Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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Indian aid to SAARC nations dips

News

• India’s financial assistance to SAARC neighbours declined considerably in the past five years, a reply by the government in Parliament this week showed.

Beyond News

• The figures were revealed in the Lok Sabha in reply to a question on whether India had completed projects committed to countries in the neighbourhood.
• Minister of State for External Affairs submitted a chart of India’s grant assistance, which have fallen from Rs. 5,928.6 crore in 2013-14 to Rs. 3,483.6 crore in 2017-18 for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka combined.

Tribal people allowed to collect forest produce

News

• Following talks with the Forest Department, tribal residents of Germalam in Tamil Nadu were allowed to collect forest produce.

Beyond News

• Hundreds of people reside in the hamlets located in the forest areas including Kottamalam, Vaithiyanathapuram, Suzilkarai, Kadatti, Germalam, Gethasal and Ganakarai that comes under the Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve (STR).
• Their main source of livelihood was collecting forest produce such as honey, gooseberry and selling it.
• However, in the last few months they were denied permission to enter the forest area and collect the produce. The tribal people said that their livelihood was completely affected and announced that they would stage a protest in front of the forest office in Germalam.
• Officials held talks with representatives of tribal associations where they explained how their livelihood was affected by the ban.

Officials said that the tribals would once again be permitted to enter the forest to collect the produce.

Centre comes to Kerala’s aid

News

• Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh conducted an aerial survey of flood-ravaged Kerala and announced an immediate relief of Rs. 100 crore as the State braced for another spell of heavy rain after a fresh low pressure area developed in the Bay of Bengal.

Beyond News

• State authorities said the death toll in the recent monsoon rain rose to 38 and more than 1,00,000 people had been shifted to 1,026 relief camps.
• The Union Minister’s announcement of aid came as the first response to the State’s plea for Rs. 1,220 crore from the National Disaster Response Fund. The Centre had earlier sanctioned Rs. 80 crore and another Rs. 18.24 crore assistance to the State.
• Singh called the flood situation serious and unprecedented in the history of the State.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

Start-up develops optical fencing to tackle human-elephant conflict

News

• When six fresh engineering graduates from different educational institutions joined to form a start-up based in Coimbatore, they wanted to address an issue that is a cause of worry in the rural parts of the district human-elephant conflict.

Beyond News

• They came out with a novel and cheap alternative for electric fencing, a widely used method to ward off wild elephants in forest boundaries.
• The start-up Spihood Synergy Pvt. Ltd. has developed an Optical Fencing technology that can be used as an early warning system by detecting elephant intrusion.
• Optical Fencing works with the help of a network of poles that are linked together with radio frequency network and laser beams. Any breach of the laser beams, fixed in varied heights to detect movement of elephant between two poles, will be communicated through the radio network to the operator.
• The operator – who can view the breaching in computer, tablet or mobile phone – can generate alarm and issue warning messages to mobile phones.
• Two poles can be fixed at a maximum distance of 100 m between them. The poles have a number of transmitters and receivers creating an Optical Fence around a given area.
• The poles can also generate buzzing of honey bees, a known natural remedy to scare elephants.
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Rescue, rehabilitation centre for marauding monkeys

News

• The monkey rescue and rehabilitation centre, proposed to be established by the Telangana State government as a pilot project of its kind, is likely to be completed by October-end. Based on its success, more such projects would be taken up in areas facing human-monkey conflict in the State.

Beyond News

• The centre is proposed at Chincholi village near Nirmal in Adilabad district, where five acres of land has been allocated for the purpose.
• The need for the centre was felt after several complaints were made to the authorities about marauding groups of simians, that were destroying crops, entering homes and stealing food. Two species, Rhesus and Bonnet monkeys, were blamed for destruction of crops such as millets, cereals and groundnut.
• Once the centre is established, monkeys would be captured and sterilised, before releasing them into the wild, in order to control their population and keep their menace in check.
• Before the decision to establish the centre, a study was taken up of similar centres in Himachal Pradesh, which too suffered the primate attacks. Himachal Pradesh has administered sterilisation to more than 1.5 lakh monkeys so far through the centre.
• The government has sanctioned Rs. 2.21 crore for the centre, of which Rs. 1.56 crore would be the establishment expenditure and Rs. 65 lakh would be the recurring expenditure for the first year.
• The expenditure would be met from the afforestation fund meant for Haritha Haram programme, as per the government order.

IGIB team finds a new target to reverse iron overload disease

News

• Using zebrafish, researchers have successfully discovered a pathway that regulates hepcidin hormone The hepcidin hormone, released by the liver, is a central regulator of iron in the body. Dysregulation of the hormone leads to anaemia on one hand and excess iron accumulation in organs such as liver and heart leading to multi-organ failure.

Beyond News

• Hemochromatosis is a rare hereditary disease that is characterised by iron accumulation or overload in various tissues. The symptoms are non-specific and hence difficult to diagnose. Current options only manage the disease by removing excess iron.
• Mutations in about six genes are known to cause reduction in hepcidin hormone production thereby causing excess iron accumulation. But for the study, the research team created a disease model in zebrafish by mutating one of these genes (TFR2). Mutations in the TFR2 gene cause a severe form of the disease.
• The zebrafish with the mutant gene showed excess iron accumulation in organs, quite similar to what is seen in humans.
• In the conventional drug discovery approach, the target protein and even the pathway are already known and molecules that would either inhibit or overproduce the target protein are screened for. But the researchers adopted a different approach for this study.
• Since the researchers knew hepcidin production is regulated by many signalling pathways, they selected 80 compounds that specifically target signalling pathways in zebrafish. Of the 80 compounds tested, eight were found to induce the production of hepcidin hormone in the fish.
• One of these compounds is a blocker of NFkB signalling pathway. This pathway was not known to be important in hepicidin regulation in the liver.
• This is the first time that researchers have been able to identify and tell that the NFkB pathway regulates liver hepcidin production.
• When the pathway in the zebrafish model of Hemochromatosis was inhibited using the four compounds, the hepcidin production was restored and iron overload was reduced, thus reducing the severity of the disease.

Forty-five new exoplanets discovered

News

• Scientists have discovered a trove of forty-four planets in solar systems beyond our own in one go, dwarfing the usual number of confirmations from extrasolar surveys.

Beyond News

• The findings will improve existing models of solar systems, and may help researchers investigate exoplanet atmospheres.
• Astronomers pooled data from NASA’s Kepler and the ESA’s Gaia space telescopes. They confirmed existence of these 44 exoplanets and described various details about them
• A portion of the findings yield some surprising characteristics.
• Four of the planets orbit their host stars in less than 24 hours.
• These contribute to a small but growing list of “ultrashort-period” planets, suggesting that they could be more common than previously believed.

NASA launches probe to ‘touch’ Sun

News

• NASA launched a $1.5 billion spacecraft toward the Sun on a historic mission to protect the earth by unveiling the mysteries of dangerous solar storms.

Beyond News

• The unmanned spacecraft’s mission is to get closer than any human-made object ever to the centre of our solar system, plunging into the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, during a seven-year mission.
• The probe is guarded by an ultra-powerful heat shield that can endure unprecedented levels of heat, and radiation.
• NASA has billed the mission as the first spacecraft to “touch the Sun.”
• In reality, it should come within 3.83 million miles of the Sun’s surface, close enough to study the curious phenomenon of the solar wind and the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, which is 300 times hotter than its surface. The car-sized probe will give scientists a better understanding of solar wind and geomagnetic storms that risk wreaking chaos on the earth by knocking out the power grid.
• Knowing more about the solar wind and space storms will also help protect future deep space explorers as they journey toward the Moon or Mars. The spacecraft is protected from melting during its close shave with the Sun by a heat shield just 4.5 inches thick.
• The sunlight is expected to heat the shield to around 1,371 degrees Celsius. Yet the inside of the spacecraft should stay at just 29 degree Celsius. The probe is set to make 24 passes through the corona collecting data.
• The spacecraft is the only NASA probe in history to be named after a living person 91-year-old solar physicist Eugene Parker, who first described the solar wind in 1958.

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