Quote of the Day June 24, 2024

 

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”
Carl Sandberg (1878-1967), Poet

“कोई सपना देखे बिना कुछ नहीं होता।”
कार्ल सैंडबर्ग (१८७८-१९६७), कवि

India Ranks 129th on Global Gender Gap Index

 India is ranked 129th out of 146 countries in the 2024 Global Gender Gap Index. This is the same spot it has held in the bottom 20 for the past few years. This shows that fixing the gender gap has been hard for a long time in many areas, even though there has been some progress in some areas. Iceland retained its top position in the rankings list.

About the Global Gender Gap Index

The Global Gender Gap Index, launched in 2006, examines gender equality in economic participation and opportunity,  education, health and survival, and political empowerment. The index ratings emphasize gender inequality rather than women’s performance, ranging from 0 (no parity) to 1 (complete parity).

Analysis of India’s Sub-Indices Performance

• Economic participation: India’s 39.8% score ranks 142nd, indicating a persistent gender gap in the working and managerial ranks, despite a little increase from previous years.
•  Educational Attainment: India ranks 112th in  education with a 96.4% gender gap closed. This shows  educational equality is better but remains below global levels.
• Health and Survival: India ranks 142nd with 0.951, suggesting significant gender health disparities.
• Political Empowerment: India ranks 65th in political inclusion, bridging the gender gap with 25.1%.

Regional Comparison

In South Asia, India ranks fifth out of seven countries, while Bangladesh leads globally at 99th. India is generally underperforming on gender equity, especially compared to its neighbors. Discrimination based on gender costs the world’s economy a lot—up to $12 trillion a year. Improving equality between men and women could greatly increase GDP growth rates. This shows how important it is to include equality between men and women in economic policymaking.

What is AlphaFold?

 In the past few years, the creation of  AlphaFold, a tool that has greatly sped up the process of understanding  protein structures, has been a huge step forward in biological study. Molecular biology is used in medicine, agriculture, and many other areas, so this is very important.

The Protein-Folding Problem

 Proteins are essential to all cellular processes. They are made up of amino acids that fold into complicated three-dimensional shapes that determine what they do. X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance were once used, but they were expensive and took a long time to figure out. The protein-folding problem was created to try to figure out  protein structures just by looking at the patterns of amino acids.

The Introduction of  AlphaFold

DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet) made  AlphaFold, which was a big step forward in fixing the protein-folding problem. Starting in 2016, its technology got better through events like the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP). By 2020, when AlphaFold 2 came out, it was as accurate as it had ever been. People thought that adding this version would solve the protein-folding problem because it would change how  protein shapes could be predicted from their sequences.

Expansion and Evolution: AlphaFold 3

Together with Isomorphic Labs, AlphaFold 3 was released in 2024, which was the next step in the growth of AlphaFold. Along with  proteins, this version could now predict other substances like DNA, RNA, and small molecular ligands. The improvements made by  AlphaFold 3 could have a bigger effect on many fields, such as medicine design, genomics, and the creation of biorenewable materials.

 AlphaFold Database

DeepMind has promised to let the rest of the  scientific world know about AlphaFold’s perks. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database was created with help from EMBL’s European  Bioinformatics Institute. It had its first release in 2021, which included more than 350,000 protein structures. By 2022, the database had grown to include more than 200 million structures. This important data is now available to scholars all over the world for free.