VASAT::Blog

Nitrogen is vital for all plant life, but increasingly the planet is paying a heavy price for the escalating use of nitrogen fertilizer. A new biological process has been discovered, by which leguminous plants control behavior of symbiotic bacteria. These plants have a specialized protein processing system that generates specific protein signals. These were hitherto unknown, but it turns out they are critical to cause nitrogen fixation. Alternating legumes with other crops has been a major component of agriculture around the world for thousands of years. Only bacteria that contain a special enzyme are capable of this sort of “nitrogen fixing” using airborne nitrogen; no other type of living organism can do it. The special enzyme encoding gene has been identified and isolated .This nitrogen fixing ability allows legumes to flourish in nitrogen-poor soils, whereas other plants require applications of manufactured nitrogen fertilizer to grow well.
The rhizobium bacteria are a critical partner in existing symbiosis and we need to make them better, optimize them for being productive even when conditions start to deteriorate.

Top scientists from international agricultural institutes are heralding a new system of farming based on using fertilizer trees to increase crop yield. The new system, which was inspired by small time farmers in Africa who grew the Acacia, could provide a solution to dwindling paddy production in India and will help mitigate climate change. Acacia tree holds the same amount of nitrogen in its leaves as three bags of commercial fertilizer. When the tree drops its leaves crop size can improve by as much as 150 per cent. This limits fertilizer usages, stores more corban on land and provides animal feeds, fuel and timber to the farmer. Farming systems like these also have longer growing seasons and better resistance to drought.

Mr. Emani Krishna Rao, from Doordarshan came to AMS-Adakkal to document small movie on activities of AMS-ICRISAT and to shoot how ICT tools are used to disseminate information to cope with drought.

Mr. Krishna Rao had interviewed Ms. Lavanya and Mr. Sreedhar. He asked the following questions:
* What difference you had found in the people before and after the intervention of ICT tools?
* When AMS-ICRISAT started working and why have you chosen this area?

Later they had taken the shots in the AMS campus and their activities. Doordarshan team interviewed Ms. Vimmalamma (ICRISAT coordinator) and asked following questions:
* What made you to change the cropping pattern from paddy to dry-land crops?
* How color coded maps help in decision making?
* How ICRISAT and the ICTs tools are helping you?

At around 4 PM we went to Nijalapur and took the shots of the Village Information Center. DD team interviewed Ms. Rameshwaramma (VNA) and asked her about her activities, how the computer in the center is useful and how SMS service is useful?

At around 5.30 PM we went to ragi field. DD team interviewed a farmer Mr. Yadagire. They asked him the following questions:
* Who suggested you to grow this dry-land crop in your field and why have you chosen this?
* Are you happy with your decision in growing dry-land crops?
* From many years you have been growing paddy, now that you have shifted dry-land crops. What made you take this decision?

Mr. Emani Krishna Rao said that he never came across such SHG’s where different activities are carried out under one umbrella. He felt happy that International organization like ICRISAT is working with this group in disseminating the information by using various ICT tools. He mentioned that he would like to shoot more of these kind of activities in future.

To protect ourselves and nature from Global warming planting trees is one of the solutions. We need to plant as many trees as possible and at the same time we have to protect them also. We care the trees in our houses but who will care of trees around us? ‘Tree ambulance’ has originated from this thought by NDMC (New Delhi Municipal Corporation). The cost of each ambulance is 13.5 laks and equipped with 5,500 lt capacity water tanks, ladders, sprayers, tree pruners, chain saw, and others to cater the emergency needs of lakhs of trees in the NDMC area. A team of trained professional staff look after regular management of trees, including trimming and removal of decayed branches etc.

A new kinetic energy-harnessing device was launched at CES 2009.

Its a stick we can shake to generate enough energy to power your mobile devices.
The device is called the nPower PEG (Personal Energy Generator) that transfers the kinetic energy of our walking, running, or other body movement to charge any USB 2.0 powered device.

The PEG can charge most handheld devices up to 80% with just one hour’s worth of walking
It is compatible with over 90% of handheld electronic devices,  including cell phones,  MP3 players,ipods, handheld gaming devices, handheld GPS, digital cameras, kindles.

Its power generation is upto 4Watts and it costs about 149$

Cells may not have a mouth, but they still need to ingest substances from the external environment. If this process known as endocytosis is affected, it can lead to infectious diseases or cardio-vascular diseases, cancer, Huntington’s and diabetes. Cells don’t simply go out and ingest just any substances, handling them in the same manner. On the contrary, they have a very precise definition of what they need when and in what quantity, and also where it needs to get to in the cell. The enormous number of genes involved also reflects the significance of endocytosis for the cell and the entire organism. Scientists blocked each of the approximately 23,000 expressed human genes one by one with the help of small interfering RNA molecules (siRNAs) that silence the respective gene. Next they used fluorescent dyes to mark two proteins which the cells under investigation took up in their endosomes; this made them visible to automated high-resolution microscopy and image-analysis software. They were therefore able to observe under the microscope how substance uptake in the cells changed if one of the human genes was inactivated.

An ICT based survey was conducted to know about channels of information flow, reach of ICT tools. This done by conducting group interview in three villages in Adakkal. During this survey we came to know that there is strong relation between farmer to farmer in disseminating the information. Vendor is also playing an important role in information flow. Very few of them are using television, news paper and magazine’s for agriculture information. The penetration of mobile is high but most of them us their mobiles for entertainment like listening to music and etc. Ever few of them are using Short Message Service (SMS) for chatting with friends, sending jokes and etc.,

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Switching of optical signals carried in telecommunications networks currently requires conversion to electrical signals, which must be switched and then converted back to optical format. All-optical switching could allow dramatic speed increase in telecommunications by eliminating the need to convert photonic signals to electronic signals and back for switching. Existing electro-optical technology may ultimately be able to provide transmission speeds of up to 100 gigabits-per-second. However, all-optical processing could theoretically transmit data at speeds as high as 2,000 gigabits-per-second, allowing download of high-end data in minutes rather than hours.

A class of molecules whose size, structure and chemical composition have been optimized for photonic use could provide the demanding combination of properties needed to serve as the foundation for low-power, high-speed all-optical signal processing.

The software, developed by Andrew Cohen, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, analyzes time-lapse images capturing live stem cell behaviors. It will allow scientists to search for mechanisms that control stem cell specialization, the main obstacle in advancing the use of stem cell therapy for treatment of disease. It could also lead to new research into causes of cancer, which involves cells that continuously self-renew. Stem cells play a key role in human development, and also offer the potential to repair tissues or organs damaged by disease or injury. But, in order to use stem cell-based therapies, biologists need to better understand the mechanisms that control stem cell differentiation. The software developed is 87 percent accurate in determining the specific “offspring” a stem cell will ultimately produce, and 99 percent accurate in predicting when self-renewal of these stem cells will end in specialization.

Till now online tutorials are available in English only but now it possible to get them in regional languages also. On 26th January 2010 Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India officially launched spoken-tutorial.org which allows the learner to choose language option. Currently the audio and video tutorials are available in 16 regional languages. To get register and for more details please visit http://spoken-tutorial.org/