Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

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Multiple threats to Himalayan biodiversity

News:

• The Indian Himalayas, which constitute about 12% of the country’s landmass, is home to about 30.16% of its fauna, says a new publication from the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI).

Beyond News

• The publication, Faunal Diversity of Indian Himalaya, lists 30,377 species/subspecies in the region with the entire identified fauna in the country adding up to 1,00,762.
• Spread across six States from Jammu and Kashmir in the west through Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and West Bengal’s Darjeeling to Arunachal Pradesh in the far east  the Indian Himalayas are divided into two bio-geographic zones  the Trans-Himalaya and the Himalaya, based on physiographic, climatic and eco-biological attributes.
• The entire region, spread over 3.95 lakh sq. km., is home to 280 species of mammals, 940 species of birds, 316 species of fishes, 200 species of reptiles and 80 species of amphibians. This put together accounts for 27.6% of the total vertebrate diversity of the country.
• The central Himalayas are the most rich in faunal diversity with 14,183 species, followed by the west Himalayas, which is home to 12,022 species.
• The Indian Himalayas also have 131 protected areas, which cover 9.6% of the entire protected area of the country, almost the same as the Western Ghats (10% of protected areas), another biodiversity hotspot in the country. The protected areas include 20 national parks, 71 wildlife sanctuaries, five tiger reserves, four biosphere reserves and seven Ramsar Wetland sites.
• The publication lists 133 vertebrate species of the region cited as threatened in the IUCN Red List.

Reasons

• Climate change is the major threat as far as mammals and birds are concerned. The impact is visible in the shifting distribution of sensitive species like the Asiatic Black Bear, the Snow leopard, and the Himalayan Marmot.
• Habitat loss due to land use change, illegal wildlife trade, forest fires and increasing anthropogenic activities pose threats to this Himayalan biodiversity, the publication underlines.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

Don’t get into tusk trouble, says SC

 News:

• The Supreme Court has ruled that tusks are the property of the government. A three-judge Bench filled a half-a-century vacuum in law, with its interpretation that “there cannot be an iota of doubt” about government having the right.

Beyond News:

• The court was examining the Kerala Forests Act of 1961 and the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 in a case dealing with the alleged unauthorised collection and storage of elephant tusks, possession of an unlicensed gun and other accessories by an individual in Wayanad two decades ago.
• The Supreme Court observed that there is a clear “declaration” in the 1972 Act on elephant tusks being government property.
• Conservationists campaigning to curb ivory-trafficking and poaching got a boost with the order. India prohibits import and export of ivory.
• The ruling, however, would not affect individuals who have ownership certificates for declared ivory. Even in the case of captive elephants, either the government keeps custody of tusks or owners are permitted to retain them if they give an undertaking that they would not be traded.
• The Supreme Court said, It is quite clear that ivory imported into India and an article made from such ivory in respect of which any offence against this Act (1961 Act) or any rule or order made thereunder has been committed, shall be deemed to be the property of the State Government.

Domestic Violence Act for divorced women too: Supreme Court

News

• The Domestic Violence Act meant to punish men who abuse women in a relationship  extends to all man-woman relationships, and also protects divorced women from their former husbands, the Supreme Court has upheld.

Beyond News

• A three-judge Bench confirmed a Rajasthan High Court ruling of 2013 that the term ‘domestic violence’ cannot be restrained to marital relations alone.
• The Supreme Court’s recent order, based on a question of law raised by advocate Dushyant Parashar, found no reason to differ with the High Court’s conclusion that ‘domestic relationship’ includes “consanguinity, marriage, a relationship in the nature of marriage, adoption or as family members living together as a joint family”.
• The apex court did not intervene with the interpretation that ‘domestic relationship’ is not confined to the “relationship as husband and wife or a relationship in the nature of marriage, but it includes other relationship as well such as sisters, mother, etc.”
• The court held that domestic violence can continue even after divorce and the reach of the Act should not be shackled by confining only for the protection of women living in marriage.
• It illustrated how a divorcee husband could resort to violence by entering the workplace of his former wife to commit an act of violence, or even attempt to communicate with her, or threaten or cause violence to her relatives or dependants or any other person.
• It amounts to domestic violence if the former husband tried to dispossess the woman from a jointly-owned property or refuse to return her ‘stridhan’ or valuable security or other property. The Act brings all these acts of violence within its ambit.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

ISRO making green propellant

News

• Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have reported progress in the development of an environment-friendly propellant to power satellites and spacecraft.

Beyond News

• The effort is to replace the conventional hydrazine rocket fuel, a highly toxic and carcinogenic chemical, with a greener propellant for future missions.
• Initial tests by a research team at the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC) here have shown promising results in the formulation and associated tests of a propellant blend based on hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN).
• Due to its high performance characteristics, hydrazine has dominated the space industry as the choice of propellant for over six decades, despite its environment and health hazards and the challenges faced in its manufacturing, storage, ground handling and transportation.
• The LPSC team formulated the HAN-based monopropellant and carried out a variety of tests to investigate its characteristics, like thermal and catalytic decomposition and compatibility with different materials.
• A monopropellant is a chemical propulsion fuel which does not require a separate oxidizer. It is used extensively in satellite thrusters for orbital correction and orientation control.
• The in-house formulation consists of HAN, ammonium nitrate, methanol and water. While methanol was added to reduce combustion instability, the choice of AN was dictated by its capacity to control the burn rate and lower the freezing point of the propellant.

Gene editing can make ‘chocolate trees’ disease resistant

News

• Scientists are using a powerful gene-editing tool to grow cacao trees that are more resistant to diseases, an advance that could help boost the production of chocolates all over the world.

Beyond News

• The cacao tree, which grows in tropical regions, produces the cocoa beans that are the raw material of chocolate. Reliable productivity from cacao plants is essential to the multibillion-dollar chocolate industry, the economies of producing countries and the livelihoods of millions of smallholder cacao farmers.
• However, each year, several plant diseases severely limit global production, with 20-30 % of cocoa pods destroyed preharvest.
• The study, is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of using CRISPR technology to improve Theobroma cacao. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
• It is a way to modify an organism’s genome by precisely delivering a DNA-cutting enzyme, Cas9, to a targeted region of DNA. The resulting change can delete or replace specific DNA pieces, thereby promoting or disabling certain traits.
• Previous work in cacao identified a gene, known as TcNPR3, that suppresses the plant’s disease response. The researchers hypothesised that using CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out this gene would result in enhanced disease resistance.
• The researchers also created CRISPR gene-edited cacao embryos, which they will grow into mature trees to test the effectiveness of this approach at a whole-plant level. This research builds on more than 30 years of biotechnology research aimed at building a better cacao tree.

New therapy for drug resistant skin cancer

News

• A team of researchers has managed to exploit a vulnerability in melanoma or skin cancer that develops resistance to a targeted therapy, providing a potential new therapeutic strategy to selectively kill the drug-resistant cancer cells.

Beyond News

• The study has shown that when cancer cells develop drug resistance, they also acquire a new vulnerability.
• The researchers, however, found that the hyperactive resistant melanoma cells produced large amounts of reactive oxygen species, but cancer cells still sensitive to the drug did not do so.
• The study, published in the journal Cell, found that the abundance of free radicals caused the resistant melanoma cells to stop dividing, but they did not die.
• When tested on mice along with an existing drug, vorinostat, which is known to stimulate the production of free oxygen radicals, the researchers saw tumours shrinking under the influence of the drug, the report said.
• This laid the foundation for a new therapeutic strategy: Treating patients with BRAF-mutated melanoma, as usual, with signal pathway inhibitors.
• When the tumour becomes resistant, stop giving those inhibitors and immediately treat the patients with vorinostat to kill the resistant cancer cells.

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