As environmentalists see red over the Centre's notification limiting the eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) around Okhla Bird Sanctuary, activist and birder Anand Arya challenged the decision before the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Thursday.
Mr. Arya challenged the August 19 notification of the Centre setting the extent of eco-sensitive zone around the sanctuary as 100 metres on all sides, except northern, and 1.27 km on the northern boundary.
His counsel Rahul Choudhary told the Bench that the notification is in violation of all legislative policies, including the provisions of the Environment (Protection) Act.
The notification on the sanctuary, which is one among the several ornithologically-significant sites along the 50-km stretch of the Yamuna, had rejoiced many big builders and investors, who have projects or have brought homes in the area.
“The notification will not only adversely affect the community at large, but will also result in the violation of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; Biological Diversity Act, 2002; precautionary principle; principle of sustainable development; inter-generational equity; and the principle of eco-centrism, all of which are law of the land as propounded by the Supreme Court,” Mr. Choudhary said.
A Bench headed by NGT chairperson Justice Swatanter Kumar issued notices to the Centre, the State of Uttar Pradesh, chief wildlife warden, and the government of NCT of Delhi seeking their response in two weeks.
Wild pandas in China turn carnivorous, fight for meat
In a clip captured by infrared cameras, a panda was seen gnawing at the bones of a dead calf.
Wild pandas at a national nature reserve in northwest China’s Gansu province have been captured by infrared cameras in an unusual behaviour such as fighting and eating meat.
Since the beginning of 2014, staff at Baishuijiang National Nature Reserve have been observing the habits of the reserve’s 110 pandas with over 200 infrared cameras.
Reserve manager Yuan Fengxiao said, “In the past, even our staff seldom saw wild pandas, but the infrared cameras have helped us record many valuable images of the animals.”
Over 99 per cent of pandas’ diet consists of bamboo. In one clip, a panda was seen gnawing at the bones of a dead calf.
Researcher He Liwen said that besides bamboo, wild pandas are scavengers and eat meat, but rarely find carcasses of dead animals.
Another panda was seen with a bleeding forehead shortly after appearing on another camera with its forehead intact, probably as a result of fighting with other pandas or bears, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
In another clip, a pair of pandas were wandering in the woods when one discovered the camera and started to chew on it.
Spread over 2,00,000 hectares, the Baishuijiang reserve is one of China’s largest reserves for wild pandas.
Mr. Yuan said that about 500 species of animals and over 2,000 kinds of wild plants have been recorded there.
The infrared cameras have also captured footage of other rare species including the golden monkey and Takin.
Surprising discovery of oxygen in 67P comet’s atmosphere
The Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has thrown a very big surprise — its atmosphere contains molecular oxygen. Based on our current thinking, the presence of molecular oxygen in a comet had been ruled out. But chemical analysis of its atmosphere using ROSINA mass spectrometer on board the Rosetta spacecraft has shown that molecular oxygen is not only present but is also found in high proportion.
In fact, molecular oxygen level in the comet was found to range from one per cent to 10 per cent relative to water with a mean value of 3.8 per cent (with an error margin of 0.85 per cent). It has turned out that oxygen is the fourth most common gas in the comet’s atmosphere, after water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
The results were published today (October 29) in the journal Nature.
“It is the most surprising finding as molecular oxygen was not among the molecules expected to be found in a comet,” Prof. Kathrin Altwegg, project leader of the ROSINA mass spectrometer from the University of Bern, Switzerland and a co-author of the study said during a press briefing.
Since molecular oxygen is highly reactive, it was assumed that it would have combined with hydrogen then present to form water. “We had never thought that oxygen could ‘survive’ for billions of years without combining with other substances,” said Prof. Altwegg. Alas, the discovery of molecular oxygen has shaken the very foundation of our understanding of oxygen in comets.
“Molecular oxygen was constant over a long period of time. When the comet is orbiting the Sun, it loses more material from the surface. So a fresh layer gets exposed over time. Since the ratio of water to oxygen is remaining constant [in different locations on the comet], it means that molecular oxygen must be present in the whole body [of the comet]. If it is present only on the top surface then there would be a decrease [in amount] over a period of time,” Prof. A. Bieler the first author of the paper from the University of Michigan, U.S. told during the briefing.
During the period of study — August 2014 to March 2015 — the authors estimate that several centimetres thick layer of material must have been lost from the surface areas of the comet.
Since the ratio of water to oxygen has not changed in different locations on the comet or over time (nearly 4.6 billion years), there is a stable correlation between water and oxygen.
Since oxygen is present in the whole body of the comet, the oxygen must be primordial and must be present even before or at the formation of the comet, Prof. Bieler said. In other words, the oxygen originated very early, before the formation of the Solar System.
“Specifically, high-energy particles struck grains of ice in the cold and dense birthplaces of stars, the so-called dark nebulae, and split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen was then not further “processed” in the early solar system. The oxygen measurements show that at least a significant part of the comet’s material is older than our solar system and has a composition typical of dark nebulae, from which solar nebulae and later planetary systems originate,” notes a University of Bern release.
The molecular oxygen has been trapped in the water ice of the comet 67P. The ice has never been heated up to get reprocessed. “[You have] ice grains with oxygen embedded into it and you have them even today means that the ice was never sublimated, never went back into the gas phase,” Prof. Altwegg said.
According to her, most of the Solar System info models predict heavy inflow of material from outside to the centre of the Solar System and then also a heavy outflow of material leading to a mixing of intrasolar system during formation. “But these [models] are not compatible with ice grains containing oxygen. They must have stayed out, never mixed, or never come close to the young Sun,” she said.
“The preferred explanation of our observations is the incorporation of primordial oxygen into the cometary nucleus,” they note in the paper.
Radiolysis of icy grains before accretion is one of the possible mechanisms that the author think could have preserved the oxygen over a long period of time. “When produced by radiolysis in water ice, oxygen can remain trapped in voids, while hydrogen can diffuse out. This prevents the hydrogenation of oxygen, which is otherwise a dominant reaction for the destruction of molecular oxygen, and could lead to increased and stable levels of oxygen in the solid ice,” they write.
Eating bacon, sausages poses cancer risk: WHO
Ham, hot dogs also in group 1 list alongside tobacco, diesel fumes, asbestos for causes of cancer
Eating processed meat can lead to bowel cancer in humans while red meat is a likely cause of the disease, World Health Organisation (WHO) experts said on Monday in findings that could sharpen debate over the merits of a meat-based diet.
The France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the WHO, put processed meat such as hot dogs and ham in its group 1 list, which already includes tobacco, asbestos and diesel fumes, for which there is "sufficient evidence" of cancer links.
"For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal (bowel) cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed," Dr Kurt Straif of the IARC said in a statement.
Red meat, under which the IARC includes beef, lamb and pork, was classified as a "probable" carcinogen in its group 2A list that also contains glyphosate, the active ingredient in many weed-killers.
The lower classification for red meat reflected "limited evidence" that it causes cancer. The IARC found links mainly with bowel cancer, as was the case for processed meat, but it also observed associations with pancreatic and prostate cancer.
The agency, whose findings on meat followed a meeting of health experts in France earlier this month, estimated each 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent.
The IARC, which was assessing meat for the first time and reviewed some 800 studies, does not compare the level of cancer risk associated with products in a given category, so does not suggest eating meat is as dangerous as smoking, for example.
Health policy in some countries already calls for consumers to limit intake of red and processed meat, but the IARC said such advice to consumers was in certain cases focused on heart disease and obesity.
The preparation of the IARC's report has already prompted vigorous reactions from meat industry groups, which argue meat forms part of a balanced diet and that cancer risk assessments need to be set in a broader context of environmental and lifestyle factors.
The IARC, which does not make specific policy recommendations, cited an estimate from the Global Burden of Disease Project - an international consortium of more than 1,000 researchers - that 34,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.
This compares with about 1 million cancer deaths per year globally due to tobacco smoking, 600,000 a year due to alcohol consumption, and more than 200,000 each year due to air pollution, it said.
If the cancer link with red meat were confirmed, diets rich in red meat could be responsible for 50,000 deaths a year worldwide, according to the Global Burden of Disease Project.
First insect-size robot that can fly, swim
For the first time, scientists have designed an insect-like robot smaller than a paperclip that can both fly and swim — paving the way for future dual aerial aquatic robotic vehicles.
The biggest challenge is conflicting design requirements: aerial vehicles require large airfoils like wings or sails to generate lift while underwater vehicles need to minimise surface area to reduce drag.
To solve this engineers at the Harvard University’s John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) took a clue from puffins.
The birds with flamboyant beaks are one of nature’s most adept hybrid vehicles, employing similar flapping motions to propel themselves through air as through water.
“Through various theoretical, computational and experimental studies, we found that the mechanics of flapping propulsion are actually very similar in air and in water,” said Kevin Chen, a graduate student at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab at SEAS.
The RoboBee, designed in postdoctoral fellow Robert J Wood’s lab, is a microrobot, smaller than a paperclip, that flies and hovers like an insect, flapping its tiny, nearly invisible wings 120 times per second.
In order to make the transition from air to water, the team first had to solve the problem of surface tension.
The RoboBee is so small and lightweight that it cannot break the surface tension of the water.
To overcome this hurdle, the RoboBee hovers over the water at an angle, momentarily switches off its wings, and crashes unceremoniously into the water in order to sink.
Next the team had to account for water’s increased density.
“Water is almost 1,000 times denser than air and would snap the wing off the RoboBee if we didn’t adjust its flapping speed,” said graduate student Farrell Helbling, the paper’s second author.
The team lowered the wing speed from 120 flaps per second to nine but kept the flapping mechanisms and hinge design the same.
A swimming RoboBee changes its direction by adjusting the stroke angle of the wings, the same way it does in air. Like a flying version, it is still tethered to a power source.
The team prevented the RoboBee from shorting by using deionised water and coating the electrical connections with glue.
While this RoboBee can move seamlessly from air to water, it cannot yet transition from water to air because it can’t generate enough lift without snapping one of its wings.
Solving that design challenge is the next phase of the research, according to Chen.
Bacteria neutralises greenhouse gas
A type of bacteria found at the bottom of the ocean could be used to neutralise large amounts of industrial carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, researchers have found. Most atmospheric CO is produced from fossil fuel combustion.
But converting the carbon dioxide into a harmless compound requires a durable, heat-tolerant enzyme. The bacterium, Thiomicrospira crunogena, studied by researchers from University of Florida, produces carbonic anhydrase, an enzyme that helps remove CO in organisms.
The bacterium lives near hydrothermal vents, so the enzyme it produces is accustomed to high temperatures.
That is exactly what is needed for the enzyme to work during the process of reducing industrial CO, said Robert McKenna at the University of Florida College of Medicine.
The enzymecatalyses a chemical reaction between CO and water.
The CO interacts with the enzyme, converting the greenhouse gas into bicarbonate. The bicarbonate can then be further processed into products such as baking soda and chalk.
According to the UF researchers, which included graduate research assistants Brian Mahon and Avni Bhatt, in an industrial setting the carbonic anhydrase would be immobilised with solvent inside a reactor vessel that serves as a large purification column.
Flue gas would be passed through the solvent, with the carbonic anhydrase converting the carbon dioxide into bicarbonate.
National leaders and the Medicine Nobel
Several Latin American countries have been declared free of sleeping sickness
What have national leaders like Ho Chi Min of Vietnam, Chairman Mao of China and Jimmy Carter of America to do with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine? Reports have it that Ho Chi Min was greatly disturbed by the loss of thousands of soldiers (fighting the Americans in the Vietnam War) to malaria. He appealed to his ally, Chairman Mao, stating that a wild plant in rural Vietnam was claimed to cure malaria, and whether he could direct Chinese scientists to help isolate any active anti-malarial drug molecules from such a plant. Mao did so, and decades of work by Chinese scientists led to the drug artemisinin. The main player behind this was a lady scientist called Tu You You, who was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Medicine a few weeks ago. (Apparently when the Nobel Committee tried to call Tu You You (what a lyrical name!), they could not; she was away in the hinterlands, presumably working away).
Former President of America, Mr. Jimmy Carter, after retirement, established the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Center in 1982 with the theme: “Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope”. In the area of fighting disease, the Center collaborated with Emory University at Atlanta, GA, and the drug firm Merck. Together, they focused on the disease called Human African Trypanosomosis (also spelt as trypanosomiasis), which affects vision, leads to sleeping sickness, lymphatic swelling and elephantiasis, and overall lethargy. This disease was found to spread across 10 million square km in Sub-Saharan Africa (Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Gambia, Zimbabwe etc, particularly along river coasts (hence the name river blindness). It affects not only people but also livestock, where it leads to drop in milk and meat production, abortions and gradual weakness and wasting away. The Carter Center, in collaboration with Lions International, Merck Institute and in-house support, launched a programme to fight and end trypanosomosis in affected areas.
The end results have been stunning and successful. The researchers, led by Dr William C Campbell of the Merck Center, obtained a natural product called Avermectin (sent to them by Dr. Satoshi Omura of Tokyo, Japan, who showed its effectiveness against parasitic infections), tweaked its chemical structure a bit to produce the drug called Ivermectin (Merck’s trade name for this is Mectizan). This drug cures this debilitating disease and also protects against latter day recurrence. One tablet a year (yes, just one per year) for 10 years is the dose; rather similar to how we administer vaccines! To date, thanks to the Carter Center’s request and participation, Merck has given away 270 million tablets of Ivermectin across not just Africa but also in parts of Latin America (Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil) and in the Arab country Yemen. Several of these Latin American countries have been declared trypanosomosis-free.
Why and how does trypanosomosis come about and how does it affect the body of the infected animals and humans? It is caused by a parasitic protozoan (a type of roundworm) that resides inside the fly called Tsetse (or Tzetze, also called tik tik; lyrical names again), which abound along river coasts across Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America. When the tsetse fly bites you, it delivers the villain parasite. This is what leads to the sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, lymphatic swelling and inflammation of the cornea of the eye, leading to loss of vision (river blindness or ‘onchocerciasis’ as the eye doctors call it).
How was the solution found? It was in the 1970s that Dr. Satoshi Omura, working at the Kitasato University in Tokyo, identified some microbes called Streptomyces in the soil, and one form of it called S. avermitilis, which produces molecules that fight roundworms and other parasites. He isolated one of them, which he called avermectin and sent it to Merck in the US. William Campbell worked on it, modified it into a more effective molecule which he named Ivermectin (apparently named after a village in UK called Iver; Campbell is of Irish origin), and history was made. Campbell and Omura share half the prize amount, while Tu You You gets the other half. Incidentally, Jimmy Carter himself received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, for his humanitarian efforts.
Does trypanosomosis through such a parasite occur in India? To date, thankfully enough, no; and even if it does, ivermectin will help take care of it. Thus, the sleeping sickness we see often in government offices has other origins.
Why don't we see solar eclipse every month?
SOLAR ECLIPSE
Since the moon revolves around the Earth all the times, why don’t we see solar eclipse during every moon’s revolution around the Earth?
Before the question is answered, we should know how solar eclipses do happen. Solar eclipse is nothing but obscuring of the Sun due to the Moon coming in between the Sun and the viewer on the Earth during the course of revolving of the Moon and the Earth. As we all know that the Earth revolves around the Sun in a near circular path completing one revolution in about 365 days. The plane in which the Earth moves around the Sun is known as the Ecliptic.
At the same time the Moon also revolves around the Earth which is also a near circular path, completing on revolution in about 28 days, known as a lunar month. But the fact is that these two planes are inclined to each other at an angle.
For the Solar eclipse to occur, the Sun, the Moon and the Earth must come not only in one straight line but also these three bodies should be in one plane.
Although the Sun, the Moon and the Earth come in one line every two weeks, once on a new Moon night and second time on the full Moon night, they seldom come in one plane during these events. This occurs two to maximum of five times in a year. Similarly, the Moon eclipse occurs when the Earth’s shadow falls on the Moon, which happens when the Earth comes in between the Sun and the Moon exactly.
This phenomenon takes place on a full Moon night and up to three times in a year. Generally the Sun eclipse and the Moon eclipse follow each other with a gap of 14 days. Another interesting fact about the Sun eclipse is that the events repeat each other after a time gap of 18.6 years, known as Saros cycle.
NASA completes key milestone for most powerful rocket
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), which will be the most powerful rocket ever built and the first vehicle designed to meet the challenges of the journey to Mars, has completed all steps needed to clear a critical design review.
This is the first time in almost 40 years that a NASA human-rated rocket has cleared a critical design review (CDR).
“We’ve nailed down the design of SLS, we’ve successfully completed the first round of testing of the rocket’s engines and boosters, and all the major components for the first flight are now in production,” said Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Division in US.
“There have been challenges, and there will be more ahead, but this review gives us confidence that we are on the right track for the first flight of SLS and using it to extend permanent human presence into deep space,” Mr. Hill said.
The CDR examined the first of three configurations planned for the rocket, referred to as SLS Block 1.
The Block 1 configuration will have a minimum 70-metric-ton lift capability and be powered by twin boosters and four RS-25 engines.
The next planned upgrade of SLS, Block 1B, would use a more powerful exploration upper stage for more ambitious missions with a 105-metric-ton lift capacity.
Block 2 will add a pair of advanced solid or liquid propellant boosters to provide a 130-metric-ton lift capacity.
In each configuration, SLS will continue to use the same core stage and four RS-25 engines.
The SLS Programme completed the review in July, in conjunction with a separate review by the Standing Review Board, which is composed of seasoned experts from NASA and industry who are independent of the programme.
Throughout the course of 11 weeks, 13 teams — made up of senior engineers and aerospace experts across the agency and industry — reviewed more than 1,000 SLS documents and more than 150 GB of data as part of the comprehensive assessment process at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre, where SLS is managed for the agency.
The Standing Review Board reviewed and assessed the programme’s readiness and confirmed the technical effort is on track to complete system development and meet performance requirements on budget and on schedule.
The programme briefed the results of the review in October to the Agency Program Management Council, led by NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot, as the final step in the CDR process.
This review is the last of four reviews that examine concepts and designs. The next step for the programme is design certification, which will take place in 2017 after manufacturing, integration and testing is complete.
Critical design reviews for the individual SLS elements of the core stage, boosters and engines were completed successfully as part of this milestone.
ASTROSAT spots Crab Nebula, the brightest X-ray source
The sighting implies that the specific instrument can locate X-ray sources
On October 9, ASTROSAT, the first Indian space observatory, spotted the Crab Nebula using the Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI) instrument. The Crab Nebula is the brightest hard X-ray (highest energy X-ray) source in the sky; researchers often use it as a reference to calibrate hard X-ray detectors.
The sighting of the Crab is significant and implies that the specific instrument on board can locate X-ray sources. It would further view other celestial X-ray sources and aid Indian research on them.
“This is only the beginning, with many more events to unfold”, ISRO said. The nebula was detected on October 9 [at the same time] by both the Mission Operation Centre at Peenya, Bengaluru, and the Payload Operation Centre, IUCAA, Pune.
ASTROSAT also spotted and viewed Cygnus X-1, a black hole source, for two days.
Nerve-wracking
The sighting of the Crab Nebula was preceded by palpable tension and a “nerve wracking period which seemed like eternity but was only three days” before scientists at the Mission Operation Centre in Bengaluru detected the Crab Nebula at 2.03 pm on October 9. The Payload Operation Centre, IUCAA, Pune too detected it at almost the same time.
“If we are not looking at the source, we would get some background photons. But the background photons were a lot more than anticipated,” said Dr. Varun Bhalerao, Post Doctoral Fellow at the Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA). In fact, the background rate exceeded the anticipated rate by a factor of four.
“When a cosmic ray hits any matter [in this case the telescope], it creates lots of photons locally due to cosmic ray interaction. What would be detected as one photon becomes 10 photons,” Dr. Bhalerao said. “Theoretically and observationally, it is known that when a high-energy cosmic ray hits any matter it can create a shower. Several parameters should be right to see this shower.”
As a result, the signal from the Crab Nebula was swamped by noise (background photons) and hence the scientists could not spot the nebula in the very first orbit.
Soon thereafter, the ASTROSAT passed through the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) region when the Crab was in the field of view. The South Atlantic Anomaly is Earth’s magnetic field anomaly region as a lot of charged particles are trapped there. So there is so much noise whenever a satellite passes through the SAA region. The region can also damage the instruments. Hence all instruments were switched off when ASTROSAT was passing through the South Atlantic Anomaly region.
“Once outside the SAA region, the Crab Nebula was behind the Earth for most of the time,” Dr. Bhalerao said. “After a couple of orbits, we could finally see the Crab. The scientists by then were able to suppress the noise and detect the signal from the Crab Nebula. “On more analysis, we can now see the Crab from parts of all orbits. In hindsight, it becomes easier,” he said.
The multi-wavelength ASTROSAT was launched on September 28 with its five scientific instruments.
Other X-ray instruments would be made operational in the coming weeks. In about a month, all X-ray instruments will be ready to stare at interesting stars.
Atom bomb: no excess cancer death among survivors’ kids
This year we observed the 70th anniversary of A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1950 Japanese national census, nearly 280,000 persons stated that they “had been exposed” in the two cities. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF)selected about 94,000 people to to study the health effects of radiation.
One of the most notable among these projects is the study of the survivors’ children. Quite contrary to popular perception, this study recently revealed that the children born to exposed parents did not suffer from excess cancer mortality or non-cancer deaths (The Lancet Oncology, September 15, 2015).
Dr Eric J Grant and co workers from the RERF looked at the birth records to identify children conceived after the atomic bombings and born in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They also collected data from city offices which entertained applications from pregnant women.
The study included 75,327 children of atomic bomb survivors in the two cities and unexposed controls, born between 1946 and 1984, and followed up to Dec 31, 2009. Researchers interviewed the parents directly or matched them to a master list of survivors to estimate the radiation exposure to their reproductive organs. This dose depended on distance of the individual from the hypocentre, shielding from such objects as buildings or hills and shielding from intervening tissues inside the body before radiation reached a particular organ.
The study covered 16,869 children with one or both parents within 2 km of the hypocentres. The researchers compared them with 18,450 children born to one or both parents resident in the city before and after the bombing but neither parent closer than 2.5 km to the hypocentres and 16,738 children who had both parents outside of the cities at the time of the bombing. Researchers matched the comparison groups by year of birth, sex, and city.
They cautioned that the study is still underpowered. Ninety per cent of the cohort is still alive. Further follow up will enhance the statistical power of the study.
What is the importance of the study? In an accompanying comment, David Brenner, Center for Radiological Research, Columbia University Medical Center, U.S. noted that in the first decade or so after the explosions, scientists focussed most of the concerns about long-term health on potential heritable genetic effects in subsequent generations.
They relied on Dr. Herman Mueller's 1927 study which showed that radiation could induce heritable genetic effects in fruit fly.
“Since the 1950s, however, understanding of the relative importance of genetic and somatic radiation related effects has completely reversed: genetic effects are now considered only a small contributor to the overall detriment to health after radiation exposure”, Brenner clarified. The conclusions from the latest study are consistent with the recent thinking on the topic.
. Long-term studies of the health impact of radiation on the progeny of A-bomb survivors have not shown any scientific evidence for heritable genetic effects.
Scientists assume that persons exposed to radiation may suffer from genetic effects as a matter of abundant caution as studies on fruit flies and mouse have shown that radiation can cause genetic effects. Though it is only an assumption, members of the public consider genetic effects of radiation as gospel truth — a wrong public perception prevails over a robust scientific fact.
While agreeing with Dr Brenner's view that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, we need not lose sleep over the genetic effects of radiation as he rightly stated that “the risks must be small, otherwise they would have been observed in the children of survivors”.
The writer is a former secretary, AERB
Chinese chrysanthemum enters Guinness World Records
A “full-standing multiflorous chrysanthemum” grafted in central China’s Henan province has earned its place in the Guinness World Records for containing the largest number of chrysanthemum species.
The multiflorous chrysanthemum is 3.8 metres in diameter and composed of 641 different types of chrysanthemums grafted to southernwood. It was certified for the world record on Sunday in Kaifeng city of Henan province, Xinhua news agency reported.
A representative of Guinness World Records made the announcement at a chrysanthemum festival in the city.
It took about four years to cultivate the plant, which now has more than 1,500 flowers blossoming at one time.
ABC conjecture: proved but still out of reach?
The conjecture is key to solving several other important problems
In August 2012, Shinichi Mochizuki, Japanese mathematician from Kyoto University’s Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, posted four papers on his website that claimed to contain a proof of the important ABC conjecture. This was a potential bombshell, as the ABC conjecture holds the key to solving several other important problems.
However, most mathematicians are still flummoxed by the proof which uses a new branch of the field too abstract even to them. It is not as though Mochizuki has made elaborate attempts to either publicise his work or render it more comprehensible by giving lectures about it around the world. His approach seems to be to quietly work for about a decade in near isolation, and then, equally quietly, to post the proof online!
The ABC conjecture
“The ABC conjecture says that an ‘additive condition’ on integers imposes strong restrictions on their ‘multiplicative structure’, that is, their prime factorization,” says mathematician Hector Pasten, of Harvard University, who works in number theory and mathematical logic, in an email to this correspondent.
“For example, take the equation 128+81=209. On the left-hand side are 128 (which is factorised as the prime 2 repeated seven times) and 81 (which is factorised as the prime 3 repeated four times). The ABC conjecture says that we should not expect too many repetitions on the right-hand side because, on average, the primes should not be repeated too many times in an equation of the form A+B=C (after common primes are cancelled). And, in fact, 209=11x19 has no repeated prime factor!” he said.
Dr Pasten remarks, “Believe or not, the content of the conjecture is not more complicated than what I just explained. A totally different story is trying to prove it!”
There are many known uses to having a proof of the conjecture. These include its ability to solve many of the so-called Diophantine equations. Dr Pasten elaborates, “It would give much simpler new proofs to known very deep and complicated theorems in the area, such as Gerd Faltings’s theorem for curves (previously Mordell’s conjecture) and Fermat’s Last Theorem…It would give solutions to important open problems in number theory... It would establish new connections between the number theory and other areas of mathematics that might seem rather distant, such as complex analysis and mathematical logic...”
Impenetrable
Dr Pasten says, “The key notion in Mochizuki’s recent work is identifying arithmetic-geometric objects from their symmetries. However, this is not a new subject. In the technical sense required here, the idea was suggested by the great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck under the name of Anabelian Geometry … Mochizuki is a world expert in the subject of Anabelian Geometry and, in fact, he proved Grothendieck’s Anabelian conjecture in 1996, with all mathematical rigor. This experience makes people consider his work on ABC as a serious attempt, although we don’t currently understand it.”
(It will be updated with more article from Sci tech section from October month.)
