even after, it was infrequently, but for over 40 years I would meet ex-students of his. And they were generally a class apart. Most of us printers, and several abroad, preferred them when recruiting, because they came with two advantages: More machine experience than those from other printing schools, and they considered themselves craftsmen, not ready-made white collar supervisors, which many from elsewhere thought they should be because they’d got a few letters as suffixes. Training on the job and a strong work ethic, that a printer had to be a hands-on person, not necessarily a whiz in theory, was what Santi taught his wards. Few of our training institutions look at students that way.
Was Santi a printer himself, was he SIGA’s Principal, I never discovered, but I did find out he was a trainer par excellence, a man who taught his wards the dignity of working with their hands. I hope he has rooted that culture deep in SIGA.
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When the postman knocked…
Several items over the last six weeks have brought much mail and, happily, several noteworthy pictures. They’ll appear over the following weeks, one at a time, starting today to supplement the earliest, Marmalong Bridge.
DH Rao for whom bridges, lighthouses and the Buckingham Canal are passions, sent me today’s picture. Rao had seen it at a Corporation of Madras exhibition where it was dated to 1900. Its caption added, “In 1966 it was dismantled and replaced with today’s bridge.” The caption also said that a plaque was removed and re-positioned at the bridge’s north end. That plaque, recalling Uscan’s contribution, is little cared for today and is almost hidden by road-raising.
Rao adds he came across the following, written in 1829, by a French naval officer, J Dumont D’Urville: “An entire neighbourhood is reserved for Muslims and we go there by the Armenian bridge (Saidapet?) built on the river Mylapore. This bridge 395 metres in length (has) 29 arches of various sizes.”
The chronicler of Madras that is Chennai tells stories of people, places and events from the years gone by, and sometimes, from today.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Society> Madras Miscellany / by S. Muthiah / May 15th, 2017
This could be used in applications such as tunable laser, LEDs and white light display
Dr. Vikram Singh, former research scholar in the Department of Chemistry, IIT Madras won the BIRAC Gandhian Young Technological Innovation (GYTI) Award 2017 for his work on producing white light emission using natural extracts.
Dr. Singh and Prof. Ashok Mishra from the Department of Chemistry, IIT Madras used a mixture of two natural extracts — red pomegranate and turmeric — to produce white light emission. The researchers used a simple and environment-friendly procedure to extract dyes from pomegranate and turmeric.
While polyphenols and anthocyanins present in red pomegranate emit at blue and orange-red regions of the wavelength respectively, curcumin from turmeric emit at the green region of the wavelength. White light emission is produced when red, blue and green mix together. This is probably the first time white light emission has been generated using low-cost, edible natural dyes. The results were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“We had to mix the two extracts in a particular ratio to get white light,” says Dr. Singh, the first author of the paper; he is currently at Lucknow’s CSIR-Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI). By changing the concentration of the two extracts the researchers were able to get different colour temperature (tunability).
“When we mix the two extracts and irradiate it with UV radiation at 380 nm, we observed energy transfer (FRET mechanism) taking place from polyphenols to curcumin to anthocyanins, which helps to get perfect white light emission,” says Dr. Singh. For FRET mechanism to take place there must be spectral overlap between the donor and acceptor.
Energy transfer
In this case, there is a perfect overlap of emission of polyphenols with absorption by curcumin so the energy from polyphenols is transferred to curcumin. Since there is also a perfect overlap of emission of curcumin with absorption by anthocyanin, the energy of curcumin is transferred to anthocyanin.
As a result of this energy transfer from one dye to the other, when the extract is irradiated with UV light at 380 nm (blue region of the wavelength), the polyphenols emit in the blue region of the wavelength and transfers its energy to curcumin. The excited curcumin emits in the green region of the wavelength and transfers its energy to anthocyanin, which emits light in the red region of the wavelength.
“Because of the energy transfer, even if you excite in the blue wavelength we were able to get appropriate intensity distribution across the visual wavelength,” says Prof. Mishra, who is the corresponding author of the paper.
Without turmeric
Taking the work further, the duo produced carbon nanoparticles using pomegranate and to their surprise it was producing fairly green emission. So instead of using turmeric to get green wavelength, the researchers used carbon nanoparticles made from pomegranate extract. “We could get white emission, though it is not as white as when we use turmeric. It’s slightly bluish but well within the white zone,” says Prof. Mishra. “It is an attractive to use a single plant source to create white light emission.” The principle by which the pomegranate extract and carbon nanoparticles made from the extract is the same as in the case when pomegranate and turmeric extracts were used. The results were published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C.
Though this natural mixture of dyes can be used in a wide variety of applications such as tunable laser, LEDs, white light display, much work needs to be done in terms of photostability and chemical stability before it becomes ready for translation. Biosystems have an inherent tendency to breakdown and so this has to be addressed.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Sci-Tech> Science / by R. Prasad / May 06th, 2017
15 sensors that help gather data on kinematics or hand motion
A data glove, which measures the individual joint angles of all the five fingers to understand the activity of daily living, developed by Nayan Bhatt, Research Scholar from the Department of Applied Mechanics, IIT Madras, recently won the Budding Innovators Award given by the Delhi-based National Research Development Corporation (NRDC). Mr. Bhatt has been working on developing models for studying finger kinematics for the past three years.
The data glove has 15 sensors (plus an additional reference sensor) that help in gathering information about kinematics or hand motion. The sensors are placed on the segments of a finger — each finger has three segments and the junction between two segments forms a joint. Each sensor is connected to a microcontroller board using a flexible wire to collect data.
“The sensors measure the joint angles through the change in orientation information. We are interested in gathering information about motion of the fingers excluding the wrist,” said Mr. Bhatt. “In the case of people with Parkinson’s disease, the data glove will provide information about hand kinematics and help clinicians assess the severity of disease. It will complement the traditionally used Universal Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale.”
Avoiding deformation
The development may find application in animation and other industries.
Unlike in the case of the conventional data glove, the sensors are placed directly on each segment of the finger to avoid any deformation. “We placed the sensors directly on the segments of fingers as the use of cloth like in a traditional data glove can hinder natural movements and also cause slippage or deformation,” he said.
Efforts are on to reduce the number of sensors used. “We will first use all the 15 sensors to perform some training postures, which will then be used for developing an algorithm that will reduce the number of sensors used. Currently, with the machine learning algorithm developed by Mr. Bhatt we can use as few as eight sensors. We want to reduce it to six,” said Dr. Varadhan S.K.M. from the Biomedical Engineering Division of the Department of Applied Mechanics, IIT Madras.
“We are using the prototype to develop products for speech-related disability,” Dr. Varadhan said. “By using specific movements of a finger for specific words, the data glove can help speech-disabled people to communicate. We can use a speech synthesiser and speaker to generate sound.” Work has to be done to first map specific words to specific movements of the finger.
21 angles
One finger can move in different directions. So the total number of joint angles is about 21. Sensors have been used to sense all the 21 angles. “Ten predicted angles have large errors of more than two degree, and the remaining angles have less than 2 degree error. The average is five degrees. In a few months, with advanced algorithms, we might be able to reduce the average prediction error to two-three degrees,” Dr. Varadhan said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Sci-Tech> Technology / by R. Prasad / Chennai – April 26th, 2017
Student projects in agriculture, energy, water and environment, manufacturing and technology and infrastructure took the centre stage at Sai Ram Engineering College as part of the A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Innovation Ecosystem Awards.
The event seeks to identify the three best innovative contributions in each stream towards promoting application and analytical thought.
‘Will boost research’
“While the number of engineers passing out of colleges in Tamil Nadu has greatly increased over the last few years, there is a need for institutions to expand their horizons and encourage more than just academics. We hope that by encouraging them to innovate, research and development will get a boost,” said Saiprakash Leo Muthu, CEO of the Sairam Group of institutions.
Among the innovations on display, a team of students from Rajalakshmi Engineering College had come up with an IOT-based smart irrigation system using embedded development. “There are sensors on the agricultural field which detect when it needs to be irrigated and when the system can be turned off. This will help the farmer conserve water. The system will be operated by a smart phone app with the farmer. It is our contribution as engineers to farmers to help them have an automated system in place,” said N. Madhumitha, a student from the college.
Students of the Sandip Institute of Technology and Research Centre, Nashik, spoke about their innovation, a WSN-based infrastructural health monitoring and audit system, which would seek to shift the focus from manual auditing of public infrastructure such as bridges and roads towards electronic systems.
Of the 100 projects that were on display, three in each stream from agriculture, energy, water and environment, manufacturing and technology and infrastructure will be awarded cash prizes.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Chennai / by Staff Reporter / Chennai – April 11th, 2017
It will focus on smart textiles, healthcare, renewable energy
With efforts to encourage commercial production of innovative products in areas such as biotechnology, internet of things, and nano technology, about 30 % companies at the technology business incubators in the country are in such high-end technologies, Harkesh Mittal, advisor and head of National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), told presspersons here on Monday.
He inaugurated here the PSG Nanotech Research, Innovation, and Incubation Centre, which is a collaboration of the PSG Institute of Advanced Studies, PSG College of Technology, and PSG-STEP and is supported by the NSTEDB.
This is the only incubation centre so far for nano technology and it will focus on smart textiles, healthcare, renewable energy, and plastic electronics.
The area of nano technology is new and lot of research is happening in this field. There is a need for transfer of technology, taking ideas to the market. The incubator will support such an effort, he said.
The NSTEDB aims to start 20 new technology business incubators every year in different verticals.
There are 110 technology business incubators in the country and 50 of these give seed support to the incubatees. The NSTEDB gives ₹10 crore to each of these incubators and the amount is disbursed as loan or equity in two to three years. The National Initiative for Developing and Harnessing Innovations was launched last year. Under this initiative, an incubator gets seed support, has the scope to upscale, and will get support to covert ideas into prototypes.
PSG STEP will launch shortly an entrepreneurial residential programme. It is among the 10 incubators in the country that will offer fellowship for a year to students who are entrepreneurs. A student can receive up to ₹30,000 a month. Each incubator will get ₹36 lakh a year to extend this support, he said.
It will also launch a programme to give up to ₹10 lakh as grant to convert ideas into prototypes (Promoting and Accelerating Young and Aspiring Innovators and Start Ups). About 10 innovators will receive the support every year and this project is sanctioned for 10 incubators this year. The incubator will get ₹1.2 crore support from the Department of Science and Technology to set up a lab and ₹20 lakh to buy raw materials.
According to K Suresh Kumar, General Manager of PSG STEP, the nano tech centre here is established at a total cost of ₹15 crore. While ₹7.5 crore is provided by the DST, the rest is from the PSG Institute.
It will support 10 incubatees for a maximum of five years each. Entrepreneurs can come with their own projects or take up products developed by researchers at PSG Institute of Advanced Studies, he said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Coimbatore / by Special Correspondent / Coimbatore – February 28th, 2017
Former director of Centre for Plant Molecular Biology at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University S Sadasivam on Wednesday released a book – “Genetically Modified Crops: A Scientist’s Perspective.”
The book aims at creating awareness about the advantages of GM crops among people and farmers.
President of Association Of Biotechnology Led Enterprises- Agriculture Focus Group (ABLE-AG), P Murali released the book, and the chairman of Rasi Seeds, M Ramasami, received the first copy.
Speaking about his book, Sadasivam said, “I was in academia and research from 1964 to 2011. Teaching was my passion and research was my interest. However, popularisation of science was the third dimension in my career.”
He further said, “Since 1964, I have participated in radio programmes discussing science and technology. I have authored six books so far. This one too is an attempt to make people aware about the benefits of genetically modified crops.”
The book is short and has four chapters. The book is written in Tamil so that it can reach out to the local farmers. The book talks about gene, theories of evolution and the introduction of genetically modified crops. “It is not a textbook material. It is written as a conversation between a scientist and a common man,” said Sadasivam.
Vouching for genetically modified crops, Sadasivam said that a group of 107 Nobel Laureates have recently passed a resolution that GM crops are safe. “There are regulatory bodies and the central and state governments have deeply accessed the advantages and consequences of GM crops. We need more research in the area of GM crops to address the growing needs of food and grain shortage,” said Sadasivam.
ABLE-AG has published Sadasivam’s book. Executive director of ABLE-AG Shivendra Bajaj said, “About two-three states have stalled research on GM crops. While others have not banned it, they are either positive about it or are evaluating the pro and cons.”
Ramasami said that Bangladesh has been cultivating Bt Brinjal for more than three years now. “Bangladesh has acquired all the data from India’s research and has begun cultivating it,” said Ramasami. The only GM crop cultivated in India is Bt Cotton .
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Coimbatore News / by Adarsh Jain / February 15th, 2017
Exhaustive research carried out by a team of researchers led by Prof. T. Pradeep from the Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, spread over four years, has put to rest the scepticism about the merits of the arsenic water filter developed by them. The water filter has been in operation for three and half years in about 900 sites in India, serving close to 400,000 people.
Arsenic in drinking water is the largest natural mass poisoning in the history of humanity, affecting 13 crore people globally. The problem of arsenic in the environment, known for over 1,002 years, has not been solved satisfactorily, due to the non-availability of appropriate and affordable materials. Arsenic is a slow poison, causing numerous adverse health effects, including cancer and genetic anomalies.
The technology developed at IIT makes use of confined metastable 2-line iron oxyhydroxides and its large adsorption capacity to remove arsenic in two different dissolved forms (arsenate and arsenite). The filter was able to reduce the arsenic concentration in the water from 200 ppb (parts per billion) to well below the WHO limit of 10 ppb. The results were published recently in the journal Advanced Materials.
“The arsenic removal capacity of the material filter was found to be 1.4 to 7.6 times better than all the other available materials,” says Prof. Pradeep. “The superior arsenic uptake capacity is due to its inherent structure. Nanostructured iron oxyhydroxide makes many sites available for arsenic uptake. The ions of arsenic adsorb on the nanoparticles at specific atomic positions. No nanoparticles are released into the purified water due to the biopolymer cages in which they are contained.”
The team mimicked the average arsenic concentration seen in West Bengal — 200 ppb of arsenic — for carrying out several laboratory studies. Though studies were carried out at a pH of 7.8, the team found the adsorption capacity of the filter was not compromised in the pH range 4 to 10. “The pH of drinking water is in the range of 6.5 to 8.5. But we tested the filter in a wide range of pH so it can be used for other purposes as well,” says Prof. Pradeep.
“A filter composed of 60 grams of the material can be used safely for removing arsenic from 1150 litres of water and till such time the concentration of arsenic in the filtered water does not cross the WHO limit of 10 ppb,” he says. Once the filter has reached its saturation limit it has to be reactivated or recharged with new material.
Reactivation is done by soaking the material in sodium sulphate solution for an hour at room temperature. It is further incubated for about four hours after reducing the pH to 4. “Using this reactivation protocol we reused the same filter seven times,” he says.
Studies were carried out to test if the adsorbed arsenic leached from the filter. The team found that the amount of arsenic that got leached was 1 ppb in the case of arsenite and 2 ppb for arsenate. “Soil in the affected regions also contains arsenic, typically around 12 ppb of arsenic, which is the background concentration. The amount of arsenic leached from the saturated filter was far less than the background concentration,” Prof. Pradeep says. Leaching of arsenic from disposed filters was one of the biggest criticisms by a few researchers who had worked on arsenic filters. Arsenic, being an element, cannot be degraded further to simpler species.
Since the arsenic filter developed by the team has so far been in use at a community level, studies were carried out to test its performance as a domestic water filter. A domestic three-stage filter was developed to remove particulate matter, iron and arsenic. Input water containing 200 ppb of arsenic and 4 ppm (parts per million) of Fe(III) was passed through the filter for a total volume of 6,000 litres (translating to 15 litres of water per day for one year). “The output was below the WHO limit for both arsenic and iron throughout the experiment,” he says.
“For a family of five, arsenic-free drinking water can be produced at $2 per year,” he adds.
In the course of the development of this technology, he and his former students incubated a company, InnoNano Research Pvt. Ltd. at IIT Madras. In July this year, the company received venture funding to the tune of $18 million. “With this research, a home grown technology appears to be all set for global deployment. Knowledge is no more a limiting factor for solving the arsenic menace,” he said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Sci-Tech> Science / R. Prasad / December 19th, 2016
J Daniel Chellappa, senior scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre’s (BARC) technical coordination wing, Chennai, has won the PRSI national award for the best communications campaign for 2016.
Chellappa, a gold medallist from University of Madras, was associated with IIT Madras for his PG project and joined the scientific community of Department of Atomic Energy, Kalpakkam in 1984. He has carried out research in high temperature fuel behaviour as part of the indigenous development of the Uranium – Plutonium Mixed Carbide Nuclear Fuel for the Fast Breeder Test Reactor.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / New> City News> Chennai News / TNN / December 18th, 2016