• GPS tech used for surgery
• Indian researcher in US makes software to boost airport security
• Tsunami warning system at place; alerts in 13 min
• Agni-I successfully test-fired from Balasore
• Down-to-earth Sunita floors fans

• Bihar to e-connect villages
• Scientists beat warning system
• Indian American in scientist challenge finals
• ISRO for satellite help to resolve Saurashtra's water woes
• IIITM-K bags award for best e-content

The dream of Bihar's rural folks to surf the internet at their villages would soon become a reality. The government has initiated a plan to take information technology to the grass root level by setting up common service centres called Vasudha. Explaining the concept to DNA, deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi said Vasudhas would be started in e-kiosks to be setup by the 'SREI Sahaj E-Village'. The e-kiosks will function as the delivery point for e-governance as well as e-learning centres, where the youth can access distant education modules and vocational skills other than normal internet access. In the first phase, it had been decided to open 5,540 Vasudhas across the state. The SREI had been already given a 'letter of intent' by the Bihar State Electronic Development Corporation, the nodal agency of Bihar government for implementation of e-governance. The state cabinet had also approved funds for development of the required software by the TATA Consultancy Services, Modi said. To begin with, eight departments of the government would be linked to Vasudha to provide information and services for mutual purposes like weather forecast, commodity rates, agricultural counselling, health and hygiene. Issuance of birth and death certificates and land records would also be available on the net on payment of nominal fees. More departments would be linked later. The Vasudha would be owned and operated by selected village entrepreneurs and will be monitored by the regional control centres and the central control centre. The estimated cost of setting up each of these e-kiosks will be Rs1.20 lakh. The selected rural entrepreneur will have to invest this amount from his own resources or by obtaining loan from the banks. The Vasudhas in Bihar would not only create 5,500 entrepreneurs in the rural areas and provide internet access to the villagers but it would also bring a number of government services to the doorsteps of the rural folks, Modi said.

Courtesy: www.rediff.com, October 22, 2007

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The latest technology fitted in cars to help navigate streets - the global positioning system (GPS) - is being used to perform surgeries as well. Computer-assisted surgeries (CAS), which are increasingly becoming popular in India, use the same positioning technology as GPS, which helps navigate streets. During surgeries, the software helps the surgeon make the right cut and align the artificial joint to the bone more precisely for each individual patient. At present, most surgeons use their own experience, judgment and mechanical devices to get the right alignment during surgeries. Dr Chandrashekhar Dhar, consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Calcutta Medical Research Institute, who has performed over 50 surgeries using this navigation system, said that the use of the software during knee and hip replacement surgeries has increased the effectiveness of joint replacements while facilitating the rapid return of the patient to previous activity levels. He said that the need for a repeat surgery has gone down notably with the new technology. "The surgery is complicated and much quicker and the blood loss is minimised. Since the wounds are much smaller and the injury to the tissues are much less, it boosts the patient's recovery time," explained Dr Dhar. "In knee replacement, small inaccuracies have significant implications. To achieve accuracy in implanting the joint, the computer image-guided surgery helps the surgeon to attain perfection, which is difficult to achieve with manual methods," said experts in the field. CAS allows an orthopaedic surgeon to plot the movement of the joint in 3D space, along with key features of its anatomy, using a hand-held sensor. It analyses and displays on the monitor interactive data that helps the surgeon correctly line up the prosthetic joint. This, in turn, helps reduce errors during the surgery and also eases some of the problems faced by the surgeons and the need for more corrective work afterwards. Experts in the field explained that CAS is also very helpful in doing total knee anthroplasty (TKA) with minimal invasive surgery (MIS). "CAS allows total knee replacement to be performed without drilling a hole in the end of the femur and pushing a metal rod into it to gauge alignment as done in conventional surgeries," explained Dr Dhar.

Courtesy: www.asianage.com, October 19, 2007

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Indian scientists claim to have beaten the newly- built tsunami warning system in predicting that the waves triggered by the September 12 undersea tremblor would move towards the open sea keeping the coastline safe. A team of geophysicists at the Hyderabad-based National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) forecast within an hour of the quake strike that the tsunami would not hit the southern Indian coast and Andaman and Nicobar islands. An earthquake of 8.4 magnitude had struck Bengkulu in southern Sumatra at 4.40 pm IST on September 12 triggering tsunami alerts across the region as well as in India. "Our preliminary results at 5.40 pm showed that the directivity of the tsunami was towards the open ocean in the southwest direction and India would be safe from tsunami," Kirti Srivastava, a scientist at NGRI, who conducted the study said. The tsunami early warning system had taken nearly two hours to forecast that killer waves will not strike the country's southern coast. Immediately after the earthquake, a group of scientists at NGRI started simulating the tsunami using the American National Earthquake Information Centre (NEIC) catalogues for focal mechanism solutions estimated for the Bengkulu region, NGRI Director V P Dimri said. The research paper has been accepted by peer review journal Current Science for publication. Besides Srivastava and Dimri, NGRI scientists V Swaroopa and D Srinagesh were involved in the study. The Bengkulu earthquake had resulted from thrust faulting on the boundary between the Australia and the Sunda plate that covers the south China sea, Andaman sea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and parts of the Indonesian archipelago. The Australian plate is moving northeast with respect to the Sunda Plate at a velocity of about 60mm per year, Srivastava said. The scientists, assuming the fault length as 500 km and width of 200 km, simulated the tsunami wave propogation for its directivity and intensity.

Courtesy: www.asianage.com, October 19, 2007

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An Indian origin researcher in the US has designed a new software, based on a game theory that could prove to be a valuable tool for law enforcement officials manning security check points at international airports. Guards are usually told to patrol in a random fashion, but being human, they tend to form habits that patient criminals are able to exploit easily. To help make their rounds less predictable, Praveen Paruchuri and his colleagues at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles have created software that simulates various random paths that a guard could take airports and how criminals might react. Potential rewards, such as catching more criminals, and costs, such as a terrorist explosion, are evaluated for each path, before the software suggests the best route. Presently the software is being tested at the Los Angeles International airport (LAX), reports New Scientist magazine.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, October 15, 2007

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An Indian American student from Minnesota who got his project idea during a visit to India has reached the finals of Discovery Channel's science talent hunt show Young Scientist Challenge. Prithwis Mukhopadhyay, a ninth-grader at Lake Junior High in Woodbury, is one of the 40 finalists who will travel to Washington for the Oct 20-24 competition to present his research on banana peels as a source of biogas energy. He will compete in a series of team challenges. The 14-year-old got the idea for his project a few years ago during his family's annual trip to India, Star Tribune newspaper reported. Biogas energy is common in Indian villages, with families extracting methane-based gas from cow manure. For his project, Prithwis decided to see how much gas he could get from an alternate source. He filled one airtight jar with manure and another with banana peels, mixing both with water and connecting each to an empty jar to collect gas. He set a heater fan at 80 degrees next to the jars, and measured the gas for 60 days. Prithwis found that the banana peels yielded five times as much biogas as the manure, converting a pollutant into a clean energy source and leaving the leftover material for compost. Back in the US, the study took him from regional and district science fairs to the state science fair last year and finally the project earned him a spot as one of the finalists in the competition. Prithwis admitted that he was nervous but added that whatever the outcome, this probably would not be the end of his project. Also, this isn't his first big academic endeavour. He competed for a Davidson Fellows scholarship - awarded to profoundly intelligent students under 18 - last year, and is currently taking first-year calculus through the University of Minnesota Talented Youth Math Programme. The teenager also volunteers at a Chicago Veterans Administration hospital, helping professors with their research work.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, October 15, 2007

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Three years after tsunami battered many coastal parts of the country, India on Monday unveiled the "most modern" tsunami early warning centre that will issue alerts for the killer waves within 13 minutes of an earthquake. The National Early Warning System for Tsunami and Storm Surges in the Indian Ocean was dedicated to the nation by Minister of Earth Sciences Kapil Sibal at a ceremony attended by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy, top scientists and senior government officials. "We require about seven minutes to analyse the earthquake data and another six minutes to run simulation models to generate alerts," Sibal said, adding the scientists were working to reduce this time nearly by half. Peter Koltermann, Head, Tsunami Co-ordination Unit Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, UNESCO described the system as the "most modern" in the world. "The Indian system is completely different from the Pacific Tsunami Warning System. It is the most modern system as INCOIS has adopted a multi-hazard approach in developing it," Koltermann said.

Courtesy: www.saharasamay.com, October 15, 2007

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Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will take the help of satellite systems to resolve the water crisis in Saurashtra region. Interacting with students at the inauguration of a space exhibition here last night, ISRO Chairman, G. Madhavan Nair, said that shortage of water for drinking and farming in the region was a major issue, and the space organisation had decided to use satellite systems to resolve it. Stressing the need for latest technologies to reach village level, Nair said: "India has best science technology and knowledge, but it is unfortunate that they could not cover the remote areas of the country." ISRO has decided to provide technology to cover every corner of the country by various programmes under its Village Resource Centre (VRC), he said. Nair also inaugurated the state's first ISRO-sponsored rocketry club for educating students on making and launching of rockets.

Courtesy: www.saharasamay.com, October 11, 2007

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The short range variant of India's indigenously developed Agni series of ballistic missiles, Agni-I, was test-fired from Wheelers Island off the Orissa coast on Friday. The test-firing, termed as "users trial", was conducted from a mobile launcher from the Integrated Test Range (ITR) launch complex- 4 around 10.38 am IST, Defence sources said. This was the fourth test-firing of the surface-to-surface ballistic missile, which is capable of striking a target up to a distance of 700 kms. There were "considerable improvements in its re-entry technology and manoeuvrability" since Agni's first trial was carried out on January 25, 2002 from Wheelers Island, the sources said. The second and third trials were conducted on January 9, 2003 and July 4, 2004 from the same launching site.

Courtesy: www.sify.com, October 05, 2007

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The Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management - Kerala's (IIITM-K) Education Grid project has bagged this year's Manthan Award for India's Best e-content in 2007, in the e-education category. A spokesperson for the IIITM-K said that under the Education Grid initiative, the institute has been evolving systems and methodologies for improving the quality of education through Technology Enhanced Learning and Teaching (TELT). Several systems and processes have been developed under the Education Grid that are of significant value to improving the standards of teaching and learning in our colleges and higher education institutions. Of the total 353 nominations, 39, including three from Kerala, received the award. The Education Grid of IIITM-K under e-education, Manorama Online in the e-news and puzha.com under the e-localisation categories were the winners from the state. The Manthan Awards, launched in 2004 and administered by the Digital Empowerment Foundation in partnership with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), aims at encouraging the networking of the recipients and others so that it becomes a movement across the country for more innovations and bridging the digital divide.

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Tuesday morning saw Sunita Williams at Bluebells International School, engaging with students in an interactive session. Children from Sanskriti and from Modern School were also present. The excitement was palpable, with pictures and write-ups of the famous astronaut put up all over the school and children clamouring to get a chance to meet her. Pictures of Williams as a child, as a teenager graduating from high-school and as a young professional flashed on a screen as she chatted animatedly with the school children. Laughing, Williams answered the barrage of questions directed at her. Her favourite sport is swimming, her favourite people are her parents and Mahatma Gandhi, she loves eating samosas and ice-cream and no, she hadn't seen any UFOs in space. "When I grow up I want to be a school teacher," joked Williams.

"Were you scared?" one of the children asked her, referring to her maiden journey to space. Williams replied the training programme had prepared her so well that she hardly felt any fear when she entered the space shuttle. Her toughest moment on the shuttle came during the crossover from the expedition 14 to 15. Williams, who was part of both expeditions, stayed behind as the crew members of the first expedition left. "I felt as though my family was leaving me," she said. Speaking about her identity as a person from a mixed cultural background, Williams said, "I have Indian attributes that I have got from my father as well as attributes imbibed from my mother, who is Slovenian. There is also a lot of the American in me as that is where I grew up. All the same, I feel I did bring a bit of Indian culture into the mission." In the words of her predecessor, Kalpana Chawla, Williams described herself as a "citizen of the universe." "I believe in a world without borders. At the same time, every person from a different cultural background brings something special and unique to the table, which is what happened in the mission. When we were in the shuttle, we ended up talking a lot about culture and language and how it evolved," she said. Proud of the "legacy" that Kalpana Chawla left behind, Williams said that, in a way, she was completing Chawla's mission by coming and talking to children in India. "I know that's what Kalpana wanted to do after her last mission," she said. Williams was also keen on returning to India on an annual basis and engaging with students in more personal forums. Sunita Williams's father, Deepak Pandya, was present on the occasion. "I feel overwhelmed and proud," he said. "I always knew she would do something great. It was a dangerous mission that she undertook but I trusted the excellent technology behind the mission. I also never lost my faith in God."

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, October 03, 2007

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