A new Japanese import is on the cards. The Chennai Corporation is planning to bring in advanced technology from Japan to improve the stormwater drain (SWD) network in the city. So far, management of stormwater drain network has only been partly effective.
Corporation engineers will be sent to Japan for a training programme, which would cover techniques to construct and manage SWDs effectively. The Chennai Corporation Council passed a resolution on Monday permitting engineers K. Chinnasamy and G. Tamilselvan to attend this programme.
Expenses for the training — which is from September 23 to December 5 — will be met by Japan International Co-operation Agency. The knowledge the engineers will acquire from this exercise is expected to be useful in the implementation of new projects in watersheds of waterways such Adyar and Cooum.
With the help of World Bank funding, work on SWDs will begin next month in zones such as Ambattur and Valasaravakkam. Designed with advanced technology, new SWDs are likely to reduce the displacement of people living along the banks of waterways and canals.
The work on construction of drains will prevent flooding of neighbourhoods in many of the added zones.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu /Home> News> Cities> Chennai / by Aloysius Xavier Lopez / Chennai – September 06th, 2015
In a bid to increase public awareness of cervical cancer, considered to be the most common cancer among women in India, the Christian Medical College is hosting the Sixth Asia Oceania Conference on Genital Infections and Neoplasia (AOGIN) from August 27 to 29 at its campus.
The theme this year is “HPV infection and HPV related cancers”. There will be five concurrent workshops on the first day on Colposcopy, Community Screening, HPV detection, Cytopathology and Research Methods. In the evening, there will be a public meeting on measures adopted to increase awareness of cervical cancer, its prevention and treatment. This will be followed by the AOGIN-India Presidential Oration by Professor Shalini Rajaram from New Delhi.
Over 15 international universities’ faculty members and over 50 national universities’ faculty members will be taking part. There will be lectures, debates, panel discussions and video presentations. The topics covered will be basic science of HPV, vaccination, screening for pre-cancer and treatment of cancer of the cervix, vulva, vagina, anus and oropharynx. The conference will end with a round table discussion on “Collaborations and linkages to tackle cervical cancer”.
It is hoped that the conference will increase public awareness, stimulate young doctors, galvanise NGOs and increase leverage with the government to take preventive steps to fight cervical cancer in India.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> TamilNadu / by Express News Service / August 27th, 2015
The story is also a vindication of sorts for India’s patent regime that is often criticized in the West for not honouring intellectual property rights in medicine.
Less than four months ago, Greg Jeffery was on the verge of getting liver cirrhosis. The 61-year-old Australian, suffering from hepatitis C, desperately needed a drug called Sivoldi to reverse the life-threatening condition.
The problem was, each Sivoldi pill cost over 1,000 Australian dollars and the total treatment regime of 84 tablets would have set him back by around 100,000 dollars.
Jeffery, a historian and author, didn’t have that kind of money. Desperate to source the drug at a cheaper rate, he landed in Chennai three months ago. There, he not only got the drug but bought it for less than one-tenth the price in Australia.
“The same treatment with the same drug in India is $900,” Jeffery told Australian TV channel, ABC.
” Basically as soon as I got home I started taking it. Within 11 days all my liver functions had returned to normal and within four weeks there was no virus detectable in my blood — I was essentially cured,” he told the channel.
Jeffery’s story, now all over Australian media, has renewed the debate on whether life-saving drugs should be priced so high.
” If you haven’t got the money, for a lot of people it’s a death sentence — you die,” Jeffery told ABC. ” I was right on the edge of cirrhosis of the liver, once you get cirrhosis you then open up to tumours and cancer.”
And just like the protagonist of Hollywood movie Dallas Buyers Club, Jeffery is now helping other Australians in a similar situation to source the drug from India.
” I get about 40 to 50 emails every day, seven days a week and they are from people who have hep C, whose mother or father has hep C, wife or husband has hep C,” he told the channel.
The story is also a vindication of sorts for India’s patent regime that is often criticized in the West for not honouring intellectual property rights in medicine.
In January this year, India’s patent office rejected the patent application for Sovaldi (chemical name sofosbuvir) from US pharma giant Gilead Sciences on the ground that there was little evidence to show that ” minor changes in the molecule” had substantially improved the drug.
What made the ruling possible was a controversial provision in India’s law that says patent applications can be turned down if they fail to show sufficient novelty and inventive steps.
The decision opened the doors for Indian manufacturers to copy the drug and sell it cheaply. According to one report, 10 Indian companies were now making sofosbuvir. Two Hyderabad-based companies have reportedly priced their copied version at a retail price of Rs 19,900 per bottle of 28 tablets of 400 mg dosage, which is one-90th of Gilead’s price.
Earlier, a study from Liverpool University had claimed that sofosbuvir could be produced for as little as $101 for a three-month treatment course.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> Science / TNN / August 21st, 2015
Arya Bashyam being taken away by the police after he hoisted the tricolour at Fort St.George in 1932. Ilustration: Satwik Gade
From the tricolour being hoisted at Fort St.George to filmgoers at Gaiety defying imperialist high-handedness, Cooum has witnessed some defining moments of the Indian freedom struggle
All of us are in some form of shackles, self-imposed or otherwise. I was made to flow freely, but the dead weight of man-induced sewage has reduced me to a piteous crawl. If I could, I would break free of this shackle. But I am just a river, and I can’t. My own helplessness has made me an admirer of those who have shaken off their yokes. For one, I have been a witness to stirring expressions of love for the country, when it was under British yoke.
Everyone loves a hero. Everyone is enthralled by people who put their lives on the line for the common good. On the 26 of January in 1932, in the whole of India, there was none more heroic than Arya Bhashyam. Even today, I develop goosebumps as I recall how Arya Bhashyam, his face afire with a deep-burning love for his country, clambered up the incredibly tall flagstaff at Fort St. George, and replaced the Union Jack with the Tricolour. When he climbed down, his eyes were aglitter with pride and a sense of accomplishment. There was no trace of fear in those eyes, when the guards pounced on Bhashyam.
It surprises me no end how we forget our heroes – most of them, I mean. I got to see T. P. Kumaran Nair, when he was lodged in the Madras Central Jail in the early 1940s. A handsome and guileless man, he was on death row. Arrested when he was returning from Singapore and tried for treason, he did not seek mercy and faced death fearlessly. He courted martyrdom and found it on July 7, 1944, and had the honour of Subhash Chandra Bose calling him Shahid-e-Hind (martyr of Hindustan). Nair worshipped Bose and he trained cadets in the Indian National Army. It’s a pity that except for a road in Nellicode, Kerala, that bears his name, T.P. Kumaran Nair remains largely forgotten.
There were many common people who made a contribution to the freedom struggle who will forever remain in the shadows. During stilly nights, the cries of people being beaten inside the Gaiety cinema come back to me.
It was 1939 and Thyaga Bhoomi, a Tamil film based on a work by writer Kalki, was being screened in defiance of ban orders from the British Indian government in Madras. The government saw in the film a subtle call to support the freedom movement. It acted on the assumption that the Congress party had a hand in it. The ban order was served when the film was in its 22 week at Gaiety. The people behind the film, which included S.S. Vasan and K. Subramanyam (who made the film) chose not be cowed down: they ran free shows of the film at the cinema. It was during one such show the police barged into the cinema and beat up the audience. Despite the pummelling, they stayed inside.
Doveton House in Women’s Christian College where Tipu Sultan’ sons are believed to have been held captive.
Then there are certain structures proximate to where I flow, which are not readily associated with the freedom struggle. But they have had a part in it. Tipu Sultan’s sons were held captive at the timeworn Doveton House in Women’s Christian College.
Then the Tipu’s weapons of war on display at the Madras Museum bring back the past powerfully for me. For visitors to the Museum, they are relic of the past. Flowing – actually, crawling by the Museum – and looking at these instruments, I could hear the distant sounds of a spirited struggle.
Sources: Venkatesh Ramakrishnan of the Chennai Cooum Group, The Hindu Archives and the Madras Musings
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Chennai / by Prince Frederick / August 20th, 2015
Pichai Sundararajan aka Sundar Pichai. / Photo: Kamal Narang / The Hindu
“Super excited about his progress and dedication to the company,” says Google co-founder Larry Page.
Google’s announcement on Monday that it would be subsumed within a new parent company called Alphabet had a bonus for people of Indian-origin world over: the company’s head of Products and Engineering, Chennai-born Pichai Sundararajan, was anointed the CEO of the new, “slimmed down” Google.
Underscoring his confidence in the man known as Sundar Pichai (43), Google boss Larry Page said of the restructuring in the company he co-founded with Sergey Brin, “A key part of this is Sundar Pichai.”
Mr. Pichai, who is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and Stanford University, had “really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our Internet businesses,” Mr. Page said in a blog post, adding that he and Mr. Brin were “super excited about his progress and dedication to the company.”
They may well have reason to feel fortunate that Mr. Pichai is the man to head their $66-billion revenue, $16-billion profit, company– by most accounts he combines a deep passion for engineering excellence with a rare managerial quality of attracting the best talent into the teams he works with.
Mr. Pichai started at Google in 2004, where he was known as a “low-key manager” who worked on the Google toolbar and then led the launch of the market-beating Chrome browser in 2008.
Following this his rise through the ranks of Google took on an increasingly meteoric tenor, and soon he became Vice President, then Senior Vice President, and ultimately was charged with supervising all Google apps including Gmail and Google Drive and finally given control of Android itself.
His promotion to Product Chief in October 2014 literally made him Mr. Page’s second-in-command with oversight of day-to-day operations for all of Google’s major products including maps, search, and advertising.
Some of Mr. Pichai’s colleagues describe him in the media as a skilled diplomat, including Caesar Sengupta, a Google Vice President who has worked with Mr. Pichai for eight years, and said to Bloomberg News, “I would challenge you to find anyone at Google who doesn’t like Sundar or who thinks Sundar is a jerk.”
Nowhere was Mr. Pichai’s easy blending of techno-diplomatic competence evident than in early 2014, when the fracas between Samsung and Google was reaching fever pitch, at the time over Samsung’s Magazine UX interface for its tablets, which Google felt may have been deliberately underselling Google services such as its Play apps store.
According to reports “Defusing the situation fell to Sundar Pichai, the tactful, tactical new chief of Google’s Android division. Pichai set up a series of meetings with J.K. Shin, CEO of Samsung Mobile Communications, [where] they held ‘frank conversations’ about the companies’ intertwined fates [and a] fragile peace was forged.”
Since then, Samsung has apparently agreed to scale back Magazine UX, and the two corporations have announced a broad patent cross-licensing arrangement to implement which they “now work together more closely on user experience than we ever have before,” according to Mr. Pichai.
Another apparent talent of Google’s new CEO – his thinking seems to be ahead of the curve. Although Mr. Pichai trained in metallurgy and materials science at IIT Kharagpur, and Stanford and did an MBA at Wharton, he was already deeply immersed in the world of electronics.
According to one of his college professors Mr. Pichai “was doing work in the field of electronics at a time when no separate course on electronics existed in our curriculum.”
The Google founders no doubt recognised that Mr. Pichai was a man on an evangelical-type mission for pushing the boundaries of technology.
Mr. Pichai most eloquently outlined this mission when he said, “For me, it matters that we drive technology as an equalising force, as an enabler for everyone around the world. Which is why I do want Google to see, push, and invest more in making sure computing is more accessible, connectivity is more accessible.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Sci-Tech> Technology / by Narayan Lakshman / Washington – August 11th, 2015
Sofia Ashraf’s video has had more than a million views on YouTube, drawing attention to accusations against a thermometer factory in the town of Kodaikanal that closed down 14 years ago.
Sofia Ashraf.
An Indian rapper has gone viral with a music video calling on consumer products giant Unilever to clean up alleged toxic waste from a forested southern hill station. Sofia Ashraf’s video, posted online by a nongovernmental organization called Jhatkaa, or “shock” in Hindi, has had more than a million views on YouTube, drawing attention to accusations against a thermometer factory in the town of Kodaikanal that closed down 14 years ago.
Hindustan Unilever, the Indian subsidiary of the consumer goods company, has denied wrongdoing. It disputes claims of former workers who say their health has been damaged by exposure to mercury. The company said it shut down the factory in 2001 when environmental activists including Greenpeace “brought to Hindustan Unilever’s attention the fact that glass scrap containing mercury” had been sold to a scrap dealer about three kilometres from the factory.
“We have been rigorous in establishing the facts and several independent expert studies have concluded that there were no adverse impacts on the health of our people at Kodaikanal. We have also taken action to ensure the clean-up of soil within the factory premises,” a Hindustan Unilever spokesperson said in an email.
“There is still work to do here – which we are committed to fulfilling – as soon as we have received final consent from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board to start the soil remediation.” Set to the beat of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”, and retweeted by Minaj herself, Ashraf also asks Unilever to compensate workers.
“Kodaikanal won’t step down, until you make amends now,” she raps.
source : YouTube
source: http://www.indiatoday.intoday.in / IndiaToday.in / Home> News> India / Reuters Mumbai / August 04th, 2015
Joshna Chinappa today upstaged second seed Line Hansen in straight games to win the USD 15,000 Victorian Open squash competition for her 10th WSA title.
Third seed Joshna beat the Dane 11-5, 11-4, 11-9 in the final of the WSA event. It was only last week that Joshanalost to Line in Kooyong.
The Indian’s last triumph had come in the Richmond Open in April last year.
Known for mixing strokes and accuracy in the placements, the Joshna held the upper-hand right through, though she admitted, it was a “hard game” particularly after Line fought and brought the score to nine-all in the third game.
Coming as it did soon after her recent success in the National Championship, she was happy with her current form.
With the Australian Open to start in a few days and the venue being the same, the Joshna is looking forward to more success.
“I am so happy it will be at the same centre,” she said.
The title in the men’s section went to Australian Ryan Cuskelly who beat Greg Lobban of Scotland 12-10, 13-11, 11-9.
Meanwhile, India went down 0-2 to top ranked and title-favourite Egypt in the quarterfinals of the girls’ event of the WSF-world junior squash championship in Eindhoven.
Debutant Nikita Joshi, who played first, tried her best but Salma Hany Ibrahim was far superior. The Egyptian won 11-5 11-6 11-2 to give Egypt the lead.
Adya Advani was pitted against the top player Habiba Mohamed and it proved a tough task for the Indian. Habiba won easily 11-3 11-5 11-3 to give Egypt the win and a place in the semi-final.
India now will play for the 5th to 8th place matches
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Sport / by PTI / August 02nd, 2015
A scientist at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) along with a Japanese professor has identified the genes responsible for barley’s ‘domestication’ that transformed this once-wild food grain into an item of mass consumption. Today, barley is the fourth most important crop in the world – both in the size of cultivation and grain production, and its high production is due to its domestication that happened 10,000 years ago.
Their two-decade-long research work was published by the journal ‘Cell’ on July 30.
“About 10,000 years ago, people identified barley as a food grain. And, then farmers started cultivating barley,” said Senthil Natesan, professor and head of biotechnology department, Agricultural College and Research Institute, Madurai.
There was a problem with the wild variety. The spikes that contain the grain were brittle in the wild variety. “This brittle nature breaks the spike, and the grain falls on the ground. While this is essential for the proliferation of the crop, this made harvesting difficult,” said Takao Komatsuda, senior researcher in the National Institute of Agro-biological Sciences (NIAS), Tsukuba, Japan. Komatsuda is the principle researcher in this project.
The wild variety underwent domestication, which helped farmers in cultivating barley. “Barley domestication occurred twice. The first was a natural mutation in one gene (Btr1), while an independent mutation in the other gene (Btr2),” said Senthil. This domestication resulted in the cell wall thickening, that induced flexibility in the spikes. “And, the spikes developed a non-brittle nature, and this prevented the grains from dispersing on the ground,a major relief for farmers,” said Senthil.
Takao Komatsuda, during his initial years at NIAS, thought that mapping of brittleness in barley would resolve the key phenomenon behind the barley domestication. “In Okayama University, 60 years ago, two of the genes (Btr1 and Btr2) essential for grain fall in wild barley were discovered. Many scientists working on wheat and barley research were interested in the subject, but it was hard to initiate the project to identify these complex traits responsible for barely domestication,” said Komatsuda.
The research work began in late 1990s and was completed a few months ago, said Komatsuda. Senthil started his career as assistant professor at TNAU in 1995 after competing his PhD. “I wanted to pursue my postdoctoral research, and came across the NIAS. I applied for the fellowship, and was fortunate to have been selected for the Japanese government-sponsored research programme,” he said. I visited Japan in 2002 for six months and in 2006 for one year to participate in this research work.Komatsuda and Senthil, along with the fellow researchers, mapped the genes responsible and identified the genes that were responsible for the domestication of the crop. “We also studied the cell wall morphology under scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope,” said Senthil. The major part of the research work was carried out at NIAS. And, the Japan Science and Technology Corporation (CREST), Japanese Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS), the German Science Foundation Priority Programme SPP1530 and the Australian Research Council along with NIAS have funded the project.
Komatsuda, who has pursued extensive research on barley, plans to take this research forward. “Identifying new traits such as disease resistance, quality in the production of beer depending on breeding lineages will be the areas of future research. Also, the origin of cultivated wheat will be studied using the similar genes isolated in this study,” he said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Coimbatore / by Adarsh Jain, TNN / August 03rd, 2015
IFP has now provided a fresh lease of life to these murals and paintings that had been created using herbal colours and natural pigments.N. MurugesanResearcher IFP
IFP completes first phase of documentation of temple art, murals in Tamil Nadu
The French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) has completed the first phase of documentation of endangered temple art, murals and paintings in Tamil Nadu in an effort to bring them back to life and preserve them for posterity.
A team of researchers from IFP documented the murals in Madurai Meenakshi Amman temple; Kallalagar temple i.e Alagarkovil; Chenraya Perumal temple in Adiyamankottai; Chithiraichavadi near Narasingapatti and Jain caves of Tirumalai in the first phase in collaboration with the British Library. The IFP has already completed a major portion of digitisation of its photo archives which contain over 1,60,000 photographs of temples in South India and are an unique repository of information on temple art and iconography in South India.
The documentation of temple art is aimed at enriching the collection enabling historians and researchers to carry out their work. Dr. N. Murugesan, researcher IFP told The Hindu that “Documentation of temple art and murals in these five vulnerable sites in Tamil Nadu should have been done at least 50 years back. Many of the sites had lost their glory and historical importance. IFP has now provided a fresh lease of life to these murals and paintings that had been created using herbal colours and natural pigments.” There are more than a hundred inscriptions found on the walls, gopuras and corridors of the Kallalagar temple in Alagarkovil dating back from 11th to 18th centuries. The paintings are of high quality and depict episodes from the Ramayana.
The murals found in the world famous Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai depict Meenakshi Thirukalyanam, the celestial wedding ceremony of Goddess Meenakshi with Lord Sundareshwarar. The murals are more than 600 years old.
At the Chenraya Perumal Temple in Adhiyamankottai there are five galleries that lead to the sanctum sanctorum depicting the scenes of Mahabharata, Viswarupa Darshan of Lord Krishna, scenes from the Ramayana including the life of Lord Rama and various episodes from Mahabharata and Vedas.
Mr. Murugesan said that the murals in Chithiraichavadi near Narasingapatti are estimated to belong to 17{+t}{+h}-18{+t}{+h}century and have similarities with Nayak era murals. IFP is planning to take up documentation of 10 more sites in Tamil Nadu in the second phase.
IFP has now provided a fresh lease of life to these murals and paintings that had been created using herbal colours and natural pigments.
N. MurugesanResearcher IFP
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> National> Tamil Nadu / by S. Prasad / August 02nd, 2015
At the core of ancient Indian poetry and music, there is lot of mathematics. Mystical as they are, many theorised and recurring number patterns are found in places we wouldn’t expect – in stems shooting out from a sapling, in logs of wood found in a beam, in the number of petals found in a flower and also, in our very own relics – Sanskrit poetry. This was revealed by celebrated Mathematician and Field’s medalist winner, Manjul Bhargava, who spoke on the subject ‘Poetry, Drumming and Mathematics’, drawing interesting correlations between them.
Recently the math behind Michelangelo’s iconic ‘Creation of Adam’ was decoded. The Sistine Chapel painting follows the ‘golden rule’, a famous mathematical rule. Maths textbooks in India pack in many mathematical theories like this, for instance, the ‘Fibonacci numbers’. Any student is at least vaguely aware of its existence. But what comes as a shocker is that a century before the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, an Indian linguist by the name Hemachandra discovered this.
He strung a series of numbers together, wherein each number in a series is the sum of two preceding numbers*, forming the basis of this ‘Hemachandra theory’ as our textbooks should be rightfully calling it. (Hemachandrandra no.s – 1,2,3,5,8,13, 21,34 and so on)
Although all this could sound like Greek to layman, it’s practical and simple for Manjul Bhargava.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express/ Home> States> Tamil Nadu / by Express News Service / July 24th, 2015
