H.H. Prince Yakub Habeebuddin Tucy, a descendent of Babur, the Mughal Emperor, called on Governor N.N. Vohra at the Raj Bhavan here today.
Prince Tucy apprised the Governor about his views on the current situation in Kashmir and restoration of peace and normalcy by organizing planned public contact programmes. He sought Governor’s intervention for constitution of Madrassa Board in J&K and involvement of various NGOs for helping youth in finding better avenues for employment.
Governor appreciated Prince Tucy’s tours and lectures in various places in Rajouri and Poonch and his efforts towards the restoration of normalcy in the State. He urged the Prince to continue his honest endeavours towards country’s development and assured him all support.
source: http://www.crosstownnews.in / Cross Town News / Home> News> J & K / by Cross Town News / May 24th, 2017
The Congress-run Associated Journals Ltd, a company founded by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, on Wednesday announced its plan to resume publication of Urdu newspaper Qaumi Awaz with veteran journalist Zafar Agha named as its Editor-in-Chief.
Qaumi Awaz, one of the pioneers of post-Independence Urdu journalism, had temporarily suspended publication in 2008.
“The company has appointed veteran journalist Zafar Agha as Editor-in-Chief for its Urdu newspaper Qaumi Awaz and the digital property with immediate effect. He will be responsible for building and leading the team of Qaumi Awaz and its digital and related assets,” said a Congressstatement.
Associated Journals had launched the beta version of its English website — www.nationalheraldindia.com — last year and named Neelabh Mishra as its Editor-in-Chief for its Hindi and English newspapers.
–IANS
sid/vd/vt
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
source: http://www.business-standard.com / Business Standard / Home> News-IANS / New Delhi / May 24th, 2017
Anas Rashid, who plays Sooraj Rathi in “Diya Aur Baati Hum”, recently lent his voice for a sad version of the show’s title track.
TV actor Anas Rashid, who plays Sooraj Rathi in “Diya Aur Baati Hum”, recently lent his voice for a sad version of the show’s title track.
TV actor Anas Rashid, who plays Sooraj Rathi in “Diya Aur Baati Hum”, recently lent his voice for a sad version of the show’s title track.
The 35-year-old actor said though it was not easy for him, he thoroughly enjoyed it.
“Singing isn’t an easy thing to do. There’s a lot that goes into it. However, I did make sure my effort didn’t go into vain and I sang from my heart.
“The title track is very touching and is exactly what Sooraj is going through on the show. The whole sequence fits the bill completely,” Rashid said in a statement.
“Diya Aur Baati Hum” sees Deepika Singh in the female lead role, Sandhya Rathi.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Entertainment> Television / by PTI / October 01st, 2015
The two-day Times UniverCity (TU) will commence on Saturday at St Joseph’s Boys’ High School. The event is specially designed to help students explore different career options after pre-university.
TOI speaks to two of the speakers, Danish Sait and Saad Khan, about role models, advice they’d like to give the youth and the importance of bringing people from different backgrounds to a common platform.
Danish Sait
Focus on learning, not on earning
On role models: Mentors play a bigger role than role models. Role models may influence you with trends and goals. A mentor will help you build a foundation for the launch pad; they aren’t the destination, they’re travel agents.
Advice: I read this quote many years ago: `You get what you work for, not what you wish for’. Patience, persistence, perseverance are three important words. Focus on learning, and not on earning. Know your weaknesses. There is no absolute route to succeed. Build relationships, don’t be impulsive, don’t be shy to ask, have fun.
Views on the event: It’s an excellent initiative, great way to bridge the future with the present. There’s abundant information available on the internet. Unfortunately, we don’t spend enough time to pick the skills we need in the real world. This should help fix that in a tiny manner.
Saad Khan
Understand importance of hard work On role models: Role models can inspire you to work towards your passion, but you shouldn’t lose focus from yourself and just become a follower. If someone inspires you, it should be about their work and not who they are as people.
Advice: My humble advice to all young people is to first understand the importance of hard work.Most people working with me are young and it’s rare to see a consistent drive.Fatigue and confusion set in early while they pursue their first job and it almost seems that they want things to happen fast. We are all so used to Google answers on our fingertips that working hard to find a solution is beyond us now. A quote on my school notice board has always been with me that Success comes before work only in a dictionary.
Views on the event: It is a fabulous initiative. Students know a lot about what is going on in the world today via social media. What I feel they can learn is to deal with situations and problems in the real world, professionally and personally and Times UniverCity is a wonderful platform for the same.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Bangalore News / TNN / May 20th, 2017
Kalam had his early training at NASA in 1963 before he set up India’s first rocket-launching facility in the fishing village of Thumba in Kerala. DH Photo
In great news for India, scientists at NASA have named a new organism discovered by them after the much-loved A P J Abdul Kalam.
Till date, the new organism — a form of a bacteria — has been found only on the International Space Station (ISS) and has not been found on earth!
Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the foremost lab of NASA for work on inter-planetary travel, discovered the new bacteria on the filters of the International Space Station (ISS) and named it Solibacillus kalamii to honour the late president, who was a renowned aerospace scientist.
Kalam had his early training at NASA in 1963 before he set up India’s first rocket-launching facility in the fishing village of Thumba in Kerala.
“The name of the bacterium is Solibacillus kalamii, the species name is after Dr Abdul Kalam and genus name is Solibacillus which is a spore forming bacteria,” said Dr Kasthuri Venkateswaran, senior research scientist, Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group at JPL.
The filter on which the new bug was found remained on board the ISS for 40 months. Called a high-efficiency particulate arrestance filter or HEPA filter, this part is the routine housekeeping and cleaning system on board the international space station.
This filter was later analysed at JPL and only this year did Venkateswaran publish his discovery in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.
According to Venkateswaran, even as it orbits the earth some 400 kilometres above, the ISS is home to many types of bacteria and fungi which co-inhabit the station with the astronauts who live and work on the station.
Venkateswaran said even though Solibacillus kalamii has never been found on earth till date, it is really not an extra-terrestrial life form or ET.
“I am reasonably sure it has hitch hiked to the space station on board some cargo and then survived the hostile conditions of space,” explained Venkateswaran.
Naming the new microbe after Kalam was natural to Venkateswaran and his team.
“Being a fellow Tamilian, I am aware of the huge contributions by Dr. Kalam,” he said.
New bacteria are usually named after famous scientists.
Venkateswaran is part of a team which is asking that eternal question “are we alone in the universe?”
Towards that, his responsibilities include monitoring the bug levels on the ISS and he also has to ensure that all spacecraft that fly to other planets are free of terrestrial bugs.
One of his big jobs was to ensure that NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover — the massive car-sized almost 1000 kg buggy — was totally sterile when it left earth.
By international law, this extreme hygiene is required else other planets could get contaminated by bugs that reach the Martian or other planets hidden on human satellites.
Today the ISS is the size of a football field and its construction started with a launch in 1998 and as of now it is the largest human-made object orbiting the earth.
Weighing about 419 tonnes, it can house a maximum of six astronauts and has costs roughly USD 150 billion.
Till date, 227 astronauts have flown to the space station. This makes the space station actually a very dirty place and maintaining hygiene is critical so that humans can live on it with ease.
On the space station all the air and water is recycled, being a completely closed environment there is a rapid build- up of moulds and bacteria on the station.
These not only have to be cleaned but monitored to ensure that they do not corrode the walls of the space station and do not turn hazardous to the astronauts.
Venkateswaran’s main job is to monitor the environment of the space station so that harmful bugs do not proliferate.
He heads the ‘Microbial Observatory’ on the ISS projects to measure microorganisms associated with compartments owned by the US.
According to NASA, he also directs several research and development tasks for the JPL – Mars Program Office, which enables the cleaning, sterilisation, and validation of spacecraft components.
He directs several NASA competitive awards on the microbial monitoring of spacecraft and associated environments for the Exploration System Mission Directorate, closed habitats like ISS or its earth analogues for the Human Exploration and Operation Mission Directorate.
But is the new bug of some use.
“These spore formers tend to withstand high radiation and also produce some useful compounds protein wise which will be helpful for biotechnology applications,” Venkateswaran said.
His team has not characterised the bacteria fully but he hints that the new bug could be a key source for chemicals that can help protect against radiation damage.
source: http://www.deccanherald.com / Deccan Herald / Home / Press Trust of India, Los Angeles / May 21st, 2017
An oral history of marginalised Muslim women’s narratives
How does violence, communal or otherwise, impact ordinary people? What happens after the conflict, when the spotlight shifts elsewhere? How do victims pick up the pieces? Now direct all these questions at marginalised groups, especially poorer women, who anyways live in areas of darkness. What could have been their experience? Between 2006 and 2009 — after some of the worst communal clashes our country had seen — a scholar and a film-maker/researcher decided to investigate. Working with local researchers and activists in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and several cities of Gujarat, they began gathering stories from women survivors of collective violence.
K. Lalita and Deepa Dhanraj’s account is deeply disturbing, and this book of oral history is an important one on the narratives of marginalised Muslim women. As they write in the introduction, Lalita and Dhanraj documented life histories of 75 Muslim women survivors of communal violence, and present the stories of 19 of them divided into four thematic sections: I Began to See the World for What it is, Loss and Trauma, Negotiating Survival and Livelihood, and Claiming Accountability, Seeking Justice. Without going into issues like Muslim personal law, Islam, politics or the question of Muslim identity, the writers draw out experiences of violence these women had, “whether instigated or abetted by the state, communal, sexual, domestic or structural….”
For many of these women, “rupture manifested as complete displacement — physical, economic, domestic and emotional” — and they still live in a state of anguish, the experience too much to bear. For others “the loss of vatan (homeland)” is also the “loss of … community,” the loss of a sense of belonging to your birthplace. Add to this impoverishment, loss of income and identity — we hear of a woman in Mumbai who tells us her husband, a carpenter, lost his tools during a riot. Unable to invest in a new set, he became unemployed and depressed, and never recovered.
The stories of ordinary lives — their pain at losing their joy — stay with you. Just like Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the demise of communism, Second-Hand Time, where she recorded the voices of men and women rarely given an opportunity to speak. They didn’t speak of lofty ideals or politics, but of their daily lives, their joy and pain.
www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books> Reviews / by Sudipta Datta / May 21st, 2017
Some of the members of the IIT-H team working to make cancer treatment better, on the institute’s campus in Hyderabad. | Photo Credit: Mohd Arif;Mohd Arif
Team working on finding alternative to chemotherapy
The Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad (IIT-H) has developed biodegradable non-particles that could be instrumental in treating cancer.
A team led by assistant professor Aravind Kumar Rengan has been working on finding alternative ways to chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer treatment to minimise side-effects caused by these therapies. He designed a novel nano system which kills the cancer cells by photothermal therapy.
The group is currently working on making more cost-effective nano particles for photothermal therapy, integrating these particles with cancer specific drugs to have an enhanced effect in killing cancer.
The team members involved in the research are Tejaswini Appidi, Syed Basseruddin, Deepak Bharadwaj, Anil Jogdand, Sushma, Anula — all Ph.D. scholars; junior research fellow Rama Singh, and postdoctoral fellow Surya Prakash Singh.
Photo thermal therapy is a treatment procedure where light (photo) energy is supplied by means of an external laser to nano particles which absorbs this energy and converts it to heat (thermal) energy. This heat generated by irradiation of laser would increase temperature within the tumour and result in the death of cancer cells.
No side-effects
The important aspects of the research is that the treatment procedure has no side-effects, since the nano particles would be accumulated in the tumour region, and also the irradiation is specific to particles, which means the heat is generated only within the tumour and not elsewhere in the body.
Also, the laser used to provide light energy would not harm the healthy cells around the tumour region as these healthy cells would not absorb this light energy as they remain transparent to this irradiation.
The nano particulate system is very unique in its own way. The particles, after generating the heat required to kill the cancer cells, will degrade inside the body and further breakdown into much smaller particles which will be excreted from the body.
“This procedure had very good results in experiments carried out in mice, and is expected to show the same in humans too. This treatment is now under clinical trials and once the trials are completed, this would be available as an alternative treatment procedure to cancer,” Dr. Rengan told The Hindu.
Dr. Rengan was recently awarded the prestigious INSA award in the young scientist category for his outstanding research in treatment of cancer by photothermal therapy using biodegradable particles.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Hyderabad / by R. Avadhani / May 19th, 2017
On June 21 this year, history will be made with the launch of the world’s smallest ever satellite — KalamSat. The launch will also hold special significance for India, with 18-year-old Rifath Sharook, a native of Tamil Nadu, being the brains behind the satellite. This will be the first time an Indian student’s experiment will be operated by NASA.
18-year-old Rifath Sharook; Source- New York Post
Hailing from the Tamil Nadu town of Pallapatti, Sharook has truly achieved something special with the KalamSat. The satellite will be launched by the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and weighs only 64 grams. Named after India’s former President and nuclear scientist A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the satellite is slated to be launched from a NASA facility in Wallops Island.
Sharook’s project made it through the competition ‘Cubes in Space’, which was a collaboration between NASA and ‘I Doodle Learning’. The project is the first to be manufactured through 3D printing, and aims to redefine the performance of new technology in space, reports the Business Standard .
The mission span will be for 240 minutes, with KalamSat operating for 12 minutes in a micro-gravity environment, transported by a sub-orbital flight. Sharook, in a conversation with TOI, said,
The main role of the satellite will be to demonstrate the performance of 3D-printed carbon fibre. We designed it completely from scratch. It will have a new kind of on-board computer and eight indigenous built-in sensors to measure acceleration, rotation, and the magnetosphere of the earth. The main challenge was to design an experiment to be flown to space that would fit into a four-metre cube weighing 64 grammes.
Sharook’s project was sponsored by ‘Space Kidz India’, and points to his keen interest in space. He has also subscribed to the NASA kid’s club. Further speaking about the scope of the project, he said,
We did a lot of research on different cube satellites all over the world, and found that ours was the lightest. We obtained some of the components from abroad, and some are indigenous. The satellite is made mainly of reinforced carbon fibre polymer.
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source: http://www.yourstory.com / YourStory.com / Home> Academia / Think Change India / May 19th, 2017
MMEWS general secretary Mohammed Atique with the cows at the gaushala
A cattle shelter run by a Jodhpur-based Muslim educational and welfare society earns goodwill
Even as cow vigilante groups in the northern States are targeting people on the mere suspicion of eating beef or smuggling cattle, an adarsh gaushala (model cow shelter) established by a Muslim institution in Jodhpur is taking care of old and sick cows. It is also assisting dairy farmers in a dozen surrounding villages in looking after their animals, and earning goodwill for promoting communal amity.
Launched in 2004 by Jodhpur-based Marwar Muslim Educational and Welfare Society (MMEWS), the initiative has won mass appreciation, with hundreds of people handing over cows and bulls to the shelter.
Old, weak, sick, abandoned, and neglected cows are given priority at the sprawling gaushala located in Bujhawad village off the Jodhpur-Barmer highway, 12km from Jodhpur. The shelter claims to be the first gaushala to be wholly owned and managed by the Muslim community.
Situated on a large piece of land without any boundary wall, the shelter is currently home to 217 bovines tagged by the State government’s Animal Husbandry Department.
The shelter’s full-time caretaker Hakim Khan and his wife Allahrakhi are in charge of the bovines’ welfare. Dogs and wild animals intruding into the shelter is a major concern, but Mr. Khan says the job is worth it. “We are glad to receive appreciation from the majority community, which sees the gaushala as an enterprise promoting communal harmony,” he said.
A trained team brings the cows, mostly from nearby villages, to the gaushala in a specially-designed vehicle. The MMEWS currently spends a little over ₹1 lakh a month on the animals. It is planning to double the shelter’s capacity by taking over a part of the 56 acres of land allotted for the construction of the Maulana Azad University, the society’s general secretary, Mohammed Atique, told The Hindu.
“When we started the gaushala, some fringe elements objected to Muslims operating the shelter,” Mr. Atique said. “But over the years, the shelter has won people’s admiration and generated immense goodwill as villagers appreciate the selfless work.”
Most of the bovines in the shelter have come from villages such as Doli, Gangana, Bhandu, Narnadi, Khudala, Jhanwar and Rohila Kalan. The shelter also employs a team of veterinarians who not only attend to the animals but also visit the nearby villages to assist dairy farmers in taking care of their cattle. Filling gaps in the government’s veterinary infrastructure, the team runs vaccination and treatment camps for stray cows in the villages. “A mobile van visits these villages to treat cows, goats and buffaloes free of cost,” Mr. Atique said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> States> Other States / by Mohammed Iqbal / Jodhpur – May 21st, 2017
Peerless: Muhammed Anas proved he is the master of the one-lap race in the country, by winning in a record time on Monday.
New Delhi :
The 400m specialist qualifies for the World Championship
Muhammed Anas qualified for the World Championship in style by breaking his own National record with a time of 45.32 seconds in the men’s 400 metres in the third Indian Grand Prix athletics meet at the Nehru Stadium here on Monday.
The 22-year-old beat Arokia Rajiv by one second, as he erased his mark of 45.40 set in Poland last year, a time that helped him qualify for the Rio Olympics.
Like everyone, Anas was surprised by the time and record. He said that the hard work for the past few months back home in Kerala had helped him tune nicely. It is a nice progression in preparation for the Federation Cup and the Asian Championship scheduled over the next two months, before the World Championship in August in London.
It was also not exactly a surprise as Anas had clocked 45.69 in the Asian Grand Prix in Chinese Taipei, after having missed the first two meets in China owing to visa issues. He had clocked 45.89 in the first Indian Grand Prix in Patiala and had skipped the second in Delhi on May 11.
Jisna Mathew, a trainee of P.T. Usha, beat favourite M.R. Poovamma by eight-hundredth of a second with a time of 52.65 in the women’s race. The World Championship qualification standard of 52.10 was too stiff for her.
While Husandeep Singh of Chandigarh won the men’s 100 metres in 10.69 seconds, Dutee Chand could not work up any magic while beating Merlin Joseph with a time of 11.30 seconds in the women’s race.
In the absence of World junior champion Neeraj Chopra, Davinder Singh asserted his ability once again, after having clinched his sport for World Championship in Patiala, by winning the men’s javelin with a 81.53 metres in his fifth throw.
