Jaish, LeT helped Osama escape, says new book
Indian officials say al-Qaeda link to groups not actionable
•Jaish-e-Mohammad Chief Masood Azhar, the man India has been trying unsuccessfully to have designated as a terrorist at the U.N. Security Council for years, and LeT chief Hafiz Saeed helped Osama bin Laden and several other al-Qaeda leaders cross over to Pakistan in 2001 and helped settle them in places like Karachi and Abbottabad, where bin Laden was eventually killed in 2011, a new book by British investigative journalists reveals.
•The book, The Exile by Cathy Scott Clark and Adrian Levy, that was released in India on May 29, comes at a significant time as a Pakistani court will rule on Monday on the legality of the current detention of Hafiz Saeed at his home in Lahore.
•The international Financial Action Task Force is simultaneously reviewing Pakistan’s actions on terror at its June 18-23 plenary session in the Spanish city of Valencia.
China’s decision
•Meanwhile, India is awaiting China’s decision on the designation of Masood Azhar as a U.N.-sanctioned terrorist at the United Nations Security Council 1267 al-Qaeda/ISIL committee. Beijing’s “technical hold” on the process will lapse in late July this year.
•Surprisingly, dossiers submitted by India so far have referred only to the original links between Azhar and bin Laden, who first met in 1993 when Azhar helped recruit Yemeni mercenaries to fight as jihadis in Somalia, but not to his assistance to bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership in the years post-2001.
•Indian officials who drafted the original application at the U.N. against the JeM and Masood Azhar, a copy which The Hindu has seen, say that “actionable intelligence” is yet to be found on the exact connection between them.
Hard evidence matters
•“We had source-based information about Osama-Azhar links but that’s not enough. Only evidence that can stand the scrutiny of law can be presented at international forums,” a former intelligence official told The Hindu .
•Another senior official dealing with counter-terror cooperation internationally said Indian efforts have generally focused more on the groups’ “State-sponsored” links with Pakistan’s ISI, than on the links to international terror groups like al- Qaeda.
ISRO may use semi-cryogenic engine for heavy lift rockets
It hopes to complete engine development by 2019
•The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has progressed to the testing of subsystems in the development of a semi-cryogenic engine for rockets with heavier payload capacity.
•The testing facilities at the ISRO Propulsion Complex, Mahendragiri, are being augmented for the engine being developed by the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre here under a project codenamed SCE 200. Three of the four turbo pumps of the new engine have been tested and the pre-burner and thrust chamber are being readied for testing, LPSC Director S. Somanath told The Hindu .
•The semi-cryogenic engine uses a combination of liquid oxygen (LOX) and refined kerosene (Isrosene) as propellants.
•ISRO scientists have simultaneously begun work on the stage configuration. ‘‘We hope to complete the development of the engine by 2019. The stage test is expected to take place by 2020, followed by the first flight test in 2021,’’ he said.
•One of the options before ISRO is to replace the liquid core (L110) engine of the GSLV Mark 3 with the SCE-200 to boost the payload capacity of the rocket from four to six tonnes. ‘‘That could be one of the immediate applications of the new engine, though the objective is to power the future heavy lift launch vehicles and reusable launch vehicles as well as human spaceflight missions,’’ K. Sivan, Director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, said.
•Mindful of the fact that the standard size of satellites is expected to go up in the near future, ISRO is already looking much ahead. On the cards is a proposal to develop a bigger semi cryogenic engine with a cluster of four or five engines that could generate a lift of eight to 10 tonnes.
More work ahead
•A clustered semi cryogenic booster with a more powerful cryogenic upper stage is another possibility. ‘‘Once we have mastered the technology, we could possibly go on to modular development of rockets with different configurations,’’ Mr. Somanath said.
•But before that, ISRO needs to ensure that critical technologies such as special materials and coatings, brazing process, kerosene refinement, combustion instability and control components are mastered and key infrastructure is in place.
When immunity goes awry
A national registry of primary immunodeficiency disorders offers hope for early diagnosis and treatment
•When he was three years old, R. Sai Monesh, now seven, was diagnosed with a rare condition: Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis or HLH, a life-threatening condition, in which the body’s immune system cells attack healthy tissue.
•“He was constantly ill: he had loose motions, fever and vomiting and at one point was hospitalised for a month with a 108°F temperature,” says his mother, R. Rajeshwari, who works as a domestic help. Six months ago, Sai Monesh underwent a bone marrow transplant at a private hospital in Chennai — his father, a construction worker, was the donor — and is now recovering.
Not much awareness
•Sai Monesh’s condition is one of the over 300 types of primary immunodeficiency disorders (PIDs) — conditions that weaken the immune system, leaving patients susceptible to infections and health complications. Many people with PIDs are born with some of the body’s immune defences missing, while some acquire the condition later in life.
•To date, doctors say, there is not much awareness about PIDs even in the medical community. India does not have any figures on the number of people affected, though it is estimated that no more than 5% of those afflicted get the right treatment. Now however, the Indian Society for Primary Immune Deficiency (ISPID), set up in 2011, is taking the initiative to help form a national registry of PIDs under the aegis of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), says its president Manisha Madkaikar.
•In April this year, the ICMR put out a proposal for participation in a national registry of rare diseases — those that affect fewer than one in 2,500 individuals. “More than 70 million people of India suffer from the plethora of Rare Diseases,” the proposal said. It includes six categories of diseases, of which PIDs are one. While no data are available for India, doctors suspect the number will likely be higher than the United States figure of 4 in 100,000, due to the large number of consanguineous marriages in the country.
Expensive treatment
•Diagnosis involves a number of tests, and treatment is mainly of two types — intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) therapy or a bone marrow transplant, both of which are expensive. The former involves an injection every month that could cost up to Rs. 30,000 every month. A bottle of immunoglobulin requires the collection of plasma from 1,000 blood donors, explains Revathi Raj, paediatric haematologist, Apollo Hospitals, Chennai. “One gram of IVIG costs Rs. 1,500. Patients need 0.4 grams for every kilogram of their weight, which means that the older they become, the more expensive the treatment,” she says. Bone marrow transplants costing around Rs. 10 lakh for related donor transplants and around Rs. 30 lakh for unrelated donor transplants, adds Dr. Raj.
•This is the main reason, says Dr. Madkaikar, the registry was important — statistics would help with health-related policymaking, and a push could be made for diagnostic facilities and treatment in government health facilities that are currently unavailable. Sai Monesh was initially seen at a government hospital, but had to be moved to a private facility for further treatment. “Simple tests can be set up in government facilities, and maybe even IVIG therapy can be offered,” says Dr. Madkaikar.
•Soumya Swaminathan, Director General, ICMR, says they were hoping to have a network of institutes specialising in a particular type of rare disease in order to collect information for the registry. “One thing that is missing in this country is a good understanding of the genetics of these diseases,” she says. This is important for treatment. For instance, she says, recent molecular techniques such as exome sequencing had led to targeted therapy for PIDs in some cases. The Union Health Ministry had prepared a draft policy of rare diseases that was in the final stages of completion and would be incorporated soon.
We must subject the canon to criticism
There is a need to interrogate concepts such as ‘nation’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘culture’ to arrive at more pragmatic ways of living
•In one of Buddhism’s canonical texts, Sangiti-suttanta , monk Sariputta offered an explanation on why the early Jainas failed to thrive unlike, presumably, he and fellow Buddhists. He claimed that a great schism had emerged among the Jainas and that they were bent on killing each other because their “doctrine and discipline were so ill-proclaimed”.
•By ‘ill-proclaimed’, he meant that keeping the Buddhist sangha together required them to reiterate their adherence — via chanting and memorisation — to the Buddha’s originary discourses. In essence, according to Sariputta, an elaborate and intricate network of Buddhist lives could only thrive and survive if they collectively tied themselves to the mast of ritual and routine.
•Sariputta’s diagnoses of what can drive groups to divisions — mishearing, misremembering, misunderstanding the originary discourse, infidelity to the primordial text — have emerged in various guises over time. Historically, those without any creedal affiliations to a text, even ostensibly strange ones, were often described away as ‘barbarians’. Who remembers the Visigoths now? But we are inundated with Roman history, even if the latter killed many times over.
Privileging the text
•By the mid-17th century in the north Atlantic, this conceit of privileging the text in order to construct polities found two unexpected allies. One was the Gutenberg revolution, thanks to which the printed word reached the masses; the other was the idea of a ‘nation state’. In 1651, when Thomas Hobbes’s bookDe Cive was translated into English, which he declared was an effort to perform “a more curious search into the rights of states, and duties of subjects”, what followed was a quantum leap with regard to how individuals could re-conceptualise their loyalties. From being ‘subjects’, individuals slowly became ‘citizens’, which in turn meant the particularistic loyalty for the king was transmuted into a more diffuse commitment to the collective. More subtly, in the era before Hobbes, the mere magnificent presence of the king was meant to, as philosopher Quentin Skinner describes, “serve as an ordering force”. But after 16th century, the social contract amongst the governed that we now call ‘the Constitution’ became this ordering force. In some circles, particularly among the Americans, the Constitution has acquired near talismanic powers in the imagination of many.
•Yet, at its heart, any Constitution is merely a protocol for coexistence with a specific grammar and tags to annotate portions of the text. What is striking is that most Constitutions are smaller in length than an average bestselling novel, yet they affect so many. For example, the Chinese Constitution is 10,900 words, the American one is 7,762 words, and even the longest — the Indian Constitution — is only approximately 1,46,000 words. As a point of comparison, a conventional high-end car has 100 million lines of software code.
•Arguably, humans don’t need programming and human societies are presumably non-programmable. Yet, out of these thinly defined protocols — which make up the Constitution — has emerged an elaborate ecosystem of self-descriptions. Concepts such as ‘national identities’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘patriotism’ have an incredible ability to corral and coax us to act in certain ways, perhaps no differently than bots that act under the influence of algorithms. In a way, these constructs are analogous to ‘fat’ applications which are built on ‘thin’ protocols.
Self-perpetuating institutions
•For the past three millennia, and particularly since the beginning of modernity in the 16th century, we have had a situation that is not so different from what we see when we study the architecture of the Internet. On a barebones protocol such as TCP/IP, as venture capitalist Joel Monegro notes, gargantuan ecosystems such as Facebook, Amazon and Uber have come about. Much like these ‘fat applications’ that operate solely to extract value and perpetuate themselves, elaborate institutions have been built, since the beginning of the nation state, whose sole function is self-perpetuation.
•This status quo may have been adequate a few decades ago. But now, thanks to the scalability, communicability, and unpredictability of the challenges we face — like climate change, monetary flows, migration and terrorism — institutions like the police, central banks, and legislatures that we deem fundamental to society have hit diminishing returns. We find traditional methods of organising small groups into large, homogeneous clusters — as many since Sariputta have insisted — becoming less effective with each passing year.
•What are we — the governed — and those who are governing us to do? One strategy to ensure peaceful survival seems to be that we muddle along while taking small, creative steps to progressively recognise many historical and personal forms of conditioning. As citizens caught in the throes of feeling loyal to a country as well as appalled by what is done in its name, in our name, perhaps another answer is to teach ourselves to interrogate more critically concepts such as ‘nation’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘culture’ and hopefully arrive at less orthodox and more pragmatic ways of living.
Caribbean chronicles
You can’t understand cricket till you know of the islands’ history, politics, culture
•The elimination table has delivered another ‘Super Sunday’ for cricket enthusiasts, with India and Pakistan squaring up once again today at the ICC Champions Trophy. The result will be what it will be, but the Indian team might perhaps be already looking ahead to its next destination, the West Indies. It’s a short tour, five one-day internationals and one Twenty20, with stopovers in just three of the cricket-playing Caribbean’s many magnificent islands, Trinidad, Antigua and Jamaica. The West Indies team is a yet-more-pale shadow of its old fiery self, having lost the first of this month’s three ODIs against Afghanistan, and then drawing the series 1-1 when the last match was washed out, leaving the hosts’ hopes for a direct entry for the 2019 World Cup in doubt.
•But the West Indies will remain cricket’s most special destination as long as the game continues to be played in these islands. Much is said about the ‘international’ entity cricket has woven in bringing together independent territories into one team — but as Indian cricketers island-hop over the next few weeks, it’s intriguing to consider the wider region too as one entity. The inquiry is prompted by a recent encyclopaedic book, Island People: The Caribbean and the World , by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, an American geographer who has travelled over the past decade all across the region — from Jamaica to Montserrat, from Cuba to Barbados — to understand ‘Caribbean-ness’.
•Each island is its own delineated self, as even a causal visitor on the cricket trail will find upon visiting, say, Barbados and Antigua. But the claim that Jelly-Schapiro makes is this: that the Caribbean islands are “places where phenomena we think of as belonging to our own age — mass migration and mass industry and transcontinental trade — have been facts of life for centuries.” One of the biggest political questions of our time, he argues, was “birthed” in the Caribbean, with the Haitian Revolution, more than 200 years ago: “How universal, really, are human rights?”
•Cheerful tourism pamphlets mostly gloss over the dark history of slavery — Jelly-Schapiro points out that the Caribbean “received” six million African slaves, compared to the four lakh who reached the U.S. Along with people from almost every other part of the world, including India from where indentured labour started moving to the sugar plantation colonies in the mid-19th century, they “built island societies”, finding selfhood in a multicultural ethos, and setting up, in the most difficult circumstances, the big ideas of what it meant to be free, to be equal, to be a society.
Search for roots
•That pursuit, the search for ‘roots’, in its deepest political iteration, suffuses every enterprise in the Caribbean: music, sports, literature, spirituality. Take Trinidad, from where C.L.R. James, historian of the Haitian Revolution, cricket’s greatest writer and much else, came and whose spirit guides this book, no doubt because he was Jelly-Schapiro’s “first big intellectual crush”.
•It became a Spanish colony after Christopher Columbus claimed it in 1498. In the centuries ahead, the Spanish gave land rights to French Catholic planters. The British took the island in 1797, and after slavery was ended in 1835, indentured labour was brought from India to work on the sugar cane estates.
•In an aside, Jelly-Schapiro then adds a little known detail, that after the Second World War, American soldiers brought along with them 55-gallon oil drums, which local musicians used for the steel pan drum, famously “the only acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century”, and whose sounds you may be lucky to hear during telecasts from Port of Spain’s Queen’s Park Oval if the commentators just quieten down for a few minutes. Explaining Trinidad’s reputation for “extreme literacy” with the unique ways in which, say, calypso and the steel band were encouraged by post-independence governments as “intrinsic to the nation”, he suggests that Trinidad is “a place… where the emergence of C.L.R. James makes sense”.
•It’s also the place where the emergence of V.S. Naipaul makes sense, even though he went on underplay the Trinidadian influence. Writes Jelly-Schapiro: “But what bonds him to Trinidad, as lettered Trinidadians all know and one suspects he does on some level, too, is the truth that though he produced as huge and varied an oeuvre as you’d expect of a Nobel winner, with books set all over the world, the books he wrote about growing up in Trinidad — The Mystic Masseur (1957), Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) in his early phase; A Way in the World (1994) later on — have remained in many ways unexcelled both in their vivid rendering of a society’s audible surface and in their grip of its internal dynamics.”
•The West Indies is a place, if it may be called that, without which cricket cannot be truly embraced. Jelly-Schapiro is not really cricket literate. (He puzzles for a while at the meaning when someone in Antigua complains that “as great a batsman Viv Richards was, ‘you can’t forget that man Roberts: he took five wicket’.”) But, being a James devotee, he knows its importance. As we watch cricket from the Caribbean, it’s valuable to read this account of travels and the region’s great musicians and writers to be reminded of the Jamesian truth: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
The spectre of unemployment
Sans quality jobs, ‘aspirational young India’ will become ‘angry young India’
•The government – and Paytm – may not agree, but there are some downsides to the rising digitisation and connectivity. One is an unleashing of aspirations. Everyone wants not just what Bengal’s leftists used to contemptuously dismiss as components of the middle-class Indian dream — gaadi , baadi , chaakri (car, home, job) — but a whole lot of other things. From watching the latest Salman-starrer now — which is why India is the ‘download’ capital of the world — to the latest phone and footwear, people desire for all forms of comfort. This is a downside because the Indian economy is simply not in a position to create the kind of ecosystem which will enable all these aspirations to be realised by a vast majority of the people.
•The other downside is the near-instantaneous transmission of unrest. Thanks to YouTube and WhatsApp, an expression of farmer unrest can travel from Mannargudi to Mandsaur faster than any ponderous government’s attempts to address or contain the disturbance within a particular area. So far, we have only had glimpses of what such spontaneous congregations can be like — tens of thousands of students virtually bringing Parliament to a standstill during the ‘Nirbhaya’ protests, or the huge crowds at Delhi’s Ramlila grounds which so spectacularly launched Arvind Kejriwal’s career as a mainstream political leader.
Recent farmer protests
•If we haven’t had more such demonstrations, or bigger unrests, it is probably because there hasn’t been an issue big enough to concern all the people across the country at the same time. The recent farmer protests, big and significant though they were, left urban India untouched — except for Mumbai, where a 50% jump in vegetable, milk and meat prices in two days brought the Fadnavis government to its knees.
•But there is one issue which, sooner or later, may unleash social unrest on a scale which will make the farmer agitation look like a toddler’s tantrum — jobs. Or more precisely, the lack of them.
•That the available workforce of a country needs to be occupied in fruitful employment is a no-brainer. The reason global businesses are investing billions of dollars in India is its potential to become one of the world’s economic powerhouses.
Demographic advantage
•This potential derives from India’s ‘demographic dividend’ — the millions of young people joining the workforce every year. India will add more than 100 million people of working age between now and 2025, by which time it will account for one-fifth of the entire world’s workforce.
•That creating productive and remunerative jobs for these aspirants is India’s biggest economic challenge is also a no-brainer. As the Bombay Stock Exchange, which, in collaboration with the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, produces India’s only high-frequency indicator on employment, puts it eloquently: “The degree to which society can provide employment to those who seek employment is one of the most important indicators of the well-being of any society... A society where a large proportion of the labour force is employed provides respite from poverty and vulnerability. It also motivates households to spend more to improve their quality of life. In doing so, households propel economic growth and more employment.”
•If that be the case, then, going by the BSE’s own yardstick, India appears to be in a very good place. As per the BSE-CMIE Unemployment Rate Index, the 30-day moving average of the unemployment rate was just 3.90 as of June 16 — 4.7% in urban areas and 3.5% in rural areas.
•That’s an astonishingly good number. If 96% of India’s workforce is productively employed, as the index suggests, then Prime Minister Narendra Modi has more than made good on his pre-poll promise of creating one crore new jobs in five years. It also means that India is now well and truly a middle-income country, with poverty and deprivation confined to isolated pockets, and many, if not all, in a position to fulfil most of those newly unleashed aspirations.
Fall in agricultural employment
•A recently released report by the McKinsey Global Institute also appears to suggest that India may be getting a handle on the challenge of creating qualitatively richer jobs in larger numbers. It says that between 2011 and 2015, agricultural employment fell by 26 million, while non-farm jobs increased by 33 million.
•Unfortunately, as with all things statistical in India, the numbers hide more than they reveal. So, an open unemployment rate of under 4% doesn’t really mean that everyone else is usefully employed.
•The vast majority of the poor simply do something or the other to survive, so they are termed ‘employed’. But they are by no means in a position to be attractive target consumers for any corporate.
•The Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey Report revealed that in 2015-16, about 85% of India’s workers earned less than or up to Rs. 10,000 a month and only 0.5% of workers earned Rs. 50,000 or more. Using these figures, economist Sudipto Mundle argued in a recent paper that “the vast majority of India’s working households are still living precariously on the brink of survival”.
•This is Modi’s — and India’s — biggest challenge. It is not just about creating jobs but generating employment that yields substantially more than mere sustenance. Otherwise, the ‘aspirational young India’ will turn into an ‘angry young India’.
As Zika spreads, questions for India
•In the 1950s, a drug called thalidomide was given to pregnant women to control morning sickness. The drug, a teratogen — an agent or factor which causes malformation of an embryo — was responsible for the birth of thousands of disabled babies who had reduced or missing arms and legs. As a rule, birth defects such as these are rare and sporadic events. Thalidomide was different as it caused an epidemic of birth defects. There was a realisation that preventing birth defects and providing care to newborns with severe disability is a public health responsibility, requiring a range of specialised services. Parents required information on the disabling condition as well as access to rehabilitation services. Contact with other parents was needed to overcome stigmatisation and guilt and receive further advice on mainstreaming life around the child’s impairment. Finally, professional, psychosocial counselling and support services were needed.
The Zika parallel
•Many years after the thalidomide disaster, the Zika virus has the potential to cause a similar public health tragedy. Like Brazil, where hundreds of babies were born with microcephaly, a similar catastrophic epidemic is a possibility in India. The mosquito that spreads dengue and chikungunya also spreads the Zika virus. In India, dengue outbreaks are routine occurrences each year, so the likelihood of a catastrophic epidemic of Zika virus-associated microcephaly is not an idle speculation. An additional area of concern is the difference between Zika on the one hand and dengue or chikungunya on the other. While the latter conditions occur soon after a mosquito bite, the presence of the Zika virus will be known six months later, after the birth of microcephalic infants. In the meantime, the virus will have ample time to spread through the population unless public health interventions to control mosquitoes are implemented on a warfooting.
•There are repeated assurances that India is prepared to tackle the Zika virus, with activities centring around mosquito control measures. While this is required to control the spread of the Zika virus as well as malaria, dengue, chikungunya, Japanese encephalitis, kala-azar and filaria, there is little mention of the lack of public health preparedness to address the needs of babies born with microcephaly. India is a signatory to all the major international declarations on disability and child rights. A plethora of policies and guidelines are available, most of which are on paper but with little translation into services. The policies are focussed on the empowerment of persons with disabilities, addressing issues of employment rights, and ensuring an environment that does not hinder the mobility of the disabled person. A microcephalic child is not likely to achieve the potential for employment or have sufficient mobility to benefit from the fruits of the Accessible India Campaign. For these children, their primary right is the right to rehabilitation and care especially if poor public health activities permit the Zika virus to spread through the country.
A huge divide
•At present, there are few, fragmented public services for the rehabilitation of children with severe disabilities. Most available services are delivered by private providers and non-governmental organisations. To a large extent, these are available to those who can afford to pay, underlining the public responsibility to provide care to children from the most vulnerable strata of Indian society. A huge investment is required to functionalise existing services. Current district rehabilitation centres are suboptimal facilities, with the responsibility of running these centres transferred to non-governmental organisations. Most doctors are unaware of these centres, so parents learn about rehabilitation by word of mouth. Staff need to be trained in sensitive counselling methods. Counselling services also need to be extended to antenatal services.
•One wonders how long it will take to build up this service. But with reports that three Zika cases were detected [in north India] and requisite public health measures not implemented, there cannot be a denial of public responsibility. In case Zika were to spread, it will be the right of affected parents to demand and receive standard care to ameliorate the suffering associated with microcephaly.
Hyderabad team grows miniature eyes using stem cells
•Researchers at the Hyderabad-based LV Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI) have successfully grown miniature eye-like organs that closely resemble the developing eyes of an early-stage embryo. The miniature eyes were produced using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The iPS cells are produced by genetically manipulating human skin cells to produce embryonic-like stem cells that are capable of forming any cell types of the body.
•Small portions of the corneal tissue were separated from the miniature eyes and used for growing corneal epithelial cell sheets in the lab. Such tissue-engineered cell sheets can potentially be used for restoring vision in patients whose limbus region of the cornea is damaged in both the eyes. The limbus region of the cornea contains stem cells, and chemical or thermal damage to this region affects corneal regeneration and results in vision loss.
•Stem cells present in the limbus region of a healthy eye have been used for restoring vision when only one eye is damaged. But when the damage is present in both eyes, the only way to restore vision is by using the healthy limbus taken from a related or unrelated donor. Patients have to be on immunosuppressants lifelong when limbus is transplanted from donors. However, immunosuppressants are not required when corneal cells grown using the patient’s own skin cells are used for restoring vision.
Growing eye-like organs
•A team led by Dr. Indumathi Mariappan was able to grow complex eye-like organs in the lab by allowing the cells to organise themselves in three dimensions. The miniature eye closely resembles the developing eyes of an early-stage embryo. The eye-like structure consists of miniature forms of retina, cornea and eyelid. The results were published in the journalDevelopment.
•“It took about four–six weeks for the eye-like structure to form from iPS cells. We then removed the cornea-like structure for further study,” says Dr. Mariappan from the Centre for Ocular Regeneration at the LV Prasad Eye Institute and the corresponding author of the paper.
•The cornea has three layers — epithelium (outer layer), stroma (middle layer) and endothelium (inner layer). “All the three layers of the cornea were observed, indicating that the mini-cornea had developed correctly,” she says. “The cornea initially forms as a simple bubble-like structure which is very delicate to handle. It later matures to form a thick cornea-like structure over a period of 10-15 weeks.”
•The corneal epithelial sheets that would be used for treating the damaged eyes were then grown in the lab using small pieces of the mini-cornea containing the epithelium and a portion of the stroma. The stem cells present in the tissue pieces proliferated and gave rise to a uniform sheet of epithelium of about 2.5 cm by 2.5 cm size.
Animal trials
•The team is currently focusing on testing the usefulness of the corneal cells grown from iPS cells in restoring vision in animal models (rats). “We will soon be starting the animal experiments,” she says. Trials on human subjects will be considered if the animal experiments turn out to be safe and effective in restoring vision.
In treatment
•In parallel, the researchers are also working on producing mini-retinal tissue and actively exploring iPS cell-derived retinal tissues for treating several retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), retinitis pigmentosa and certain forms of congenital blindness seen in children and young adults.
•Already, retinal cells grown using human embryonic stem cells and iPS cells are being tested in clincal trials in a few countries to treat retinal diseases.
Purveyor of plastic
Study finds river Ganga is the world’s second biggest carrier of plastic waste
•Every year, the world’s rivers deposit between 1.15 and 2.41 million tonnes of plastic waste into the ocean: grocery bags and shampoo bottles, plastic straws and microplastics make their way into the sea via riverine systems, hugely impacting marine life.
•Now, a new study finds that the Ganga is the world’s second biggest riverine contributor to plastic pollution in the oceans, discharging 1,20,000 tonnes annually. This quantity is exceeded only by Yangtze in China, which transports 3,30,000 tonnes, says a paper published in the latest edition of the journalNature Communications.
•While the average Indian generates relatively little ‘mismanaged plastic’ (3.2 kg/year) compared with the rest of the world (17 kg/year per person), “with half a billion people living within the Ganges catchment, the overall pressure on the river is very large,” lead author Laurent Lebreton, Data Scientist at The Ocean Cleanup Foundation told The Hindu.
•However, in rapidly developing economies like India, “a rise in the middle class population has meant a higher level of consumption — and plastic waste generation — but this is not matched by infrastructure to manage the waste,” he added.
Monsoon swell
•The pollution swells during the southwest monsoon, peaking in August with 44,500 tonnes discharged by the Ganga.
•Most of top 20 polluting rivers around the world are located in Asia, accounting for 86% of the global annual input of plastic debris. This “emphasise[s] the need to focus monitoring and mitigation efforts in Asian countries with rapid economic development and poor waste management,” says the paper. Also among the top 20 polluters are Xi and Huangpu rivers in China, Cross river (Nigeria, Cameroon), Brantas river in Indonesia and the Amazon.
•For the study, the researchers looked at indicators within the river catchment such as mismanaged plastic waste, population density, monthly catchment runoff and dams and weirs that act as particle sinks.
AstroSat rules out afterglow in black hole merger
The burst of light was identified as a distinct supernova explosion that would form a black hole
•Recently US-based LIGO group announced having detected gravitational waves emanating from the merger of two massive black holes located nearly 3 billion light years away. Simultaneously, Hawaii-based ATLAS group identified a fading glow from the part of the sky where these black holes were roughly estimated to lie. The group surmised that this was an electromagnetic (light based) afterglow emanating from the merger. ISRO’s space observatory, AstroSat, however, has, with extremely sensitive measurements, ruled out the possibility that this has any connection with the black hole merger.
•In collaboration with the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) network of observatories, AstroSat team has concluded that this event is due to a gamma ray burst. A gamma ray burst is light emanating from a bursting star, for example, an exploding supernova, that may lead to the formation of a black hole. This places the afterglow among a class of phenomena detected routinely by the space observatory. The discovery was made with the help of the Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI), an x-ray telescope aboard AstroSat.
Imposter revealed
•The burst of light, dubbed ATLAS17aeu, appeared to Varun Bhalerao of IIT Bombay, who leads the searches for transients and explosive sources, to have come from a burst that took place on January 5 and not January 4, the date on which the signal from the black hole merger was picked up by the LIGO detectors. “I shot off a mail to my student Sujay, asking him to search for a burst in CZTI data in the calculated time window. And then I noticed an email from Vidushi [another student] in my inbox: She had found the burst I was looking for,” Dr Bhalerao is quoted as saying in a press release circulated by the AstroSat team. CZTI had indeed recorded a gamma ray outburst on January 5. Named GRB170105A, this outburst had happened about 21 hours after the detection of the gravitational wave signal, thereby dissociated from the signal detected by LIGO.
•Later analysis made the team guess that this signal was part of a gamma ray outburst. “There are two types of Gamma Ray Bursts: short, hard and long, soft. We showed that this is a long gamma ray burst. These long gamma ray bursts are associated with a particular type of supernova which creates a black hole,” says Dr Bhalerao when contacted by phone.
•Prof. A. R Rao of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the principal investigator of the CZTI project, describes the special features of AstroSat that make it the most sensitive detector.
•“An important innovation of the CZTI is that it is transparent to x-rays above 100 kilo electron volts in energy. So... the instrument receives signals from all directions in the sky,” he says.
•The Hawaii group, in their paper still mentions the existence of a small probability that the two events might be related. However this falls far below even a 5-sigma level which is what one expects for the probability to be significant.
•This outburst was also independently discovered by a Chinese-European mission called POLAR.
Lightning over ocean is stronger than over land
•Research from Florida Institute of Technology in the US, published inGeophysical Research Letters shows that lightning can be much more powerful over the ocean than land. Amitabh Nag and Kenneth L. Cummins, from Florida Tech, analysed lightning over parts of Florida and its coasts using data provided by the US National Lightning Detection Network.
•The new study validates for the first time through independent measurement previously formed beliefs that strikes over sea water tend to be more powerful. It could inform how off-shore infrastructure and vessels are to be built to minimise the risk of super-powerful lightning bolts.
•In their study, which measured peak currents of various cloud-to-ground lightning strikes over land and ocean from 2013 to 2015, researchers calculated the duration of the “negative stepped leader” — the electrical channel that moves down towards ground from a thundercloud.
•When the leader touches ground, a surge of current, typically with a peak value of around 30 kilo amperes, flows upward to the cloud. The durations of negative stepped leaders over the ocean were significantly shorter than those over land, indicating they carry more charge in them.
•This leads to a higher following current surge from ground, researchers said.
•Dr Nag and Prof. Cummins estimate, using a relationship between leader duration and lightning peak current derived by them, that lightning with peak currents over 50 kilo amperes is twice as likely to occur in oceanic thunderstorms.
