Syed Akbar Hyderabad: The coastal region in Andhra Pradesh is fast changing with the area under beaches either increasing or decreasing, and rivulets shifting their course. The sea is eating into lush green lands at certain places.
The geomorphology data for the last four decades available with the city unit of the Geological Survey of India indicate that the mouth of the Upputeru rivulet has unidirectionally shifted very rapidly westwards by about 3 km in the last 30 years, eroding more than 100 hectares of high-yielding coconut gardens near Chinnagollapalem. There has been a growth of about 3 km long beach near the Upputeru river mouth and formation of bars and shoals in the vicinity.
The coastal tract between the two distributaries channel mouths of the Gautami Godavari at Malatithippa is subjected to both erosion and accretion, though the latter is dominant. The prominent bar, which existed in 1971, and the northeastern side of the Gautami-Godavari mouth disappeared. Spits are developing on left mouth of the Vainateyam and the Vasishta.
The GSI has summerised the research works (GSI Memoirs) since the opening of the Hyderabad centre in 1973. An analysis of the data reveals that the delicate geomorphology of the coastal region is undergoing visible changes at a rapid phase. According to the GSI data, beach growth up to 1 km wide has been noticed along the 10 km stretch from river mouth of Gautami towards west, while the shoreline near Machilipatnam is subjected to erosion. The tidal creek mouth is constantly shifting northwards with respect to the Machilipatnam Port.
The GSI city team has found erosion of bars on one side and accretion on the other side of the estuary of the Penna River. A spit is emerging on the Swarnamukhi River mouth. There is beach accretion further south near Kondurupalem.
“Accretion in the form of bar and shoal is seen at the confluence of Vainateyam, Vasishta, Krishna River northeast distributary and also the outfalls of Enamadurru drain- straight cut, Kunavaram straight cut, Peddalanka drain etc. Due to the formation of the Kakinada spit, a vast area of shallow sea is being separated from the main sea,” the GSI Memoirs points out.
The GSI has noticed sea erosion north of Uppada village, where 100 m wide beach was eroded in 14 years. Besides, presence of a wave-cut platform at 2.5 km southwest of Uppada, and erosion of beach at Mulapeta are the important evidences of sea erosion.
Syed Akbar Hyderabad: Dr MS Valiathan, eminent surgeon and national research professor, Manipal University, has regretted that Independent India had failed to come out with any new ”knowledge, product or process” that had improved the health care of people in the country.
Addressing a group of scientists and researchers at the annual convention of the Andhra Pradesh Akademi of Sciences here on Friday, Dr Valiathan said medical research in India did not produce new technologies in the last several decades. The private sector, on the other hand, had been successful in providing cheap and effective vaccines, and technologies like iodization of salt.
Much of the medical research including on malaria, kala azar and cholera was done during the British India. Describing the health status of medical research in India as “feels healthy but diseases latent”, he said of the Rs 1,20,000 crore allocated during the 11th five-year plan, a whopping Rs 40,000 crore remained unspent.
“Majority of the 18,000 medical research papers published in independent India had appeared in low impact journals. Only 80 research papers on medicine appeared in high impact journals, that too published by non-medical institutions,” Dr Valiathan pointed out.
He said topics of medical research carried out in the country did not correlate with diseases identified as high priority by the epidemiological data of the union ministry of health.
As many as 180 of the 300 and odd medical colleges in the country never published a research paper in five years.
There is no collaborative research among medical colleges even within a city, he said adding that medical research is driven by the urge to publish in high impact journals even if the research has little relevance for India.
Dr Valiathan said the major tasks ahead for the country include fighting emerging and re-emerging infections and rise in non-communicable diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and compulsory promotion of research in medical colleges.
Syed Akbar Hyderabad: After oil and natural gas, the offshore of Krishna River now holds prospects for diamond mining. The diamond search in the State has extended to areas beyond Vijayawada and up to the estuary of the river Krishna with the Geological Survey of India finding evidence for the presence of precious stones in this hitherto unexploited region.
So far, the area between Sangam (confluence of Tungabhadra and Krishna in Mahbubnagar district) and Prakasam Barrage in Vijayawada is recognized as the diamond zone. Recent studies by the GIS have revealed that the diamond zone well extends beyond Vijayawada and up to near shore in Avanigadda and Nagayalanka in Krishna district and Repalle in Guntur district. Penna River, downstream of Somasila, is another new area with prospects of diamond reserves. The region may go well into the sea, offshore of Krishna and Penna.
The mapping of the geological terrain of coastal areas dating back to the last glacial maximum (18,000 years ago) and beyond shows that the palaeo-channels and channel bars comprising diamond bearing gravels extend into the lower part of the Krishna delta and even into the near shore area.
According to GSI, about 18,000 years ago Krishna as well as the Penna rivers had extended courses joining the sea at lower levels. “The palaeo-channels of Krishna and Penna in their delta and offshore areas may also form important diamond prospects, in select zones,” GSI’s new “Quaternary Maps” point out. Quaternary is the current period in the Cenozoic era on the geological timescale. These diamonds were formed during this period. Diamond-bearing gravels are also found in Chennuru and Kanuparthy, located along the upper reaches of the Penna.
GIS believes that Quaternary studies of the river basins of Penna, Hagari and Handri might help in delineating their palaeo-drainage channels and in locating new diamond bearing terrace/gravel zones. The existence of a few old pits and dumps near these gravel beds indicates that terrace gravels were excavated to recover diamonds in the past.
Diamond constitutes the most important economic mineral of the Quaternary fluvial gravels of AP. The alluvial tracts around Kolluru, Ustapalle, Paritala, Chandralapadu and Venkatayapalem areas in Guntur and Krishna districts along the banks of the Krishna River, have yielded many world famous diamonds.
Besides diamonds, precious stones like transparent to translucent ruby corundum have been found around Salebhanjar village in Khammam district. Corundum is also found in an area of about 50 sq km up to Lalguda in the south, Tummalapalle in the west and Lallurgudem in Kadapa district.
Gem variety garnets are noticed in the Muneru river around Tekugudem. Semi-precious stones including chalcedony, agate, carnelian, jasper and opal have been found in abundance in the older gravel bed as well as recent channel/ point bars of the Godavari river around Bhadrachalam.
Syed Akbar Hyderabad: Bhuvan, Isro’s answer to Google Earth, has just got better. The Isro’s geoportal is now loaded with new features that make the Google Earth obsolete as far as earth observation data about India is concerned. In fact, it has overtaken its international rival in several features.
The new Bhuvan provides information not only about the earth, but also about what lies beneath it, in the form of hidden minerals resources. The new thematic services facilitate users to select, browse and query the thematic datasets from Bhuvan. One can download the information for personal use.
The Bhuvan team has included digital land use, land cover (LULC) facility, which provides data and statistics about any district, city or state in India. One can get information at the click of mouse on urban and rural lands, mining, agriculture, fallow and uncultivable lands, shifting cultivation, forest cover, grass lands, salt-affected and ravenous lands, sandy soils, barren rocky areas, water bodies and wet and waste lands. It also gives data on how much of land is under what type of utilization and whether the land under agriculture or forests had increased or decreased over the years.
For instance, the digital LULC shows that only 0.09 per cent of land in Andhra Pradesh is under evergreen and semi-evergreen forests. The rest of land under the control of the forest department is either forest plantations or deciduous or scrub jungles. About eight per cent of the State’s land is uncultivable and is affected by salinity and rocky terrain.
Unlike in Google Earth, Bhuvan has introduced a discussion forum wherein people can hold discussions, converse, participate and brain storm ideas. The National Remote Sensing Centre in Hyderabad constantly updates the information about the natural resources in the country obtained through remote sensing satellites. To begin with, the thematic data at present is based on the satellite info obtained during 2005-2006. The data will be updated in the coming days, according to the Bhuvan team.
Syed Akbar Hyderabad: Contrary to popular belief that trees fight pollution, several species of plants including cashew, tamarind, guava, mango, custard apple, gulmohar, banyan, sapota and Jack fruit, are falling prey to heavy air pollution in the industrial city of Visakhapatnam.
Researchers from the departments of chemistry, and environmental studies, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam, have found that many plant species have been experiencing “physiological changes” due to heavy air pollutants before exhibiting visible damage to leaves. The content of chlorophyll has come down in many trees affecting the delicate process of converting carbondioxide into oxygen. It has also affected food preparation by the trees, and thus reduction in their fruit yield and growth.
Of the 29 trees studied, only six fell under the “moderately tolerant” to air pollutants category. None of them is tolerant to chemicals present in the air. Only those trees that are tolerant to heavy air pollutants are capable of fighting pollution in industrial belts, and reducing its impact on human beings, animals and other plants. The research was conducted separately by N Srinivas and others from department of environment studies, and A Sunil Dadhich and team from the department of chemistry.
Peepal, jujube, amla, cassia, lemon and neem are moderately tolerant to pollution. A majority of trees fall in the sensitive category. This means growing these trees in industrial belts and highly polluted areas will do more harm than good to the environment.
“Trees can be used as both passive biomonitors and bio-mitigators in the urban industrial environment to indicate the environmental quality and to ameliorate the pollution level in a locality. Air pollutants can directly affect plants via leaves. The level of injury is high in sensitive species and low in tolerant ones,” they pointed out.
The teams studied the content of chlorophyll and ascorbic acid, relative humidity, pH and air pollution tolerance index (APTI) of trees selected. The results were compared to those obtained from trees growing in less polluted localities. They found that the total chlorophyll and ascorbic content was higher in trees from less polluted areas, as compared to the trees growing in industrial areas.
Syed Akbar Hyderabad: In a major relief to people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a team of Indian researchers has found that a combination of anti-retroviral drugs will help in drastic reduction of opportunistic infections. Combination of two or more anti-retroviral drugs will bring down the infection events by as much as 96.59 per cent.
Combination therapy, also called highly active anti-retroviral therapy (Haart), not only fights the HIV, but also helps in controlling opportunistic infections like tuberculosis, oral Candidiasis and Herpes Zoster. Since HIV brings down the immunity levels, a number of infections tend to create problems, tuberculosis being the leading health issue in people living with HIV. Effective delivery of Haart will help about 30 lakh people living with HIV in the country. The drugs used under Haart by the National Aids Control Organisation have been found to be effective in checking opportunistic infections.
The research team led by Dr S Srirangaraj and Dr D Venkatesha has found that six months of Haart has brought down the infection events by 96.59 per cent. Moreover, the risk of developing an opportunistic infection within six months of Haart initiation was only 5.56 per cent.
Stating that there is not much data from India on relative frequencies of specific opportunistic infections in different regions, they said the study revealed tuberculosis as the leading co-infection with 53.4 per cent of patients suffering from it. This is followed by oral Candidiasis in 27.2 per cent, and Herpes Zoster in 14.7 per cent patients.
They emphasized the need for appropriate TB control measures on a massive scale all over the country to bring down the level of co-infection in HIV and other immune-suppressed individuals. The researchers suggested that people diagnosed with HIV and having a CD4 count of less than 200 should be screened for tuberculosis. The research study revealed that people with a CD4 count of less than 200 are mostly susceptible to TB.
Syed Akbar Hyderabad: The Krishna-Godavari basin near Rajahmundry has now helped scientists solve the age-old mystery of disappearance of dinosaurs and other animals, 65 million years ago.
A team of scientists from the USA and India collected samples of dead plankton (microorganism) from the oil wells of the Oil and Natural Gas Commission in the KG basin and subjected them to paleontological studies. The results showed that dinosaurs and other animals were wiped out of the earth, not because of a single meteor strike, but due to intense volcanic activity in the Deccan region.
There were at least three major volcano eruptions in the Deccan, which led to intense flow of lava, heavy dust and poisonous gases like carbondioxide and suphur dioxide. The gases surrounded the earth killing a majority of animals including the giant reptiles.
The volcanic eruption had its impact right through the present day Mumbai and Hyderabad to Rajahmundry and down. The Indo-US team comprised Dr Gerta Keller of Princeton University, and PK Bhowmick, H Upadhyay, A Dave, AN Reddy and BC Jaiprakash, of the ONGC. The researchers collected the plankton from the sediment trapped in the Deccan lava flows, the largest flows on earth, near Rajahmundry. They reject the prevailing theory that the extinction was caused by a single large meteorite.
“Marine sediments from Deccan lava flows show that the population of a plankton species widely used to gauge the fallout of prehistoric catastrophes plummeted nearly 100 per cent in the thousands of years leading up to the mass extinction,” Dr Keller told this correspondent.
"Our work provides the first one-to-one correlation between the mass extinction and Deccan volcanism," she added.
The marine sediments preserved between lava flows from the second- and third-phase eruptions contained evidence of the KT (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary, a thin, worldwide geological layer that marks the mass-extinction event. The activity wiped out nearly 100 per cent of planktonic foraminifera and ultimately initiated the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass-extinction event. A less severe third eruption phase occurred roughly 300,000 years after the mass extinction and kept the Earth nearly uninhabitable for another 5,00,000 years.
According to the researchers, the number of species evolving remained low, and existing species dwarfed during the 5,00,000-year period after the mass extinction. New, larger marine species did not appear until after the third phase when Deccan eruptions went dormant. Gradually, life began to recover as the atmosphere became less poisonous.
Syed Akbar Hyderabad: The elusive God particle or Higgs Boson is likely to be discovered in the next 12 months if it exists, says Dr Sridhara Rao Dasu, senior physicist from Wisconsin University.
God particle is considered the source of the universe and a search for it began 30 years ago. The mystery surrounding the universe can be unraveled if the so-called God Particle, if it at all exists, is discovered. Even as interest around the God particle gained momentum after the Large Hadron Collider was set up in Europe, the USA had shut down its Fermilab, which had been unsuccessfully searching the elusive particle for quite long.
Dasu, who graduated from a city college, is now associated with the Higgs Boson search team. He has been analyzing the data generated from God particle search experiments in the USA and Europe.
“By end of 2012 we may be able to establish if Higgs Boson really exists. We have gathered a few hints, but are yet to arrive at any concrete conclusion. Once we find the God particle we should be able to establish that it does not spin,” Dr Dasu said.
Delivering a lecture on the elusive God particle at BM Birla Science Centre here on Thursday, Dr Dasu, who arrived in the city after participating in the latest experiment, said scientists have now zeroed in on the range between 115 to 130 gigaelectron volts to find the Higgs. “We have now generated four times more data from various experiments and are now analyzing it. However, the most interesting region remains as elusive as ever. This makes our finding inconclusive as of now,” he said adding that they may be able to find it by December 2012.
Syed Akbar Hyderabad: Indian scientists and farmers have geared up to play a major role in converting barren Africa into a granary of future food needs of humanity.
The Indian agricultural experiment, which pushed the country from “begging bowl” to “granary godowns”, will be replicated in Africa to boost agricultural production in the backward continent. “In the next few years we hope Africa will be able to feed itself, and then it will grow to feed the world,” said Ms Idit Miller, vice-president, Growing Partnerships for Africa (EMRC).
The city-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat) is going to set up five agricultural technology business incubators across the African continent to boost agricultural growth there. “Africa has many untapped reserves while India has many success stories from agriculture. Vast stretches of land in Africa are yet to be utilised to their potential. If Indian seed companies go there, new crops can be introduced,” said Dr Kiran K Sharma, principal scientist, Icrisat, and chief executive officer of Agribusiness and Innovation Platform.
He said small innovations by Indian farmers and research strategies and technologies by local scientists could be put to experiment in Africa. Officials of African governments and African farmers on Thursday interacted with Indian teams in the city to build a road map for the future granary in the continent. Icrisat and EMRC conducted a business-to-business meeting between Indian and African teams to explore business opportunities in agriculture as part of the 2nd Africa-India Agricultural Economic Mission.
Dr Kiran emphasized the need for India-Africa agricultural coordination in research. He said India has 11 technology incubators in agricultural universities and ICAR centres, the largest number of such centres for any country in the world. The success rate for is as high as 90 per cent in these centres. They are now being linked with one another for transfer of technologies.
Citing an example how small farmers could turn into producers of branded seeds, Dr Kiran said about 70 farmers trained at Icrisat are now able to produce seeds of legumes like groundnut, chickpea and pigeon pea and selling them to other farmers. These high quality seeds produced through natural pollination are now being commercially grown in fields for the first time, and the results are quite encouraging.