Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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India cautious over Maldives curbs on envoy

News:

• New Delhi appears to be weighing diplomatic options after Male reportedly placed restrictions on the movement of the Indian Ambassador to the Maldives.

Beyond News

• According to reports, the Maldives’ Local Government Authority has mandated that foreign diplomats in Male obtain government approval before meeting any Maldivian official.
• The government suspended three members of a local body allegedly for meeting Indian Ambassador Akhilesh Mishra without permission.
• Ibrahim H. Shihab, International Spokesperson at the President’s office, said the Indian envoy was a friend of the Maldives.

‘India, EU air pact will spur tourism’

News:

• The European Union’s Mobility and Transport Commissioner has invited India to explore a deeper engagement in civil aviation through a comprehensive aviation agreement, and also suggested the need for a global agreement on railways.

Beyond News:

• That will have a direct positive impact on tourism .
• Topics like safety, security, improving capacities of airports were all part of discussion.
• Road safety has become a very important global issue. It has been elevated at the UN level as well.
• Vision Zero is a multi-national road safety project that aims to achieve zero fatalities or serious injuries involving road traffic.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

IACS develops hydrogel to remove toxic dyes and metal ions

News

• Scientists from Indian Association for Cultivation of Sciences (IACS), Kolkata, have developed a new gel that can remove toxic organic dyes and metal ions from waste water.

Beyond News

• They found the hydrogel began absorbing various commonly used dyes within 15 minutes.
• The dyes tested were malachite green, congo red, brilliant blue and rhodomine B.
• In the case of metals, the hydrogel was able to considerably remove commonly found ones such as cobalt and nickel from industrial effluents in about six hours.

Basic amino acids like leucine and phenylalanine were used to make the gel; the gel is biodegradable. It was stable at room temperature and remained as a gel for several months.

 Significance:

• The current methods used for treating wastewater adsorption using activated carbon, chemical precipitation or electrochemical techniques are largely ineffective due to incomplete removal or high energy requirements.
• In comparison, the new hydrogel-based material is able to remove the hazardous waste effectively as it has high water permeability, large surface area for adsorption and is also simple to use.
• The hydrogel can absorb the wastes for up to 60 hours before reaching a saturation point. The gel was able to remove 78-92% of the dyes and more than 80% metals ions.

The researchers say that the production of the gel can be scaled up to the desired volume for use in water treatment at industries.

Mars absorbed water like sponge

News:

• Scientists suggest that,the Martian surface may have reacted with and absorbed the water that once flowed on the Red Planet, making it uninhabitable.

Beyond News

• Today’s Martian surface is barren, frozen and uninhabitable, a trail of evidence points to a once warmer, wetter planet, where water flowed freely. The conundrum of what happened to this water is long standing and unsolved.
• The results revealed that the basalt rocks on Mars can hold approximately 25 per cent more water than those on Earth, and as a result drew the water from the Martian surface into its interior.

IS, Al Qaeda competing for Indian recruits

News

• Islamic State and Al Qaeda have been engaged in a fierce competition to promote their propaganda in India, an analysis of messages posted on social media platforms suggest.

Beyond News

• In the past few months, both IS and Al Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) have been posting several provocative messages.
• A senior officer in the security establishment said they were monitoring the content but were particularly concerned with the Al Qaraar media of the Islamic State that has been posting ‘Kashmir’ centric messages.
• Intelligence officials strongly suspect that AQIS is being backed by the Pakistan establishment to carry out attacks in India on its pretext.

Terrormonitor.org, a non-profit watchdog that tracks the online activities of terror groups said AQIS had re-branded its media approach since it was challenged by the IS.

Diagnosing early-stage cervical cancer using artificial intelligence

News

• An artificial intelligence-based algorithm developed by a team of researchers from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata and Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur makes this possible.

Beyond News

• The algorithm developed by the team not only differentiates normal and precancerous tissue but also makes it possible to tell different stages of progression of the disease within a few minutes and with accuracy exceeding 95%.
• This becomes possible as the refractive index of the tissue is different in the case of healthy and precancerous cells, and this keeps varying as the disease progresses.

How it Works

• The microstructure of normal tissue is uniform but as disease progresses the tissue microstructure becomes complex and different.
• The change in scattered light as disease progresses is marked by a change in tissue refractive index.
• The team has quantified the changes in tissue refractive index using a statistical biomarker multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA). The statistical biomarker has two parameters (Hurst exponent and width of singularity spectrum) that help in quantifying the spectroscopy dataset.

While MFDFA provides quantification of light scattered from the tissues, artificial intelligence-based algorithms such as hidden Markov model (HMM) and support vector machine (SVM) help in discriminating the data and classifying healthy and different grades of cancer tissues.

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