SWATI (Science for Women- A Technology & Innovation) Portal

 In February 2024, the government has launched the SWATI (Science for Women- A Technology & Innovation) portal, a database highlighting accomplishments of Indian women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics & Medicine) fields. The interactive portal was developed by the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) to address the gender gap in sciences.

Need for the Portal

Women comprise only 13-15% of researchers in STEMM in India, lower than most G20 nations. They are disproportionately clustered in junior roles indicating barriers to advancement. Lack of visibility further marginalizes women’s scientific contributions. Diversity in leadership and problem-solving suffers, hampering innovation ecosystems. The SWATI portal tackles this visibility gap.

Salient Features

The portal allows self-registration of profiles of women students, faculty and scientists across levels capturing expertise, qualifications, publications etc. The dashboard provides dynamic analytics on distribution of women in STEMM roles across states and institutions. It enables collaborations through expert outreach, forums and open access in English and Hindi.

Addressing Inclusion Challenges

Analysis of portal data can guide counseling programs and returnship policies tailored to states. Domain-specific polls enable targeted opportunity initiatives. Automated scholarship alerts empower women scientists. By highlighting challenges, SWATI can trigger interventions to maximize women’s potential.

Realizing the Vision

With women crossing 25% threshold in STEMM by 2030, increased visibility from the portal is expected to attract more girls to science careers. Connecting investors and corporates can boost commercialization. By lifting the veil of invisibility, SWATI could catalyze a watershed movement for gender parity in Indian science.

Plant ‘cries’: Recalling Jagadish Chandra Bose

 

Researchers have picked up ‘distress’ calls from plants in difficulty, such as when they need water. More than a century ago, a pioneering Indian scientist had demonstrated that plants can ‘feel’ pleasure and pain.

Late last month, a group of researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel reported that they had been able to pick up distress noises made by plants. The researchers said these plants had been making very distinct, high-pitched sounds in the ultrasonic range when faced with some kind of stress, like when they were in need of water.

This was the first time that plants had been caught making any kind of noise, and the breakthrough research findings made global headlines. But many Indians just had a sense of déjà vu. Several previous generations of Indians had grown up hearing that Jagadish Chandra Bose had shown, more than a century ago, that plants experienced sensations and were able to feel pleasure and pain just like animals. Children were often advised not to pluck leaves, flowers or twigs because that could cause pain to the plants or trees. The discovery that plants ‘cry’ in distress, therefore, did not come as much of a surprise to them. It seemed just a logical extension of J C Bose’s work. Bose might not be a very familiar name to the current generation, but he is a colossal figure of Indian science. A physicist-turned-biologist, Bose, who lived between 1858 and 1937, made pioneering contributions in both the fields and was the first Indian to have made a powerful impact on modern science, much before Srinivasa Ramanujan, C V Raman, or Satyendra Nath Bose, a student of Jagadish, arrived on the scene.

J C Bose could — many believe he deservedly should — very well have been India’s first Nobel Prize winner, ahead of his life-long friend and confidant Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he used to have a prolific, and often poetic, correspondence.

Bose’s science

Jagadish Chandra Bose is remembered for two things — his work on wireless transmission of signals, and on the physiology of plants. He is also credited as one of the first contributors to solid state physics. Sir Neville Mott, Nobel Prize winner in 1977, is said to have remarked that Bose was “at least 60 years ahead of his time and he had anticipated the p-type and n-type semiconductors”, according to an account in Remembering J C Bose, a 2009 publication by D P Sen Gupta, M H Engineer and V A Shepherd.

Bose is widely believed to be the first one to generate electromagnetic signals in the microwave range. In 1895, just a year after he began his active research, he demonstrated, before an audience in Kolkata, how microwaves could be used, wirelessly, to ring an electric bell on the other side of a building. He published as many as 12 papers on radio waves in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and many more in some other prestigious journals, as reported in the book Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science, by Subrata Dasgupta. He lectured on his work at some highly publicised scientific gatherings in Europe, in the presence of some of the leading scientists of the day. He was the first one to come up with radio receivers, which enabled wireless telegraphy.

And yet, Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian scientist who carried out the first transmission of signals across the Atlantic in 1901, is recognised as the sole inventor of the radio. Marconi, along with another colleague, was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize for work that Bose is known to have accomplished earlier.

It was not just bias, but as several accounts put it, a reluctance on Bose’s part to obtain patents for his work, that deprived him of the Nobel. As mentioned in the publication Remembering J C Bose, he wrote to Tagore about being approached by a big businessman in Europe with the offer to get his work patented. Bose not just rejected the offer, he felt disgusted at the idea of making money from science. “If only Tagore would witness the country’s (England’s) greed for money,” Bose wrote to Tagore. “What a dreadful, all-consuming disease it was”.

His study of plants

Bose, rather abruptly, changed tack in the initial years of the 20th century and began to focus his attention on plants. But as Professor A S Raghavendra from the University of Hyderabad explained, Bose’s work was not as disjoined as it seems.

“J C Bose was extremely talented at picking electric signals. The other thing he was extremely creative at was making instruments. Bose was working with rudimentary facilities and, yet, was able to build some remarkably sensitive instruments. He used these instruments to try and detect the faintest signals from the plants. He was carrying over his skills from physics to probe the world of biology,” Raghavendra, a former J C Bose National Fellow, who has written extensively on Bose’s work, told The Indian Express.

“His (Bose’s) contributions to the communication systems in biology as well as physics are amazing. He devoted strong attention to studies on the biology of movements, feelings and nervous system. The word ‘feelings’ was used for plants, but clearly this is a matter of semantics; plants react both chemically and physically to touch, but to use the word ‘feeling’ or ‘sensation’ as we know it is quite different. The simple experiments of Bose revealed a high degree of similarity in the responses of plant and animal tissues to external stimuli. This principle was amply demonstrated later by biophysicists, using highly sophisticated instruments,” Raghavendra wrote in a 2010 paper.

In a way, Bose was possibly the world’s first biophysicist. But some of his work became controversial as well, particularly when he claimed that not just plants, even inanimate inorganic matter could respond to stimulus, and that there was actually no sharp demarcation between living and non-living worlds. Such “mental leaps” have sometimes been attributed to Bose’s “deep convictions in Indian philosophy” and his “faith in universalism”. Bose regarded plants to be the “intermediates in a continuum that extended between animals and the non-living materials”, according to the authors of Remembering J C Bose.

His work on plants, too, was also not easily digested. Bose himself records the opposition he faced. In a letter to Tagore, he mentioned a lecture he was delivering in Europe. “When I commented during my lecture at the Royal Society that plants which come between the living and the non-living will provide similar response, (John) Burden Sanderson (a leading physiologist of his time) told me that he had worked all his life with plants. Only mimosa (touch-me-not) responds to touch. That ordinary plants should give electrical response is simply impossible. It cannot be”. Over the years, much of Bose’s work has been confirmed, though his genius is not always acknowledged. “He was much ahead of his times, no doubt. Many of his contemporaries did not fully understand him,” Raghavendra said, adding that the recent discovery of distress noise from plants could lead to some exciting research in the field. “We cannot lose sight of the fact that it was Bose who started it all”.

Written by Amitabh Sinha 

F

Source: The Indian Express, 19/04/23

National Science Day 2023: The Raman Effect, which CV Raman won the Nobel for

 

In 1986, the Government of India designated February 28 as National Science Day, to commemorate the announcement of the discovery of the “Raman effect”. Here is more about CV Raman and his groundbreaking discovery.

In 1986, the Government of India, under then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, designated February 28 as National Science Day to commemorate the announcement of the discovery of the “Raman Effect”. This year’s edition is being celebrated under the theme of “Global Science for Global Wellbeing”, in light of India’s G20 presidency.

The Raman Effect was the discovery which won physicist Sir CV Raman his Nobel Prize in 1930. Conducting a deceptively simple experiment, Raman discovered that when a stream of light passes through a liquid, a fraction of the light scattered by the liquid is of a different colour. This discovery was immediately recognised as groundbreaking in the scientific community, being the subject of over 700 papers in the first seven years after its announcement.

What is the “Raman Effect”? Why is it so important? Most importantly, who was the man behind this momentous discovery?

A young prodigy conducting after-hours research

Raman was born to a family of Sanskrit scholars in Trichy (present-day Tiruchirapalli) in the Madras Presidency in 1888. At the age of only 16, He received a BA degree from Presidency College in Madras, and was placed first in his class. While studying for his MA degree, at the age of 18, he got published in the Philosophical Magazine: this was the first research paper ever published by Presidency College.

Due to his ill health, he was unable to travel abroad for further education. Thus, in 1907, he got married and settled down in Calcutta as an assistant accountant general. While still a full-time civil servant, Raman began after-hours research at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). Raman raised the profile of IACS, doing some award-winning research as well as conducting public demonstrations with charisma. At the age of 29, he finally resigned from his civil services job and took up a professorship in Presidency College, Calcutta.

A voyage across the ocean leads to interest in the scattering of light

By 1921, CV Raman had gained a solid reputation as a top scientific mind both in India and in the West. That year, he made his first journey to England. It was on the return journey that Raman would make an observation that would change his life and science forever.

While passing through the Mediterranean Sea, Raman was most fascinated by the sea’s deep blue colour. Dissatisfied with the then-accepted answer (“the colour of the sea was just a reflection of the colour of the sky”), his curious mind delved deeper.

He soon found out that the colour of the sea was the result of the scattering of sunlight by the water molecules. Fascinated by the phenomenon of light-scattering, Raman and his collaborators in Calcutta began to conduct extensive scientific experiments on the matter – experiments that would eventually lead to his eponymous discovery.

Simply put, the Raman Effect refers to the phenomenon in which when a stream of light passes through a liquid, a fraction of the light scattered by the liquid is of a different colour. This happens due to the change in the wavelength of light that occurs when a light beam is deflected by molecules.

In general, when light interacts with an object, it can either be reflected, refracted or transmitted. One of the things that scientists look at when light is scattered is if the particle it interacts with is able to change its energy. The Raman Effect is when the change in the energy of the light is affected by the vibrations of the molecule or material under observation, leading to a change in its wavelength.

In their first report to Nature, titled “A New Type of Secondary Radiation,” CV Raman and co-author KS Krishnan wrote that 60 different liquids had been studied, and all showed the same result – a tiny fraction of scattered light had a different colour than the incident light. “It is thus,” Raman said, “a phenomenon whose universal nature has to be recognised.”

Raman would go on to verify these observations using a spectroscope, publishing the quantitative findings in the Indian Journal of Physics on March 31, 1928.

The importance of the discovery

CV Raman’s discovery took the world by storm as it had deep implications far beyond Raman’s original intentions. As Raman himself remarked in his 1930 Nobel Prize speech, “The character of the scattered radiations enables us to obtain an insight into the ultimate structure of the scattering substance.” For quantum theory, in vogue in the scientific world at the time, Raman’s discovery was crucial. The discovery would also find its use in chemistry, giving birth to a new field known as Raman spectroscopy as a basic analytical tool to conduct nondestructive chemical analysis for both organic and inorganic compounds. With the invention of lasers and the capabilities to concentrate much stronger beams of light, the uses of Raman spectroscopy have only ballooned over time.

Today, this method has a wide variety of applications, from studying art and other objects of cultural importance in a non-invasive fashion to finding drugs hidden inside luggage at customs.

Source: Indian Express, 28/02/23

Challenges Faced by Women in STEM And How To Address Them

 Technology and innovation are the forerunners of development in India and the world. Education and progress in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are essential components of this development in terms of overcoming challenges across sectors and ensuring their growth and expansion.However, as India stands at the precipice of becoming a global power, one must acknowledge that to move forward in any field, equal participation by women is imperative. Women in the STEM segment, until recently, faced severe hurdles in gaining access to equal opportunities, but the situation is gradually improving, and women are participating in the field in large numbers. This article discusses how bringing more women into STEM will contribute to the greater development of our economy.

The Situation At Present

Statistics suggest that over 43% of STEM graduates were women. The All India Survey on Higher Education Report estimates that over 10,56,095 women have enrolled in graduate, post-graduate, and Ph.D. courses in the field, as of 2019-20. The Science Technology and Innovation Policy were launched to increase this number by 30% by 2030. The policy also aims to revise the sectoral strategies and priorities of the industry to make it more inclusive, decentralized, evidence-based, and expert-driven. The Scopus database also suggests that women have authored one in three research papers published in India. Estimates also indicate that India is second in the world in terms of the number of women CEOs in the tech sector.

These developments paint an optimistic picture for women in STEM. Women in India are breaking the glass ceiling and excelling in all realms of STEM. Women like Roshni Nadar, the chairperson of HCL, Sharmistha Dubey, the CEO of Match Group, and Revathi Advaithi, CEO of Flex, are exemplary role models who have changed the face of the industry in modern times. However, more must be done to ensure fuller participation and a gender-friendly workspace. Several shortcomings need to be countered if we hope to achieve equitable and balanced development.

What Does The Future Hold?

The Indian government has taken several laudable initiatives to encourage women to join the STEM bandwagon and achieve milestones. For instance, India’s participation in the Gender Advancement for Transforming Institutions project and the launch of Consolidation of University Research for Innovation and Excellence played a pivotal role in paving the way for women in STEM. However, more must be done to push women to reach their full potential.

Women scientists and young achievers are also being given recognition through women excellence awards distributed by SERB. National Women Bioscientists Awards are also accorded to senior researchers in the field of biotechnology for their contribution. Many companies today are incorporating policies like flexible work timings, provision of daycare, and relaxation of age limits to encourage women further to participate in the STEM field. Learning platforms are organizing workshops and seminars to provide women with upskilling and reskilling opportunities, where they can learn by interacting with recognized women role models.

Although experts in the field of psychology have repeatedly suggested that there is no significant difference in the aptitude for STEM subjects between men and women, the participation of women in these fields remained low for a decade. However, the industry has come a long way from that, and today women are not only entering the STEM fields but are leading major companies and corporate houses in the industry. This has been enabled by the hard work and determination of these women, changes in the workplace policy, and deploying more financial and human resources for effective training of these women in technologies like AI and ML.

Sonya Hooja

Source: The Telegraph, 24/11/22

Science vs religion-I

 In Tao of Physics, Fritzof Capra wrote that science does not need religion and religion does not need science, while a man needs both. I am not so sure. Again, in The DemonHaunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan wrote, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.” If spirituality implies appreciating our own insignificance in the Universe and the resulting feeling of humbleness, then this has nothing to do with religion.

But leaving aside spirituality, religion and science have never been compatible. While science teaches us a systematic, rational way of exploring this universe to understand the laws of nature that guide life and non-life, religion has brought untold misery and suffering upon humanity throughout the course of history by claiming certainty in “information” and “facts” amenable neither to reason nor to observation.

Like oil and water, science and religion are immiscible and belong to mutually exclusive domains without any interface. Whenever they have been attempted to be brought together, the result invariably has been confusion, conflict, and bloodshed, of which there are too many gory examples in history.

Allow religion to explain the origin of the Universe according to its own ideas, and you end up with corpses of men and women burnt at stakes. Same with politics. Allow religion to rule a nation according to its own theories, and you end up with Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran where the laws of Sharia are more important than human life or human happiness.

Given the chance, religion would turn this world into a demon-haunted place in no time ~ in fact it has attained a remarkable degree of success in doing so. But what exactly is science, and what is religion? According to The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, “One way to distinguish between science and religion is the claim that science concerns the natural world, whereas religion concerns the supernatural world and its relationship to the natural. Scientific explanations do not appeal to supernatural entities such as gods or angels (fallen or not), or to non-natural forces (such as miracles, karma, or qi).

For example, neuroscientists typically explain our thoughts in terms of brain states, not by reference to an immaterial soul or spirit, and legal scholars do not invoke karmic load when discussing why people commit crimes.” Science concerns itself with what is or can be observed and seeks an immediate answer. Religion claims the answer is either unknowable or explained only with the help of faith, that is acceptance of something whose existence is indeterminate.

Science claims to explain phenomena or mysteries only through the tested method of empirical inquiry which is a series of steps involving observation-hypothesis-experiment-inference-theory- prediction-testing. This process is indispensable, even where it may not succeed in explaining all observed phenomena, whereas religion takes recourse to God and finds it absurd that by studying STEM subjects (Science-TechnologyEngineering and Mathematics) alone, the concept of God can be reduced to irrelevance. Given the chance, it will subsume science too.

In fact, a great deal of effort has already been invested towards this end, to start a dialogue between science and religion that is actually an exercise in futility.

In 1998, the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson in his book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, argued that knowledge is a unified system that embraces science, morality, and ethics as well. The aim was perhaps not to make science spiritual but to make religion scientific.

In the 1990s, with its multi-million-dollar grants, the John Templeton Foundation launched a magazine called Science & Spirit, “to explain what science cannot, and asking science to validate religious teachings”. The magazine died a natural death in 2009.

The Foundation also financed several documentaries like “Faith and Reason”, “Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World” or “God & the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony Between Science & Spirituality”.

Scores of bestselling books written by eminent scientists followed, like Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998) by John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge physicist turned Anglican priest, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006) by Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, or Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe (2021) by Stephen Meyer, Director of the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute which is the main organization behind the so-called Intelligent Design Movement, according to which the universe was created by an intelligent designer, the God almighty.

But physics explains the origin of the universe convincingly from quantum electrodynamics as arising from a vacuum fluctuation and biology explains the evolution of all life, starting with a chance molecule that learned to replicate itself. But both intelligent design and evolution cannot be true at the same time, hence the attempt to find a middle path ~ an absurd one at that ~ that God created the universe and left it to the laws of nature, also designed by him, to run it, without any further interference in its future course.

As the New York Times science journalist George Johnson wrote, thus “God becomes a metaphor for the laws that science tries to uncover.” On the question of faith, there are deep divisions among the scientists themselves. While Einstein’s God was one “who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists”, and not one “who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind”, many scientists hold radically different views. Some, like the cosmologist Allan Sandage, wonder: “‘How is it that inanimate matter can organize itself to contemplate itself? That’s outside of any science I know”, while others, like the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, believe that pursuing God is a “waste” of time that never has “added anything to the storehouse of human wisdom”.

Believers in God hold that a grand unified theory to explain the universe in terms of a single theory that is the holy grain of science would be incomplete without the integration of faith and ancient wisdom in it, while others, like Christians, were outraged when the radiocarbon dating of the shroud of Turin suggested it as a medieval forgery and not the burial cloth of Jesus, feel that as science develops more sophisticated techniques, their religious beliefs will be vindicated.

Fortunately, the endeavour of all these new-age scientists to blur and finally erase the boundary between science and pseudoscience has not yet succeeded. Similar efforts are on even in our own country. Religion is essentially about worship, and worship means surrender.

Faith is necessarily blind and has to disregard evidence in order to reinforce and validate its belief system. Human life is full of misery and suffering ~ indeed it is a “flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery” from which faith alone can provide a temporary deliverance. “Happiness is but only an occasional episode in the general drama of pain” that surrounds us, as Thomas Hardy said, and if surrender could mitigate even a little of that pain, it should be welcome.

Surrender can also be made more convincing when imbued with love and fear that a God is capable of inspiring in human minds. Finally, if the surrender can hold out the promise of something eternal, like an eternal deliverance from pain or from the endless cycles of birth and death, such an eternal vision becomes too tantalising to resist by most.

All that remains is to remind and reinforce these ideas continually through repetitive rituals, meaningless though they are, and the whole package becomes so overwhelming that few could emerge out of its enchanting aura to be able to see the world and reality with objectivity. After all, we still do not know how the objective reality conveyed to our brain through the senses acquires a subjective meaning in our mind, how the scent of a rose gets transformed into the memory of our first love, or a fading photograph brings back long-forgotten emotions.

Subjectivity rules the roost, everything else, even hard evidence, becomes mere speculation. Blind faith has no rival, and when blind faith masquerades as science, the conquest of the mind by religion becomes total, and all logic has been clinically erased. The evolution of life and that too on a tiny planet called earth that has just about the right conditions with the right values of fundamental constants among billions of such planets is an awesome mystery that the believers cite to establish intelligent design as the only explanation.

They ignore the fact that there are planets with all possibilities and ours happen to be the one with only just one of these permutations that made life ~ and God ~ possible. Logic and faith, like science and religion ~ are incompatible; if bring them together, there will be combustion and conflict.

But bring complexity to replace conflict, and the science-religion debate immediately acquires a political dimension ~ struggle between secular liberalism and traditional conservatism, authority versus individual liberty, herd mentality versus reason, and state versus individual. In each one of these struggles, rationality is the obvious victim that is left bleeding to die.

GOVIND BHATTACHARJEE

Source: The Statesman, 22/11/22

Change is constant

 The mobile phone wins hands down — from communication to storage, from entertainment to learning, it is all on your phone

Some of us were more disturbed than impressed when we read a poem in The New Yorker written by an Artificial Intelligence bot. The last two lines of the poem on cryptocurrency are chilling: “Of inventing money, just like that,/ I ask you, is nothing sacred?” The AI, code-davinci-002, had been ordered to write the poem in the style of Philip Larkin and it was written in less than a second. “We are being replaced by a button,” a friend remarked ominously. Is the time imminent then that our students will produce an essay or a poem with a quick ‘command’ and we teachers will be reduced to teaching them how to give the right prompts? We don’t really know, but we can certainly try to understand the implications of the signs of the times. 

The toddler rushes to the door every time the bell rings, hoping it is ‘Amazon Uncle’. He has never been taken shopping because of the pandemic, not even to a glittering mall. No worries. All his toys and clothes are delivered to the door.

Attendance in some schools is through biometric devices. I doubt that we will see the old school register with students’ names laboriously handwritten in alphabetical order very much longer and the familiar response, ‘Present, Sir’, will not be heard. I also see the disappearance of the greetings ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good evening’. It is being gradually replaced with ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello Ma’am’ — the teachers’ responses to this are mixed. Talking about forms of address, first names are used these days without so much as a ‘by your leave’ but caution is exercised where gender is involved. No longer is one limited to ‘he’ or ‘she’ as some prefer the inclusive word ‘they’. The Bengali term, ‘aapni’, is hardly used by young people — the informal, ‘tumi’ or ‘tui’ are far more prevalent. I think that this indicates a preference for an informal conversational style rather than a lack of respect.  

How do the young of today relate to books? Many kindergarteners would much rather look at their tablets than go through their static but colourful books. Even senior students admit that they find it difficult to ‘process’ their text or reference books or type-written documents. According to them, moving images, sounds, animation, and movie clips, along with bulleted points and handy notes (as seen in many YouTube lessons) make studying much easier. School libraries have begun to house digital material in the form of audio books, films, podcasts, and video lessons. Recently, I happened to view the digital collections in a public library exhibition entitled Treasures and indeed they seemed as valuable as the old manuscripts on display.

Tasks are executed differently too, with Siri or Alexa serving as a useful helpmate. (Worryingly, they even serve as companions to some lonesome youngsters.) For various assignments, screenshots of the design or plan are prepared in advance and then the finished product is presented. Practice sessions of programmes are video-filmed and played back for comments and advice. Students in drama and elocution classes not only learn to throw their voices but are also taught how to modulate them while using microphones. Sport is becoming increasingly fine tuned and those inclined towards games and athletics select their respective areas of specialisation early in life. Sadly, we hardly find children playing a sport for sheer pleasure.

The late Sir Ken Robinson, one of the greats in education, once stated that the young don’t wear watches any longer as they are ‘single-function’ devices. This is not true now: we find more and more young people sporting Fitbit watches to keep track of their fitness regimen — incidentally, these watches tell the time too. But as the most useful device, it is the mobile phone that wins hands down — from communication to storage, from entertainment to learning, it is all on your phone. These are some of the signs of our times. Whether we like them or not, changes will keep coming fast and furious. I have had to adapt to these changes so rapidly in recent years that there was no time to ponder on the good old days. But if I live a little longer, I hope to dwell deliciously on a slower and more intelligible time.

Devi Kar

Source: The Telegraph, 11/08/22

Earth is spinning faster and this can be harmful for us

 On July 29, the earth completed its rotation in less than 24 hours. In fact, the earth broke its own record for the shortest day, as it completed an entire spin in lesser than 1.59 milliseconds. The day was shorter than the usual 24-hour day by 1.59 milliseconds

For busy people scurrying around the clock, the earth seems to be moving fast. This is, however, not just a feeling, the earth is indeed spinning faster.

According to news reports, the earth is rotating faster, and on July 29, the earth completed its rotation in less than 24 hours. In fact, the earth broke its own record for the shortest day, as it completed an entire spin in lesser than 1.59 milliseconds. The day was shorter than the usual 24-hour day by 1.59 milliseconds.

The earlier shortest day on the planet since the 1960s was recorded on July 19, 2020. This time, it was shorter than a usual 24-hour day by 1.47 milliseconds.

In 2021, the globe continued to spin faster but it did not set any new records. But Interesting Engineering (IE), a leading community designed for all lovers of engineering, technology and science, seemed to suggest a 50-year era of shorter days may become a norm and has already flagged off.

Nobody has the answers as yet, as to why the earth is spinning at a differing speed. Some scientists have postulated that less weight on the poles results from the melting of the glaciers; others noted that the molten core of our planet’s interior is moving over time; seismic activity could be another related cause.

Some other scientists have suggested that this is due to the Chandler wobble, which is a little change or departure in the earth’s axis of rotation. ( Think of the wobble you see in a toy top when it first starts spinning or slows down. Its “poles” do not spin in a perfectly straight line) Scientists Leonid Zotov, Christian Bizouard, and Nikolay Sidorenkov have described it as being similar to the quiver one sees when a spinning top starts gaining velocity or slows down.

This may be leading to the earth’s accelerated rate of rotation and the shorter days.

The fallout – introduction of negative leap second

The effect of the earth spinning faster, however, can spell doom for us. The increase in the earth’s rotation speed could result in the introduction of the negative leap seconds, which happens to keep the rate that the earth orbits the Sun consistent with the measurement from atomic clocks.

However, the negative leap second would have potentially confusing consequences for smartphones, computers and communications systems. The leap second can be a risky practice that does more harm than good. IT systems will also be impacted by the negative leap second since a clock typically runs from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 before restarting at 00:00:00.

A time skip like this can potentially crash programmes and corrupt data due to the timestamps on data storage.

The Independent citing Meta blog pointed out the jump second “primarily benefits scientists and astronomers” but is a “risky technique that does more harm than good.” Meta also said that if a negative leap second occurs, the clock will change from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00, and this can have a “devastating effect” on the software, which depends on timers and schedulers. To solve this problem, international timekeepers may need to add a negative leap second – or what is known as a “drop second”.

Source: The federal, 1/08/22

What are Nairobi flies, which are causing disease in Sikkim?

 Around 100 students of an engineering college in East Sikkim have reported skin infections after coming in contact with Nairobi flies, officials said on Tuesday (June 5).

The population of Nairobi flies, a species of insect native to East Africa, is growing at a fast pace on campus of the Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology (SMIT) in Majhitar, officials were quoted as saying. The flies can overwhelm new areas in search of breeding grounds and food supply, Health Department officials said.

The college administration said infected students had been given medication and were recovering. One student who was recently infected had to undergo surgery in his hand.

What are Nairobi flies?

Nairobi flies, also called Kenyan flies or dragon bugs, are small, beetle-like insects that belong to two species, Paederus eximius and Paederus sabaeus. They are orange and black in colour, and thrive in areas with high rainfall, as has been witnessed in Sikkim in the past few weeks.

Like most insects, the beetles are attracted by bright light.

How are humans affected by them?

Usually, the insects attack pests that consume crops and are beneficial for humans — but at times, they come in contact with humans directly are cause harm. Health officials say these flies do not bite, but if disturbed while sitting on anyone’s skin, they release a potent acidic substance that causes burns.

This substance is called pederin, and can cause irritation if it comes in contact with the skin, leading to lesions or unusual marks or colouring on the skin. The skin begins to heal in a week or two, but some secondary infections can occur, especially if the victim scratches the irritated skin.

Have there been outbreaks of the disease?

Major outbreaks have happened in Kenya and other parts of eastern Africa. In 1998, unusually heavy rain caused a large number of insects to come into the region, reported the Associated Press.

Outside Africa, outbreaks have happened in India, Japan, Israel, and Paraguay in the past.

What is the way to protect oneself against Nairobi flies?

Sleeping under mosquito nets can help. If a fly lands on a person, it should be gently brushed off, and should not be disturbed or touched to reduce the chances of it releasing pederin.

The area where the flies sits should be washed with soap and water. If they are squelched and end up leaving toxic fluids on the skin, care should be taken that unwashed hands do not touch any other part of the body, particularly the eyes.

Written by Rishika Singh 

Source: Indian Express, 5/07/22

Why do leaves fall off trees?

 

To survive in the environment as it becomes hostile, trees initiate abscission, the process of separation of leaves, naturally.

The ethereal beauty of Kashmir has inspired scores of poets and writers, artisans, and even Bollywood to churn out memorable works of art. Besides the breathtaking landscapes, the stimulation is also derived from the beauty of the Chinar leaf, the colour of which changes from green in summers to blood-red, amber, and yellow in autumn before they wither and fall. The tree that this leaf belongs to, the Chinar, is a majestic one known for its antiquity and magnificence. Another widely recognised leaf that is beautiful and unique is that of the Sugar Maple, an indigenous tree of Canada. The maple leaf in its autumn, fiery red avatar occupies a place of pride in the Canadian national flag.

Both Chinar and Maple are examples of deciduous trees that have broad and flat leaves which they shed once a year, leaving behind bare branches and a skeletal trunk. The plummeting of these leaves is actually an act of self-preservation against harsh weather conditions. They do not simply fall off, but are separated intentionally through a meticulous process. This loss of leaves in deciduous trees like oak, elm, beech, and maple happens primarily in winters which protects them from foliar frostbite. On the other hand, the tropical deciduous trees such as Peepal, Palash, Neem, and Ashok shed leaves between February and May which help them deal with seasonal droughts.

When we take a look at fossil records, they show that about 250 million years ago there was not a single tree on Earth designed to survive in temperatures below freezing point. They were all built for life in the tropics where the weather was always warm, water was liquid and leaves were safe year-round. If such trees grew in extreme cold regions, their water would freeze into sharp-edged ice crystals, fatally puncturing the living cells. Additionally, the Xylem tissue’s water would also freeze and bubbles would form from the gases that were previously dissolved in liquid water. When the ice would thaw, these bubbles would impede the upward flow of water, destroying the tree. And thus we see that for survival, the trees needed to prevent damage to the living cells due to ice crystal bubble formation.

Apart from extremely cold weather, it is also difficult for trees to survive in regions that are exceedingly dry. In this weather, the plants have to work harder to get water from the soil and in the process, they might suck in tiny pockets of air from the surrounding tissues which would lead to their destruction. Therefore, it is to cope with such severe weather, both extremely dry and/or cold, that the deciduous trees shed their leaves.

To survive in the environment as it becomes hostile, trees initiate abscission, the process of separation of leaves, naturally. Hormones are produced in the terminal buds, the tip of the stem that connects to the leaf. This halts the production of chlorophyll and enables the underlying yellow-orange pigments to shine through, making the trees look like a beautiful painting! The trees also pull out the moisture and other nutrients from leaves, while the xylem and the phloem which carry water and food, respectively are closed off. A layer of cells, termed an abscission layer then grows, cutting the connection between the leaf and the tree. The tree as a result then becomes dormant, similar to hibernation in animals, and the colourful leaves then become redundant and are dismantled.

Thus, by going leafless, trees conserve energy and moisture while also ensuring that all the valuable nutrients which were laboriously extracted from the soil to build the leaves earlier are absorbed and stored in twigs and branches until it is time for renewal. The exquisite gold and russet displays help deciduous trees recover as much as 50 percent of nitrogen and phosphorus from the old leaves. It would be right to say that such trees are perhaps the world’s prettiest recycling plants.

How beautifully nature has provided for creation, sustenance, self-preservation and recycling of leaves growing from and going back to Mother Earth. Nature indeed is truly marvellous!

Source: Indian Express, 1/07/22

How lightning kills, and how to be safe when it strikes

 Seventeen people have been killed by lightning over the last two days in various parts of Bihar, Six deaths have been reported from Bhagalpur district, while three people were killed in Vaishali, and two each in Banka and Khagaria. Other deaths happened in Madhepura, Saharsa, Munger and Katihar.

Of all the atmospheric phenomena, lightning perhaps is the most dangerous and mysterious. In India, lightning kills about 2,000-2,500 people every year. Bihar is just one of the several hotspots for lightning in India, as a new atlas of lightning shows.

What is lightning?

Scientifically, lightning is a rapid and massive discharge of electricity in the atmosphere some of which is directed towards earth. The discharges are generated in giant moisture-bearing clouds that are 10-12 km tall. The base of these clouds typically lie within 1-2 km of the Earth’s surface, while the top is 12-13 km away. Temperatures in the top of these clouds are in the range of –35° to –45°C.

As water vapour moves upward in the cloud, the falling temperature causes it to condense. As they move to temperatures below 0°C, the water droplets change into small ice crystals. They continue to move up, gathering mass until they are so heavy that they start to fall to Earth. This leads to a system in which, simultaneously, smaller ice crystals are moving up and bigger crystals are coming down.

Collisions follow and trigger the release of electrons, a process that is very similar to the generation of sparks of electricity. As the moving free electrons cause more collisions and more electrons, a chain reaction ensues. This process results in a situation in which the top layer of the cloud gets positively charged, while the middle layer is negatively charged. The electrical potential difference between the two layers is huge, of the order of a billion to 10 billion volts. In very little time, a massive current, of the order of 100,000 to a million amperes, starts to flow between the layers.

While the Earth is a good conductor of electricity, it is electrically neutral. However, in comparison to the middle layer of the cloud, it becomes positively charged. As a result, about 15%-20% of the current gets directed towards the Earth as well. It is this flow of current that results in damage to life and property on Earth.

Direct lightning strikes are rare but even indirect strikes are fatal given the immense amount of charge involved.

Which areas are lightning-prone?

A recently released annual report on lightning by the Climate Resilient Observing Systems Promotion Council (CROPC), which works closely with government agencies like the India Meteorological Department, includes a lightning atlas which maps vulnerability at the district level.

According to the report, Madhya Pradesh has reported the largest number of cloud to ground lighting strikes, followed by Chhatisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha and West Bengal. Other states with high strike rate include Bihar, UP, Karnataka, Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu.

Lightning is fairly common, though it is not often realised in the urban centres. In India, well over one crore lightning strikes have been recorded in recent years. It is only over the last few years that lightning records have begun to be maintained, thanks to the efforts of CROPC and India Meteorological Department.

In 2019-20, about 1.4 crore lightning strikes were recorded, which increased to 1.85 crore in 2020-21.

In 2021-22, about 1.49 crore strikes were recorded across the country. The reduction, in line with the trend observed globally, has been attributed to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The reason attributed to reduction in lightning is due to Covid-2019 pandemic induced reduction in aerosol level, pollution, environmental upgradation and relatively stable weather system in Indian subcontinent,” the annual lightning report said.

But most of this reduction was seen in the cloud-to-cloud lightning. Of the strikes that reach the Earth, only a 2.5% reduction was observed.

How can the effects of lightning strikes be mitigated?

Lightning is not classified as a natural disaster in India. But recent efforts have resulted in the setting up of an early warning system, that is already saving many lives. More than 96% of lightning deaths happen in rural areas. As such, most of the mitigation and public awareness programmes need to focus on these communities.

Lightning protection devices are fairly unsophisticated and low-cost. Yet, their deployment in the rural areas, as of now, is extremely low.

States are being encouraged to prepare and implement lightning action plans, on the lines of heat action plans. An international centre for excellence on lightning research to boost detection and early warning systems is also in the process of being set up.

Written by Parthasarathi Biswas , Amitabh Sinha 

Source: Indian Express, 21/06/22

The Big Bang Theory

 Philosophers and scholars over centuries have devoted their time contemplating space to find answers to one of the most important questions of human existence – how did the universe evolve and come into being and what might be its future? Our understanding of the cosmos has advanced significantly over time, but every insight has thrown up new questions and new mysteries.The prevalent belief is that the universe came into being nearly 13.8 billion years ago with a massive explosion widely known as the “Big Bang”. This is also the most acknowledged notion of our existence and the evolution of our universe.

The genesis of the Big Bang theory can be traced to eminent scientist Edwin Hubble who not only discovered that there are galaxies other than the Milky Way but also that we live in an ever-expanding universe in which all galaxies are moving away – the farther the galaxy, the faster it is receding! These profound implications about the universe were also proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest, who is considered as the father of the Big Bang theory.

The universe is continuously expanding. If we retrogress that back in time, in the past the universe was smaller and as we reach time equal to zero, all visible universe collapses down to an infinitely small volume of infinite density and infinite temperature. This is what physicists term as singularity or primeval atom. There was no space and no time and then there was a Big Bang. Although during an explosion debris fly out and spread unevenly at different distances from the blast centre, Big Bang shot out the same amount of material, over the same distance in all directions giving birth to a homogenous universe in space and time. Thus what happened was neither big nor with a bang. What triggered this, we may never know as singularity and laws of physics as we know them don’t mix.

What we do know is that after the Big Bang, space started to expand and cool down at a speed faster than light. The period when this happened is identified as the inflation period. It is hard to ascertain what caused inflation but it only lasted for a very short time. Then the universe continued to coast and is still expanding.

As the universe continued to expand and became cooler, energy started getting converted to matter, antimatter, particles and radiation. The first matter to be formed were fundamental particles like quarks and bosons which condensed creating protons and neutrons. The formation of atoms took a long time as electrons which are fundamental to the structure of an atom could not coalesce with the ions and were involved in incessant collisions with photons, the particles that make light. When finally, atoms and elements like hydrogen and helium were formed, the universe became transparent from its earlier opaque appearance.

Gravity pulled together clumps of matter and in about 100 million years got dense and hot enough to start nuclear fusion with the birth of the first stars. In another 600 million years, galaxies were formed followed by planets and the solar system. The Universe as we see it started taking shape.

Scientists do have compelling empirical evidence of the Big Bang in the form of Cosmic Microwave Background radiations (CMB) which were discovered in 1965. When the universe had cooled enough to form atoms, a huge amount of light was liberated into space and it has been travelling through the universe ever since unabated and these primordial photons can be seen as CMB. CMB is thus the light that was released into the universe 380,000 years after Big Bang. It was 3000 degrees Celsius when released and now is only 2.7 degrees above absolute zero due to continuous expansion.

Cosmologists have been eagerly measuring CMB with higher and higher precision which fits with the concept of the Big Bang. By using equations of general relativity and nuclear physics we have calculated how much helium, beryllium and lithium should have been formed and we find that the results are consistent with the quantities actually found in the universe. Moreover, experiments carried out by accelerating protons to the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have successfully produced quarks, gluon plasma that existed shortly after the Big Bang. These observations serve as a persuasive argument in favour of the Big Bang.

To sum up, the Big Bang theory does not explain the exact, precise moment of creation, it explains things after the moment of creation of the Universe. However, there are many missing pieces too. We do not have the faintest idea about what happened in the first moments of the Big Bang. After the Big Bang both matter and antimatter were created. As the universe cooled, and expanded, matter and antimatter should have destroyed each other. This would have left us with a universe without any galaxies, stars, planets or life which clearly is not the case. Thus, there was somehow an imbalance between matter and antimatter which we do not comprehend.

We have also known for some time now that 5/6th  of all the matter in the universe is dark matter, but we have no inkling about what it exactly is. Space is not only expanding, it is accelerating. It is as if you throw a ball upwards, the ball not only continues to go up but its speed increases instead of slowing and finally falling down. This observation is credited to dark energy and we don’t know why it exists or what it is.

Science offers a fascinating and solid narrative for stories around the creation of the universe but it is not complete. Exploring the unknown and pushing back the frontier of our current ignorance is what science is all about and this expedition for the search of truth shall continue. Unravelling the mystery of the universe continues to be an interesting saga.

By Rachna Arora

Source: Indian Express, 9/06/22