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indianexpress:  NOTED scientist Govind Swarup has been awarded the prestigious Grote Reber medal 2007 for lifetime innovative achievement in radio astronomy. Swarup, who works at the National Centre for Radio Astronomy (NCRA) in the city, has been chosen for his contribution to the design and construction of innovative radio telescopes including the Ooty Telescope and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT).

The Grote Reber Medal was instituted three years in the name of pioneer radio astronomer Grote Reber. Swarup is the third recipient of this award, which was previously presented to B Y Mills of Sydney University and W C Erickson of the University of Tasmania. “It is a great honour for an Indian to receive this award, instituted in the name of the first radio astronomer in the world,” said Swarup.

Swarup began his career in radio astronomy with the construction of a large steerable radio telescope at Ootacamund called the Ooty Telescope.

The telescope, was designed to use the technique of lunar occultations, where the moon passes in front of celestial objects and temporarily blocks them from view. It was used to determine the angular structure and precise position of many distant radio galaxies.

indianexpress:  IN a first of its kind procedure in the country, a pacemaker was implanted in a six-day-old baby at Pune’s Jehangir Hospital. According to Dr Manoj Pradhan, chief cardiac surgeon at Jehangir Hospital, “In adults this a simple procedure done under local anesthesia, wherein the pacemaker is implanted through subclavian vessels and not directly onto the heart. In this case the infant’s age and tiny blood vessels posed a huge challenge and necessitated a major cardiac surgery, carried out under general anesthesia.”

He said a permanent pacemaker was implanted directly onto the heart, while the baby was still on ventilator.

“This infant, the baby of Avinash and Vandana Rathod, was born with a heart block on September 16. This resulted in the pulse rate being barely 50-60 beats per minute (The normal rate 120 to 130 per minute in infants),” neonatologist Dr Anshu Sethi told mediapersons on Tuesday. “The baby had difficulty in breathing as the heart was unable to keep up with the body requirements and was on ventilator from birth.”

“This condition is extremely rare in newborn babies and is due to a defect in the conducting system of the heart muscles, which controls the rate of pumping of the heart,” Dr J S Duggal, head of Cardiology at Jehangir Hospital said. “Due to the heart block weaning from the ventilator was not possible and we decided to implant a permanent pacemaker, while still on the ventilator.”

He also said this procedure was extremely difficult in a newborn and is probably the first time it has been performed in the country.

indianexpress: In a path-breaking innovation that could have implications in the fields of defence, space research and electronics, a professor along with a student from the University of Pune’s Department of Physics has developed an ultra lightweight aerogel material that can support nearly five lakh times its own weight.

The invention could set a world record, as it is stronger than the material prepared by a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in February 2007, which could support 8,000 times its body weight.
 
Aerogels can be used for lightweight military uniforms for soldiers in combat, bio-chemical sensors, lightweight packaging, the automobile industry and even other applications like soundproof walls or heat resistant walls and windows in homes.

Using principles of nanotechnology, Sulabha Kulkarni and MSc Microbiology student Supriya Pandhe developed a lightweight aerogel using a composite of carbon nano-tubes and silica. “Three pieces of this material weighing 15 milligrams were able to support the weight of over seven kilograms placed over them. We have not yet noted the breaking point of the material, which means it could possibly support more weight,” said Kulkarni.

Kulkarni, who has been conducting research in the field of aerogels for nearly seven years, had been working in collaboration with Banaras Hindu University’s (BHU) professor O N Srivastava for preparing aerogels using carbon nano-tubes and silica. While the carbon nano tubes were procured from the BHU, the actual formula for the aerogel composite was developed at the University of Pune.

“Although aerogels was developed in 1930, their uses were not discovered till recently and now they have wide applications, and were even used in the NASA’s Pathfinder mission to Mars,” said Kulkarni.

indianexpress:  * An online search engine that gives only those search results that you really want.
* A farmer in a remote village in drought-hit Vidarbha, using his radio to tune in to weather information broadcast from a computer terminal in New Delhi.

These are entries by two student teams — Techmint and AITtude — from Pune’s Army Institute of Technology (AIT) for the Imagine Cup 2007, a worldwide student technology competition sponsored by software giant Microsoft. They have made it to the national rounds to be held in New Delhi on May 4. The worldwide finals to be held in Seoul, South Korea. The theme is ‘Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all.’

For AITtude’s four-member team of final year engineering students Anupama Nair, Sunjeet Singh, Sonali Upadhyaya and Karanbir Singh, it all began in December 2006 after the government introduced a policy to allow NGOs to set up community radio networks.

“We decided to create a system where an NGO can set up an online radio station,” explains Sunjeet. After setting up an account on the web-based system, NGOs can upload files for broadcasting, along with the schedule. This will be transmitted over the internet to a computer terminal in the vicinity of the target area. “For the last few miles, the information will be conveyed over radio, so that villagers can listen to it,” says Karanbir.

The Techmint team sought to reduce the time taken for information search. “Seeking information online can be tedious, as a search engine often throws up a many useless results,” says AIT student Shiv Anand Thakur, who joined hands with Lucknow-based computer applications student Sumeet Kumar Pranav.

Techmint’s Educational Content Identification and Grabbing System (ECIGS) makes use of a natural language processing software based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which analyses the meaning of the key words used for the search. “Normally, the computer does not analyse the meaning and context of the words, thus throwing up irrelevant results,” explains Thakur. For example, a phrase like ‘time flies like an arrow’ would also throw up results of pages about the insect ‘fly’, since ‘flies’ can have two meanings depending on the context.